ArgRewrite: A Web-based Revision Assistant for Argumentative Writings

Abstract

While intelligent writing assistants have become more common, they typically have little support for revision behavior. We present Ar-gRewrite, a novel web-based revision assistant that focus on rewriting analysis. The system supports two major functionalities: 1) to assist students as they revise, the system automatically extracts and analyzes revisions; 2) to assist teachers, the system provides an overview of students' revisions and allows teachers to correct the automatically analyzed results, ensuring that students get the correct feedback.

Using Context to Predict the Purpose of Argumentative Writing Revisions

“…Also, we plan to investigate whether revision dependencies exist in other types of corpora such as Wikipedia revisions. While the corpora used in this study cannot be published because of the lack of required IRB, we are starting a user study project (Zhang et al, 2016) on the application of our proposed techniques and will publish the data collected from this project.…”

Extracting PDTB Discourse Relations from Student Essays

“…For example, there may be an interaction such that more coherent, less ambiguous essays also receive higher grades. We will also investigate ways in which annotated discourse relations in learning-based domains can be used to improve existing educational technologies such as language-based tutors and writing assistants (e.g., (Litman and Forbes-Riley, 2014;Zhang et al, 2016)). Level-1 senses have already been shown to be useful for improving sentiment analysis in product reviews (Yang and Cardie, 2014), and we are seeing improvements when using Level-1 senses to enhance our prior work on classifying writing revisions.…”

“…(Litman and Forbes-Riley, 2014)), as could the use of discourse relations for improving automated essay graders and writing tutors (c.f. (Zhang et al, 2016)).…”

A product- and process-oriented tagset for revisions in writing

“…Here, the first two could be considered semantic changes, while the latter constitutes surface changes. Sometimes, the orientation labels for the semantic changes are tailored to a specific genre; e.g., for argumentative writing, F. Zhang, Hwa, Litman, and Hashemi (2016) distinguished semantic changes in thesis/idea (claim), rebuttal, reasoning (warrant), evidence, and general content changes.…”