Turnitin® today announced the general availability of Turnitin Scoring Engine, a service that provides automated scoring of short answer texts and written essays.
The technology is based on research in natural language processing (NLP) pioneered by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and developed by LightSide Labs, a company Turnitin acquired in October 2014. Turnitin Scoring Engine analyzes the lexical, syntactic, and stylistic features of writing, such as word choice and genre conventions. Turnitin Scoring Engine "discovers" the unique, content-based patterns in an existing set of hand-scored essays and "learns" to assess other essays.
To begin using Turnitin Scoring Engine, institutions provide their existing rubrics, along with a seed set of de-identified student essays and reliable existing scores. These texts are analyzed to build a custom scoring model for each new writing context.
Turnitin Scoring Engine is available on an annual subscription basis. Pricing is per student. Learn more by visiting http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/turnitin-scoring-engine.
