Name of the participant: Anna Filighera
Description of the IT research project: Questions and answers have always been a central part of knowledge acquisition. Whether it is to determine understanding in exams or to stimulate thinking processes – asking learners questions and evaluating their answers is an essential part of everyday pedagogical life. In this project, automatic evaluation methods for free text answers, also known as “automatic short answer grading”, are investigated. The aim is to check free-text answers for correctness, completeness and relevance to the question. Automatic short answer grading makes it possible, among other things, to compare the learner’s understanding expressed in given answers with reference material and thus uncover misunderstandings or gaps. This makes it particularly attractive as an aid for citizens in dealing with administrative files. The lack of comprehensibility of official language documents has been discussed since the 18th century and remains a serious problem today. Misunderstandings and the resulting actions can have serious consequences not only for the citizen concerned but also for society as a whole. In addition to fines and the enforcement of unlawful administrative acts, citizen acceptance of effective notices also suffers when there is a lack of understanding, especially of the reasoning given in the administrative act. In this project, a system is being developed that automatically asks citizens about the important points of their administrative act, evaluates the answers given and provides corresponding feedback.
Software Campus partners: TU Darmstadt, IAV
Implementation period: 01.04.2021 – 31.03.2023