Automatic Classification with SVM and F-VSM on Elementary Chinese Composition

Currently, automated evaluation of Chinese composition still has limitations. Moreover, the human evaluation is possible subjective, time-consuming and laborious. Hence, to develop automatic evaluation of Chinese composition is very meaningful and potential. In this study, we adopted two methods: support vector machine (SVM) and feature vector space model (F-VSM) to evaluate 4193 Chinese compositions collected from 1st to 6th grade at an elementary school in Wuhan. This study integrated natural language processing techniques to extract features, and uses SVM and F-VSM to classify the composition level. We investigated 45 linguistic features and divided into four aspects: text structure, syntactic complexity, word complexity and lexical diversity. The result indicated that both SVM and F-VSM have good classification effect, and F-VSM effect is better than SVM.