OntoBAeval: Ontology Based Automatic Evaluation of Free-Text Response

Semantic Web facilitated e-learning, where Computer-Assisted Assessment-CAA has vitally contributed for effective use of computers to evaluate Open-ended questions for free-text response. Domain Ontology as an aid to CAA, plays a very pivotal role by preserving domain-specific conceptual knowledge that not only endorse the semantic capability of Information Retrieval as Question Answering, but is also used to evaluate the response. OntoBAeval is Ontology based tool for automatic evaluation of free-text short responses submitted by users in Learning Management Systems-LMS based discussion forums or Community-based Question Answer (Q & A) forums. In this paper we propose architecture based on simple Natural Language Processing-NLP techniques, Word net and hand-coded logic to make sense of user Questions and submitted responses using the Semantic Web Ontology Language-OWL. The experimental results show that the proposed approach, which is tested on Computer Science subject Operating Systems, can be effectively used to evaluate the response by providing score that a learner uses to satisfy the learner's objective.