Shiyan Jiang


2022

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Toward Automatic Discourse Parsing of Student Writing Motivated by Neural Interpretation
James Fiacco | Shiyan Jiang | David Adamson | Carolyn Rosé
Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)

Providing effective automatic essay feedback is necessary for offering writing instruction at a massive scale. In particular, feedback for promoting coherent flow of ideas in essays is critical. In this paper we propose a state-of-the-art method for automated analysis of structure and flow of writing, referred to as Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing. In so doing, we lay a foundation for a generalizable approach to automated writing feedback related to structure and flow. We address challenges in automated rhetorical analysis when applied to student writing and evaluate our novel RST parser model on both a recent student writing dataset and a standard benchmark RST parsing dataset.

2019

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Applying Rhetorical Structure Theory to Student Essays for Providing Automated Writing Feedback
Shiyan Jiang | Kexin Yang | Chandrakumari Suvarna | Pooja Casula | Mingtong Zhang | Carolyn Rosé
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

We present a package of annotation resources, including annotation guideline, flowchart, and an Intelligent Tutoring System for training human annotators. These resources can be used to apply Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to essays written by students in K-12 schools. Furthermore, we highlight the great potential of using RST to provide automated feedback for improving writing quality across genres.