PRACTICING STUDENTS' WRITING SKILLS THROUGH E-LEARNING: AUTOMATED EVALUATION OF TEXT COHERENCE IN CZECH

The paper presents possibilities of improving students' writing skills through e-learning. It addresses the topic of automated evaluation of surface text coherence and introduces improvements of a system solving this task for Czech. With the implementation of new morpho-syntactic features, the system works with the reliability of 0.63 macro-average F-score. Except for the overall mark for coherence, the system newly provides also a detailed feedback for users. The user (student) learns stronger and weaker aspects of his or her text in the following language fields: spelling, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse (in terms of coreference and discourse relations). The student (a learner of Czech) is thus given a detailed evaluation of his or her text, which is available online and gives thus space for practicing writing skills easily through e-learning.