An enhanced framework for smart automated evaluations of answer scripts using NLP and deep learning methods

The manual process of evaluating answer scripts is strenuous. Evaluators use the answer key to assess the answers in the answer scripts. Advancements in technology and the introduction of new learning paradigms need automation of the evaluation process. This work aims to develop an enhanced novel hybrid framework that can evaluate answer scripts and automatically assign marks for different type of questions based on keywords, grammar, symbols, special keywords, and the given factors. First, the proposed system uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert image answer scripts into an editable text format. Second, the sentence transformers, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique flips the answer script and answers key texts into word embedding vectors. To find similarity measures, these vectors are matched using BERT encoding, spearmanś rank-order correlation, and fuzzy search. At last, the proposed model is trained using Deep Columnar Convolutional Neural Network (DCCNN) in the third step with MINST and Kaggle handwritten mathematical symbols and tested with the segmented mathematical equations to find the similarity. The performance of proposed model is measured using precision, recall, accuracy, and F1-score, and its gives highest accuracy of 93% and 95% when compared to the existing methodologies.