Predicting the Structural Parts of the Plot on Elementary School Written Essays

Essay writing is an essential task throughout all life stages. In the final years of elementary education, classes are dedicated to narrative text production, requiring students to develop and organize their ideas and thoughts in a logical sequence. The process of correcting and identifying the structural elements of the narrative plot in texts is a routine task for educators, which generates an overload and hampers the implementation of a formative, unbiased assessment that supports the enhancement of students’ writing skills. Providing automatic identification of the structural elements of the narrative plot, considering this educational stage and the Brazilian Portuguese language, is an underexplored issue in the field of natural language processing. The aim of this research is to analyze the performance of predicting the structural elements of the narrative plot in narrative text productions of Brazilian elementary school students. The experimental research includes a corpus of 3099 narrative sentences obtained and annotated through the formative assessment project of the Brazil in School program of the Ministry of Education.