Patent ID: 8185378

Claim:
A computer implemented method of determining a relatedness of two text segments within an essay, the method comprising: receiving an essay with a computer, wherein the essay comprises a plurality of text segments; determining, for two or more of the text segments, one or more words associated with each text segment; determining term vectors for each of the one or more words associated with each of the text segments, wherein the term vectors are adjusted by a mean vector derived from term vectors of all text segments; determining semantic vectors for words associated with the two or more text segments, wherein the semantic vectors are generated through training without a topically coherent corpus, wherein a semantic vector for a text segment is based on an average of term vectors of the words associated with the text segment; wherein, in the training, a label vector and a semantic vector are initially assigned to each word in the corpus; wherein for each word appearing within the corpus, an incremental vector is added to the semantic vector corresponding to the word, wherein the incremental vector is computed by multiplying each entry of the label vector corresponding to one or more second words proximate to the word by a weighted value; wherein each semantic vector is normalized to a unit length; summing the semantic vectors for words associated with the two or more text segments with the computer to determine a text segment vector for each text segment; and calculating a semantic similarity between at least one pair of text segment vectors with the computer to determine a relatedness of at least one pair of text segments corresponding to the text segment vectors.