Indexing student essays paragraphs using LSA over an integrated ontological space

A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the evaluation of essays. The main idea of this paper is that Latent Semantic Indexing (LSA) can be used in conjunction with ontologies and First order Logic (FOL) to locate segments relevant to a question in a student essay. Our test bed, in a first instance, is a set of ontologies such the AKT reference ontology (describing academic life), Newspaper and a Koala ontology (concerning koalas' habitat).