Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Designed to determine a reader's ability in processing information relationships in written discourse in English, the extended-cloze instrument consists of six reading passages, each with four complete sentences deleted. Students read each passage and select the best of four multiple choice alternative sentences for each deletion. The instrument…