Short-answer grading using textual entailment

Given a question, a reference answer, and the answer given by the student, the aim of the automatic short answer grading task is to assign a grade to the students answer.We use for this a large number of matching rules relying on recognizing entailment relation between dependency structures of the two answers. Comparison of the grades generated by our method with those given by human judges on a computer science dataset shows a quite promising maximum correlation of 0.627.