Strategy and Tools for Collecting and Annotating Handwritten Descriptive Answers for Developing Automatic and Semi-Automatic Marking - An Initial Effort to Math

This paper presents our strategy to collect handwritten answer patterns for descriptive questions, which will be new benchmarks for the research on automatic and semi-automatic marking of descriptive answers as well as the most natural patterns for handwriting recognition research. Then, we describe two tools for collecting and annotating handwritten descriptive answers as well as our initiation of collecting math answers for developing their recognition and clustering. One tool, e-testing tool, works as the pattern collection tool and the other, e-marking tool, works as the annotation tool. We invite collaboration and sharing of the sample patterns, and then we conclude the paper with the current state of the effort and future directions.