Supervised Learning Approach and Evaluation: As in<cite> Yannakoudakis et al. (2011)</cite> , the automated scoring task was treated as a rankpreference learning problem by means of the SVM-Rank package (Joachims, 2006) , which is a much faster version of the SVM-Light package used by<cite> Yannakoudakis et al. (2011)</cite> .