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EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners
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EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners is a software for automatic evaluation of surface coherence (cohesion)
in Czech texts written by non-native speakers of Czech.
It is an update of the previous versions, EVALD 1.0 for Foreigners and EVALD 2.0 for Foreigners.

The evaluation part (the server) is implemented in Treex (http://ufal.cz/treex), a highly modular
NLP framework written in the Perl programming language, and uses the Weka toolkit
(http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/) for the final prediction of a coherence mark.
It can be used directly from a command line or as a backend server for a client.
The client part is implemented as a web server, accessible with a web browser.

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There are three possible ways of using EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners:
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1. interactively as a web demo and RESTful web service hosted at the LINDAT/CLARIN server,
2. interactively but locally, with both the server and the client running on the same machine (or two machines
   in the same network),
3. in a batch mode run on the local machine.

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Ad 1) No installation is needed in this case; in a web browser (such as Firefox or Chrome),
go to https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/evald-foreign/.

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Ad 2) Both the backend server and the client components are distributed via the Docker software
(https://www.docker.com/), which needs to be installed first. Docker greatly simplifies
the installation process of the two components and allows them to be run on Linux-based
operating systems, Windows 10, as well as Mac OS X.

To download both the server and the client, run the following commands:

docker pull ufal/evald.treex-server:3.0
docker pull ufal/evald.php-server:3.0

See the EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners project web pages
(http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/evald/documentation) for further instructions.

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Ad 3) The dockerized backend component can be run locally also in a batch mode. In a command 
line, the user must specify paths to input and output directories. All files in the input 
directory are then processed and the result is stored in the output directory.

In order (for more experienced users) to gain better control over the processing pipeline,
the backend application can be installed also without being wrapped by a Docker container.
Treex (http://ufal.cz/treex) needs to be installed on the local machine, along with all (mostly CPAN)
dependencies for the Czech text analysis (please note that in this case, some parts of the Czech
analysis can only be run on Linux-based systems). Treex must be in the revision tagged
as EVALD_3.0 (https://github.com/ufal/treex/releases/tag/EVALD_3.0). In addition,
Vowpal Wabbit 8.1.1 (https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/releases/tag/8.1.1) must be
installed to the location installed_tools/ml/vowpal_wabbit-v8.1-3cf3f692/ relative to the Treex
Share directory. The Treex scenario to be run is a part of this Lindat EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners
distribution (file Evald-3.0-Foreign.scen).

See the EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners project web pages
(http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/evald/documentation) for further instructions.

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Further Info
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EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners project web pages: https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/evald
If you have questions or need technical support, please contact evald@ufal.mff.cuni.cz.

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How to Cite EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners
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Jiří Mírovský, Michal Novák, Kateřina Rysová, Magdaléna Rysová, Eva Hajičová:
EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners – Evaluator of Discourse. Data/software, LINDAT/CLARIN digital
library, Prague, Czech Republic, http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-2864, Nov 2018.

There are also papers describing the related research and experiments:

Michal Novák, Jiří Mírovský, Kateřina Rysová, Magdaléna Rysová: Topic–Focus Articulation:
A Third Pillar of Automatic Evaluation of Text Coherence. In: Advances in Computational Intelligence
(LNAI 11289): 17th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2018,
Proceedings, Part II, Springer, Switzerland, ISBN 978-3-030-04497-8, pp. 1-14, 2018, in print.

Michal Novák, Kateřina Rysová, Magdaléna Rysová, Jiří Mírovský: Incorporating Coreference
to Automatic Evaluation of Coherence in Essays. In: Statistical Language and Speech Processing.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-319-68455-0,
ISSN 1611-3349, pp. 58–69, 2017.

Kateřina Rysová, Magdaléna Rysová, Jiří Mírovský, Michal Novák: Introducing EVALD
– Software Applications for Automatic Evaluation of Discourse in Czech. In: International
Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2017. Šumen, Bulgaria.
ISSN 1313-8502, pp. 634–641, 2017.

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Acknowledgement
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EVALD 3.0 for Foreigners was developed at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
(ÚFAL, http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University,
with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, project
Automatic Evaluation of Text Coherence in Czech (DG16P02B016,
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/grants/evald-evaluator-discourse).