  Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has been quite popular and is being widely
used. However, lack of appropriate methodology for rating nonnative English
speakers' essays has meant a lopsided advancement in this field. In this paper,
we report initial results of our experiments with nonnative AES that learns
from manual evaluation of nonnative essays. For this purpose, we conducted an
exercise in which essays written by nonnative English speakers in test
environment were rated both manually and by the automated system designed for
the experiment. In the process, we experimented with a few features to learn
about nuances linked to nonnative evaluation. The proposed methodology of
automated essay evaluation has yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.750 with
the manual evaluation.
