Since all the systems we examined fared poorly on identifying Somewhat classes, one may wonder how these systems would perform if we considered a simplified version of the task where we merged each Somewhat class with the corresponding Strongly class.
since Faulkner's approach was originally not designed to distinguish between Strongly and Somewhat classes, it may seem fairer to compare our approach against Duplicated Faulkner on the four-class essay stance classification task, where stance can take one of four values: Agree (created by merging Agree 10 All significance tests are approximate randomization tests with p < 0.01.