Automatic summarization assessment through a combination of semantic and syntactic information for intelligent educational systems.

•We proposed a specialized method that works well in assessing short summaries.•It integrates the semantic relations between words, and their syntactic composition.•We experimentally examine the influence of the combination of semantic and syntactic information on short summary assessment.•Experiments have displayed that it is to be preferred over the existing techniques.•We have developed the method as an intelligent tool to grade students’ summaries.