In this dissertation, I explore unsupervised techniques for the task of automatic short answer grading. I compare a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluate the effect of domain and size on the corpus-based measures, and also introduce a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating automatic feedback from the student answers. I continue to combine graph alignment features with lexical semantic similarity measures and employ machine learning techniques to show that grade assignment error can be reduced compared to a system that considers only lexical semantic measures of similarity. I also detail a preliminary attempt to align the dependency graphs of student and instructor answers in order to utilize a structural component that is necessary to simulate human-level grading of student answers. I further explore the utility of these techniques to several related tasks in natural language processing including the detection of text similarity, paraphrase, and textual entailment. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]