Student achievement and French sentence repetition test scores

Abstract Sentence repetition (SR) tests are one way of probing a language learner's oral proficiency. Test-takers listen to a set of carefully engineered sentences of varying complexity one-by-one, and then try to repeat them back as exactly as possible. In this paper we explore how well an SR test that we have developed for French corresponds with the test-taker's achievement levels, represented by proficiency interview scores and by college class enrollment. We describe how we developed our SR test items using various language resources, and present pertinent facts about the test administration. The responses were scored by humans and also by a specially designed automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine; we sketch both scoring approaches. Results are evaluated in several ways: correlations between human and ASR scores, item response analysis to quantify the relative difficulty of the items, and criterion-referenced analysis setting thresholds of consistency across proficiency levels. We discuss several observations and conclusions prompted by the analyses, and suggestions for future work

Automated Rating of ESL Essays

To date, traditional NLP parsers have not been widely successful in TESOLoriented applications, particularly in scoring written compositions. Re-engineering such applications to provide the necessary robustness for handling ungrammatical English has proven a formidable obstacle

Learning in Minimalism-based Language Modeling

The natural language version of the Soar cognitive modeling system (Newell, 1990) has enabled a number of language modeling applications from on-line parsing behavior (Lewis, 1993) to simultaneous interpretation (Lonsdale, 1997, 1998) to robotic control (Benjamin, Lonsdale, & Lyons, 2004). The system supports an integrated approach to incremental comprehension and generation. Learning mechanisms account for processes in language performance from deliberate, explicit reasoning to automatic, recogni-tional expertise. Syntactic processing in prior versions of the system followed the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. Minimalist incremental parsing This paper introduces new results: how the syntactic model of an incoming utterance is constructed incrementall

Comparison and superlatives : what's the best?

Abstract: "This paper investigates several phenomena of superlatives, contrasts them with documented observations about the comparative, and proposes a theory for the semantics of the superlative. Superlatives will be explored with respect to such properties as ambiguity, operator scope, polarity environments, negation, interactions with modality, and inferential behavior. A brief survey of degree variable, extent variable, difference variable, and interpretive approaches will explore the possible paradigms for a theory of superlatives. The necessity for a new theory, treating the superlative as an independent phenomenon related in part to the comparative, will be demonstrated. The resulting proposal is based on a Klein-style model-theoretic extent-based account for comparatives, augmented with a Larson-style lambda calculus approach for operator-based representation of scopal phenomena. Attempts to directly apply comparative theories to the superlative are shown to be inadequate, though initial formulations from the comparative are adopted. These are refined with the addition of two semantic constraints, the exclusion constraint and the membership constraint. The membership constraint imposes a set inclusion constraint on the head of the superative [sic]; the exclusion constraint enforces set complementarity upon the second comparand. The final result is a higher-order logic account for the meaning of the superlative which supports several of the superlative- related observations introduced. Its compatibility with several standard assumptions from the comparative theories, including implicitude and uniqueness, are demonstrated. Finally, future directions are indicated along which the foundation laid in this paper could be pursued.