Cloze tests, also known as gap-fill exercises, are a popular tool for acquiring and evaluating language proficiency. A major challenge in the way of automating scoring of cloze tests is the yet unsolved problem of gap filler ambiguity. To address this challenge, we present the concept of bundled gap filling, along with (1) an efficient computational model for automatically generating unambiguou...

The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood, least developed and, yet, one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment. It is particularly important because of its potential wash-back effects on classroom practices. Given the fact that listening tests play a great role in assessing the language proficiency of students, they are expected to enjoy a hig...

Van Petten and Luka's (2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83(2), 176-190) literature survey of late positive ERP components elicited by more or less predictable words during sentence processing led them to propose two topographically and functionally distinct positivities: a parietal one associated with semantically incongruent words related to semantic reanalysis and a frontal on...

When listening to speech under adverse conditions, expectancies resulting from semantic context can have a strong impact on comprehension. Here we ask how minimal variations in semantic context (cloze probability) affect the unfolding comprehension of acoustically degraded speech. Three main results are observed in the brain electric response. First, auditory evoked responses to a degraded sent...

In second language learning, cloze tests (also known as fill-in-the-blank tests) are frequently used for assessing the learning progress of students. While preparation effort for these tests is low, scoring needs to be done manually, as there usually is a huge number of correct solutions. In this paper, we examine whether the ambiguity of cloze items can be lowered to a point where automatic sc...

Reading comprehension has embraced a booming in recent NLP research. Several institutes have released the Cloze-style reading comprehension data, and these have greatly accelerated the research of machine comprehension. In this work, we firstly present Chinese reading comprehension datasets, which consist of People Daily news dataset and Children’s Fairy Tale (CFT) dataset. Also, we propose a c...

Many students with autism spectrum disorders show good decoding combined with poor comprehension. Twenty adolescent students with autism spectrum disorders participated in a study concerning the effects of three kinds of facilitation on reading comprehension. In a within-subjects design, each students read passages under four conditions: answering prereading questions, completing cloze sentence...