Automatic extraction of synonyms and/or semantically related words has various applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). There are currently two mainstream extraction paradigms, namely, lexicon-based and distributional approaches. The former usually suffers from low coverage, while the latter is only able to capture general relatedness rather than strict synonymy. In this paper, two ru...

To investigate the construct validly of a section of a high stakes test, an exploratory factor analysis using principal components analysis was employed. The rotation used was varimax with the suppression level of .30. Eleven factors were extracted out of 35 reading comprehension items. The fact that these factors emerged speak to the construct validity of the test. However the problem of over-...

In this paper we present a new spell-checking system that utilizes contextual information for automatic correction of non-word misspellings. The system is evaluated with a large corpus of essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English to the writing prompts of high-stakes standardized tests (TOEFL and GRE). We also present comparative evaluations with Aspell and the speller from Mic...

Many grammar checkers in rule-based approach do not handle errors that come from various usages, for example, the usages of prepositions. To study the behavior of prepositions, we introduce the language model into a grammarchecking task. A language model is trained from a large training corpus, which contains many short phrases. It can be used for detecting and correcting certain types of gramm...

Automated scoring of written and spoken responses is an NLP application that can significantly impact lives especially when deployed as part of high-stakes tests such as the GRE® and the TOEFL®. Ethical considerations require that automated scoring algorithms treat all testtakers fairly. The educational measurement community has done significant research on fairness in assessments and automated...

Backgound: Having been influenced by the trend of internationalization of higher education, most universities in Taiwan have implemented an English benchmark requirement for graduation, which requires students to demonstrate their English ability at a specified Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) level through taking a standardized English language test (e.g., GEPT, IELT...

Scoring the quality of persuasive essays is an important goal of discourse analysis, addressed most recently with highlevel persuasion-related features such as thesis clarity, or opinions and their targets. We investigate whether argumentation features derived from a coarse-grained argumentative structure of essays can help predict essays scores. We introduce a set of argumentation features rel...