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...

We administered six functional intelligibility tests, i.e., spoken and written versions of (i) an isolated word recognition test, (ii) a cloze test at the sentence level and (iii) a picture-to-text matching task at the paragraph level. The scores on these functional tests were compared with each other and with intersubjective measures obtained for the same materials through opinion testing, i.e...

We present a strategy to improve the quality of automatically generated cloze and open cloze questions which are used by the REAP tutoring system for assessment in the ill-defined domain of English as a Second Language vocabulary learning. Cloze and open cloze questions are fill-in-the-blank questions with and without multiple choice, respectively. The REAP intelligent tutoring system [1] uses ...

OBJECTIVE To explore the way the doctor-patient communication process may be improved by adopting the patients' conversational style in the development of written materials for surgical patients. METHODS Written information prepared by doctors, specialists in abdominal surgery, was tested for comprehension on patients undergoing cholecystectomy, using the standard Cloze test procedure. At the...

Language switching is common in bilingual processing, and it has been repeatedly shown to induce processing costs. However, only a handful of studies have examined such costs at the sentence level, with a limited few among them having incorporated factors extensively studied in monolingual sentence processing, such as semantic expectedness. Using the event related potentials (ERP) technique, th...

Computer generation of cloze tasks still falls short of full automation; most current systems are used by teachers as authoring aids. Improved methods to estimate cloze quality are needed for full automation. We investigated lexical reading difficulty as a novel automatic estimator of cloze quality, to which cooccurrence frequency of words was compared as an alternate estimator. Rather than rel...

The N400 component of the event-related brain potential is widely used in research on language and semantic memory, but the cognitive functions underlying N400 amplitudes are still unclear and actively debated. Recent simulations with a neural network model of word meaning suggest that N400 amplitudes might reflect implicit semantic prediction error. Here, we extend these simulations to sentenc...

We present evidence for a monitoring process in language perception at the word level, reflected by a P600. This P600 is triggered when a conflict evolves because the brain encounters an unexpected linguistic item when another item is highly expected. To resolve this conflict between representations, the brain monitors the input to check for possible processing errors. A P600 was hypothesized t...

Attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models have achieved promising performance in speech recognition. However, because of the end-to-end training, an AED model is usually trained with speech-text paired data. It challenging to incorporate external text-only data into models. Another issue that it does not use right context a text token while predicting token. To alleviate above two issues, we...

Abstract In order to have a better understanding of the nature reading behavior, it is quite essential scrutinize underlying assumptions two competing theories: componential approach and unitary hypothesis see how this reflected on testing skills. As result, current study was aimed at broadening existing knowledge horizon by trying identify if there relationship in overall scores learners diffe...