1 We report experience in applying techniques for natural language processing to algorithmically generating test items for both reading and listening cloze items. We propose a word sense disambiguationbased method for locating sentences in which designated words carry specific senses, and apply a collocation-based method for selecting distractors that are necessary for multiple-choice cloze ite...

While aging is associated with increased knowledge, it is also associated with decreased semantic integration. To investigate brain activation changes during semantic integration, a sample of forty-eight 25-75 year-old adults read sentences with high cloze (HC) and low cloze (LC) probability while functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted. Significant age-related reduction of cloze ef...

Recognition and source memory were explored in healthy older adults, adults diagnosed with very mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), and adults diagnosed with mild DAT. Two sentence-completion tasks were used. In Task 1, half of the sentences were completed (clozed) by the participant, and half by the experimenter. In Task 2, half were participant clozed, and half were participant read (a...

s Scott Crossley Crowdsourcing text complexity models The current study builds on work by De Clercq et al. (2014) and Crossley et al. (2017) by using crowdsourcing techniques to collect human ratings of text comprehension, processing, and familiarity across a large corpus comprising a diverse variety of topic domains (science, technology, and history). Pairwise comparisons among the ratings wer...

This paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of automatically generated cloze questions in the style of the definitions found in Collins COBUILD English language learner’s dictionary. The definitions and the cloze questions are used in an automated reading tutor to help second and third grade students learn new vocabulary. A parser provides syntactic phrase structure trees for the def...

This research sought to investigate the relationship between simultaneous interpreters’ oral cloze performance, their emotional intelligence, and gender. In other words, the study tried to predict the variability in performance on simultaneous interpreting (SI) oral cloze test based on the variability in gender, emotional quotient (EQ) and its subscales. To this end, a number of seventy partici...

We propose a method to generate high-quality cloze test questions using a computational approach. Previous methods for automatic cloze test generation have contained some problems; specifically, there can be multiple correct answers. We found that approximately 50% of the generated answers have such errors with previous methods, which requires human post-editing was necessary in previous resear...

Despite growing evidence of young adults neurally pre-activating word features during sentence comprehension, less clear is the degree to which this generalizes to older adults. Using ERPs, we tested for linguistic prediction in younger and older readers by means of indefinite articles (a's and an's) preceding more and less probable noun continuations. Although both groups exhibited cloze proba...

Multiple-choice cloze items constitute a prominent tool for assessing students’ competency in using the vocabulary of a language correctly. Without a proper estimation of students’ competency in using vocabulary, it will be hard for a computer-assisted language learning system to provide course material tailored to each individual student’s needs. Computer-assisted item generation allows the cr...

There have been several computational alternatives to the cloze task (Taylor, 1953) intended to approximate word predictability effects on eye movements during reading. In this study, we implement a computational model that instantiates each content word in a sentence as an input that activates semantic concepts in working memory. The predictability of a word is then determined by the extent to...