Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests

Carl Christensen, Ross Hendrickson, Deryle Lonsdale


Abstract
In this paper we discuss the methodology behind the construction of elicited imitation (EI) test items. First we examine varying uses for EI tests in research and in testing overall oral proficiency. We also mention criticisms of previous test items. Then we identify the factors that contribute to the difficulty of an EI item as shown in previous studies. Based on this discussion, we describe a way of automating the creation of test items in order to better evaluate language learners' oral proficiency while improving item naturalness. We present a new item construction tool and the process that it implements in order to create test items from a corpus, identifying relevant features needed to compile a database of EI test items. We examine results from administration of a new EI test engineered in this manner, illustrating the effect that standard language resources can have on creating an effective EI test item repository. We also sketch ongoing work on test item generation for other languages and an adaptive test that will use this collection of test items.
Anthology ID:
L10-1460
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/672_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carl Christensen, Ross Hendrickson, and Deryle Lonsdale. 2010. Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests (Christensen et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/672_Paper.pdf