Conference article

Towards Automatic Scoring of Cloze Items by Selecting Low-Ambiguity Contexts

Tobias Horsmann
Language Technology Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Torsten Zesch
Language Technology Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

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Published in: Proceedings of the third workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning at SLTC 2014, Uppsala University

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 107:3, p. 33–42

NEALT Proceedings Series 22:3, p. 33–42

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Published: 2014-11-11

ISBN: 978-91-7519-175-1

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

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 scoring becomes possible. We utilize the local context of a word to collect evidence of low-ambiguity. We do that by seeking for collocated word sequences, but also taking structural information on sentence level into account. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method in a user study on cloze items ranked by our method. For the top-ranked items (lowest ambiguity) the subjects provide the target word significantly more often than for the bottom-ranked items (59.9% vs. 36.5%). While this shows the potential of our method, we did not succeed in fully eliminating ambiguity. Thus, further research is necessary before fully automatic scoring becomes possible.

Keywords

cloze tests; language proficiency tests; automatic scoring

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