Summary of the paper

Title Item Development and Scoring for Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing
Authors Hitokazu Matsushita and Deryle Lonsdale
Abstract This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a corpus-based test item creation method to produce EI items with targeted linguistic features in a principled and efficient manner. Second, we sketch how we are able to bootstrap a small learner speech corpus to generate a significantly large corpus of training data for language model construction. Lastly, we show how newly created test items effectively classify learners according to their L2 speaking capability and illustrate how our scoring method computes a metric for language proficiency that correlates well with more traditional human scoring methods.
Topics Speech resource/database, Language modelling, Tools, systems, applications
Full paper Item Development and Scoring for Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing
Bibtex @InProceedings{MATSUSHITA12.241,
  author = {Hitokazu Matsushita and Deryle Lonsdale},
  title = {Item Development and Scoring for Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  month = {may},
  date = {23-25},
  address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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