Summary of the paper

Title Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests
Authors Carl Christensen, Ross Hendrickson and 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.
Topics Tools, systems, applications, Acquisition, Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.)
Full paper Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests
Slides -
Bibtex @InProceedings{CHRISTENSEN10.672,
  author = {Carl Christensen and Ross Hendrickson and Deryle Lonsdale},
  title = {Principled Construction of Elicited Imitation Tests},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  month = {may},
  date = {19-21},
  address = {Valletta, Malta},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Mike Rosner and Daniel Tapias},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {2-9517408-6-7},
  language = {english}
 }
Powered by ELDA © 2010 ELDA/ELRA