Controlling Cloze-test Question Item Difficulty with PLM-based Surrogate Models for IRT Assessment

Item difficulty plays a crucial role in adaptive testing. However, few works have focused on generating questions of varying difficulty levels, especially for multiple-choice (MC) cloze tests. We propose training pre-trained language models (PLMs) as surrogate models to enable item response theory (IRT) assessment, avoiding the need for human test subjects. We also propose two strategies to control the difficulty levels of both the gaps and the distractors using ranking rules to reduce invalid distractors. Experimentation on a benchmark dataset demonstrates that our proposed framework and methods can effectively control and evaluate the difficulty levels of MC cloze tests.

InDEX: Indonesian Idiom and Expression Dataset for Cloze Test

We propose InDEX, an Indonesian Idiom and Expression dataset for cloze test. The dataset contains 10438 unique sentences for 289 idioms and expressions for which we generate 15 different types of distractors, resulting in a large cloze-style corpus. Many baseline models of cloze test reading comprehension apply BERT with random initialization to learn embedding representation. But idioms and fixed expressions are different such that the literal meaning of the phrases may or may not be consistent with their contextual meaning. Therefore, we explore different ways to combine static and contextual representations for a stronger baseline model. Experimentations show that combining definition and random initialization will better support cloze test model performance for idioms whether independently or mixed with fixed expressions. While for fixed expressions with no special meaning, static embedding with random initialization is sufficient for cloze test model.

Tapping the Potential of Coherence and Syntactic Features in Neural Models for Automatic Essay Scoring

In the prompt-specific holistic score prediction task for Automatic Essay Scoring, the general approaches include pre-trained neural model, coherence model, and hybrid model that incorporate syntactic features with neural model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extract and represent essay coherence features with prompt-learning NSP that shows to match the state-of-the-art AES coherence model, and achieves the best performance for long essays. We apply syntactic feature dense embedding to augment BERT-based model and achieve the best performance for hybrid methodology for AES. In addition, we explore various ideas to combine coherence, syntactic information and semantic embeddings, which no previous study has done before. Our combined model also performs better than the SOTA available for combined model, even though it does not outperform our syntactic enhanced neural model. We further offer analyses that can be useful for future study.

Yunshan Cup 2020: Overview of the Part-of-Speech Tagging Task for Low-resourced Languages

The Yunshan Cup 2020 track focused on creating a framework for evaluating different methods of part-of-speech (POS). There were two tasks for this track: (1) POS tagging for the Indonesian language, and (2) POS tagging for the Lao tagging. The Indonesian dataset is comprised of 10000 sentences from Indonesian news within 29 tags. And the Lao dataset consists of 8000 sentences within 27 tags. 25 teams registered for the task. The methods of participants ranged from feature-based to neural networks using either classical machine learning techniques or ensemble methods. The best performing results achieve an accuracy of 95.82% for Indonesian and 93.03%, showing that neural sequence labeling models significantly outperform classic feature-based methods and rule-based methods.

Learning Syntactic Dense Embedding with Correlation Graph for Automatic Readability Assessment

Deep learning models for automatic readability assessment generally discard linguistic features traditionally used in machine learning models for the task. We propose to incorporate linguistic features into neural network models by learning syntactic dense embeddings based on linguistic features. To cope with the relationships between the features, we form a correlation graph among features and use it to learn their embeddings so that similar features will be represented by similar embeddings. Experiments with six data sets of two proficiency levels demonstrate that our proposed methodology can complement BERT-only model to achieve significantly better performances for automatic readability assessment.