DISTRIBUTIONS OF ACTFL RATINGS BY TOEFL SCORE RANGES

Using a New Statistical Model for Testlets to Score TOEFL

No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Violators will be prosecuted in accordance with both U.S. and international copyright laws. Abstract Standard item response theory (IRT) models fit to exam...

Optimizing substitution matrices by separating score distributions

MOTIVATION Homology search is one of the most fundamental tools in Bioinformatics. Typical alignment algorithms use substitution matrices and gap costs. Thus, the improvement of substitution matrices increases accuracy of homology searches. Generally, substitution matrices are derived from aligned sequences whose relationships are known, and gap costs are determined by trial and error. To discr...

Evaluation of MT Systems by TOEFL

Recently, we did some comparative evaluation of the commercial English-to-Japanese MT systems by using the TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language. The passages in the Reading Comprehension part of the Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension section were extracted from a TOEFL guide book [1], and were translated into Japanese by using the MT systems. Then the translated tests were taken by th...

Modeling Population Distributions of Subjective Ratings

Most human figure models used in ergonomic analyses present postural comfort ratings based on joint angles, and present a single comfort score for the whole body or on a joint-by-joint basis. The source data for these ratings is generally derived from laboratory studies that link posture to ratings. Lacking in many of these models is a thorough treatment of the distribution of ratings for the p...

Determinants of TOEFL Score: A Comparison of Linguistic and Economic Factors