The Development and Evaluation of Interactional Competence Elicitor for Oral Language Assessments

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Interaction Competence Elicitor (ICE), a spoken dialog system (SDS) for delivery paired oral discussion task in context language assessment. The purpose ICE is to sustain topic-specific conversation with test taker order elicit discourse that can be later judged assess taker's ability, including interactional competence. reported detail provide guidance future developers similar systems. performance evaluated on two aspects: (a) by analyzing errors occur at different stages natural processing (NLP) pipeline terms both their preventability impact downstream pipeline, (b) questionnaire semistructured interview data establish takers' experience system. Findings suggest was robust 90% turns it produced, takers noted positive negative aspects communicating as opposed human interlocutor. We conclude this prototype lays important groundwork use specialized SDSs assessment communication, which includes