In developing regions like India, voice based telecommunication services are one of the most appropriate medium for information dissemination as they overcome prevalent low literacy rate. However, voice based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are still not exploited to their full potential and are commonly considered as frustrating to use. We did a real world experiment to investigate th...

Standardized tests often group items around a common stimulus. Such groupings of items are called testlets. The potential dependency among items within a testlet is generally ignored in practice, even though a basic assumption of item response theory (IRT) is that individual items are independent of one another. A technique called tree-based regression (TBR) was applied to identify key features...

A hierarchical IRT model is proposed for mastery classification in criterionreferenced measurement. In this model, items measuring the same criterion are grouped, and a difficulty and discrimination parameter of the criterion is estimated on the same scale as the person and item parameters. The level of proficiency of a student with respect to the criterion is determined by the probability of s...

Teucrium polium L. (Lamiaceae) is used in the traditional medicine of Iran for the treatment of disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. The essential oil from the aerial parts of T polium was assessed for antispasmodic activity and compared with the effect of atropine and dicyclomine. Acetylcholine and KC I were used for induction of contraction on rat isolated ileum. Teucrium polium essen...

The present study aims to shed some light on an old controversy about the joint impact of acquiescence and social desirability on item responses. There are two main hypotheses: (a) of the two biases, social desirability is by far the prime determinant, and (b) acquiescence operates in all sorts of items, including those impacted by social desirability. A new methodology is harnessed to assess t...

There are two currently popular statistical frameworks for addressing measurement problems namely Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT). This study is aimed empirically to examine the similarities and differences in the parameters estimated using these two frameworks. For this purpose, firstly the model assumptions and the goodness of fit analyses were checked for IRT. The ...

Understanding intramolecular energy flow in molecules is one of the central goals of chemical physics. Statistical theories [such as Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-MarCus (RRKM) theory] of unimolecular reaction rates, which assume that the vibrational degrees of freedom rapidly exchange energy, have proved extremely successful (1). Recent work on small molecules has provided rigorous tests of these the...

Using picosecond time-resolved photoelectron imaging we have studied the intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) dynamics that occur following the excitation of the 35 level which lies 2068 cm above the S1 origin in p-difluorobenzene. Our technique, which has superior time resolution to that of earlier studies but retains sufficient energy resolution to identify the behavior of i...

Item Response Theory (IRT) models enable researchers to evaluate test or survey subjects and questions simultaneously to more accurately judge the difficulty and quality of the test as well as the strength of each subject. Most IRT analyses use parametric models, often without satisfying the necessary assumptions of these models. The KernSmoothIRT package uses kernel smoothing from Ramsay (1991...

This paper describes our efforts towards the creation of corporate synthetic voices from low quality speech data, as it can typically be found on many Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units. In doing so, we first touch on several normalization techniques that aim on a better support of a highly automated voice construction process. Subsequently, we describe methods for the creation of enriched ...