This work investigates linguistically motivated features for automatically scoring a spoken picture-based narration task. Specifically, we build scoring models with features for story development, language use and task relevance of the response. Results show that combinations of these features outperform a baseline system that uses state of the art speechbased features, and that best results ar...

the factor structure of the listening section of a persian language proficiency test (plpt), developed and used for academic purposes, was examined in this study. a structural equation modeling (sem) was employed using amos (v. 18) to analyze the responses of a number of persian language learners (n=120) who participated in the first piloting phase of the test in 2014. to examine whether the li...

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elemen...

The language modelling approach to Information Retrieval (IR) has generated much interest in the field since its conception in 1998[73]. However, some serious questions have been asked about the integrity of the language modelling approach. Specifically, it does not model relevance explicitly, unlike traditional probabilistic models of IR such as the Binary Independence Model[93]. Instead, it r...

Language modeling plays a critical role for automatic speech recognition. Conventionally, the n-gram language models suffer from lacking good representation of historical words and estimating unseen parameters from insufficient training data. In this work, the latent semantic information is explored for language modeling and parameter smoothing. In language modeling, we present a new representa...

Scale effects in per capita production are an outcome of many theoretical economic models like second generation growth models, models of the new trade theory or the new economic geography. The prediction is that larger economies should have a higher per capita production than smaller economies. However, in an open economy context the scale of the economy is less important because countries can...

Within a Question Answering (QA) framework, Question Context plays a vital role. We define Question Context to be background knowledge that can be used to represent the user’s information need more completely than the terms in the query alone. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses statistical language modeling techniques to develop a semantic Question Context which we then incorporate ...