During the development of Web services and their deployment to a specific target system, organizations need to evaluate if the Web service implementation and the hardware can meet the Quality of Service attributes specified in a Service Level Agreement. One important aspect are performance-related attributes, such as response time, throughput or scalability of the Web service. Typically tests w...

Language proficiency tests are a useful tool for evaluating learner progress, if the test difficulty fits the level of the learner. In this work, we describe a generalized framework for test difficulty prediction that is applicable to several languages and test types. In addition, we develop two ranking strategies for candidate evaluation inspired by automatic solving methods based on language ...

Recent language testing research investigates factors other than language proficiency that may be responsible for systematic variance in language test performance. One such factor is the test takers' cognitive styles. The present study was carried out with the aim of finding the probable effects of Iranian EFL learners' cognitive styles on their performance on communicative tests. For purposes ...

This paper describes a system which solves language tests for second grade students (7 years old). In Japan, there are materials for students to measure understanding of what they studied, just like SAT for high school students in US. We use textbooks for the students as the target material of this study. Questions in the materials are classified into four types: questions about Chinese charact...

A lightweight, human-in-the-loop evaluation scheme for machine translation (MT) systems is proposed. It extrinsically evaluates MT systems using human subjects’ scores on second language ability test problems that are machine-translated to the subjects’ native language. A largescale experiment involving 320 subjects revealed that the context-unawareness of the current MT systems severely damage...

Stuttering patterns may differ when comparing two languages. In bilinguals, specific patterns of stuttering in each one of the languages may potentially be found. This study reports on the case of a 27-year-old Spanish/English simultaneous bilingual whose dominant language is English. Speech and language testing was performed in both languages (language repetition, language understanding, vocab...

This article defines the origin of an internet-centered language assessment (ICLA), how ICLAs are different from the other traditional computer-oriented tests, and what uses and functions ICLAs have in different taxonomies of language testing. After a very short review of computer- oriented testing, ICLAs are defined and categorized in low-tech or high tech categories. Since low-tech tests are ...

The popularity of use-of-language testing seems to have been growing dramatically, in recent years, particularly where second language learners are involved ; and the term 'communicative testing' appears to have become a battle cry for all that is 'progressive' . By espousing communicative testing, the impression is given that one can throw off at a stroke the shackles of test irrelevance and a...