1 We report experience in applying techniques for natural language processing to algorithmically generating test items for both reading and listening cloze items. We propose a word sense disambiguationbased method for locating sentences in which designated words carry specific senses, and apply a collocation-based method for selecting distractors that are necessary for multiple-choice cloze ite...

Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

The GTZAN dataset appears in at least 100 published works, and is the most-used public dataset for evaluation in machine listening research for music genre recognition (MGR). Our recent work, however, shows GTZAN has several faults (repetitions, mislabelings, and distortions), which challenge the interpretability of any result derived using it. In this article, we disprove the claims that all M...

Music is often described in terms of the structure of repeated phrases. For example, many songs have the form AABA, where each letter represents an instance of a phrase. This research aims to construct descriptions or explanations of music in this form, using only audio recordings as input. A system of programs is described that transcribes the melody of a recording, identifies similar segments...

The perception of prosodic structure (phrasal prominences and boundaries) may depend in part on acoustic cues in the speech signal and in part on utterance meaning as related to syntactic structure and discourse context. In this study we ask if listeners are able to differentially weigh acoustic and meaningbased cues to prosody. We test naïve subjects’ transcription of prominences and boundarie...