A novel species, Aspergillus brasiliensis sp. nov., is described within Aspergillus section Nigri. This species can be distinguished from other black aspergilli based on intergenic transcribed region, beta-tubulin and calmodulin gene sequences, by amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis and by extrolite profiles. A. brasiliensis isolates produced naphtho-gamma-pyrones, tensidol A and B ...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

Objective: This study is devoted to a relationship between irrational beliefs and severity of addiction in methadone treatment addicts in shahrood city, Iran. Method: the research was conducted between 56 addicts that was in treatment with methadone. They were selected with using Simple random sampling method then evaluated by Irrational Beliefs Test (IBT) and and severity of addiction Semi-str...

This paper presents the first version of the SpeechRater system for automatically scoring non-native spontaneous high-entropy speech in the context of an online practice test for prospective takers of the Test of English as a Foreign Language internet-based test (TOEFL iBT). The system consists of a speech recognizer trained on non-native English speech data, a feature computation module, using...

Conventionally, the questions on a test are assumed to be kept secret from test takers until the test. However, for tests that are taken on a large scale, particularly asynchronously, this is very hard to achieve. For example, example TOEFL iBT and driver’s license test questions are easily found online. This also appears likely to become an issue for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In thi...

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinesespeaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary assessment, two practice reading comprehension passages...

1. INTERACTIVE BEHAVIOR TREES Interactive Behavior Trees (IBT’s) address challenges in traditional Behavior Tree representations by facilitating freeform user interaction and state persistence. IBT’s, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a) are divided into 3 independent sub-trees that are connected using a Parallel control node. An IBT tIBT = 〈tui, tstate, tnarr = {t i |t 1 . . . t m }, β〉 where: (1) tnar...