The narrative cloze is an evaluation metric commonly used for work on automatic script induction. While prior work in this area has focused on count-based methods from distributional semantics, such as pointwise mutual information, we argue that the narrative cloze can be productively reframed as a language modeling task. By training a discriminative language model for this task, we attain impr...

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere (RH) has a privileged role in the processing of figurative language, including metaphors, idioms, and verbal humor. Previous experiments using hemifield visual presentation combined with human electrophysiology support the idea that the RH plays a special role in joke comprehension. The current study examines metaphoric language. Event-related pot...

Fill-in-the-blank questions, or cloze items, are commonly used in language learning applications. The benefits of personalized items, tailored to the user’s interest and proficiency, have motivated research on automatic generation of cloze items. This paper is concerned with generating cloze items for prepositions, whose usage often poses problems for non-native speakers of English. The quality...

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...

This study aims to examine when and how readers make use of top-down information to predict or integrate upcoming words by utilizing the characteristics of Chinese classifier-noun agreement, as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs). Constraint strength of classifiers (strong and weak) and cloze probability of the pairing noun (high, low, implausible) was manipulated. Weakly constrained cl...

Most of the previous work on cloze prediction focused on grammar testing such as preposition generation. In this paper we explore a different problem on knowledge testing by designing a system to automatically generate blanks for cloze test. We present a cross-document Information Extraction (IE) driven approach, and compare its performance on two different tasks with and without background doc...