Two applications of lexical information to computer-assisted item authoring for elementary Chinese

Abstract

Testing is a popular way to assess one`s competence in a language. The assessment can be conducted by the students for self evaluation or by the teachers in achievement tests. We present two applications of lexical information for assisting the task of test item authoring in this paper. Applying information implicitly contained in a machine readable lexicon, our system offers semantically and lexically similar words to help teachers prepare test items for cloze tests. Employing information about structures and pronunciations of Chinese characters, our system provides characters that are similar in either formation or pronunciation for the task of word correction. Experimental results indicate that our system furnishes quality recommendations for the preparation of test items, in addition to expediting the process. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.