scholarly journals Machine Learning–Driven Language Assessment

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 247-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burr Settles ◽  
Geoffrey T. LaFlair ◽  
Masato Hagiwara

We describe a method for rapidly creating language proficiency assessments, and provide experimental evidence that such tests can be valid, reliable, and secure. Our approach is the first to use machine learning and natural language processing to induce proficiency scales based on a given standard, and then use linguistic models to estimate item difficulty directly for computer-adaptive testing. This alleviates the need for expensive pilot testing with human subjects. We used these methods to develop an online proficiency exam called the Duolingo English Test, and demonstrate that its scores align significantly with other high-stakes English assessments. Furthermore, our approach produces test scores that are highly reliable, while generating item banks large enough to satisfy security requirements.

2020 ◽  
pp. 026553222093783
Author(s):  
Jinnie Shin ◽  
Mark J. Gierl

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness and the performance of two AES frameworks, each based on machine learning with deep language features, or complex language features, and deep neural algorithms. More specifically, support vector machines (SVMs) in conjunction with Coh-Metrix features were used for a traditional AES model development, and the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) approach was used for more contemporary deep-neural model development. Then, the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional and contemporary models under different circumstances (e.g., types of the rubric, length of the essay, and the essay type) were tested. The results were evaluated using the quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) score and compared with the agreement between the human raters. The results indicated that the CNNs model performs better, meaning that it produced more comparable results to the human raters than the Coh-Metrix + SVMs model. Moreover, the CNNs model also achieved state-of-the-art performance in most of the essay sets with a high average QWK score.


2020 ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Mia Halonen ◽  
Ari Huhta ◽  
Sari Ahola ◽  
Tuija Hirvelä ◽  
Reeta Neittaanmäki ◽  
...  

In this paper, we present a multidisciplinary study addressing fairness in the speaking test in a high-stakes language proficiency test in Finnish, National Certificates of Language Proficiency. The background of the research lies in studies on language assessment and (reversal) linguistic stereotyping and language attitudes. The focus L1 groups were Thai, Estonian, Finland Swedish, Arabic and Russian. Altogether 49 speech samples of test takers of these L1s were rated on a digital platform by 44 raters of the test system. The current paper reports on the sub-study that investigated whether the raters’ recognition of the test takers’ L1 affected their ratings and whether the effect differed across various assessment criteria.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-549
Author(s):  
You-Min Lin ◽  
Michelle Y. Chen

This study examined the writing score and writing feature changes of 562 repeat test takers who took the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program–General (CELPIP–General) test at least three times, with a short (30–40 day) interval between the first and second attempts and a longer (90–180 day) interval between the first and third attempts. Analysis was conducted to uncover whether changes occurred at different testing durations (short vs. long) and whether the observed changes varied across repeater’s initial proficiency groups (low, mid, high). The writing scores measured by CELPIP bands showed great stability over the 6-month period, but the trends of development differed by proficiency group. Low proficiency test takers were more likely to have faster observable score gains, compared to the medium proficiency group, whereas high proficiency repeaters may not maintain their score levels at later attempts. Writing quality was analyzed using natural language processing (NLP) tools. Results suggested that for all proficiency groups, lexical features were more likely to improve over the 6-month period, with some measures showing improvement at 1 month; features in cohesion and syntactic sophistication, however, did not change significantly.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 6579-6590
Author(s):  
Sandy Çağlıyor ◽  
Başar Öztayşi ◽  
Selime Sezgin

The motion picture industry is one of the largest industries worldwide and has significant importance in the global economy. Considering the high stakes and high risks in the industry, forecast models and decision support systems are gaining importance. Several attempts have been made to estimate the theatrical performance of a movie before or at the early stages of its release. Nevertheless, these models are mostly used for predicting domestic performances and the industry still struggles to predict box office performances in overseas markets. In this study, the aim is to design a forecast model using different machine learning algorithms to estimate the theatrical success of US movies in Turkey. From various sources, a dataset of 1559 movies is constructed. Firstly, independent variables are grouped as pre-release, distributor type, and international distribution based on their characteristic. The number of attendances is discretized into three classes. Four popular machine learning algorithms, artificial neural networks, decision tree regression and gradient boosting tree and random forest are employed, and the impact of each group is observed by compared by the performance models. Then the number of target classes is increased into five and eight and results are compared with the previously developed models in the literature.


Author(s):  
Sumit Kaur

Abstract- Deep learning is an emerging research area in machine learning and pattern recognition field which has been presented with the goal of drawing Machine Learning nearer to one of its unique objectives, Artificial Intelligence. It tries to mimic the human brain, which is capable of processing and learning from the complex input data and solving different kinds of complicated tasks well. Deep learning (DL) basically based on a set of supervised and unsupervised algorithms that attempt to model higher level abstractions in data and make it self-learning for hierarchical representation for classification. In the recent years, it has attracted much attention due to its state-of-the-art performance in diverse areas like object perception, speech recognition, computer vision, collaborative filtering and natural language processing. This paper will present a survey on different deep learning techniques for remote sensing image classification. 


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Jaeger ◽  
Simone Fulle ◽  
Samo Turk

Inspired by natural language processing techniques we here introduce Mol2vec which is an unsupervised machine learning approach to learn vector representations of molecular substructures. Similarly, to the Word2vec models where vectors of closely related words are in close proximity in the vector space, Mol2vec learns vector representations of molecular substructures that are pointing in similar directions for chemically related substructures. Compounds can finally be encoded as vectors by summing up vectors of the individual substructures and, for instance, feed into supervised machine learning approaches to predict compound properties. The underlying substructure vector embeddings are obtained by training an unsupervised machine learning approach on a so-called corpus of compounds that consists of all available chemical matter. The resulting Mol2vec model is pre-trained once, yields dense vector representations and overcomes drawbacks of common compound feature representations such as sparseness and bit collisions. The prediction capabilities are demonstrated on several compound property and bioactivity data sets and compared with results obtained for Morgan fingerprints as reference compound representation. Mol2vec can be easily combined with ProtVec, which employs the same Word2vec concept on protein sequences, resulting in a proteochemometric approach that is alignment independent and can be thus also easily used for proteins with low sequence similarities.


Author(s):  
Rohan Pandey ◽  
Vaibhav Gautam ◽  
Ridam Pal ◽  
Harsh Bandhey ◽  
Lovedeep Singh Dhingra ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this ‘Infodemic’ requires strong health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective and continuously learn the new patterns of misinformation. OBJECTIVE We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational AI, machine translation and natural language processing. WashKaro provides the right information matched against WHO guidelines through AI, and delivers it in the right format in local languages. METHODS We theorize (i) an NLP based AI engine that could continuously incorporate user feedback to improve relevance of information, (ii) bite sized audio in the local language to improve penetrance in a country with skewed gender literacy ratios, and (iii) conversational but interactive AI engagement with users towards an increased health awareness in the community. RESULTS A total of 5026 people who downloaded the app during the study window, among those 1545 were active users. Our study shows that 3.4 times more females engaged with the App in Hindi as compared to males, the relevance of AI-filtered news content doubled within 45 days of continuous machine learning, and the prudence of integrated AI chatbot “Satya” increased thus proving the usefulness of an mHealth platform to mitigate health misinformation. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that a multi-pronged machine learning application delivering vernacular bite-sized audios and conversational AI is an effective approach to mitigate health misinformation. CLINICALTRIAL Not Applicable


Author(s):  
Timnit Gebru

This chapter discusses the role of race and gender in artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid permeation of AI into society has not been accompanied by a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical issues that cause certain groups of people to be harmed rather than advantaged by it. For instance, recent studies have shown that commercial automated facial analysis systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women, while having minimal errors on light-skinned men. Moreover, a 2016 ProPublica investigation uncovered that machine learning–based tools that assess crime recidivism rates in the United States are biased against African Americans. Other studies show that natural language–processing tools trained on news articles exhibit societal biases. While many technical solutions have been proposed to alleviate bias in machine learning systems, a holistic and multifaceted approach must be taken. This includes standardization bodies determining what types of systems can be used in which scenarios, making sure that automated decision tools are created by people from diverse backgrounds, and understanding the historical and political factors that disadvantage certain groups who are subjected to these tools.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (14) ◽  
pp. 4736
Author(s):  
Sk. Tanzir Mehedi ◽  
Adnan Anwar ◽  
Ziaur Rahman ◽  
Kawsar Ahmed

The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus works as an important protocol in the real-time In-Vehicle Network (IVN) systems for its simple, suitable, and robust architecture. The risk of IVN devices has still been insecure and vulnerable due to the complex data-intensive architectures which greatly increase the accessibility to unauthorized networks and the possibility of various types of cyberattacks. Therefore, the detection of cyberattacks in IVN devices has become a growing interest. With the rapid development of IVNs and evolving threat types, the traditional machine learning-based IDS has to update to cope with the security requirements of the current environment. Nowadays, the progression of deep learning, deep transfer learning, and its impactful outcome in several areas has guided as an effective solution for network intrusion detection. This manuscript proposes a deep transfer learning-based IDS model for IVN along with improved performance in comparison to several other existing models. The unique contributions include effective attribute selection which is best suited to identify malicious CAN messages and accurately detect the normal and abnormal activities, designing a deep transfer learning-based LeNet model, and evaluating considering real-world data. To this end, an extensive experimental performance evaluation has been conducted. The architecture along with empirical analyses shows that the proposed IDS greatly improves the detection accuracy over the mainstream machine learning, deep learning, and benchmark deep transfer learning models and has demonstrated better performance for real-time IVN security.


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