LINGUIST List 10.1546

Mon Oct 18 1999

FYI: GRE/Writing, Minority Lang, Lang Acquisition

Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. don powers, GRE Writing Assessment
2. Briony Williams, Minority Languages: SALTMIL/List
3. Robin Allott, Lang Acquisition by Helen Keller

Dear Colleague:

	We are seeking help with research we are conducting on behalf of the 
Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Board. Our research concerns the 
automated (or computer) scoring of open-ended essay responses. In 
particular, we are studying the feasibility of applying automated scoring 
methods to the kinds of essays that will be written for the new GRE Writing 
Assessment. As you probably know, the automated scoring of essay responses 
is now becoming a realistic possibility. 

Our "challenge" to you is to try to "beat" the current version of our 
automated scoring system, or e-rater, as we call it. The "game," should 
you choose to play, is to write essays that will be problematical for 
e-rater. By "problematical" we mean essays that would get scores from 
e-rater that are either too high or too low, relative to the scores 
assigned by human readers. We hope to learn both (a) how robust e-rater is 
to attempts to foil it, and (b) whether it undervalues certain kinds or 
styles of writing. Ideally, our findings will enable us to distinguish 
between failures that are easily correctable and ones that are more serious 
because they stem from fundamental differences in the ways that humans and 
computers understand language.

Although we can't compensate participants for their time, we hope we can 
entice you by providing feedback on how successful your challenges were, as 
well as a summary of the challenges made by other participants. (We'll 
also award $250 to a writer whose essay is greatly undervalued by e-rater, 
and $250 to another whose essay is greatly overrated.) If you are 
interested in participating, please let us know as soon as you can 
(dpowersets.org), and we'll send further details. Thanks.

Sincerely, 


Don Powers
Principal Research Scientist
Educational Testing Service

 Announcing a new ISCA SIG: SALTMIL
 ===================================

 SALTMIL: "Speech And Language Technology for MInority Languages"
 =================================================================


The start of the new academic year sees the start of the SALTMIL Special
Interest Group within ESCA (now ISCA [International Speech Communication 
Association]). The group's initial activities are as follows: 
more activities will ensue later.


1) Email discussion list
- -----------------------

The first activity is an email discussion list. As a preliminary
measure, a new list has been created at the US website www.onelist.com. 
There are two possible ways to subscribe to the SALTMIL list:

a) Point your web browser to http://www.onelist.com/community/saltmil
 and follow the link to subscribe;
 or
b) Send a blank email to saltmil-subscribeonelist.com
 A message with further details will be automatically sent to you.

This list is free, but carries commercial advertising in a brief section
at the end of each message. However, until we can migrate to a
non-commercial server this will be adequate. The discussions can be
followed through email, and also through a Web browser at the Onelist
site. 


2) SALTMIL web page
- ------------------

The provisional SALTMIL website is currently at
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/SALTMIL 

Please send any material you would like to add to the web pages to: 
brionycstr.ed.ac.uk
This could include details of your work, or a link to your web pages.

We hope very much that many colleagues will join in the discussions and
share their knowledge and experience with others who are also working in
the field of speech and language technology for minority languages. 


Briony Williams			University of Edinburgh, UK
Climent Nadeu			Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain
Donncha �'Cr�in�n		Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Ireland

Perhaps in thinking about the nature and significance of language we
ought to reconsider something so familiar that we no longer mention it,
the acquisition of language by Helen Keller. For the relation between
this and the current intensive discussion of consciousness see 
http://www.percep.demon.co.uk/hkeller.htm

Robin Allott email: RMAllottpercep.demon.co.uk
 http://www.percep.demon.co.uk
 tel/fax: +44 1323 492300