Abstract:

This paper describes a powerful answer analysis system which solves the difficult problems of recognizing student reproductions of spoken Japanese sentences. It allows all reasonable Roman spellings of Japanese words, while at the same time detecting mishearings, and distinguishing between important and unimportant spacing errors. The system can handle combinations of these errors while detecting incorrect word orders and missing sentence parts, and determining the semantic category into which the student answer falls. For each Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) system it is used with, the specification of answer categories and requests for error checks are contained in a database separate from the program. The system has been used successfully for answer analysis in listening comprehension exercises.

Author: Rika Yoshii, Alastair Milne