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<Paper uid="W04-1708">
  <Title>Automatic Measuring of English Language Proficiency using MT Evaluation Technology</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> For effective second language learning, it is absolutely necessary to test proficiency in the second language. This testing can help in selecting educational materials before learning, checking learners' understanding after learning, and so on.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> To make learning efficient, it is important to achieve testing with a short turnaround time.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Computer-based testing is one solution for this, and several kinds of tests have been developed, including CASEC (CASEC, 2004) and TOEFL-CBT (TOEFL, 2004). However, these tests are mainly based on cloze testing or multiple-choice questions. Consequently, they require labour costs for expert examination designers to make the questions and the alternative &amp;quot;detractor&amp;quot; answers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Inthispaper, weproposeamethodfortheautomatic measurement of English language proficiency by applying automatic evaluation techniques. The proposed method selects adequate test sentences from an existing corpus. Then, it automatically evaluates the translations of test sentences done by users. The core technology of the proposed method, i.e., the automatic evaluation of translations, was developed in research aiming at the efficient development of Machine Translation (MT) technology (Su et al., 1992; Papineni et al., 2002; NIST, 2002).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In the proposed method, we apply these MT evaluation technologies to the measurement of human English language proficiency. The proposed method focuses on measuring the communicative skill of structuring sentences, which is indispensable for writing and speaking. It does not measure elementary capabilities including vocabulary or grammar. This method also proposes a test sentence selection scheme to enable efficient testing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Section2 describes several automatic evaluation methods applied to the proposed method. Section3 introduces the proposed evaluation scheme. Section4 shows the evaluation results obtained by the proposed method. Section 5 concludes the paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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