Assessment of ESL learners' syntactic competence based on similarity measures

This study presents a novel method that measures English language learners' syntactic competence towards improving automated speech scoring systems. In contrast to most previous studies which focus on the length of production units such as the mean length of clauses, we focused on capturing the differences in the distribution of morpho-syntactic features or grammatical expressions across proficiency. We estimated the syntactic competence through the use of corpus-based NLP techniques. Assuming that the range and sophistication of grammatical expressions can be captured by the distribution of Part-of-Speech (POS) tags, vector space models of POS tags were constructed. We use a large corpus of English learners' responses that are classified into four proficiency levels by human raters. Our proposed feature measures the similarity of a given response with the most proficient group and is then estimates the learner's syntactic competence level. Widely outperforming the state-of-the-art measures of syntactic complexity, our method attained a significant correlation with human-rated scores. The correlation between human-rated scores and features based on manual transcription was 0.43 and the same based on ASR-hypothesis was slightly lower, 0.42. An important advantage of our method is its robustness against speech recognition errors not to mention the simplicity of feature generation that captures a reasonable set of learner-specific syntactic errors.