This paper proposes the automatic generation of Fill-in-the-Blank Questions (FBQs) together with testing based on Item Response Theory (IRT) to measure English proficiency. First, the proposal generates an FBQ from a given sentence in English. The position of a blank in the sentence is determined, and the word at that position is considered as the correct choice. The candidates for incorrect choices for the blank are hypothesized through a thesaurus. Then, each of the candidates is verified by using the Web. Finally, the blanked sentence, the correct choice and the incorrect choices surviving the verification are together laid out to form the FBQ. Second, the proficiency of nonnative speakers who took the test consisting of such FBQs is estimated through IRT.Our experimental results suggest that: (1) the generated questions plus IRT estimate the non-native speakers' English proficiency; (2) while on the other hand, the test can be completed almost perfectly by English native speakers; and (3) the number of questions can be reduced by using item information in IRT.The proposed method provides teachers and testers with a tool that reduces time and expenditure for testing English proficiency.

The demand of browsing information from general Web pages using a mobile phone is increasing. However, since the majority of Web pages on the Internet are optimized for browsing from PCs, it is difficult for mobile phone users to obtain sufficient information from the Web. Therefore, a method to reconstruct PCoptimized Web pages for mobile phone users is essential. An example approach is to segment the Web page based on its structure, and utilize the hierarchy of the content element to regenerate a page suitable for mobile phone browsing. In our previous work, we have examined a robust automatic Web page segmentation scheme which uses the distance between content elements based on the relative HTML tag hierarchy, i.e., the number and depth of HTML tags in Web pages. However, this scheme has a problem that the content-distance based on the order of HTML tags does not always correspond to the intuitional distance between content elements on the actual layout of a Web page.In this paper, we propose a hybrid segmentation method which segments Web pages based on both the content-distance calculated by the previous scheme, and a novel approach which utilizes Web page layout information. Experiments conducted to evaluate the accuracy of Web page segmentation results prove that the proposed method can segment Web pages more accurately than conventional methods. Furthermore, implementation and evaluation of our system on the mobile phone prove that our method can realize superior usability compared to commercial Web browsers.

This paper describes our new algorithm for shot boundary detection and its evaluation. We adopt a 2-stage data fusion approach with SVM technique to decide whether a boundary exists or not within a given video sequence. This approach is useful to avoid huge feature space problems, even when we adopt many promising features extracted from a video sequence. We also introduce a novel feature to improve detection. The feature consists of two kinds of values extracted from a local frame sequence. One is the image difference between the target frame and that synthesized from the neighbors. The other is the difference between neighbors. This feature can be extracted quickly with a least-square technique. Evaluation of our algorithm is conducted with the TRECVID evaluation framework. Our system obtained a high performance at a shot boundary detection task in TRECVID2005.

No abstract

The main goal of this paper is to propose automatic schemes for the translation paired comparison method. This method was proposed to precisely evaluate a speech translation system's capability. Furthermore, the method gives an objective evaluation result, i.e., a score of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The TOEIC score is used as a measure of one's speech translation capability. However, this method requires tremendous evaluation costs. Accordingly, automatization of this method is an important subject for study. In the proposed method, currently available automatic evaluation methods are applied to automate the translation paired comparison method.In the experiments, several automatic evaluation methods (BLEU, NIST, DPbased method) are applied. The exper-imental results of these automatic measures show a good correlation with evaluation results of the translation paired comparison method.