Many clinical assessment instruments used to diagnose language impairments in children include a task in which the subject must formulate a sentence to describe an image using a specific target word. Because producing sentences in this way requires the speaker to integrate syntactic and semantic knowledge in a complex manner, responses are typically evaluated on several different dimensions of appropriateness yielding a single composite score for each response. In this paper, we present a dataset consisting of non-clinically elicited responses for three related sentence formulation tasks, and we propose an approach for automatically evaluating their appropriateness. We use neural machine translation to generate correct-incorrect sentence pairs in order to create synthetic data to increase the amount and diversity of training data for our scoring model. Our scoring model uses transfer learning to facilitate automatic sentence appropriateness evaluation. We further compare custom word embeddings with pre-trained contextualized embeddings serving as features for our scoring model. We find that transfer learning improves scoring accuracy, particularly when using pretrained contextualized embeddings.

This paper presents a method of combining Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) model with a post-processing layer using Google n-grams statistical information tailored to detect word selection and word order errors made by learners of Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL). We describe the architecture of the model and its performance in the shared task of the ACL 2018 Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA). This hybrid approach yields comparably high false positive rate (FPR = 0.1274) and precision (Pd= 0.7519; Pi= 0.6311), but low recall (Rd = 0.3035; Ri = 0.1696 ) in grammatical error detection and identification tasks. Additional statistical information and linguistic rules can be added to enhance the model performance in the future.