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ICE-4005 - Meeting 4
Meeting
Attendance: Alan, Bill
Agenda:
- Present to bill create a lexical test aiming at counting the number of words in the mind of the testee using the Zipf law and a variation of the binary search algorithm.
Actions:
- Alan: Write a dummy python version of the test.
Discussions
- Alan presented the problematic and interest of vocabulary tests, pointing out that the ways current tests are subobtimal and how the use of pseudowords and a variation of the binary search algorithm could improve the way we count the number of words known by individuals. A granular evaluation of vocabulary knowledge would have applications in the following area: L2 research, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, AI (testing LLMs verbal abilities), placement testing (students, immigration) etc…
- Bill agreed with Alan’s proposision.
- Bill mentioned that the distribution of the “point of failure” in such a lexical test should be a negative biniomial distribution instead of a normal distribution as Alan thought.
Articles
Maera, P. and Jones, G. (1988) ‘Vocabulary size as a placement indicator’.
Claude E. Shannon: The Redundancy of English. Aus: Cybernetics. The Macy Conferences 1946–1953. The Complete Transactions (1953).
‘EXPRESS: UniPseudo : A Universal Pseudoword Generator | Request PDF’ (2024) ResearchGate [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231164373.