Automatic assessment of syntactic complexity for spontaneous speech scoring

Empirical results suggest that the proposed measures of syntactic complexity show a reasonable association with human-rated proficiency scores compared to conventional measures of syntactic complexity. They are also significantly robust against errors resulting from automatic speech recognition, making them more suitable for use in operational automated scoring applications. When used in combination with other measures of oral proficiency in a state-of-the-art scoring model, the predicted scores show improved agreement with human-assigned scores over a baseline scoring model without our proposed features.