Developing Computer System for Testing Cognitive Respondent’s Abili-ties Based on Elliptical Sentences

Abstract

Cognitive abilities cover all higher human intellectual functions, including oral and written speech. The use of ellipses in writing is associated with the ability to clearly formulate a thought, avoiding the redundancy of its expression. Testing the ability to use ellipses can be the basis, on the one hand, for assessing the cognitive operation of generating ellipses in writing and detecting violations of this operation. This can serve as the basis for the early detection of dementia in medicine. On the other hand, such testing can be used to teach speech technologies, including in foreign languages. From a scientific point of view, it is important to determine the influence degree of training on the performance of text tasks. The article describes the development of a computer system for remote on-line testing the operation of converting a complete sentence into a sentence with an ellipsis of a certain type, the principles of evaluating the results of testing the subjects. The concept of the system is discussed. The structure of system and software development environment are described. A feature of the system is the creation of a new type of tasks related to natural language processing. The complexity of the development is determined by the need for automated formation of a bank of sentences’ pairs in natural language without ellipses and with ellipses of a certain type, which entails the inclusion, in the software environment, of text parsing tools and algorithms for automated formation of ellipses and / or restoration of complete sentences from elliptical ones. In conclusion, the prospects for the development and application of the proposed system are discussed.