Clozetype

Clozetype refers to a type of cloze task used in testing and research in which words are removed from a text and the participant is asked to supply the missing items. The cloze method originated in psychometrics and linguistics in the mid-20th century as a means to assess language proficiency, reading comprehension, and semantic knowledge. In its standard form, a passage has selected words deleted at regular intervals, creating a passage with multiple blanks that the reader must fill in so that the text remainder remains coherent.

Variants of clozetype include fixed deletion, where deletions follow a predefined pattern for all respondents; selective or adaptive deletion, where blanks are chosen to adjust difficulty or to target specific linguistic features; and partial or full cloze, which differ in the amount of the text removed. Response formats vary from open-ended (any appropriate word) to closed-ended (multiple-choice options). Some versions provide hints, such as word length, initial letters, or semantic cues, to guide the respondent.

Applications of clozetype span education, language testing, and research. In educational settings, cloze tests gauge reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, and inferencing ability. In psycholinguistics, completion rates illuminate predictability and processing difficulty of language. In natural language processing, cloze-type tasks underpin masked language modeling, a core pretraining objective for models like BERT, where the model learns to predict masked tokens from surrounding context.

Limitations include potential cultural or genre bias, reliance on context that may favor certain backgrounds, and the possibility of multiple acceptable answers in open-ended formats. Proper design and pilot testing are essential to ensure reliability, validity, and fairness across languages and populations.