This paper provides a practical solution to the problem of generating (good) pseudowords, which are commonly used in vocabulary testing and experimental research in applied linguistics, and introduces an empirically-founded solution to evaluating the suitability of pseudowords for different tasks. In the first part of the paper we propose a novel way of generating pseudowords – a character-gram chaining algorithm. A major advantage of the algorithm is that it does not require any knowledge of the language, thereby facilitating the generation of pseudowords in any language. Secondly, there is currently a lack of formal criteria for evaluating pseudowords, both in terms of (i) their orthographic fit in the target language they are intended for, and (ii) their suitability for use in various lexical processing and language teaching tasks. In the second part of the paper, we argue for the need to evaluate pseudowords, propose a set of linguistic criteria for evaluating the generated pseudowords, and provide a comparison with other current pseudoword lists using this criteria.

中文翻译：

---

使用 Character-Grams 自动生成伪词以及如何评估它们

本文为生成（好）伪词的问题提供了一个实用的解决方案，这些问题常用于应用语言学的词汇测试和实验研究，并介绍了一种基于经验的解决方案来评估伪词对不同任务的适用性。在论文的第一部分，我们提出了一种生成伪词的新方法——字符语法链算法。该算法的一个主要优点是它不需要任何语言知识，从而有助于生成任何语言的伪词。其次，目前缺乏评估伪词的正式标准，包括 (i) 它们与目标语言的正字法匹配，以及 (ii) 它们在各种词汇处理和语言教学任务中的适用性。