Early and intermediate second language (L2) learners often encounter difficulties when engaging in introductory social conversations, typically having had little opportunity to practise such interactions. This article describes a project to design and prototype a computer dialogue system, Let's Chat, which would allow learners to rehearse social…

This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of building a natural language generation (NLG) system for automatic test item generation. While natural language processing techniques are applicable to general verbal items, mathematics word problems are particularly tractable targets for natural language…

Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3-…

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical…

Text analytics refers to the process of analyzing unstructured data from documented sources, including open-ended surveys, blogs, and other types of web dialog. Text analytics has enveloped the concept of text mining, an analysis approach influenced heavily from data mining. While text mining has been covered extensively in various computer…

"The Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis" is the authoritative reference for the theory behind Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a burgeoning mathematical method used to analyze how words make meaning, with the desired outcome to program machines to understand human commands via natural language rather than strict programming protocols.…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Speech technology--especially automatic speech recognition--has now advanced to a level where it can be of great benefit both to able-bodied people and those with various disabilities. In this paper we describe an application "TalkMaths" which, using the output from a commonly-used conventional automatic speech recognition system,…

Proposes a theoretical framework called NLPIR that integrates natural language processing (NLP) into information retrieval (IR) based on the assumption that there exists representation distance between queries and documents. Discusses problems in traditional keyword-based IR, including relevance, and describes some existing NLP techniques.…

Discussion of natural language processing focuses on term weighting in information retrieval. Presents a new weighting method that depends on low frequency terms, called negative weighted inverse verb frequency, and discusses case frames, word similarity, similarity measurement, and recall and precision improvement. (LRW)

Investigates an automatic method for Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that utilizes the multilingual Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus to translate Spanish natural-language queries into English. Results indicate that for Spanish, the UMLS Metathesaurus-based CLIR method is at least equivalent to if not better than…

This paper describes the development of an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system for learning Arabic. This system could be used for learning Arabic by students at primary schools or by learners of Arabic as a second or foreign language. It explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for learning…

The present study compares the processing of unambiguous restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses (RCs) within both a null context and a supportive discourse using a self-paced reading methodology. Individuals read restrictive RCs more slowly than non-restrictive RCs in a null context, but processed restrictive RCs faster than…

Whereas great advances have been made in the statistical sophistication of assessments in terms of evidence accumulation and task selection, relatively little statistical work has explored the possibility of applying statistical techniques to data for the purposes of determining appropriate domain understanding and to generate task-level scoring…

Learner corpora, electronic collections of spoken or written data from foreign language learners, offer unparalleled access to many hitherto uncovered aspects of learner language, particularly in their error-tagged format. This article aims to demonstrate the role that the learner corpus can play in CALL, particularly when used in conjunction with…