Deeper learning (DL) is firmly rooted in learning science and computer science. However, a dearth of review studies has probed its trajectory in DL in foreign languages (DLFL). Utilizing SSCI from the Web of Science Core Collection, we employ Citespace and Vosviewer to analyze the scientific knowledge graph of DLFL literature. Our analysis…

We present the results of an ongoing collaboration between computer science and psychology researchers that employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to examine the trajectory of semantic space used during group idea generation sessions. Specifically, we track and estimate the region of semantic space being used and the degree to which new…

This research explores the emerging field of data science from the scientometric, curricular, and altmetric perspectives and addresses the following six research questions: 1.What are the scientometric features of the data science field? 2.What are the contributing fields to the establishment of data science? 3.What are the major research areas of…

Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

Research in discourse processing has provided us with a strong foundation for understanding the characteristics of text and discourse, as well as their influence on our processing and representation of texts. However, recent advances in computational techniques have allowed researchers to examine discourse processes in new ways. The purpose of the…

In this paper, we review how eye tracking, which offers millisecond-precise information about how language learners orient their visual attention, can be used to investigate a variety of processes involved in the multifaceted endeavor of second language acquisition (SLA). In particular, we review the last 15 years of research in SLA, in which…

Language is central to education, being the core medium of instruction. Researchers and practitioners have long used manual methods to analyze instructional language like classroom discourse and instructional texts, with the goal of facilitating student-centered instruction. In this dissertation, I offer three studies demonstrating how natural…

This study is an extension of Nahatame's (2018) research that demonstrated the effects of causal and semantic relations between sentences on second language (L2) text processing. Employing eye tracking, this study aimed to examine whether these effects appear during more natural, uninterrupted reading processes and to identify the time course of…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

Elementary actions online establish an individual's existence on the web and her/his orientation toward different issues. In this sense, actions truly define a user in spaces like online forums and communities and the aggregate of elementary actions shape the atmosphere of these online spaces. This observation, coupled with the unprecedented scale…

This thesis aims to define and extend a line of computational models for text comprehension that are humanly plausible. Since natural language is human by nature, computational models of human language will always be just that--models. To the degree that they miss out on information that humans would tap into, they may be improved by considering…

Language modeling is one of many problems in language processing that have to grapple with naturally high ambient dimensions. Even in large datasets, the number of unseen sequences is overwhelmingly larger than the number of observed ones, posing clear challenges for estimation. Although existing methods for building smooth language models tend to…

For over 30 years, reference resolution, the process of determining what a noun phrase including a pronoun refers to in written and spoken language, has been an important and on-going area of research. Most existing pronominal reference resolution algorithms and systems are designed to use syntactic information and surface features (e.g. number…

In this thesis, we study the importance of background knowledge in relation extraction systems. We not only demonstrate the benefits of leveraging background knowledge to improve the systems' performance but also propose a principled framework that allows one to effectively incorporate knowledge into statistical machine learning models for…

Largely due to technological advances, methods for analyzing readability have increased significantly in recent years. While past researchers designed hundreds of formulas to estimate the difficulty of texts for readers, controversy has surrounded their use for decades, with criticism stemming largely from their application in creating new texts…