Dialogue systems, commonly called as Chatbots, have gained escalating popularity in recent times due to their wide-spread applications in carrying out chit-chat conversations with users and accomplishing tasks as personal assistants. These systems are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with handcrafted rules and often, use…

In light of the ever-increasing capability of computer technology and advancement in speech and natural language processing techniques, automated speech scoring of constructed responses is gaining popularity in many high-stakes assessment and low-stakes educational settings. Automated scoring is a highly interdisciplinary and complex subject, and…

"Natural language understanding" (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through…

This dissertation includes three essays in the field of economics of education. The first essay estimates the effect of top school management on student achievement in America. I use newly-collected data on the tenures of school district superintendents--the highest-ranking executive in U.S. school districts--to estimate the impact of individual…

Position postings and professional literature represent opportunity for insights into the expectations of aspiring position applicants as well as describe appropriate skills, experiences and management or leadership approaches that can inform incumbent information executive (e.g. Chief Information Officers and Library Deans) on effective…

Many students may find math word problems uninteresting; therefore, lacking the motivation to solve them. The content in most math word problems in use today is outdated, deliberately generic, and does not fully engage students. The development of technologies that personalize math word problems seeks to improve the engagement of students.…

Naturalistic language learning is contextually grounded. When people learn their first (L1) and often their second (L2) language, they do so in various contexts. In this dissertation I examine the effect of various contexts on language development. Part 1 describes the effects of textual, linguistic context in reading. I employed an eye-tracking…

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…

In the big data era, we have witnessed the explosion of scholarly literature. This explosion has imposed challenges to the retrieval of bibliographic information. Retrieval of intended bibliographic information has become challenging due to the overwhelming search results returned by bibliographic information retrieval systems for given input…

Through colonialism, external forces can alter and shift social structures and practices. It causes trans-generational, often normalized, invisible, and profound marginalization of the collective identities of local and indigenous populations. Decolonization is the resisting and undoing of colonial impacts. It's the process of reforming a…

We address the challenging task of "computational natural language inference," by which we mean bridging two or more natural language texts while also providing an explanation of how they are connected. In the context of question answering (i.e., finding short answers to natural language questions), this inference connects the question…

Computer games are now a significant cultural phenomenon, and a significant artistic output of humanity. However, little effort and attention have been paid to how the medium of games and interactive software developed, and even less to the historical storage of software development documentation. This thesis borrows methodologies and practices…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the writing literature. Research suggests that higher quality writing is…

While information theory is typically considered in the context of modern computing and engineering, its core mathematical principles provide a potentially useful lens through which to consider human language. Like the artificial communication systems such principles were invented to describe, natural languages involve a sender and receiver, a…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…