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…

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…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

Analysis of second language (L2) learners' language development can allow valid and reliable assessment of the learners' L2 linguistic knowledge, which can enable the teachers and researchers to choose appropriate teaching or experimental materials (Bardovi-Harlig & Bofman, 1989; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1997). However, most language development…

This dissertation study explored the feasibility of using authenticated spoken texts to test L2 Chinese listening comprehension. The spoken texts used in the study were created using an "authenticating" technique, in which scripted spoken Chinese texts were infused with characteristics of real-world, unscripted spoken Chinese. In the…

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on the study of how utterances composed of human-level languages can be understood and generated. Typically, there are considered to be three intertwined levels of structure that interact to create meaning in language: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not only is a large amount of…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

One of the most critical steps to integrating heterogeneous e-Business applications using different XML schemas is schema matching, which is known to be costly and error-prone. Many automatic schema matching approaches have been proposed, but the challenge is still daunting because of the complexity of schemas and immaturity of technologies in…

Firms now routinely collect information about the needs of their customers, but this information is not sufficiently considered during product design decisions. This research examines the relationship between designers and consumers to build an understanding of how the consumer should be represented to increase the consumer focus during the…

This dissertation examines the processing of sentences involving long-distance linguistic dependencies, or sentences containing elements that must be linked across intervening words and phrases. Specifically, both behavioral (self-paced reading and eye tracking) and neurophysiological (electroencephalography) methods were used (a) to evaluate the…

Although software testing has been well-studied in computer science, it has received little attention in natural language processing. Nonetheless, a fully developed methodology for glass box evaluation and testing of language processing applications already exists in the field methods of descriptive linguistics. This work lays out a number of…

The phonetics-phonology interface has long been debated; some linguists argue for a modular approach (Keating 1984, Pierrehumbert 1990, Zsiga 1997, Cohn 1998), while others argue that there is no interface, and that phonetics and phonology are one and the same (Browman & Goldstein 1989-1992, Ohala 1990). Recent proposals by Gafos (2002), and…

Latino English Language Learners represent the largest group of language minority students attending public school in the United States. Research is needed to address the early literacy problems which impede this population from acquiring literacy in the English language with efficacy and to determine the most effective assessment and intervention…