Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

The use of appropriate rhetorical moves (RMs) and meta-discourse markers (MMs) improve the argumentative and persuasive force of academic texts, such as essays, thesis, seminar papers, and articles. However, authors from different language backgrounds and levels of expertise may use different RMs and MMs when writing in a foreign language. This…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to identify acoustic characteristics of connected speech that differentiate children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) from typically developing children and to identify acoustic measures that best detect dysarthria in children with CP. Method: Twenty 5-year-old children with dysarthria…

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of…

Discourse coherence is a common phenomenon in linguistic studies, and plays an important role in discourse analysis. As a common and extremely important type of language phenomena, discourse coherence has drawn more and more scholars' attention, but they emphasis on partial discourse coherence, paying a little attention to holistic coherence. The…

This thesis describes how intellectual boundary spanning can be identified in the written ideas of millions of scholars, and finds that such efforts encounter translational problems which can hinder faculty careers. In particular, the work presented develops textual metrics of intellectual boundary spanning (interdisciplinarity) and field…

Background: Identifying risk and protective factors for language development informs interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Maternal responsive and intrusive communicative behaviours are associated with language development. Mother-child interaction quality may influence how children use these behaviours in language…

As Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) gains a broader usage, the need for automated tools capable of supporting tutors in the time-consuming process of analyzing conversations becomes more pressing. Moreover, collaboration, which presumes the intertwining of ideas or points of view among participants, is a central element of dialogue…

Formality has long been of interest in the study of discourse, with periodic discussions of the best measure of formality and the relationship between formality and text categories. In this research, we explored what features predict formality as humans perceive the construct. We categorized a corpus consisting of 1,158 discourse samples published…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

This study focused on the cognitive representation of causal coherence relations linguistically marked with the connective "because." This article investigated whether these local causal relations are represented both at the level of the textbase and the situation model. Following earlier studies investigating the psychological validity of levels…

What patterns of multimodal rhetoric characterizes the most successful texts meant for learning--inside or outside school? This article argues that the balance between cohesion and tension in the interplay between modes is an issue at the core of this challenging question. Texts meant for learning need both cohesion and tension in order to be both…

In the context of Learning Technologies, the need to be able to assess the learning and domain comprehension in open-ended learner responses has been present in artificial intelligence and education since its beginnings. The advantage of using summaries is that they allow teachers to diagnose comprehension and the amount of information remembered…