Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

Upto now, the knowledge building influence of the fundamental communicative functions during an on-line collaborative learning (OLCL) session, i.e. argumentative, responsive, elicitative, informative and imperative have been mainly based on results from qualitative studies, results that could have been strengthened by quantitative approaches.…

Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…

Genre analysis is today's dominant approach for textual analysis, especially in the ESP learning and teaching profession. Adopting this approach, the present study compares the Introduction chapters of MA theses in ELT (English Language Teaching) written by Thai students to those written by American university students based on the move-step…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

Coreference resolution (CR) and entity relation detection (ERD) aim at finding predefined relations between pairs of entities in text. CR focuses on resolving identity relations while ERD focuses on detecting non-identity relations. Both CR and ERD are important as they can potentially improve other natural language processing (NLP) related tasks…

Over the last decade, there has been increasing evidence for syllabic processing during visual word recognition. If syllabic effects prove to be independent from orthographic redundancy, this would seriously challenge the ability of current computational models to account for the processing of polysyllabic words. Three experiments are presented to…

Reports on a project showing that relational data models, including unnormalized models that allow the nesting of relations, cannot fully capture the structural properties of lexical information. A feature-based model that allows for a full representation of some nesting and defines a factoring mechanism is described and demonstrated. (38…

Presents a model for the a priori analysis of natural language queries which uses an algorithm to transform the query into a logical pattern that is used to determine the answerability of the query. The results of testing by a prototype system implemented in PROLOG are discussed. (20 references) (CLB)

Describes a model that displays structures necessary to map between the conceptual and external levels in database management systems, using an algorithm that maps the syntactic representations of tuples onto semantic representations. A technique for translating tuples into natural language sentences is introduced, and a system implemented in…