The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a method for deriving morphemes from Arabic words using stem patterns, a feature of Arabic morphology. The motivations are three-fold: modeling with morphemes rather than words should help address the out-of-vocabulary problem; working with stem patterns should prove to be a cross-dialectally valid…

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 deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Using the theory of mental models to account for the process of human mental information processing and representation has become an important approach in the field of knowledge engineering. Most methods of knowledge assessment are based on graphical concept mapping techniques. Tools like MITOCAR complement the graphical approaches by…

Multilingual lexicons are needed in various applications, such as cross-lingual information retrieval, machine translation, and some others. Often, these applications suffer from the ambiguity of dictionary items, especially when an intermediate natural language is involved in the process of the dictionary construction, since this language adds…

The introduction of the concept of the variable represents a critical point in the arithmetic-algebraic transition. This concept is complex because it is used with different meanings in different situations. Its management depends on the particular way of using it in problem-solving. The aim of this paper was to analyse whether the notion of…

In the United States, English learners (EL) often do not have the academic language proficiency, literacy skills, cultural background, and content knowledge necessary to succeed in kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms. This leads to large achievement gaps. Also, classroom texts are often riddled with linguistically unfamiliar elements,…

Researchers that investigate the media's coverage of health have historically relied on keyword searches to retrieve relevant health news coverage, and manual content analysis methods to categorize and score health news text. These methods are problematic. Manual content analysis methods are labor intensive, time consuming, and inherently…

This paper describes My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades (7 to 11 years old) through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor. In our study, individual students engage in spoken dialogs with the virtual tutor Marni during 15 to 20 minute…

According to the conjunction rule, the probability of A "and" B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads "and" in terms of the logical operator [inverted v], interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language "and" can convey a wide range of relationships between…

The availability and use of computers in teaching has seen an increase in the rate of plagiarism among students because of the wide availability of electronic texts online. While computer tools that have appeared in recent years are capable of detecting simple forms of plagiarism, such as copy-paste, a number of recent research studies devoted to…

Various writing assistance tools have been developed through efforts in the areas of natural language processing with different degrees of success of curriculum integration depending on their functional rigor and pedagogical designs. In this paper, we developed a system, WriteAhead, that provides six types of suggestions when non-native graduate…

Web analytics measure, collect, analyze, and report Internet data that help website managers improve the effectiveness of the site and its marketing efforts by allowing them to better understand how users interact with the site. Applying this data can help drive the right people to the website and keep them there. According to Joshua Dodson, Web…

Language plays a very important role in understanding the culture and mindset of people. Given the abundance of electronic multilingual data, it is interesting to see what insight can be gained by automatic analysis of text. This in turn calls for text analysis which is focused on non-topical information such as emotions being expressed that is in…

Self-regulated learning processes have a potential to enhance the motivation of knowledge workers to take part in learning and reflection about learning, and thus contribute to the resolution of an important research challenge in workplace learning. An equally important research challenge for the successful completion of each step of a…