Discussion of natural language processing focuses on experiments using linear discriminant analysis to distinguish "Wall Street Journal" texts from "Federal Register" tests using information about the frequency of occurrence of word boundaries, sentence boundaries, and punctuation marks. Displays and interprets results in terms…

Recent work has investigated children's developing understanding of the anatomical locus of identity. In two studies, we extend this work by exploring the role of the mind as opposed to the brain in children's conceptualization of identity. In Experiment 1, an analysis of natural language indicated that adults use the term mind more frequently…

A perception experiment involving a novel language pairing, that of Japanese as a first language (L1) and Russian as a second language (L2), was conducted with 33 Japanese learners of Russian to determine whether two phonological models could successfully predict patterns of perceptual difficulty with eight Russian segments. The Featural Model of…

Relations between emotions (affect states) and learning have recently been explored in the context of AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a tutoring system on the Internet that helps learners construct answers to difficult questions by interacting with them in natural language. AutoTutor has an animated conversation agent and a dialog management facility that…

Using computers to help students practice and learn grammatical constructions goes back to the earliest days of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). With the coming of the Internet age, CALL began to focus more heavily on the new capabilities of group connectivity and computer-mediated communication. More recently, a gathering consensus has…

Describes the characteristics of natural languages that hinder the optimal organization and accessing of networked resources, focusing on the semantic mapping processes utilizing thesauri or metadata. Considers future information retrieval system design, especially networked retrieval and natural language, and gives an example of problems in…

Discussion of automatic recognition of hand and machine-written cursive text using the Arabic alphabet focuses on an algorithm for word recognition. Describes results of testing words for recognition without segmentation and considers the algorithms' use for words of different fonts and for processing whole sentences. (Author/LRW)

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of…

Finite-state methods are finding ever increasing use among linguists as a way of modeling phonology and morphology and as a method for manipulating and modeling text. This paper describes a suite of very simple finite-state tools written by the author that can be used to investigate this area and that can be used for simple analysis.

The work aims to improve the assessment of creative problem-solving in science education by employing language technologies and computational-statistical machine learning methods to grade students' natural language responses automatically. To evaluate constructs like creative problem-solving with validity, open-ended questions that elicit…

Discusses natural language processing and proposes a novel approach to automatic text segmentation using heterogeneous linguistic knowledge and cluster algorithms. Represents the diversity of textual relations in a discourse network in order to analyze the linguistic bonds and determine the degree of coherence that a text may exhibit. (Author/LRW)

Presents an efficient text categorization (or text classification) algorithm for document retrieval of natural language texts that generates bigrams (two-word phrases) and uses the information gain metric, combined with various frequency thresholds. Experimental results suggest that the bigrams can substantially raise the quality of feature sets.…

In textbooks, foreign (second) language reading proficiency is often evaluated through comprehension questions. In case, authentic texts are used as reading material, such questions should be prepared by teachers. However, preparing appropriate questions may be a very demanding task for teachers. This paper introduces a method for automatically…

This paper presents the geometric foundation and quantification of Agent-action-Objective (AaO) kinematics. The meaningfulness of studying the flows in verbal expressions through splitting and splicing the strings in a verbal flow related to the fact that free parameters are not needed since it is not required that the presented methodological…

Defines natural language processing (NLP); describes the use of NLP in information retrieval (IR); provides seven levels of linguistic analysis: phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic. Discusses the commercial use of NLP in IR with the example of DR-LINK (Document Retrieval using LINguistic Knowledge)…