The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed-response items over multiple-choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way to score them automatically can be found. Current automatic essay-scoring techniques…

Quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD) is one of the most challenging problems in deep natural language understanding (NLU) systems. The most popular approach for dealing with QSD is to simply leave the semantic representation (scope-) underspecified and to incrementally add constraints to filter out unwanted readings. Scope underspecification has…

Negotiation mechanism using conversational agents (chatbots) has been used in Open Learner Models (OLM) to enhance learner model accuracy and provide opportunities for learner reflection. Using chatbots that allow for natural language discussions has shown positive learning gains in students. Traditional OLMs assume a learner to be able to manage…

COMPASS is an e-learning system that can visualize grammar errors during sentence production in German as a first or second language. Via drag-and-drop dialogues, it allows users to freely select word forms from a lexicon and to combine them into phrases and sentences. The system's core component is a natural-language generator that, for every new…

This paper introduces a new captioning tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption with Hints (PSCH), as a means to facilitate second language (L2) listening by providing cues for ambiguous and difficult words/phrases in the caption while filtering out the easy words. Each word in the caption is synchronized to the corresponding audio to enable…

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.'s Letter to the Editor of "Cognitive Science". We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from "normal" (i.e.,…

A latent semantic analysis-based automated summary assessment is described; this automated system is applied to a real learning from text task in a Distance Education context. We comment on the use of automated content, plagiarism, text coherence measures, and word weights average and their impact on predicting human judges summary scoring. A…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

This paper reports on the development of an analysis engine for the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), an AWE program designed to provide genre and discipline-specific feedback on the functional units of research article discourse. Unlike traditional NLP-based applications that categorize complete documents, the analyzer categorizes every sentence in…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are situated in a potential struggle between effective pedagogy and system enjoyment and engagement. iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), a reading strategy tutoring system in which students practice generating self-explanations and using reading strategies, employs two devices…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are situated in a potential struggle between effective pedagogy and system enjoyment and engagement. iSTART, a reading strategy tutoring system in which students practice generating self-explanations and using reading strategies, employs two devices to engage the user. The first is natural language processing…

The study investigated research topics of doctoral dissertations that examined issues in distance learning from 2000-2014. Twelve reviews of research on distance learning, spanning from 1997-2015, were identified. It was found that only one of these reviews of research (Davies, Howell, & Petri, 2010) looked at doctoral dissertations. The…

Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token "ledidi"). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word "lele" vs. "ledi"). Twenty-four…