Since natural language may be assumed to have an underlying conceptual structure, it is desirable to have the machine structure its own experience, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, in a manner concomitant with the human method for doing so. This paper presents some attempts at organizing the machine's information conceptually. The different…

The major objective of the Illinois Institute of Technology Retrieval Institute (IITRI) Computer Search Center (CSC) is to educate and link industry, academia, and government institutions to chemical and other scientific information systems and sources. The CSC is in full operation providing services to users from a variety of machine-readable…

The general goal of this research and development program was to facilitate man-machine communication in areas of high military impact, including on-line computing in communications, command, and control. Highlights of this research include: identification of major causes of man-machine communication difficulty for the computer-naive; discovery of…

This handbook describes existing sources of information in linguistics and certain related fields. It is intended principally for the linguistics student at the upper undergraduate or graduate level. The handbook attempts to provide coverage of all major traditional fields in linguistics (e.g., descriptive, historical, phonology, grammar,…

Describes a computer-assisted research project into the writing errors of English as a second language college students. Sentences with error types and first languages of students were entered into a database and analyzed for the most common errors of all students and the most prevalent patterns within each language group. (Author/SED)

Currently, no machine translation (MT) system is capable of successfully imitating the behavior of a human translator, and there exists no formal description of what an MT system is supposed to do. The biggest problem in practice is disambiguation. However, various types of existing systems do help reduce language barriers, even if they are poor…

An experiment compared the tagging of two languages: Czech, a highly inflected language with a high degree of ambiguity, and English. For Czech, the corpus was one gathered in the 1970s at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; for English, it was the Wall Street Journal corpus. Results indicate 81.53 percent accuracy for Czech and 96.83 percent…

The integration of a corpus-based approach in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) syllabus is one possible course design step in university settings. This paper describes a situation in which Business English is taught by incorporating corpus-driven knowledge and communicative task feedback. Two main goals are pursued in this reciprocal…

Explores one grammatical feature of metadiscourse--clauses with an anticipatory "it" and extraposed subject. This feature is compared in two computerized corpora, one consisting of published journal articles from the field business studies and the second of MBA student dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English. (Author/VWL)

Outlines the history of semantically based programs that have influenced the design of computer assisted language instruction (CALI) programs. Describes early attempts to make intelligent CALI as well as current projects, including the Foreign Language Adventure Game, developed at the University of Delaware. Describes some important…

Considers issues in customizing descriptions of English grammar in the context of creating an electronic database for secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. In developing the database, the aim was to incorporate insights from functional grammar and corpus linguistics while keeping information accessible and relevant to teachers only familiar with…

Nearly all Western loanwords in Japanese are first introduced to the public by a small number of individuals with most Japanese people having never heard or read the word before, and having no role to play in their borrowing. Because of this presumptuous use of foreign words by, for example, academics, government bodies, and the media, the…

The potential of corpora for language learning and teaching has been widely acknowledged and their ready availability on the Web has facilitated access for a broad range of users, including language teachers and learners. However, the integration of corpora into general language learning and teaching practice has so far been disappointing. In this…

Most teaching and reference materials on English idioms are primarily intuition based. As such, they often include seldom-used idioms and incorrect descriptions of the meaning and use of some idioms, hence limiting their usefulness to ESOL students. This article demonstrates how this problem can be addressed through a corpus-based study of the…

The aim of this study was to find ways to improve online reading and vocabulary learning. Various new types of online reading comprehension and vocabulary development programs and tests were compared in this study to consider how useful they may be for guiding individual or classroom L2 vocabulary instruction. It explored how these programs seek…