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…

Early and intermediate second language (L2) learners often encounter difficulties when engaging in introductory social conversations, typically having had little opportunity to practise such interactions. This article describes a project to design and prototype a computer dialogue system, Let's Chat, which would allow learners to rehearse social…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…

We describe a computer assisted language learning (CALL) system that uses human-machine dialogue as its medium of interaction. The system was developed to help students learn the basics of the Maori language and was designed to accompany the introductory course in Maori running at the University of Otago. The student engages in a task-based…

"The Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis" is the authoritative reference for the theory behind Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a burgeoning mathematical method used to analyze how words make meaning, with the desired outcome to program machines to understand human commands via natural language rather than strict programming protocols.…

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…

The 11th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2018) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Templeton Landing in Buffalo, New York. This year's EDM conference was highly competitive, with 145 long and short paper submissions. Of these, 23 were accepted as full papers and 37…

Text analytics refers to the process of analyzing unstructured data from documented sources, including open-ended surveys, blogs, and other types of web dialog. Text analytics has enveloped the concept of text mining, an analysis approach influenced heavily from data mining. While text mining has been covered extensively in various computer…

Learner corpora, electronic collections of spoken or written data from foreign language learners, offer unparalleled access to many hitherto uncovered aspects of learner language, particularly in their error-tagged format. This article aims to demonstrate the role that the learner corpus can play in CALL, particularly when used in conjunction with…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Speech technology--especially automatic speech recognition--has now advanced to a level where it can be of great benefit both to able-bodied people and those with various disabilities. In this paper we describe an application "TalkMaths" which, using the output from a commonly-used conventional automatic speech recognition system,…

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)