We present an annotation scheme for classifying differences in the outputs of syntactic constituency parsers when a gold standard is unavailable or undesired, as in the case of texts written by nonnative speakers of English. We discuss its automated implementation and the results of a case study that uses the scheme to choose a parser best suited…

This paper explores analysis of feedback data collected from student consultations at two mathematics support centres at universities in Australia and Ireland. Unstructured text data was collected over six years and includes qualitative data on student queries collected during the consultations from mathematics and statistics related subjects.…

In 2015, the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) introduced multiple changes in its study design, the most extensive being the transition from paper- to computer-based assessment. We investigated the differences between German students' text responses to eight reading items from the paper-based study in 2012 to text…

We examine the ability of supervised text classification models to identify several discourse properties from teachers' speech with an eye for providing teachers with meaningful automated feedback about the quality of their classroom discourse. We collected audio recordings from 28 teachers from 10 schools in 164 authentic classroom sessions,…

This study discusses the automatic coding methods of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework for multilingual contexts, in particular. In universities, foreign students cannot be overlooked, and learning systems are also required to work in multilingual situations. However, none of the existing work has addressed the lack of language-agnostic and…

Learning has transcended into a life-long endeavor in the information age. It is no longer restricted to confines of formal classrooms. Consequently, a student is not restricted to traditional learning resources like teachers, textbooks or printed content. Digital resources available on the Internet form a very significant component of…

The purpose of the study is to provide a literature review of the work done on sign language (SL) around the world and in Pakistan and to develop a translation tool of speech and text to Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) with bilingual subtitles. Information and communication technology and tools development for teaching and learning purposes improve…

Examinations of the words we use in our daily lives have shown that certain linguistic patterns may be indicators of underlying depressogenic schemata. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) have been used as methods of computerized text analysis to yield insight into how people's language use may be…

Background: Pedagogical agents are computerized talking heads or embodied animated avatars that help students learn by performing actions and holding conversations with the students in natural language. Dialogues occur between a tutor agent and the student in the case of AutoTutor and other intelligent tutoring systems with natural language…

This article describes the development of a tense and aspect identifier, an online tool designed to help learners of English by harnessing a natural language processing pipeline to automatically classify verb groups into one of 12 grammatical tenses. Currently, there is no website or application that can automatically identify tense in context,…

For the new approaches to language e-learning (e.g. language blended learning, language autonomous learning or mobile-assisted language learning) to succeed, some automatic functions for error correction (for instance, in exercises) will have to be included in the long run in the corresponding environments and/or applications. A possible way to…

Usage-based approaches explore how we learn language from our experience of language. Related research thus involves the analysis of the usage from which learners learn and of learner usage as it develops. This program involves considerable data recording, transcription, and analysis, using a variety of corpus and computational techniques, many of…

Presentation of raw text to language learners is not enough to ensure learning. Thus, we present the Smart and Immersive Language Learning Environment (SMILLE), a system that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for enhancing grammatical information in texts chosen by a given user. The enhancements, carried out by means of text highlighting, are…

This study investigated the effect of cloze item practice on reading comprehension, where cloze items were either created by humans, by machine using natural language processing techniques, or randomly. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 302) took a pre-test, read a text, and took part in one of five conditions, Do-Nothing, Re-Read,…

Writing a good essay typically involves students revising an initial paper draft after receiving feedback. We present eRevise, a web-based writing and revising environment that uses natural language processing features generated for rubric-based essay scoring to trigger formative feedback messages regarding students' use of evidence in…