Second/foreign language (L2) classrooms do not always provide opportunities for input and output practice [Lightbown, P. M. (2000). Classroom SLA research and second language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 431-462]. The use of smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and its associated voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant (IPA) Alexa…

The present study extended research on the effectiveness of automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems. Sixth graders were randomly assigned by classroom to an AWE condition that used "Project Essay Grade Writing" (n = 56) or a word-processing condition that used Google Docs (n = 58). Effectiveness was evaluated using multiple metrics:…

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) is the task of assessing short natural language responses to objective questions using computational methods. The active research in this field has increased enormously of late with over 80 papers fitting a definition of ASAG. However, the past efforts have generally been ad-hoc and non-comparable until…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…

Naturalistic language and communication strategies (i.e., naturalistic teaching strategies) refer to practices that are used to promote the child's language and communication skills either through verbal (e.g., spoken words) or nonverbal (e.g., gestures, signs) interactions between an adult (e.g., parent, teacher) and a child. Use of naturalistic…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the writing literature. Research suggests that higher quality writing is…

While information theory is typically considered in the context of modern computing and engineering, its core mathematical principles provide a potentially useful lens through which to consider human language. Like the artificial communication systems such principles were invented to describe, natural languages involve a sender and receiver, a…

This paper describes an initial pilot study of Rimac, a natural-language tutoring system for physics. Rimac uses a student model to guide decisions about "what content to discuss next" during reflective dialogues that are initiated after students solve quantitative physics problems, and "how much support to provide" during…

This study examines the extent to which instructions to self-explain vs. "other"-explain a text lead readers to produce different forms of explanations. Natural language processing was used to examine the content and characteristics of the explanations produced as a function of instruction condition. Undergraduate students (n = 146)…

Background: The gender gap in reading literacy is repeatedly found in large-scale assessments. This study compared girls' and boys' text responses in a reading test applying natural language processing. For this, a theoretical framework was compiled that allows mapping of response features to the preceding cognitive components such as micro- and…

This study deals with immigrant scientists integrated in academia in Israel. Studies on the subject indicate the contribution of immigrant scientists to research. The current study focuses on the influence of scientists' birth country on selecting destinations for academic conferences, as well as on the influence of one's native language on the…

This research report provides an overview of the R&D efforts at Educational Testing Service related to its capability for automated scoring of nonnative spontaneous speech with the "SpeechRater"? automated scoring service since its initial version was deployed in 2006. While most aspects of this R&D work have been published in…

In discussing a university-industry partnership on the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based simulation platform, this conceptual paper explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a pedagogical innovation in social work. Critically reflecting upon this ongoing project, we discuss the current promises and limitations of…

Purpose: Explore how different automated scoring (AS) models score reliably the expressive language and vocabulary knowledge in depth of young second grade Latino English learners. Design/methodology/approach: Analyze a total of 13,471 English utterances from 217 Latino English learners with random forest, end-to-end memory networks, long…

Prior research aimed at identifying linguistic features of tutoring that predict learning found interactions between student characteristics (e.g., incoming knowledge level, gender, and affect) and learning. This paper addresses the question: "What do these interactions suggest for developing adaptive natural-language tutoring systems?"…