Keywords of written reflection - a comparison between reflective and descriptive datasets

This study investigates reflection keywords by contrasting two datasets, one of reflective sentences and another of descriptive sentences. The log-likelihood statistic reveals several reflection keywords that are discussed in the context of a model for reflective writing. These keywords are seen as a useful building block for tools that can automatically analyse reflection in texts

Comparing automatically detected reflective texts with human judgements

This paper reports on the descriptive results of an experiment comparing automatically detected reflective and not-reflective texts against human judgements. Based on the theory of reflective writing assessment and their operationalisation five elements of reflection were defined. For each element of reflection a set of indicators was developed, which automatically annotate texts regarding reflection based on the parameterisation with authoritative texts. Using a large blog corpus 149 texts were retrieved, which were either annotated as reflective or notreflective. An online survey was then used to gather human judgements for these texts. These two data sets were used to compare the quality of the reflection detection algorithm with human judgments. The analysis indicates the expected difference between reflective and not reflective texts

Why do less creative student writers write longer texts?

When teaching academic writing in English the issue of creativity understood as experimenting, exploring and transforming language and ideas within the required writing task while keeping the audience and purpose in mind is rarely, if ever, considered. Still, there seems to be a relationship between the creative potential of a writer and the quality and quantity of their writing. The main aim of this article is to ponder upon the results of a small scale study on the relationship between students’ creativity as measured by KANH questionnaire and their lexical fluency in academic writing. The results seem to suggest that student writers who appear less creative write longer texts. The author discusses possible reasons for such a case, finding answers in research on creativity as such and creativity in writing specifically

The Effect of Text Authenticity on the Performance of Iranian EFL Students in a C-Test

As part of growing efforts to understand factors affecting c-test this study aims to investigate the effect of text authenticity on the performance of Iranian EFL students in a C-Test. The C-Test is an integrative testing instrument that measures overall language competence, very much like the cloze test. In this study the rule of two has been applied: "the second half of every second word has been deleted, beginning with the second word of the second sentence; the first and last sentences are left intact" (Katona and Dornyei 1993: 35). The research involves 60 college students in their third year, majoring in English Literature at Ershad-Damavand College. This group were randomly selected applying multi-stage sampling. Since the present study intended to investigate the role of two different formats, i.e. authentic and inauthentic texts (text translated from Persian into English), two different tailored C-Tests were made to measure and compare the performances of the participants. Two C-Tests, one with Authentic Text and the other, with Inauthentic Text were administered to this homogenized group comprising 30 subjects. The findings of this study suggest that authenticity has an effect on the performance of learners in c-tests and we should control this variable while devising a c-test

Design and enhanced evaluation of a robust anaphor resolution algorithm

Syntactic coindexing restrictions are by now known to be of central importance to practical anaphor resolution approaches. Since, in particular due to structural ambiguity, the assumption of the availability of a unique syntactic reading proves to be unrealistic, robust anaphor resolution relies on techniques to overcome this deficiency. This paper describes the ROSANA approach, which generalizes the verification of coindexing restrictions in order to make it applicable to the deficient syntactic descriptions that are provided by a robust state-of-the-art parser. By a formal evaluation on two corpora that differ with respect to text genre and domain, it is shown that ROSANA achieves high-quality robust coreference resolution. Moreover, by an in-depth analysis, it is proven that the robust implementation of syntactic disjoint reference is nearly optimal. The study reveals that, compared with approaches that rely on shallow preprocessing, the largely nonheuristic disjoint reference algorithmization opens up the possibility/or a slight improvement. Furthermore, it is shown that more significant gains are to be expected elsewhere, particularly from a text-genre-specific choice of preference strategies. The performance study of the ROSANA system crucially rests on an enhanced evaluation methodology for coreference resolution systems, the development of which constitutes the second major contribution o/the paper. As a supplement to the model-theoretic scoring scheme that was developed for the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) evaluations, additional evaluation measures are defined that, on one hand, support the developer of anaphor resolution systems, and, on the other hand, shed light on application aspects of pronoun interpretation

Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Identifying Relationships Among Sentences in Court Case Transcripts Using Discourse Relations

Case Law has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. Therefore, the information that can be obtained from previous court cases is valuable to lawyers and other legal officials when performing their duties. This paper describes a methodology of applying discourse relations between sentences when processing text documents related to the legal domain. In this study, we developed a mechanism to classify the relationships that can be observed among sentences in transcripts of United States court cases. First, we defined relationship types that can be observed between sentences in court case transcripts. Then we classified pairs of sentences according to the relationship type by combining a machine learning model and a rule-based approach. The results obtained through our system were evaluated using human judges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study where discourse relationships between sentences have been used to determine relationships among sentences in legal court case transcripts.Comment: Conference: 2018 International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer