Sequencing in SLA: Phonological Memory, Chunking and Points of Order.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139863/1/Ellis1996Chunking.pd

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

CLIFF is the Computational Linguists\u27 Feedback Forum. We are a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to hear a presentation and discuss work currently in progress. The \u27feedback\u27 in the group\u27s name is important: we are interested in sharing ideas, in discussing ongoing research, and in bringing together work done by the students and faculty in Computer Science and other departments. However, there are only so many presentations which we can have in a year. We felt that it would be beneficial to have a report which would have, in one place, short descriptions of the work in Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania. This report then, is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students, in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We want to stress the close ties between these groups, as one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Penn is the communication among different departments and the inter-departmental work. Rather than try to summarize the varied work currently underway at Penn, we suggest reading the abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. The report illustrates the diversity of interests among the researchers here, as well as explaining the areas of common interest. In addition, since it was our intent to put together a document that would be useful both inside and outside of the university, we hope that this report will explain to everyone some of what we are about

Active Processing in Implicit Learning

This thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of implicit learning. Implicit learning occurs "when there is a performance increase on some task, without an associated increase in verbal knowledge about the causes of this performance increase" (Bright, 1993 - p9). In chapter 1, two theoretical interpretations of this type of learning are described. The first proposes that implicit learning reflects the operation of a unconscious learning system (e.g. Reber, 1989). The alternative episodic processing view (Whittlesea and Dorken, 1993) suggests that implicit learning occurs when there is an indeterminate relationship between the explicitly held knowledge acquired during training, and the way this knowledge is used in the test. Two main experimental findings reported in the chapters 2-5 allow for a choice between the two main accounts mentioned above. Firstly, two implicit learning tasks (invariance learning [McGeorge and Burton, 1990] and sequence learning [Nissen and Bullemer, 1987]) demonstrate that learning is dependent on active processing of training stimuli. Secondly, findings from the invariant learning task indicate that episodic knowledge, rather than an abstract rule, is acquired in this type of learning. Both these findings are consistent with the episodic processing account of implicit learning, and not the separate system view. Furthermore, a specific prediction of the episodic account is also confirmed by the data reported in this thesis. This prediction is that the processing demands of the training and test periods must be consistent for successful performance. This support for the episodic processing account of implicit learning is accompanied by a caveat in chapter 6. It is suggested that the episodic processing view is unsuitable for understanding the type of processes occurring in all implicit learning tasks. A possible resolution is offered, in the suggestion that broadening the theoretical scope to a more general consistency model may allow the wider experimental context of implicit learning to be explained

Addressing the grammar needs of Chinese EAP students: an account of a CALL materials development project

This study investigated the grammar needs of Chinese EAP Foundation students and developed electronic self-access grammar materials for them. The research process consisted of three phases. In the first phase, a corpus linguistics based error analysis was conducted, in which 50 student essays were compiled and scrutinized for formal errors. A tagging system was specially devised and employed in the analysis. The EA results, together with an examination of Foundation tutors’ perceptions of error frequency and gravity led me to prioritise article errors for treatment; in the second phase, remedial materials were drafted based on the EA results and insights drawn from my investigations into four research areas (article pedagogy, SLA theory, grammar teaching approaches and CALL methodologies) and existing grammar materials; in the third phase, the materials were refined and evaluated for their effectiveness as a means of improving the Chinese Foundation students’ use of the article. Findings confirm the claim that L2 learner errors are systematic in nature and lend support to the value of Error Analysis. L1 transfer appears to be one of the main contributing factors in L2 errors. The salient errors identified in the Chinese Foundation corpus show that mismanagement of the article system is the most frequent cause of grammatical errors; Foundation tutors, however, perceive article errors to be neither frequent nor serious. An examination of existing materials reveals that the article is given low priority in ELT textbooks and treatments provided in pedagogical grammar books are inappropriate in terms of presentation, language and exercise types. The devised remedial materials employ both consciousness-raising activities and production exercises, using EAP language and authentic learner errors. Preliminary evaluation results suggest that the EA-informed customised materials have the potential to help learners to perform better in proofreading article errors in academic texts

“The Song of Words” teaching multi-word units with songs

The need to integrate songs into English Language Teaching (ELT) has been recognized on numerous occasions. Song lyrics host multi-word units which learners can reuse as building blocks in their English, thereby reducing language processing time and effort, and improving their fluency as well as idiomaticity, thus bringing them closer to the native speaker norm. We report on two studies into the effectiveness of using songs for teaching multi-word units to high-school Polish learners of English. The same items were taught to two groups of EFL learners, but only one of the groups heard them in a song. Learners’ vocabulary recall was measured at three points in time relative to the teaching: before, immediately after, and a week after. The group taught with songs showed a significant recall advantage over the other group, especially when tested a week from teaching. The results suggest that songs can be an effective vehicle for teaching English multi-word units

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Acquisition of syntax in a minature artificial language : effects of input and instruction

Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/568) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).This is a digitised version of a thesis that was deposited in the University Library. If you are the author please contact PEARL Admin ([email protected]) to discuss options.The goal of the research was to discover which type of input and instruction best facilitates the acquisition of syntax in adult learners. An artificial miniature language was used to model real second language to control precisely the type of input, conditions of exposure and instruction accompanying that input. Performance of learners under four input conditions was compared and analogies were drawn between these conditions and those experienced by adult second language learners (L2 learners). "Instructed" learners Z): like formally instructed L2 learners were systematically taught the rules of the language. "Exposure" learners saw example sentences and were asked to search for rules, the conditions of their input analogous to that of "naturalistic" L2 learners who receive no formal instruction but who make conscious efforts to search for rules. "Memorisation" learners received the same input as that presented to the exposure learners but were asked to memorise the sentencesT. hey were seena s analogoust o naturalistic L2 learners who do not search for the rules and the conditions of input were modelled on those claimed to induce implicit learning. "Cued" learners received input which contained cross-sentential cues to underlying phrasal structure. They were modelled on naturalistic learners whose input contains such cues and who make efforts to search for rules. Performance was compared on both grammaticality judgement and free production tasks. No overall superiority in performance was observed for any of the input conditions. An interaction between input type and rule complexity was evident in which the amount of information received regarding the rules related positively to performance on. the less salient, more complex rules. It was proposed that the findings could be explained in terms of a "noticing" hypothesis, in which noticing of features is considered a pre-requisite for acquisition. Theories of second and artificial language learning which have stipulated that complex rules can only be learned implicitly were not supported

Theories and methods

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective

Formulaic language

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective