Using learner corpora to redesign university-level EFL grammar education

This paper outlines the developing work in the TREACLE project, which is using learner corpora to inform the redesign of English grammar curricula in Spanish University contexts. The paper outlines the two components of the annotation: manual error analysis and automatic syntactic analysis, which together provide information as to what syntactic structures require attention at each proficiency level, and with what degree of attention. The degree of usage of a syntactic feature compared to native usage is often used to judge the criticality of the syntactic feature for learners at each proficiency level, but we argue for an alternative metric: onset of use, which measures how many of the learners at each level use the feature at all. This measure provides a clearer measure of how critical the feature is to the particular group. We finish the paper with proposed extension of the project to complement classroom teaching with intelligent online learning informed by the learner corpora.Este artículo presenta el trabajo que se está realizando en el proyecto TREACLE, que utiliza un corpus de aprendices para informar el diseño curricular de gramática inglesa en el contexto de universidades españolas. En este artículo se describen los dos componentes de la anotación: análisis manual de errores y análisis sintáctico automático, que, juntos, proporcionan información sobre qué estructuras sintácticas requieren atención, y cuánta atención, en cada nivel de competencia. A menudo se utiliza la frecuencia de uso de una estructura sintáctica en comparación con el uso nativo para determinar hasta qué punto esa estructura es crítica en el nivel de competencia de los aprendices. Sin embargo, aquí mantenemos que este enfoque presenta deficiencias. En su lugar, se propone una medida que llamamos inicio de uso, que mide cuántos de los estudiantes de cada nivel utilizan esa estructura sintáctica en algún momento. Se argumenta que el inicio de uso constituye una medida más clara de la importancia de esa estructura para un grupo determinado de aprendices. Por último, proponemos una extensión del proyecto para complementar la enseñanza en el aula con un sistema inteligente de aprendizaje en línea informado por corpus de aprendices

Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

Artificial Intelligence for Multimedia Signal Processing

Artificial intelligence technologies are also actively applied to broadcasting and multimedia processing technologies. A lot of research has been conducted in a wide variety of fields, such as content creation, transmission, and security, and these attempts have been made in the past two to three years to improve image, video, speech, and other data compression efficiency in areas related to MPEG media processing technology. Additionally, technologies such as media creation, processing, editing, and creating scenarios are very important areas of research in multimedia processing and engineering. This book contains a collection of some topics broadly across advanced computational intelligence algorithms and technologies for emerging multimedia signal processing as: Computer vision field, speech/sound/text processing, and content analysis/information mining

Academic abstracts: a genre analysis

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteResumos ("abstracts") em artigos acadêmicos são importantes meios de disseminação do conhecimento científico. Contudo, existem pouquíssimos estudos relativos a organização discursiva de resumos. Além disso, as normas disponíveis sobre a caracterização de resumos pouco ajudam na produção desse tipo de texto. O presente trabalho investiga a organização discursiva real de 94 resumos em três periódicos de maior circulação entre pesquisadores de Lingüística Aplicada. Através da análise de movimentos ("moves"), o estudo revelou que resumos seguem um padrão de 5 movimentos, a saber: o Movimento 1 motiva o leitor à pesquisa, indicando não só a área ou assunto mas também brechas em pesquisas anteriores; o Movimento 2 apresenta a pesquisa per se, descrevendo características principais e/ou objetivos; o Movimento 3 dispõe a metodologia utilizada; o Movimento 4 revela os resultados mais importantes; e o Movimento 5 discute o significado do estudo, apontando conclusões e/ou recomendações. Evidências sugerem que há discrepância entre prática e norma. O padrão proposto serve enquanto recurso pedagógico que auxilia pesquisadores a escreverem resumos mais comunicativos e assim contribuirem para avanços em sua comunidade científica. Recomenda-se a análise de gênero como uma abordagem valiosa para a descrição e explicação do discurso

Cognitive Underpinnings of Focus on Form

The purpose of this paper is to examine focus on form in cognitive processing terms by postulating plausible, psychologically real, cognitive correlates for a range of L2 learning processes that have become prevalent in the instructed second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Progress in adult SLA is thought often to depend crucially upon cognitive processes such as paying attention to features of target input' noticing interlocutor reactions to interlanguage output' and making insightful comparisons involving differences between input and output utterance details- To be effective' these cognitive comparisons must be carried out under certain conditions of processing meaning, forms, and function, i.e., conditions which promoteprocessingfor language learning. Whereas pedagogically oriented discussions of issues-such as noticing the gap and L2 processing-abound, psycholinguistically motivated rationales for pedagogical recommendations are still rare

Individual Differences and Instructed Second Language Acquisition: Insights from Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning

The present dissertation focuses on the role of cognitive individual difference factors in the acquisition of second language vocabulary in the context of intelligent computer assisted language learning (ICALL). The aim was to examine the association between working memory and declarative memory and the learning of English phrasal verbs in a web-based ICALL-mediated experiment. Following a pretest-posttest design, 127 adult learners of English were assigned to two instructional conditions, namely meaning-focused and form-focused conditions. Learners in both conditions read news texts on the web for about two weeks; learners in the form-focused condition additionally interacted with the texts via selecting multiple-choice options. The results showed that both working memory and declarative memory were predictive of vocabulary acquisition. However, only the working memory effect was modulated by the instructional context, with the effect being found exclusively in the form-focused condition, and thus suggesting the presence of an aptitude-treatment interaction. Finally, findings also revealed that learning during treatment in the form-focused group was nonlinear, and that paying attention to form and meaning simultaneously impeded global reading comprehension for intermediate, not advanced learners. From a theoretical perspective, the findings provide evidence to suggest that individual differences in both working memory and declarative memory affect the acquisition of lexical knowledge in ICALL-supported contexts. Methodologically, the current study illustrates the advantages of conducting interdisciplinary work between ICALL and second language acquisition by allowing for the collection of experimental data through a web-based, all-encompassing ICALL system. Overall, the present dissertation represents an initial attempt at characterizing who is likely to benefit from ICALL-based interventions

Investigating Second Language Reading Components: Reading for Different Types of Meaning

The nature of second language (L2) reading ability is extremely complex and its components are yet to be agreed upon. The current study hypothesized that L2 reading ability consists of (1) reading for literal meaning (LIT), (2) reading for implied meaning with endophoric reference (IMP-EN), and (3) reading for implied meaning with exophoric reference (IMP-EX). In addition, different reading passages were assumed to affect test performance in varying degrees. Participants were 298 incoming students to an adult English as a second language (ESL) program. They took a reading placement test consisting of four reading passages and 30 items. Participants’ reading scores were analyzed using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) approach in structural equation modeling (SEM). Findings suggest that L2 reading ability consists of the three constructs of LIT, IMP-EN, and IMP-EX. Moreover, the three reading constructs are on a continuum with LIT having the most direct relationship between the text and the response, while IMP-EX having the most indirect relationship. However, reading passages did not have a significant influence on test performance