Some Challenges of Advanced Question-Answering: an Experiment with How-to Questions

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

AN ANALYSIS ON GENERIC STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE FEATURES OF PROCEDURE TEXTS MADE BY SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF SMA SEMEN GRESIK

Abstract English is an international language that has to be mastered in order to be able to face the development of new era nowadays. English, especially in educational aspect, has the significant impact for students. It is demanded for students not only being able to speak, but also to write. In some cases, the students who are learning English as a foreign Language faces a difficulty in writing an English text. Procedure text is one of several text types which are introduced to the Senior High School students in the second semester of the second year. The generic structures of this text are; title (goal), materials/equipment, and steps. The language features of the procedure text are imperative sentences, action verbs, connectives, adverbials, and simple present tense. Meanwhile, the procedure text is considered as the simplest text among the other text types, but there are still many students who get difficulty in organizing this text. Considering that phenomena, the writer is interested to conduct this analysis study which has two research questions. First, how is the second year of senior high school students’ knowledge of generic structures in their writing procedure texts?. Second, how is the second year of senior high school students’ knowledge of language features in their writing procedure texts?. The research design of this study is text analysis design. This study concerns on procedure text compositions, which are written by the second year students at the second semester in XI IPA 3 class of Sekolah Menengah Atas ( SMA ) Semen Gresik. The writer describes and analyzes the data in the form of words or sentences. The result of this study is not the representative of the students’ real ability in writing procedure text, since the text was written in a group. The result of data analysis indicated that most of the eleventh grade students of SMA Semen Gresik were able to apply the generic structure of procedure texts, in this case: title (goal), materials/equipment, and steps. It was found that some groups made several errors in arranging “materials” and “steps” parts of generic structure but some other groups arranged a good generic structure with some minor errors. The finding also showed that most of the students still did not pay attention to the importance of their text’s language features. There were several groups that did not use complete components of language features by missing the “connectives”. Furthermore, some groups were inconsistent in using simple present tense. They mixed some grammatical forms including passive and gerund in composing the text. Some groups did not apply “adverbials” in their text which was important to show the exact need for the materials or action. Thus, in conclusion, they were still confused and made several errors in applying the language features of procedure text.   Key Words: Procedure Text, Generic Structure, Language Features.     Abstrak Bahasa Inggris adalah bahasa internasional yang harus dikuasai agar mampu menghadapi perkembangan era baru saat ini. Bahasa Inggris, terutama dalam aspek pendidikan, memiliki dampak yang signifikan bagi siswa. Hal ini menuntut siswa untuk tidak hanya mampu berbicara, tetapi juga untuk menulis. Dalam beberapa kasus, siswa yang belajar bahasa Inggris sebagai Bahasa asing menghadapi kesulitan dalam menulis teks bahasa Inggris. Teks prosedur adalah salah satu dari beberapa jenis teks yang diperkenalkan kepada siswa SMA di semester kedua tahun kedua. Struktur generik teks ini adalah; title (tujuan), bahan/peralatan, dan langkah-langkah. Fitur bahasa dari teks prosedur adalah kalimat perintah, kata kerja, kata hubung, kata keterangan, dan present tense sederhana. Sementara itu, teks prosedur dianggap sebagai teks paling sederhana di antara jenis teks lain, tetapi masih banyak siswa yang mengalami kesulitan dalam menulis teks ini. Berkaca pada fenomena itu, penulis tertarik untuk melakukan studi analisis ini yang memiliki dua pertanyaan penelitian. Pertama, bagaimana pengetahuan siswa tahun kedua di SMA tentang struktur generik dalam teks prosedur tulisan mereka ?. Kedua, bagaimana pengetahuan siswa tahun kedua di SMA tentang fitur bahasa dalam teks prosedur tulisan mereka ?. Desain penelitian dalam studi ini adalah desain analisis teks. Studi ini terfokus pada komposisi teks prosedur yang ditulis oleh siswa tahun kedua di semester kedua di kelas XI IPA 3 Sekolah Menengah Atas (SMA) Semen Gresik. Penulis menggambarkan dan menganalisa data dalam bentuk kata-kata atau kalimat. Hasil penelitian ini bukan wakil dari kemampuan nyata siswa dalam teks prosedur tertulis, karena teks ditulis dalam kelompok. Hasil analisis data menunjukkan bahwa sebagian besar siswa kelas XI SMA Semen Gresik mampu menerapkan struktur generik dalam teks prosedur, dalam hal ini: Judul (tujuan), bahan / peralatan, dan langkah-langkah. Ditemukan bahwa beberapa kelompok membuat beberapa kesalahan dalam mengatur "bahan" dan "langkah" bagian dari struktur generik tetapi beberapa kelompok lain mengatur struktur generik yang baik dengan beberapa kesalahan kecil. Temuan ini juga menunjukkan bahwa sebagian besar siswa masih tidak memperhatikan pentingnya fitur bahasa di dalam teks mereka. Ada beberapa kelompok yang tidak menggunakan komponen lengkap fitur bahasa dengan tidak menggunakan "kata penghubung". Selain itu, beberapa kelompok tidak konsisten dalam menggunakan present tense sederhana. Mereka mengkombinasikan beberapa bentuk gramatikal termasuk pasif dan gerund dalam menyusun teks. Beberapa kelompok tidak menerapkan "kata keterangan" dalam teks mereka yang penting untuk menunjukkan jumlah kebutuhan yang tepat untuk bahan atau tindakan. Jadi, kesimpulannya, mereka masih bingung dan membuat beberapa kesalahan dalam menerapkan fitur bahasa teks prosedur

Mining User-Generated Repair Instructions from Automotive Web Communities

The objective of this research was to automatically extract user-generated repair instructions from large amounts of web data. An artifact has been created that classifies a web post as containing a repair instruction or not. Methods from Natural Language Processing are used to transform the unstructured textual information from a web post into a set of numerical features that can be further processed by different Machine Learning Algorithms. The main contribution of this research lies in the design and prototypical implementation of these features. The evaluation shows that the created artifact can accurately distinguish posts containing repair instructions from other posts e.g. containing problem reports. With such a solution, a company can save a lot of time and money that was previously necessary to perform this classification task manually

Investigating the Structure of Procedural Texts for Answering How-to Questions, LREC 2008

This paper presents ongoing work dedicated to parsing the textual structure of procedural texts. We propose here a model for the intructional structure and criteria to identify its main components: titles, instructions, warnings and prerequisites. The main aim of this project, besides a contribution to text processing, is to be able to answer procedural questions (How-to? questions), where the answer is a well-formed portion of a text, not a small set of words as for factoid questions. 1. Situation and Aims The main goal of this work is to be able to answer procedural questions, which are questions whose induced response is typically a fragment, more or less large, of a procedure, i.e., a set of coherent instructions designed to reach a goal. Recent informal observations from queries to Web search engines show that procedural questions is the second largest set of queries after factoid questions (de Rijke, 2005). Answering procedural questions thus requires to be able to extract not simply a word in a text fragment, as for factoid questions, but a well-formed text structure which may be quite large. Analysing a procedural text requires a dedicated discourse analysis, e.g. by means of a grammar. Such grammars are not very common yet due to the complex intertwinning of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors they require to get a correct analysis. Discourse grammars have basically a top-down organization, they take discourse acts as their basic units, instead of just words, they account for the structure and for the interactions between these acts and they require a relatively elaborated conceptual representation as output. Such a grammar must capture the discourse cohesion, possibly the communicative intentions, as well as the discourse organization, e.g. in terms of plans. Procedural texts are organized sets of instructions, they may also be sets of advices, as in social behavior texts. In our perspective, procedural texts range from apparently simple cooking recipes to large maintenance manuals. They also include documents as diverse as teaching texts, medical notices, social behavior recommendations, directions for use, assembly notices, do-it-yourself notices, itinerary guides, advice texts, savoir-faire guide