Adult reading acquisition: a study of error types and related difficulties of adults enrolled in literacy classes

This study involved the close observation of the reading of 59 adults in literacy tuition and 25 twelve-year old children in remedial classes, and the recording of their oral reading errors and ability in comprehension, short term memory, word reading and definitions measures. Fundamental differences were found in the structures of the two samples and their approach to the reading task. Differences between subjects in the adult sample stemmed from the presence or not of semantic acceptability among errors coupled with ability in areas like comprehension, definitions skills and metalanguage. The measures used by which the adults were grouped by the Literacy Scheme were found to be inadequate and alternative adult groupings were discovered in the corpus of the data. Suggestions were made for incorporating meaning related tasks into the teaching of reading to adults

Generating automated meeting summaries

The thesis at hand introduces a novel approach for the generation of abstractive summaries of meetings. While the automatic generation of document summaries has been studied for some decades now, the novelty of this thesis is mainly the application to the meeting domain (instead of text documents) as well as the use of a lexicalized representation formalism on the basis of Frame Semantics. This allows us to generate summaries abstractively (instead of extractively).Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt einen neuartigen Ansatz zur Generierung abstraktiver Zusammenfassungen von Gruppenbesprechungen vor. Während automatische Textzusammenfassungen bereits seit einigen Jahrzehnten erforscht werden, liegt die Neuheit dieser Arbeit vor allem in der Anwendungsdomäne (Gruppenbesprechungen statt Textdokumenten), sowie der Verwendung eines lexikalisierten Repräsentationsformulism auf der Basis von Frame-Semantiken, der es erlaubt, Zusammenfassungen abstraktiv (statt extraktiv) zu generieren. Wir argumentieren, dass abstraktive Ansätze für die Zusammenfassung spontansprachlicher Interaktionen besser geeignet sind als extraktive

A Bigger Fish to Fry:Scaling up the Automatic Understanding of Idiomatic Expressions

In this thesis, we are concerned with idiomatic expressions and how to handle them within NLP. Idiomatic expressions are a type of multiword phrase which have a meaning that is not a direct combination of the meaning of its parts, e.g. 'at a crossroads' and 'move the goalposts'.In Part I, we provide a general introduction to idiomatic expressions and an overview of observations regarding idioms based on corpus data. In addition, we discuss existing research on idioms from an NLP perspective, providing an overview of existing tasks, approaches, and datasets. In Part II, we focus on the building of a large idiom corpus, consisting of developing a system for the automatic extraction of potentially idiom expressions and building a large corpus of idiom using crowdsourced annotation. Finally, in Part III, we improve an existing unsupervised classifier and compare it to other existing classifiers. Given the relatively poor performance of this unsupervised classifier, we also develop a supervised deep neural network-based system and find that a model involving two separate modules looking at different information sources yields the best performance, surpassing previous state-of-the-art approaches.In conclusion, this work shows the feasibility of building a large corpus of sense-annotated potentially idiomatic expressions, and the benefits such a corpus provides for further research. It provides the possibility for quick testing of hypotheses about the distribution and usage of idioms, it enables the training of data-hungry machine learning methods for PIE disambiguation systems, and it permits fine-grained, reliable evaluation of such systems

The linguistic competence of deaf primary school children

Observation of deaf children in conversation with their teachers might lead one to believe they are behaving in a somewhat contrived way in comparison with their behaviour when communicating with their peers. Examination of the performance of deaf and hearing children on various reading tests has shown the deaf to be pursuing markedly different strategies from the hearing (e.g. word association). Such observations lead us to ask, is the linguistic behaviour of these children then simply a selection of 'special tricks' developed to cope with everyday demands? Or, if various measures of their language intercorrelate, can we assume the existence of a unitary linguistic competence? To answer this question and to investigate the validity of the measures chosen, a group of 50 profoundly deaf children from two schools for the deaf were studied (where necessary using, videorecordings) in 4 situations. These were a) in conversation with their teachers, b) in a referential communication game with their peers, c) their performance on the Edinburgh Reading Test and d) their writing. Since degree of hearing loss, age, sex and intelligence have been shown to be influential, we included these together with teacher ratings of oral proficiency, general ability, attitude to school, written ability and speech intelligibility. The results showed all language measures intercorrelated with varying degrees of significance. Multiple regression analysis showed that the -main measure taken from the conversation with teachers (namely, average length of turn) proved to be the most powerful predictor of reading. Written syntactic accuracy was the second most powerful predictor. Since reliable measures of deaf children's linguistic abilities are badly needed (especially in the wake of recent legislation advocating the education of deaf children in ordinary schools) the potential use of these measures is discussed. Since these language abilities are good predictors of each other, future research might investigate the possibility that concentrated teaching in one area of language use could have positive effects on other linguistic abilities

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

The Texts Matter: Essential Text Characteristics For Comprehension Intervention In The Intermediate Grades

Results on state and national reading assessments indicate that students in the U.S. overall, and in Minnesota specifically, continue to struggle to comprehend expository texts; only one-third of fourth graders meeting grade level proficiency on state assessments designed to analyze reading achievement. Further, a significant gap persists for fourth grade students based on race, language, and socioeconomic status. Contemporaneously, technology continues to advance rapidly, demanding increased literacy skills and a better understanding of comprehension intervention. This research study aims to identify essential text characteristics of expository texts that will eventually be included in an online, automated reading strategy tutor providing instruction and practice designed to improve deep comprehension for a diverse population of struggling third and fourth grade students. Identification of essential text characteristics will further inform teacher practice as they continue to make decisions on what texts to place in front of their students. This design-based implementation and mixed-methods study explores reading comprehension and the role that texts in a digital format play in answering the research questions. Qualitative data was collected from teacher practitioners and analyzed to create texts that students in grades 3 and 4 read and paraphrased to understand their comprehension. Analysis showed that while most students struggled to read the texts, nearly half of the paraphrases generated were of acceptable quality and showed promise. The results of this study suggest that more use of expository texts is needed in explicit reading instruction beginning in the primary grades and that teachers would benefit from deeper learning of the positive effects of prior knowledge, motivation, and student efficacy