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The Application of Natural Language Processing and Automated Scoring in Second Language Assessment
Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of research that is used to investigate the application of natural language and is the foundation of machine translation, natural language text processing, natural language generation, multilingual and cross language information retrieval, speech recognition, parsing, and expert systems. To understand natural language in order to build or select appropriate algorithms for processing, three major issues are called into attention: humans’ thought processes, the meaning of linguistic input in context, and world knowledge. These considerations have led to the development of various types of NLP tools for lexical and morphological analysis, semantic and discourse analysis, as well as knowledge-based approaches (c.f., Chowdhury, 2003). After decades of evolution and advancement, the current stage of NLP, as Xi (2010) pointed out, has allowed language testing researchers to apply its techniques in developing automated scoring systems for the purpose of language learning and assessment
Language Without Words: A Pointillist Model for Natural Language Processing
This paper explores two separate questions: Can we perform natural language
processing tasks without a lexicon?; and, Should we? Existing natural language
processing techniques are either based on words as units or use units such as
grams only for basic classification tasks. How close can a machine come to
reasoning about the meanings of words and phrases in a corpus without using any
lexicon, based only on grams?
Our own motivation for posing this question is based on our efforts to find
popular trends in words and phrases from online Chinese social media. This form
of written Chinese uses so many neologisms, creative character placements, and
combinations of writing systems that it has been dubbed the "Martian Language."
Readers must often use visual queues, audible queues from reading out loud, and
their knowledge and understanding of current events to understand a post. For
analysis of popular trends, the specific problem is that it is difficult to
build a lexicon when the invention of new ways to refer to a word or concept is
easy and common. For natural language processing in general, we argue in this
paper that new uses of language in social media will challenge machines'
abilities to operate with words as the basic unit of understanding, not only in
Chinese but potentially in other languages.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Explicit Reasoning over End-to-End Neural Architectures for Visual Question Answering
Many vision and language tasks require commonsense reasoning beyond
data-driven image and natural language processing. Here we adopt Visual
Question Answering (VQA) as an example task, where a system is expected to
answer a question in natural language about an image. Current state-of-the-art
systems attempted to solve the task using deep neural architectures and
achieved promising performance. However, the resulting systems are generally
opaque and they struggle in understanding questions for which extra knowledge
is required. In this paper, we present an explicit reasoning layer on top of a
set of penultimate neural network based systems. The reasoning layer enables
reasoning and answering questions where additional knowledge is required, and
at the same time provides an interpretable interface to the end users.
Specifically, the reasoning layer adopts a Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL) based
engine to reason over a basket of inputs: visual relations, the semantic parse
of the question, and background ontological knowledge from word2vec and
ConceptNet. Experimental analysis of the answers and the key evidential
predicates generated on the VQA dataset validate our approach.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, AAAI 201
Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend
Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive
challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer
questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now
large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of
evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this
bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This
allows us to develop a class of attention based deep neural networks that learn
to read real documents and answer complex questions with minimal prior
knowledge of language structure.Comment: Appears in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28
(NIPS 2015). 14 pages, 13 figure
Cooperative analysis expert situation assessment research
For the past few decades, Rome Air Development Center (RADC) has been conducting research in Artificial Intelligence (AI). When the recent advances in hardware technology made many AI techniques practical, the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Directorate of RADC initiated an applications program entitled Knowledge Based Intelligence Systems (KBIS). The goal of the program is the development of a generic Intelligent Analyst System, an open machine with the framework for intelligence analysis, natural language processing, and man-machine interface techniques, needing only the specific problem domain knowledge to be operationally useful. The development of KBIS is described
SemNet: the knowledge representation of lolita
Many systems of Knowledge Representation exist, but none were designed specifically for general purpose large scale natural language processing. This thesis introduces a set of metrics to evaluate the suitability of representations for this purpose, derived from an analysis of the problems such processing introduces. These metrics address three broad categories of question: Is the representation sufficiently expressive to perform its task? What implications has its design on the architecture of the system using it? What inefficiencies are intrinsic to its design? An evaluation of existing Knowledge Representation systems reveals that none of them satisfies the needs of general purpose large scale natural language processing. To remedy this lack, this thesis develops a new representation: SemNet. SemNet benefits not only from the detailed requirements analysis but also from insights gained from its use as the core representation of the large scale general purpose system LOLITA (Large-scale Object-based Linguistic Interactor, Translator, and Analyser). The mapping process between Natural language and representation is presented in detail, showing that the representation achieves its goals in practice
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