Supporting collocation learning with a digital library

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on three processes that have been identified as leading to lexical acquisition: noticing, retrieval and generation. Collocations are automatically identified in input documents using natural language processing techniques and used to enhance the presentation of the documents and also as the basis of exercises, produced under teacher control, that amplify students' collocation knowledge. The system uses a corpus of 1.3 B short phrases drawn from the web, from which 29 M collocations have been automatically identified. It also connects to examples garnered from the live web and the British National Corpus

Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

Collaboration scripts - a conceptual analysis

This article presents a conceptual analysis of collaboration scripts used in face-to-face and computer-mediated collaborative learning. Collaboration scripts are scaffolds that aim to improve collaboration through structuring the interactive processes between two or more learning partners. Collaboration scripts consist of at least five components: (a) learning objectives, (b) type of activities, (c) sequencing, (d) role distribution, and (e) type of representation. These components serve as a basis for comparing prototypical collaboration script approaches for face-to-face vs. computer-mediated learning. As our analysis reveals, collaboration scripts for face-to-face learning often focus on supporting collaborators in engaging in activities that are specifically related to individual knowledge acquisition. Scripts for computer-mediated collaboration are typically concerned with facilitating communicative-coordinative processes that occur among group members. The two lines of research can be consolidated to facilitate the design of collaboration scripts, which both support participation and coordination, as well as induce learning activities closely related to individual knowledge acquisition and metacognition. In addition, research on collaboration scripts needs to consider the learners’ internal collaboration scripts as a further determinant of collaboration behavior. The article closes with the presentation of a conceptual framework incorporating both external and internal collaboration scripts

Your click decides your fate: Inferring Information Processing and Attrition Behavior from MOOC Video Clickstream Interactions

In this work, we explore video lecture interaction in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which is central to student learning experience on these educational platforms. As a research contribution, we operationalize video lecture clickstreams of students into cognitively plausible higher level behaviors, and construct a quantitative information processing index, which can aid instructors to better understand MOOC hurdles and reason about unsatisfactory learning outcomes. Our results illustrate how such a metric inspired by cognitive psychology can help answer critical questions regarding students' engagement, their future click interactions and participation trajectories that lead to in-video & course dropouts. Implications for research and practice are discusse

Language Learning and Interactive TV

The integration of engaging TV style content with the individualization and ‘intelligent’ content management offered by techniques from AI has the potential to provide learning environments that are both highly motivating and educationally sound. This paper describes why the area of language learning would be a particularly appropriate domain for interactive educational television to focus on. It also indicates some of the criteria to be fulfilled in order to provide optimal language learning conditions and how these might be satisfied using TV/Film content and techniques from AIED

Young children learning with mobile devices: Research on design and implementation

The increasing growth and usage of mobile devices, such as tablets and iPads, by young children has not yet been accompanied by systematic research about the effects they have on children's learning and the conditions that facilitate or hinder learning and engagement. As a result, only few empirically-based guidelines exist to guide parents, educators, and application (app) designers when choosing or designing apps for young children, often leading to non-evidence-based decisions, or the design of apps with little educational value. This symposium aims to bring together researchers from Australia, the UK and USA to discuss what evidence exist about the learning potential of mobile devices and apps for young children and how it could be used to inform relevant stakeholders

Building a Corpus of 2L English for Automatic Assessment: the CLEC Corpus

In this paper we describe the CLEC corpus, an ongoing project set up at the University of Cádiz with the purpose of building up a large corpus of English as a 2L classified according to CEFR proficiency levels and formed to train statistical models for automatic proficiency assessment. The goal of this corpus is twofold: on the one hand it will be used as a data resource for the development of automatic text classification systems and, on the other, it has been used as a means of teaching innovation techniques