8,393 research outputs found
Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity
Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars
around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs),
most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the
differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking
scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more
than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We
divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of
the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the
scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic
complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length
and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of
lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The
observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and
lexical complexity.Comment: 6 figure
Adolescent Literacy and Textbooks: An Annotated Bibliography
A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, provides an annotated bibliography of research on textbook design and reading comprehension for fourth through twelfth grade, arranged by topic. Calls for a dialogue between publishers and researchers
Ensuring Readability and Data-fidelity using Head-modifier Templates in Deep Type Description Generation
A type description is a succinct noun compound which helps human and machines
to quickly grasp the informative and distinctive information of an entity.
Entities in most knowledge graphs (KGs) still lack such descriptions, thus
calling for automatic methods to supplement such information. However, existing
generative methods either overlook the grammatical structure or make factual
mistakes in generated texts. To solve these problems, we propose a
head-modifier template-based method to ensure the readability and data fidelity
of generated type descriptions. We also propose a new dataset and two automatic
metrics for this task. Experiments show that our method improves substantially
compared with baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both
datasets.Comment: ACL 201
Text readability and intuitive simplification: A comparison of readability formulas
Texts are routinely simplified for language learners with authors relying on a variety of approaches and materials to assist them in making the texts more comprehensible. Readability measures are one such tool that authors can use when evaluating text comprehensibility. This study compares the Coh-Metrix Second Language (L2) Reading Index, a readability formula based on psycholinguistic and cognitive models of reading, to traditional readability formulas on a large corpus of texts intuitively simplified for language learners. The goal of this study is to determine which formula best classifies text level (advanced, intermediate, beginner) with the prediction that text classification relates to the formulas’ capacity to measure text comprehensibility. The results demonstrate that the Coh-Metrix L2 Reading Index performs significantly better than traditional readability formulas, suggesting that the variables used in this index are more closely aligned to the intuitive text processing employed by authors when simplifying texts
Web Mediators for Accessible Browsing
We present a highly accurate method for classifying web pages based on link percentage, which is the percentage of text characters that are parts of links normalized by the number of all text characters on a web page. K-means clustering is used to create unique thresholds to differentiate index pages and article pages on individual web sites. Index pages contain mostly links to articles and other indices, while article pages contain mostly text. We also present a novel link grouping algorithm using agglomerative hierarchical clustering that groups links in the same spatial neighborhood together while preserving link structure. Grouping allows users with severe disabilities to use a scan-based mechanism to tab through a web page and select items. In experiments, we saw up to a 40-fold reduction in the number of commands needed to click on a link with a scan-based interface, which shows that we can vastly improve the rate of communication for users with disabilities. We used web page classification and link grouping to alter web page display on an accessible web browser that we developed to make a usable browsing interface for users with disabilities. Our classification method consistently outperformed a baseline classifier even when using minimal data to generate article and index clusters, and achieved classification accuracy of 94.0% on web sites with well-formed or slightly malformed HTML, compared with 80.1% accuracy for the baseline classifier.National Science Foundation (IIS-0308213, IIS-039009, IIS-0093367, P200A01031, EIA-0202067
Evaluation of Reading Support Tools by Reading Comprehension Tests and Reading Speed Tests
This paper introduces our reading process monitoring systems and also presents the experimental results that show the adequacy of our reading data. Our system divides a text into reading areas and records reading time for each area. We conducted two experiments using this tool to verify the adequacy of our reading process data. In the first experiment, we examined whether the reading process can distinguish easy text reading and difficult text reading, and confirmed the adequacy of our reading process data. In the second experiment, we tried to evaluate efficiency of reading support tools such as (i) chunker, (ii) glosser, and (iii) machine translation system, assuming that efficiency of these systems co-relates with text readability. The experimental results show that only the machine translation system effectively supports reading
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