Teaching and learning guide for:Computational approaches to the pragmatics problem

Cummins C, de Ruiter J. Teaching And Learning Guide For Computational Approaches To The Pragmatics Problem. Language and Linguistics Compass. 2015;9(8):328-331

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

A corpus-based study of Malaysia ESL students' use of discourse connectors in upper and post-secondry argumentative writing

Discourse connectors (DCs) are one of the elements of cohesive devices that bring about cohesion to a piece of writing or speech. They are potentially useful means for writers,particularly in ESL and EFL writing pedagogic settings. DCs usefulness is two-pronged. First, they help and guide readers through the text, and then they are tools for writers to engage with their readers. It has been well-documented that appropriate and efficient use of DCs will create a coherent flow of the text. However, second/foreign language learners have some difficulties to use them efficiently and systematically in their writing. Literature review shows that the Malaysian ESL students are also suffering from improper and efficient use of DCs which leads them in failing to produce a cohesive text. Surprisingly, no single study was found in the context of Malaysia to investigate Malaysian ESL students’ understanding and use of DCs. Hence, this study attempted to investigate and understand the nature and the use of the DCs in the Malaysian student writing compared with Native speakers writing. The study also was set to examine the correlation between the frequency use of the DCs and the quality of writing. The final goal of this research study was to find out to what extent Malaysian ESL students are committing errors while using DCs. A corpus-based approach was adopted to meet the objectives of the study. To this end,an argumentative topic was assigned to the Form 4, Form 5 (upper-secondary) and the first year college students (post-secondary) and they were asked to write about the given topic in the classroom and submit their works to the instructors. They were required to write 250 words within 45 minutes. Upon compilation of the essays, the Malaysian Corpus of Students' Argumentative Writing (MCSAW) was built with ≃ 600,000 tokens. To compare and find out a vivid picture of Malaysian ESL students use of DCs with Native English Speakers, the Louvain Corpus of Native Essay Writing [LOCNESS] corpus was used. Oxford Wordsmith Tools (5) was employed to extract data from corpus for analysis, by using frequency count and concordance functions. Aiming to identify what type of DCs is used by Malaysian ESL students, Discourse Connector List developed by Rezvani Kalajahi and Neufeld (2014) was used. To be able to examine the relationship between the quality of writing and the frequency of the use of the DCs, ESL composition profile offered by Jacobs et al. (1981) was utilized. Finally, a framework of identification of DCs error type was developed by the researcher to explore the errors that students commit while using DCs. Findings of this study entail three phases. First, it was observed that Malaysian students tend to use DCs more frequently than native students. The overall frequency of the use of the DCs between Malaysian and native students was statistically significant at p < .05. However, the native students used more variety of DCs types than Malaysian students (398vs.328). It was also found that Malaysian students use DCs in some categories frequently and infrequently. Based on the findings in the native students writing (LOCNESS Corpus), the most frequent DCs in written English were offered. Second,there was a very weak negative but insignificant correlation between writing quality and the frequency of the use of the DCs in the writing of Malaysian ESL students. Finally,the qualitative analysis revealed that the erroneous use of DCs made by Malaysian ESL student writers mainly manifested in eight different categories. They had problems with the use of these devices which involved semantic, syntactic, stylistic, positional and mechanical errors. They also appeared to have tendency for unnecessary addition, omission, and redundant repetition of the DCs. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that Malaysian ESL students’ use of DCs was still at an evolving level. It is vitally important that the accurate use of DCs in writing among Malaysian students be further highlighted in the classrooms through using concordance lines and adopting explicit instruction technique. Besides, material developers may take the outcome of the research into consideration and could find out possible ways to distribute and introduce DCs systematically across the educational levels

Hedges and boosters in the English as a foreign language undergraduate persuasive essays and job application letters

Persuasive writing is one of the most difficult types of writing encountered by EFL students where they at times need to soften statements through hedges, and at others they need to indicate certainty through boosters. Although hedges and boosters are vital in the persuasive writing, few studies on EFL writing have examined these two discourse markers in the persuasive texts of EFL students. Existing studies on these discourse markers have largely examined scientific texts written mostly in the Western context. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate hedges and boosters in the persuasive texts written by 120 Yemeni EFL students. Each student wrote a persuasive essay and a job application letter in English and in Arabic. This produced a total of 480 scripts. For the experimental part of the study, forty participants from the sample were divided equally into the experimental group and control group. The participants of the experimental group were taught hedges and boosters through the genre approach. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings reveal that Yemeni EFL students tend to use hedges and boosters largely associated with spoken features. The findings also show that the students tend to use more hedges in their EFL than in their L1 persuasive essays due to lack of vocabulary. In contrast, boosters appear to be almost similar in their L1 and EFL persuasive essays while they appear to be used more in their L1 job application letters. The findings of the experiment indicate positive impact of teaching hedges and boosters through the genre approach. Overall, the findings of the study provide further insights on the use of hedges and boosters in the EFL writing context. Specifically, they provide valuable input to both instructors and curriculum designers on the use of hedges and boosters in EFL persuasive texts

Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

THE APPLICATION OF FUNCTIONAL APPROACH IN STANDAR KOMPETENSI LULUSAN (SKL) UJIAN NASIONAL SMP/MTs OF ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC YEAR 2011 – 2012

Ujian Nasional (UN) or national examination for the ninth grader of Junior High School has been conducted. Each subject tested has its own competency standard for the graduation or standar kompetensi lulusan (SKL). SKL is used as the assessment standard to determine the graduation of the students. The SKL for Ujian Nasional (UN) SMP/MTs of English in academic year 2011 - 2012 covers competency in reading and writing skill. This writing shows that competencies and the indicators of the SKL Ujian Nasional (UN) SMP/MTs of English in academic year 2011 - 2012 reflect functional approach in English Language Teaching