Measuring Productive Semantic Associational Knowledge of the Most Frequent Words

Associational vocabulary knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EAP students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of associational vocabulary knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that cover 81% and 85% of written and spoken text. This study measured 46 Iranian EAP students’ productive semantic associational knowledge of words at the 1,000 word frequency level. The findings indicate that while participants had productive form-meaning knowledge of the words, they did not seem to have extensive semantic associational knowledge of the same words. This assists in diagnosing area of weakness and the degree to which instructional emphasis on high frequency words might improve their knowledge

Measuring Productive Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge of the Most Frequent Words

Productive depth of vocabulary knowledge (PDVK) is associated with writing and speaking skills (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004). These skills are essential for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students, who have difficulties with expressing themselves in oral presentations or written assignments (Evans & Green, 2007). As a result, diagnostic measurement of PDVK is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families because these word families cover 81% of written text and 85% of spoken text (Nation, 2006). Depth of vocabulary knowledge has been investigated and measured in various studies (see Chen & Truscatt, 2010; Pigada & Schmitt, 2006; Schmitt & Meara, 1997; Schmitt, 1998, 1999; Webb, 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2009a, 2009b) leading to successful multi-dimensional batteries of tests for its measurement. However, no study, to date, has productively measured the depth (and strength) of knowledge of the most frequent words. Nation’s (2013) conception of vocabulary knowledge—the proposition that vocabulary knowledge has three main aspects of Form, Meaning, and Use—structured the current study. Considering that the development of a test battery to measure all aspects of vocabulary knowledge outlined by Nation (2013) was impractical (Ishii & Schmitt, 2009), the current Ph.D. project focused on four aspects of vocabulary knowledge: (a) word parts, (b) associations, (c) collocations, and (d) form and meaning. The study measured 46 Iranian university EAP students’ productive vocabulary knowledge of the words at the 1,000 word frequency level. One productive test of word parts, two productive tests of semantic associations (synonym & antonym, and superordination & subordination tests), one productive test of collocation, and four corresponding productive tests of form-meaning connection for the aforementioned tests were developed for the present research. The results showed that while the participants had a strong performance on form-meaning connection and superordination and subordination, their knowledge of collocations was considerably lower. The results also showed that the participants’ performance on synonymy and antonymy, on association as a general term (synonym and antonym, superordination and subordination, and collocation altogether), and on word parts was not as strong as expected and was considerably lower than the maximum possible performance. Together the findings indicate that while Iranian university students had the productive Meaning knowledge of the words at 1,000 level, they did not seem to have extensive Form knowledge of the same words, and their Use knowledge was limited. This assists in diagnosing areas of weakness and the degree to which instructional emphasis on high frequency words might improve their knowledge

Measuring Productive Derivational Knowledge of the Most Frequent Words

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that cover 81% and 85% of written and spoken text. This study measured 46 Iranian university EFL students’ productive derivational knowledge of the words at the 1,000 word frequency level. The findings indicate that while participants had the productive form-meaning knowledge of the words at 1,000 level, they did not seem to have extensive derivational knowledge of the same words. This assists in diagnosing area of weakness and placing instructional emphasis on high frequency words

Medición del conocimiento derivado productivo de las palabras más frecuentes.

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that cover 81% and 85% of written and spoken text. This study measured 46 Iranian university EFL students’ productive derivational knowledge of the words at the 1,000 word frequency level. The findings indicate that while participants had the productive form-meaning knowledge of the words at 1,000 level, they did not seem to have extensive derivational knowledge of the same woEl conocimiento derivado está asociado con la escritura y la expresión oral. Estas habilidades son esenciales para los estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera que se expresan en presentaciones orales o trabajos escritos. Por lo tanto, la medición diagnóstica del conocimiento derivativo productivo es de vital importancia, especialmente en lo que respecta a las familias de 1000 palabras más frecuentes que cubren el 81% y el 85% del texto escrito y hablado. Este estudio midió el conocimiento derivado productivo de las palabras de 46 estudiantes universitarios iraníes de inglés como lengua extranjera en el nivel de frecuencia de 1000 palabras. Los hallazgos indican que, si bien los participantes tenían el conocimiento productivo de las formas y el significado de las palabras en el nivel 1000, no parecían tener un conocimiento extensivo de las derivaciones de las mismas palabras. Esto ayuda a diagnosticar el área de debilidad y a poner énfasis en la instrucción en palabras de uso frecuente

Can reputation migrate? On the propagation of reputation in multi-context communities

As e-communities grow in both quality and quantity, their online users require more appropriate tools to suite their needs in such environments. Many such tools are not explicitly needed in real-world communities where humans directly interact with each other. Trust making and reputation ascription are among the most important examples of such tools. Humans often build trust relationships through interaction or recommendation, and are therefore able to ascribe relevant reputation to those they interact with. However, in online communities the process of trust making and reputation ascription is more complicated. In this paper, we address a special case of the trust making process where community users need to create bonds with those they have not encountered before. This is a common situation in websites such as amazon.com, ebay.com, epionions.com and many others. The model we propose is able to estimate the possible reputation of a given identity in a any new context by observing his/her behavior in other communities. Our proposed model employs Dempster-Shafer based valuation networks to develop a global reputation structure and performs a belief propagation technique to infer contextual reputation values. The preliminary evaluation of the proposed model on a dataset collected from epinions.com shows promising results.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Compliance: Encoded information and behavior in a team of cooperative object handling robots

The role of compliant elements in a team of distributed object handling robots is discussed from the information, robot behavior, and cooperation protocol points of view. Also main benefits and some limitations on implementing compliant units in a group of distributed cooperative object handling robots are shown. It is proved that, any error in position of the stiff robots executing the Constrain-Move strategy [1] to transport an object will cause a movement lock in the system. Also, difficulties in stabilizing the robot-object contact in a team of distributed mobile object handling robots with stiff arms are discussed. It is verified that, specially designed compliant arms can be used to simplify the robot-object stabilization task and to remove the movement lock. Doing so, the system would be less sensor dependent and the robot control system is simplified. In addition, a distributed method is developed to help the compliant robots to solve the lock problem when there is a limitation on possible softness of the arms. Based on the discussions, a novel compliant arm is introduced and its main features are reviewed. Moreover, the role of this compliant mechanism in simplifying the distributed cooperation and coordination protocols, the robot information system, and the robot controller for executing th

Semantic Search Guidance: Learn From History

User queries submitted to web search engines are not always informative enough for retrieving the related pages to the user intention. The main problem is that users may not know the best query items they should enter to get the most related web pages to their intentions. They may not be familiar with the specific keywords in that domain knowledge. A user may remember only a part of the phrase that he/she wants to use in the query string. Sometimes the user does not know ho