Native and non-native speakers of English in summarising expository texts

This study examines how native and non-native English speakers summarise expository texts. It investigates if there is any difference in quality between the summaries produced by two groups of students; namely native speakers of English, who acquire the language in early childhood and have their education (from kindergarten / grade 1 to high school) in English, and non-native speakers, who acquire the language in an ESL/EFL context. The sample consisted of seventy undergraduates from a private Malaysian university, comprising thirty-five native and thirty-five non-native speakers of English. Data for the study include summaries by students, response to teacher and student questionnaires as well as interviews with both teachers and students. The results of the study revealed that there was a significant difference in the quality of summaries of native and non-native English speakers in expository text

Online Model Evaluation in a Large-Scale Computational Advertising Platform

Online media provides opportunities for marketers through which they can deliver effective brand messages to a wide range of audiences. Advertising technology platforms enable advertisers to reach their target audience by delivering ad impressions to online users in real time. In order to identify the best marketing message for a user and to purchase impressions at the right price, we rely heavily on bid prediction and optimization models. Even though the bid prediction models are well studied in the literature, the equally important subject of model evaluation is usually overlooked. Effective and reliable evaluation of an online bidding model is crucial for making faster model improvements as well as for utilizing the marketing budgets more efficiently. In this paper, we present an experimentation framework for bid prediction models where our focus is on the practical aspects of model evaluation. Specifically, we outline the unique challenges we encounter in our platform due to a variety of factors such as heterogeneous goal definitions, varying budget requirements across different campaigns, high seasonality and the auction-based environment for inventory purchasing. Then, we introduce return on investment (ROI) as a unified model performance (i.e., success) metric and explain its merits over more traditional metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) or conversion rate (CVR). Most importantly, we discuss commonly used evaluation and metric summarization approaches in detail and propose a more accurate method for online evaluation of new experimental models against the baseline. Our meta-analysis-based approach addresses various shortcomings of other methods and yields statistically robust conclusions that allow us to conclude experiments more quickly in a reliable manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation strategy on real campaign data through some experiments.Comment: Accepted to ICDM201