5,674 research outputs found
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
Refining the use of the web (and web search) as a language teaching and learning resource
The web is a potentially useful corpus for language study because it provides examples of language that are contextualized and authentic, and is large and easily searchable. However, web contents are heterogeneous in the extreme, uncontrolled and hence 'dirty,' and exhibit features different from the written and spoken texts in other linguistic corpora. This article explores the use of the web and web search as a resource for language teaching and learning. We describe how a particular derived corpus containing a trillion word tokens in the form of n-grams has been filtered by word lists and syntactic constraints and used to create three digital library collections, linked with other corpora and the live web, that exploit the affordances of web text and mitigate some of its constraints
Second language learning in the context of MOOCs
Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University
Lateral Shift Makes a Ground-Plane Cloak Detectable
We examine the effectiveness of the ground-plane invisibility cloak generated
from quasiconformal mapping of electromagnetic space. This cloak without
anisotropy will generally lead to a lateral shift of the scattered wave, whose
value is comparable to the height of the cloaked object, making the object
detectable. This can be explained by the fact that the corresponding virtual
space is thinner and wider than it should be. Ray tracing on a concrete model
shows that for a bump with a maximum height of 0.2 units to be hidden, the
lateral shift of a ray with 45 degree incidence is around 0.15 units
A single-level random-effects cross-lagged panel model for longitudinal mediation analysis
Cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs) are widely used to test mediation with longitudinal panel data. One major limitation of the CLPMs is that the model effects are assumed to be fixed across individuals. This assumption is likely to be violated (i.e., the model effects are random across individuals) in practice. When this happens, the CLPMs can potentially yield biased parameter estimates and misleading statistical inferences. This article proposes a model named a random-effects cross-lagged panel model (RE-CLPM) to account for random effects in CLPMs. Simulation studies show that the RE-CLPM outperforms the CLPM in recovering the mean indirect and direct effects in a longitudinal mediation analysis when random effects exist in the population. The performance of the RE-CLPM is robust to a certain degree, even when the random effects are not normally distributed. In addition, the RE-CLPM does not produce harmful results when the model effects are in fact fixed in the population. Implications of the simulation studies and potential directions for future research are discussed
Extraordinary surface voltage effect in the invisibility cloak with an active device inside
The electromagnetic field solution for a spherical invisibility cloak with an
active device inside is established. Extraordinary electric and magnetic
surface voltages are induced at the inner boundary of a spherical cloak, which
prevent electromagnetic waves from going out. The phase and handness of
polarized waves obliquely incident on such boundaries is kept in the reflected
waves. The surface voltages due to an electric dipole inside the concealed
region are found equal to the auxiliary scalar potentials at the inner
boundary, which consequently gain physical counterparts in this case
Cylindrical Cloak with Axial Permittivity/Permeability Spatially Invariant
In order to reduce the difficulties in the experimental realizations of the
cloak but still keep good performance of invisibility, we proposed a perfect
cylindrical invisibility cloak with spatially invariant axial material
parameters. The advantage of this kind of TE (or TM) cloak is that only rho and
phi components of mu (or epsilon) are spatially variant, which makes it
possible to realize perfect invisibility with two-dimensional (2D) magnetic (or
electric) metamaterials. The effects of perturbations of the parameters on the
performance of this cloak are quantitatively analyzed by scattering theory. Our
work provides a simple and feasible solution to the experimental realization of
cloaks with ideal parameters
Intelligent design guidance
This paper presents results from an investigation regarding the use of the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) as a means to guide a designer through the calculation of numerical relationships within the early design system Designer. Characteristics, relationships and goals are used within Designer to enable the evaluation and approximation of the design model and are represented within the system as a digraph. Despite being a useful representation of the interactions within the design model, the digraph does not aid the designer in identifying a sequence of activities that need to be performed in order to evaluate the model. The DSM system was used to represent the characteristics and the dependencies obtained through the relationships. The sequence of characteristics within the DSM was optimised and used to produce a design process to guide the designer in model evaluation. The objective of the optimisation was to minimise the amount of iteration within the design process. The process enabled a designer who is unfamiliar with the model to evaluate it and satisfy the design goals and requirements. Both the DSM system and the Designer system are generic in nature andmay be applied to any design problem
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