Tools for Knowledge Analysis, Synthesis, and Sharing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Medland, Michael B.

2007-04-01

Change and complexity are creating a need for increasing levels of literacy in science and technology. Presently, we are beginning to provide students with clear contexts in which to learn, including clearly written text, visual displays and maps, and more effective instruction. We are also beginning to give students tools that promote their own literacy by helping them to interact with the learning context. These tools include peer-group skills as well as strategies to analyze text and to indicate comprehension by way of text summaries and concept maps. Even with these tools, more appears to be needed. Disparate backgrounds and languages interfere with the comprehension and the sharing of knowledge. To meet this need, two new tools are proposed. The first tool fractures language ontologically, giving all learners who use it a language to talk about what has, and what has not, been uttered in text or talk about the world. The second fractures language epistemologically, giving those involved in working with text or on the world around them a way to talk about what they have done and what remains to be done. Together, these tools operate as a two- tiered knowledge representation of knowledge. This representation promotes both an individual meta-cognitive and a social meta-cognitive approach to what is known and to what is not known, both ontologically and epistemologically. Two hypotheses guide the presentation: If the tools are taught during early childhood, children will be prepared to master science and technology content. If the tools are used by both students and those who design and deliver instruction, the learning of such content will be accelerated.

A New Measure for Assessing the Contributions of Higher Level Processes to Language Comprehension Performance in Preschoolers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hannon, Brenda; Frias, Sarah

2012-01-01

The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component…

Effect of Cultural Distance on Translation of Culture-Bound Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rafieyan, Vahid

2016-01-01

Sociolinguistic and sociocultural features of the source language can be ideally transferred to the target language when the translator's cultural background knowledge has a high overlap with the source language culture. This signifies the crucial role of national cultural distance from the source language society in the quality of translation of…

CRIE: An automated analyzer for Chinese texts.

PubMed

Sung, Yao-Ting; Chang, Tao-Hsing; Lin, Wei-Chun; Hsieh, Kuan-Sheng; Chang, Kuo-En

2016-12-01

Textual analysis has been applied to various fields, such as discourse analysis, corpus studies, text leveling, and automated essay evaluation. Several tools have been developed for analyzing texts written in alphabetic languages such as English and Spanish. However, currently there is no tool available for analyzing Chinese-language texts. This article introduces a tool for the automated analysis of simplified and traditional Chinese texts, called the Chinese Readability Index Explorer (CRIE). Composed of four subsystems and incorporating 82 multilevel linguistic features, CRIE is able to conduct the major tasks of segmentation, syntactic parsing, and feature extraction. Furthermore, the integration of linguistic features with machine learning models enables CRIE to provide leveling and diagnostic information for texts in language arts, texts for learning Chinese as a foreign language, and texts with domain knowledge. The usage and validation of the functions provided by CRIE are also introduced.

Online Text Processing: A Study of Iranian EFL Learners' Vocabulary Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ahangar, Abbas Ali; Izadi, Mehri

2015-01-01

The internet has developed into an important source of knowledge in recent times. It is used not just for engaging and entertaining users, but also for promoting language learning, especially for English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL and EFL) learners spending long hours using internet, 85% of all web pages are in English. This experimental…

The Use of Analogies in Language Teaching: Representing the Content of Teachers' Practical Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hulshof, Hans; Verloop, Nico

2002-01-01

This study sought to determine how experienced language teachers use analogies to help students comprehend a text on the course of their regular teaching routines. It is assumed that analogies constitute one important component of the content of teachers' practical knowledge in the context of reading-comprehension instruction. The framework of the…

Effects of Reading Strategies and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge on Turkish EFL Learners' Text Inferencing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Çakir, Abdulvahit; Ünaldi, Ihsan; Arslan, Fadime Yalçin; Kiliç, Mehmet

2016-01-01

Within the framework of foreign language teaching and learning, reading strategies, depth of vocabulary knowledge and text inferencing skills have not been researched extensively. This study tries to fill this gap by analyzing the effects of reading strategies used by Turkish EFL learners and their depth of vocabulary knowledge on their text…

Self-Assessment of Word Knowledge with Graded Readers: A Preliminary Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wan-a-rom, Udorn

2010-01-01

The study investigated how second language (L2) learners self-assessed word knowledge on a page of text taken from a graded reader. The case study subjects were five Thai high school learners of English. They were asked to assess their word knowledge using a page of continuous text. Data gained through observation, interviews, self-assessment and…

Mentor Texts and Funds of Knowledge: Situating Writing within Our Students' Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Newman, Beatrice Mendez

2012-01-01

The funds of knowledge concept serves as scaffolding for encouraging students to draw on background experiences and home language to generate authentic writing. This article describes and illustrates several classroom strategies, including 1) using culturally relevant mentor texts; 2) applying Nancie Atwell's writing territories concept; 3)…

ArdenML: The Arden Syntax Markup Language (or Arden Syntax: It's Not Just Text Any More!)

PubMed Central

Sailors, R. Matthew

2001-01-01

It is no longer necessary to think of Arden Syntax as simply a text-based knowledge base format. The development of ArdenML (Arden Syntax Markup Language), an XML-based markup language allows structured access to most of the maintenance and library categories without the need to write or buy a compiler may lead to the development of simple commercial and freeware tools for processing Arden Syntax Medical Logic Modules (MLMs)

Calibration of an Item Bank for the Assessment of Basque Language Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lopez-Cuadrado, Javier; Perez, Tomas A.; Vadillo, Jose A.; Gutierrez, Julian

2010-01-01

The main requisite for a functional computerized adaptive testing system is the need of a calibrated item bank. This text presents the tasks carried out during the calibration of an item bank for assessing knowledge of Basque language. It has been done in terms of the 3-parameter logistic model provided by the item response theory. Besides, this…

Critical Text Analysis: Linking Language and Cultural Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wharton, Sue

2011-01-01

Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus…

Knowledge-based machine indexing from natural language text: Knowledge base design, development, and maintenance

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Genuardi, Michael T.

1993-01-01

One strategy for machine-aided indexing (MAI) is to provide a concept-level analysis of the textual elements of documents or document abstracts. In such systems, natural-language phrases are analyzed in order to identify and classify concepts related to a particular subject domain. The overall performance of these MAI systems is largely dependent on the quality and comprehensiveness of their knowledge bases. These knowledge bases function to (1) define the relations between a controlled indexing vocabulary and natural language expressions; (2) provide a simple mechanism for disambiguation and the determination of relevancy; and (3) allow the extension of concept-hierarchical structure to all elements of the knowledge file. After a brief description of the NASA Machine-Aided Indexing system, concerns related to the development and maintenance of MAI knowledge bases are discussed. Particular emphasis is given to statistically-based text analysis tools designed to aid the knowledge base developer. One such tool, the Knowledge Base Building (KBB) program, presents the domain expert with a well-filtered list of synonyms and conceptually-related phrases for each thesaurus concept. Another tool, the Knowledge Base Maintenance (KBM) program, functions to identify areas of the knowledge base affected by changes in the conceptual domain (for example, the addition of a new thesaurus term). An alternate use of the KBM as an aid in thesaurus construction is also discussed.

Towards symbiosis in knowledge representation and natural language processing for structuring clinical practice guidelines.

PubMed

Weng, Chunhua; Payne, Philip R O; Velez, Mark; Johnson, Stephen B; Bakken, Suzanne

2014-01-01

The successful adoption by clinicians of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) contained in clinical information systems requires efficient translation of free-text guidelines into computable formats. Natural language processing (NLP) has the potential to improve the efficiency of such translation. However, it is laborious to develop NLP to structure free-text CPGs using existing formal knowledge representations (KR). In response to this challenge, this vision paper discusses the value and feasibility of supporting symbiosis in text-based knowledge acquisition (KA) and KR. We compare two ontologies: (1) an ontology manually created by domain experts for CPG eligibility criteria and (2) an upper-level ontology derived from a semantic pattern-based approach for automatic KA from CPG eligibility criteria text. Then we discuss the strengths and limitations of interweaving KA and NLP for KR purposes and important considerations for achieving the symbiosis of KR and NLP for structuring CPGs to achieve evidence-based clinical practice.

The Development of English Grammar and Reading Comprehension by Majority and Minority Language Children in a Bilingual Primary School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steinlen, Anja K.

2017-01-01

Both for the first language (L1) and for all additional languages (L2 or L3), grammatical knowledge plays a vital role in understanding texts (e.g., Grabe, 2005). However, little is known about the development and interaction of grammar and reading comprehension in beginning foreign language learning, especially with respect to children with a…

Usability Issues in the Design of Novice Programming Systems,

DTIC Science & Technology

1996-08-01

lists this as a design principle for novice programming environments. In traditional compiled languages, beginners are also confused by the need to...programming task external knowledge that might interfere with correct under- standing of the language. Most beginner programming errors can be...language for text editing, but [Curtis 1988] found that a textual pseudocode and graphical flowcharts were both bet- ter than natural language in program

Incorporating linguistic knowledge for learning distributed word representations.

PubMed

Wang, Yan; Liu, Zhiyuan; Sun, Maosong

2015-01-01

Combined with neural language models, distributed word representations achieve significant advantages in computational linguistics and text mining. Most existing models estimate distributed word vectors from large-scale data in an unsupervised fashion, which, however, do not take rich linguistic knowledge into consideration. Linguistic knowledge can be represented as either link-based knowledge or preference-based knowledge, and we propose knowledge regularized word representation models (KRWR) to incorporate these prior knowledge for learning distributed word representations. Experiment results demonstrate that our estimated word representation achieves better performance in task of semantic relatedness ranking. This indicates that our methods can efficiently encode both prior knowledge from knowledge bases and statistical knowledge from large-scale text corpora into a unified word representation model, which will benefit many tasks in text mining.

Incorporating Linguistic Knowledge for Learning Distributed Word Representations

PubMed Central

Wang, Yan; Liu, Zhiyuan; Sun, Maosong

2015-01-01

Combined with neural language models, distributed word representations achieve significant advantages in computational linguistics and text mining. Most existing models estimate distributed word vectors from large-scale data in an unsupervised fashion, which, however, do not take rich linguistic knowledge into consideration. Linguistic knowledge can be represented as either link-based knowledge or preference-based knowledge, and we propose knowledge regularized word representation models (KRWR) to incorporate these prior knowledge for learning distributed word representations. Experiment results demonstrate that our estimated word representation achieves better performance in task of semantic relatedness ranking. This indicates that our methods can efficiently encode both prior knowledge from knowledge bases and statistical knowledge from large-scale text corpora into a unified word representation model, which will benefit many tasks in text mining. PMID:25874581

Tools for Analyzing Verbal Art in the Field

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Turpin, Myfany; Henderson, Lana

2015-01-01

Song is a universal human phenomenon that can shed much light on the nature of language. Despite this, field linguists are not always equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze song texts and draw out their significances to other areas of language. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a language community to ask linguists working in the…

Investigating the Reading Engagement of English Language Learners: A Case Study of Four Middle School ELLs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Protacio, Maria Selena O.

2013-01-01

This study investigates the reading engagement of four middle school English Language Learners (ELLs) in their English or English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. Engaged readers are those who address the four components of reading engagement--motivation, strategic knowledge, constructing meaning from texts, and social interactions. In this…

SWAN: An expert system with natural language interface for tactical air capability assessment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Simmons, Robert M.

1987-01-01

SWAN is an expert system and natural language interface for assessing the war fighting capability of Air Force units in Europe. The expert system is an object oriented knowledge based simulation with an alternate worlds facility for performing what-if excursions. Responses from the system take the form of generated text, tables, or graphs. The natural language interface is an expert system in its own right, with a knowledge base and rules which understand how to access external databases, models, or expert systems. The distinguishing feature of the Air Force expert system is its use of meta-knowledge to generate explanations in the frame and procedure based environment.

MedSynDiKATe--design considerations for an ontology-based medical text understanding system.

PubMed Central

Hahn, U.; Romacker, M.; Schulz, S.

2000-01-01

MedSynDiKATe is a natural language processor for automatically acquiring knowledge from medical finding reports. The content of these documents is transferred to formal representation structures which constitute a corresponding text knowledge base. The general system architecture we present integrates requirements from the analysis of single sentences, as well as those of referentially linked sentences forming cohesive texts. The strong demands MedSynDiKATe poses to the availability of expressive knowledge sources are accounted for by two alternative approaches to (semi)automatic ontology engineering. PMID:11079899

Harnessing Biomedical Natural Language Processing Tools to Identify Medicinal Plant Knowledge from Historical Texts.

PubMed

Sharma, Vivekanand; Law, Wayne; Balick, Michael J; Sarkar, Indra Neil

2017-01-01

The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.

Harnessing Biomedical Natural Language Processing Tools to Identify Medicinal Plant Knowledge from Historical Texts

PubMed Central

Sharma, Vivekanand; Law, Wayne; Balick, Michael J.; Sarkar, Indra Neil

2017-01-01

The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement. PMID:29854223

Investigating the Effect of Contextual Clues on the Processing of Unfamiliar Words in Second Language Listening Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cai, Wei; Lee, Benny P. H.

2010-01-01

This study examines the effect of contextual clues on the use of strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, world knowledge, and others) for processing unfamiliar words in listening comprehension. Three types of words were investigated: words with local co-text clues, global co-text clues and extra-textual…

A Large-Scale Analysis of Variance in Written Language.

PubMed

Johns, Brendan T; Jamieson, Randall K

2018-01-22

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language (e.g., Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, ; Jones & Mewhort, ; Landauer & Dumais, ; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, ). The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. Copyright © 2018 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

A Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Cooperative versus Textbook-Based Individual Prereading Activities on the Reading Comprehension of Students of Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Osa-Melero, Lucia

2012-01-01

Reading texts with historical and sociopolitical content in a foreign language is often a challenge for second language students. The obstacles encountered by students should be of concern to language instructors. Lack of background knowledge frequently causes the reader to abandon the reading activity with a sense of disappointment and…

Linguistically Motivated Features for CCG Realization Ranking

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rajkumar, Rajakrishnan

2012-01-01

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the process of generating natural language text from an input, which is a communicative goal and a database or knowledge base. Informally, the architecture of a standard NLG system consists of the following modules (Reiter and Dale, 2000): content determination, sentence planning (or microplanning) and surface…

Text Coherence in Translation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zheng, Yanping

2009-01-01

In the thesis a coherent text is defined as a continuity of senses of the outcome of combining concepts and relations into a network composed of knowledge space centered around main topics. And the author maintains that in order to obtain the coherence of a target language text from a source text during the process of translation, a translator can…

The Language Demands of Science Reading in Middle School

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fang, Zhihui

2006-04-01

The language used to construct knowledge, beliefs, and worldviews in school science is distinct from the social language that students use in their everyday ordinary life. This difference is a major source of reading difficulty for many students, especially struggling readers and English-language learners. This article identifies some of the linguistic challenges involved in reading middle-school science texts and suggests several teaching strategies to help students cope with these challenges. It is argued that explicit attention to the unique language of school science should be an integral part of science literacy pedagogy.

iSentenizer-μ: multilingual sentence boundary detection model.

PubMed

Wong, Derek F; Chao, Lidia S; Zeng, Xiaodong

2014-01-01

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) system is normally quite sensitive to genres of data that the system is trained on. The genres of data are often referred to the shifts of text topics and new languages domains. Although new detection models can be retrained for different languages or new text genres, previous model has to be thrown away and the creation process has to be restarted from scratch. In this paper, we present a multilingual sentence boundary detection system (iSentenizer-μ) for Danish, German, English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, and Swedish languages. The proposed system is able to detect the sentence boundaries of a mixture of different text genres and languages with high accuracy. We employ i (+)Learning algorithm, an incremental tree learning architecture, for constructing the system. iSentenizer-μ, under the incremental learning framework, is adaptable to text of different topics and Roman-alphabet languages, by merging new data into existing model to learn the new knowledge incrementally by revision instead of retraining. The system has been extensively evaluated on different languages and text genres and has been compared against two state-of-the-art SBD systems, Punkt and MaxEnt. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms the other systems on all datasets.

Hypertext Annotation: Effects of Presentation Formats and Learner Proficiency on Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Learning in Foreign Languages

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, I-Jung; Yen, Jung-Chuan

2013-01-01

This study extends current knowledge by exploring the effect of different annotation formats, namely in-text annotation, glossary annotation, and pop-up annotation, on hypertext reading comprehension in a foreign language and vocabulary acquisition across student proficiencies. User attitudes toward the annotation presentation were also…

Medical Language Processing for Knowledge Representation and Retrievals

PubMed Central

Lyman, Margaret; Sager, Naomi; Chi, Emile C.; Tick, Leo J.; Nhan, Ngo Thanh; Su, Yun; Borst, Francois; Scherrer, Jean-Raoul

1989-01-01

The Linguistic String Project-Medical Language Processor, a system for computer analysis of narrative patient documents in English, is being adapted for French Lettres de Sortie. The system converts the free-text input to a semantic representation which is then mapped into a relational database. Retrievals of clinical data from the database are described.

Variables Predicting Foreign Language Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Acquisition in a Linear Hypermedia Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akbulut, Yavuz

2007-01-01

Factors predicting vocabulary learning and reading comprehension of advanced language learners of English in a linear multimedia text were investigated in the current study. Predictor variables of interest were multimedia type, reading proficiency, learning styles, topic interest and background knowledge about the topic. The outcome variables of…

Language Learner Strategy by Chinese-Speaking EFL Readers When Comprehending Familiar and Unfamiliar Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jia-Ying

2015-01-01

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinese-speaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary…

The comprehension skills of children learning English as an additional language.

PubMed

Burgoyne, K; Kelly, J M; Whiteley, H E; Spooner, A

2009-12-01

Data from national test results suggests that children who are learning English as an additional language (EAL) experience relatively lower levels of educational attainment in comparison to their monolingual, English-speaking peers. The relative underachievement of children who are learning EAL demands that the literacy needs of this group are identified. To this end, this study aimed to explore the reading- and comprehension-related skills of a group of EAL learners. Data are reported from 92 Year 3 pupils, of whom 46 children are learning EAL. Children completed standardized measures of reading accuracy and comprehension, listening comprehension, and receptive and expressive vocabulary. Results indicate that many EAL learners experience difficulties in understanding written and spoken text. These comprehension difficulties are not related to decoding problems but are related to significantly lower levels of vocabulary knowledge experienced by this group. Many EAL learners experience significantly lower levels of English vocabulary knowledge which has a significant impact on their ability to understand written and spoken text. Greater emphasis on language development is therefore needed in the school curriculum to attempt to address the limited language skills of children learning EAL.

Generation of Natural-Language Textual Summaries from Longitudinal Clinical Records.

PubMed

Goldstein, Ayelet; Shahar, Yuval

2015-01-01

Physicians are required to interpret, abstract and present in free-text large amounts of clinical data in their daily tasks. This is especially true for chronic-disease domains, but holds also in other clinical domains. We have recently developed a prototype system, CliniText, which, given a time-oriented clinical database, and appropriate formal abstraction and summarization knowledge, combines the computational mechanisms of knowledge-based temporal data abstraction, textual summarization, abduction, and natural-language generation techniques, to generate an intelligent textual summary of longitudinal clinical data. We demonstrate our methodology, and the feasibility of providing a free-text summary of longitudinal electronic patient records, by generating summaries in two very different domains - Diabetes Management and Cardiothoracic surgery. In particular, we explain the process of generating a discharge summary of a patient who had undergone a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft operation, and a brief summary of the treatment of a diabetes patient for five years.

The integration of lexical, syntactic, and discourse features in bilingual adolescents' writing: an exploratory approach.

PubMed

Danzak, Robin L

2011-10-01

The purpose of this study was to assess the bilingual writing of adolescent English language learners (ELLs) using quantitative tools. Linguistic measures were applied to the participants' writing at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels, with the goal of comparing outcomes at each of these levels across languages (Spanish/English) and genres (expository/narrative). Twenty Spanish-speaking ELLs, ages 11-14 years, each produced 8 expository and narrative autobiographical texts. Texts were coded and scored for lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and overall text quality. Scores were analyzed using Friedman's 2-way analysis of variance by ranks (Siegel & Castellan, 1988); resulting ranks were compared across languages and genre topics. The text topic impacted rank differences at all levels. Performance at the three levels was similar across languages, indicating that participants were emerging writers in both Spanish and English. The impact of genre was generally inconsequential at all levels. Similar results across languages implied the potential transfer of writing skills. Overall, students appeared to apply a knowledge-telling strategy to writing rather than strategically planning, composing, and revising their writing. Finally, outcomes highlighted the synergistic relationships among linguistic levels in text composition, indicating a need to address the interaction of vocabulary, morphosyntax, and text-level structures in the instruction and assessment of ELL writing.

The everyday meets the academic: How bilingual Latino/a third graders use sociocultural resources to learn in science and social studies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McIntosh Ciechanowski, Kathryn E.

Driven by questions surrounding the documented "fourth-grade slump" in student test scores and about the content learning of English language learners, this dissertation examines the science and social studies literacy practices of third grade bilingual Latino/as in an urban school. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I examined three questions: (a) What content area demands are evident in instruction and in the assigned texts that children read? (b) What sociocultural knowledge do students draw on in the reading and writing of content area texts? How does it shape their reading and writing? and (c) What linguistic knowledge do students draw on in the reading and writing of content area texts? How does it shape their reading and writing? These questions are premised on three key tenets from the extant research literature. First, research has documented that middle grade students struggle to make sense of content texts, which could be caused by not only a scarcity of expository texts in early grades but also by discipline-specific demands in the content texts. Second, although all students may struggle to read specialized texts, students from non-mainstream backgrounds may struggle more because they do not possess the social and linguistic capital valued in mainstream schools. Third, sociocultural research has documented the importance of social and cultural funds of knowledge in classroom learning and knowledge construction. Guided by these tenets, I observed for six months in 2 classes and recorded field notes, interviewed participants, collected artifacts, and conducted pre- and post-unit assessments. Analytic methods included quantitative evaluation of assessments and constant comparative and discourse analyses. Findings indicate that the textbooks posed linguistic and conceptual demands and represented multiple discourses including the discourses of the natural and social sciences. To make sense of texts, students drew from various sociocultural resources such as popular culture, family, and children's literature. The teacher was more likely to take up these resources (although briefly) when they tightly aligned with instructional goals. Bilingual students faced great complexity as they drew upon linguistic resources to learn technical language and content in two languages and within multiple academic and everyday discourses.

Intelligent Text Retrieval and Knowledge Acquisition from Texts for NASA Applications: Preprocessing Issues

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2001-01-01

In this contract, which is a component of a larger contract that we plan to submit in the coming months, we plan to study the preprocessing issues which arise in applying natural language processing techniques to NASA-KSC problem reports. The goals of this work will be to deal with the issues of: a) automatically obtaining the problem reports from NASA-KSC data bases, b) the format of these reports and c) the conversion of these reports to a format that will be adequate for our natural language software. At the end of this contract, we expect that these problems will be solved and that we will be ready to apply our natural language software to a text database of over 1000 KSC problem reports.

Using Read-Alouds to Help Struggling Readers Access and Comprehend Complex, Informational Text

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Santoro, Lana Edwards; Baker, Scott K.; Fien, Hank; Smith, Jean Louise M.; Chard, David J.

2016-01-01

The use of informational texts in the elementary grades provides a context for helping students develop content understanding and domain knowledge across a wide range of subject matter. Reading informational text also provides students with the language of thought, foundational vocabulary that can be connected to other words, and technical content…

Knowledge Discovery from Posts in Online Health Communities Using Unified Medical Language System.

PubMed

Chen, Donghua; Zhang, Runtong; Liu, Kecheng; Hou, Lei

2018-06-19

Patient-reported posts in Online Health Communities (OHCs) contain various valuable information that can help establish knowledge-based online support for online patients. However, utilizing these reports to improve online patient services in the absence of appropriate medical and healthcare expert knowledge is difficult. Thus, we propose a comprehensive knowledge discovery method that is based on the Unified Medical Language System for the analysis of narrative posts in OHCs. First, we propose a domain-knowledge support framework for OHCs to provide a basis for post analysis. Second, we develop a Knowledge-Involved Topic Modeling (KI-TM) method to extract and expand explicit knowledge within the text. We propose four metrics, namely, explicit knowledge rate, latent knowledge rate, knowledge correlation rate, and perplexity, for the evaluation of the KI-TM method. Our experimental results indicate that our proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of providing knowledge support. Our method enhances knowledge support for online patients and can help develop intelligent OHCs in the future.

Towards iconic language for patient records, drug monographs, guidelines and medical search engines.

PubMed

Lamy, Jean-Baptiste; Duclos, Catherine; Hamek, Saliha; Beuscart-Zéphir, Marie-Catherine; Kerdelhué, Gaetan; Darmoni, Stefan; Favre, Madeleine; Falcoff, Hector; Simon, Christian; Pereira, Suzanne; Serrot, Elisabeth; Mitouard, Thierry; Hardouin, Etienne; Kergosien, Yannick; Venot, Alain

2010-01-01

Practicing physicians have limited time for consulting medical knowledge and records. We have previously shown that using icons instead of text to present drug monographs may allow contraindications and adverse effects to be identified more rapidly and more accurately. These findings were based on the use of an iconic language designed for drug knowledge, providing icons for many medical concepts, including diseases, antecedents, drug classes and tests. In this paper, we describe a new project aimed at extending this iconic language, and exploring the possible applications of these icons in medicine. Based on evaluators' comments, focus groups of physicians and opinions of academic, industrial and associative partners, we propose iconic applications related to patient records, for example summarizing patient conditions, searching for specific clinical documents and helping to code structured data. Other applications involve the presentation of clinical practice guidelines and improving the interface of medical search engines. These new applications could use the same iconic language that was designed for drug knowledge, with a few additional items that respect the logic of the language.

[Application of text mining approach to pre-education prior to clinical practice].

PubMed

Koinuma, Masayoshi; Koike, Katsuya; Nakamura, Hitoshi

2008-06-01

We developed a new survey analysis technique to understand students' actual aims for effective pretraining prior to clinical practice. We asked third-year undergraduate students to write fixed-style complete and free sentences on "preparation of drug dispensing." Then, we converted their sentence data in to text style and performed Japanese-language morphologic analysis on the data using language analysis software. We classified key words, which were created on the basis of the word class information of the Japanese language morphologic analysis, into categories based on causes and characteristics. In addition to this, we classified the characteristics into six categories consisting of those concepts including "knowledge," "skill and attitude," "image," etc. with the KJ method technique. The results showed that the awareness of students of "preparation of drug dispensing" tended to be approximately three-fold more frequent in "skill and attitude," "risk," etc. than in "knowledge." Regarding the characteristics in the category of the "image," words like "hard," "challenging," "responsibility," "life," etc. frequently occurred. The results of corresponding analysis showed that the characteristics of the words "knowledge" and "skills and attitude" were independent. As the result of developing a cause-and-effect diagram, it was demonstrated that the phase "hanging tough" described most of the various factors. We thus could understand students' actual feelings by applying text-mining as a new survey analysis technique.

The Relationship between Text Comprehension and Second Language Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition: A Matter of Topic Familiarity?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pulido, Diana

2007-01-01

The study reported in this article describes second language (L2) vocabulary learning outcomes associated with adult L2 reading comprehension processes, thus connecting L2 learning with the complex cognitive and linguistic processing involved in reading. The study aimed to determine whether background knowledge moderated the relationship between…

Drawing Dynamic Geometry Figures Online with Natural Language for Junior High School Geometry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wong, Wing-Kwong; Yin, Sheng-Kai; Yang, Chang-Zhe

2012-01-01

This paper presents a tool for drawing dynamic geometric figures by understanding the texts of geometry problems. With the tool, teachers and students can construct dynamic geometric figures on a web page by inputting a geometry problem in natural language. First we need to build the knowledge base for understanding geometry problems. With the…

Language and Cognitive Predictors of Text Comprehension: Evidence from Multivariate Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Young-Suk

2015-01-01

Using data from children in South Korea (N = 145, M[subscript age] = 6.08), it was determined how low-level language and cognitive skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and working memory) and high-level cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and theory of mind [ToM]) are related to listening comprehension and whether listening…

Nontraditional Texts and the Struggling/Reluctant Reader

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fingon, Joan C.

2012-01-01

This article highlights the Wimpy Kid diary book series by Jeff Kenney and discusses how educators can increase their knowledge base and take advantage of integrating such highly visual and nontraditional texts within the reading and language arts curriculum to enhance students' vocabulary development and reading comprehension. The article…

Embedding Open-domain Common-sense Knowledge from Text

PubMed Central

Goodwin, Travis; Harabagiu, Sanda

2017-01-01

Our ability to understand language often relies on common-sense knowledge – background information the speaker can assume is known by the reader. Similarly, our comprehension of the language used in complex domains relies on access to domain-specific knowledge. Capturing common-sense and domain-specific knowledge can be achieved by taking advantage of recent advances in open information extraction (IE) techniques and, more importantly, of knowledge embeddings, which are multi-dimensional representations of concepts and relations. Building a knowledge graph for representing common-sense knowledge in which concepts discerned from noun phrases are cast as vertices and lexicalized relations are cast as edges leads to learning the embeddings of common-sense knowledge accounting for semantic compositionality as well as implied knowledge. Common-sense knowledge is acquired from a vast collection of blogs and books as well as from WordNet. Similarly, medical knowledge is learned from two large sets of electronic health records. The evaluation results of these two forms of knowledge are promising: the same knowledge acquisition methodology based on learning knowledge embeddings works well both for common-sense knowledge and for medical knowledge Interestingly, the common-sense knowledge that we have acquired was evaluated as being less neutral than than the medical knowledge, as it often reflected the opinion of the knowledge utterer. In addition, the acquired medical knowledge was evaluated as more plausible than the common-sense knowledge, reflecting the complexity of acquiring common-sense knowledge due to the pragmatics and economicity of language. PMID:28649676

Sexual Self-Schemas in the Real World: Investigating the Ecological Validity of Language-Based Markers of Childhood Sexual Abuse

PubMed Central

Stanton, Amelia M.; Meston, Cindy M.

2017-01-01

Abstract This is the first study to examine language use and sexual self-schemas in natural language data extracted from posts to a large online forum. Recently, two studies applied advanced text analysis techniques to examine differences in language use and sexual self-schemas between women with and without a history of childhood sexual abuse. The aim of the current study was to test the ecological validity of the differences in language use and sexual self-schema themes that emerged between these two groups of women in the laboratory. Archival natural language data were extracted from a social media website and analyzed using LIWC2015, a computerized text analysis program, and other word counting approaches. The differences in both language use and sexual self-schema themes that manifested in recent laboratory research were replicated and validated in the large online sample. To our knowledge, these results provide the first empirical examination of sexual cognitions as they occur in the real world. These results also suggest that natural language analysis of text extracted from social media sites may be a potentially viable precursor or alternative to laboratory measurement of sexual trauma phenomena, as well as clinical phenomena, more generally. PMID:28570129

Language and cognitive predictors of text comprehension: evidence from multivariate analysis.

PubMed

Kim, Young-Suk

2015-01-01

Using data from children in South Korea (N = 145, Mage = 6.08), it was determined how low-level language and cognitive skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and working memory) and high-level cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and theory of mind [ToM]) are related to listening comprehension and whether listening comprehension and word reading mediate the relations of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension. Low-level skills predicted comprehension monitoring and ToM, which in turn predicted listening comprehension. Vocabulary and syntactic knowledge were also directly related to listening comprehension, whereas working memory was indirectly related via comprehension monitoring and ToM. Listening comprehension and word reading completely mediated the relations of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension. © 2014 The Author. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Semantically-based priors and nuanced knowledge core for Big Data, Social AI, and language understanding.

PubMed

Olsher, Daniel

2014-10-01

Noise-resistant and nuanced, COGBASE makes 10 million pieces of commonsense data and a host of novel reasoning algorithms available via a family of semantically-driven prior probability distributions. Machine learning, Big Data, natural language understanding/processing, and social AI can draw on COGBASE to determine lexical semantics, infer goals and interests, simulate emotion and affect, calculate document gists and topic models, and link commonsense knowledge to domain models and social, spatial, cultural, and psychological data. COGBASE is especially ideal for social Big Data, which tends to involve highly implicit contexts, cognitive artifacts, difficult-to-parse texts, and deep domain knowledge dependencies. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Comparison of Taiwanese and Canadian Students' Metacognitive Awareness of Science Reading, Text, and Strategies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Jing-Ru; Chen, Shin-Feng; Fang, I.; Chou, Ching-Ting

2014-01-01

This study used a Chinese-language version of the Index of Science Reading Awareness to explore the science reading metacognition and comprehension of Taiwanese students. Structural equation modelling results confirmed the underlying model comprised three clusters of metacognitive knowledge: beliefs and confidence in science reading, knowledge of…

Task Types and Discursive Features: Mediating Role of Meta-Talk in Focus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mohamadi, Zohre; Rahimpour, Massoud

2018-01-01

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

Le montage d'une grammaire seconde (The Construction of a Second Grammar)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adamczewski, Henri

1975-01-01

Discusses the influence of modern linguistic research on foreign language instruction. Shows the role of grammar 1 in the acquisition of grammar 2, and specifically when French is 1 and English is 2. Considers that conscious, systematic knowledge of L2, learned through L1, is positive for second language acquisition. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Back Translating: An Integrated Approach to Focus Learners' Attention on Their L2 Knowledge Gaps

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Yun; Gao, Cun

2014-01-01

Integration of the four language skills can be enhanced by focusing on back translating--translating an English text into the students' first language and then back into English. This article describes a three-step process for using back translation in reading classes as a way to help students identify gaps in their English competence.

Hypertext comprehension of deaf and hard-of-hearing students and students with specific language impairment.

PubMed

Blom, Helen; Segers, Eliane; Hermans, Daan; Knoors, Harry; Verhoeven, Ludo

2017-02-01

This paper provides insight into the reading comprehension of hierarchically structured hypertexts within D/HH students and students with SLI. To our knowledge, it is the first study on hypertext comprehension in D/HH students and students with SLI, and it also considers the role of working memory. We compared hypertext versus linear text comprehension in D/HH students and students with SLI versus younger students without language problems who had a similar level of decoding and vocabulary. The results demonstrated no difference in text comprehension between the hierarchically structured hypertext and the linear text. Text comprehension of D/HH students and students with SLI was comparable to that of the students without language problems. In addition, there was a similar positive predictive value of visuospatial and not verbal working memory on hypertext comprehension for all three groups. The findings implicate that educational settings can make use of hierarchically structured hypertexts as well as linear texts and that children can navigate in the digital world from young age on, even if language or working memory problems are present. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Of Texts AND Translations And Rhizomes: Postcolonial Anxieties and Deracinations and Knowledge Constructions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ramanathan, Vaidehi

2006-01-01

This article uncovers some problems involved in culling and translating non-western texts--written in other languages, at particular times, for specific audiences, and rooted in particular local milieus--before assembling them into academic arguments in English in the west. Based on my longterm, evolving endeavour regarding English- and…

Building and Sharing Knowledge Key Practice: What Do You Know, What Don't You Know, What Did You Learn? Research Report. ETS RR-15-24

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Reilly, Tenaha; Deane, Paul; Sabatini, John

2015-01-01

In this paper we provide the rationale and foundation for the building and sharing knowledge key practice for the "CBAL"™ English language arts competency model. Building and sharing knowledge is a foundational literacy activity that enables students to learn and communicate what they read in texts. It is a strategic process that…

Text Mining in Biomedical Domain with Emphasis on Document Clustering.

PubMed

Renganathan, Vinaitheerthan

2017-07-01

With the exponential increase in the number of articles published every year in the biomedical domain, there is a need to build automated systems to extract unknown information from the articles published. Text mining techniques enable the extraction of unknown knowledge from unstructured documents. This paper reviews text mining processes in detail and the software tools available to carry out text mining. It also reviews the roles and applications of text mining in the biomedical domain. Text mining processes, such as search and retrieval of documents, pre-processing of documents, natural language processing, methods for text clustering, and methods for text classification are described in detail. Text mining techniques can facilitate the mining of vast amounts of knowledge on a given topic from published biomedical research articles and draw meaningful conclusions that are not possible otherwise.

Integrating natural language processing and web GIS for interactive knowledge domain visualization

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Du, Fangming

Recent years have seen a powerful shift towards data-rich environments throughout society. This has extended to a change in how the artifacts and products of scientific knowledge production can be analyzed and understood. Bottom-up approaches are on the rise that combine access to huge amounts of academic publications with advanced computer graphics and data processing tools, including natural language processing. Knowledge domain visualization is one of those multi-technology approaches, with its aim of turning domain-specific human knowledge into highly visual representations in order to better understand the structure and evolution of domain knowledge. For example, network visualizations built from co-author relations contained in academic publications can provide insight on how scholars collaborate with each other in one or multiple domains, and visualizations built from the text content of articles can help us understand the topical structure of knowledge domains. These knowledge domain visualizations need to support interactive viewing and exploration by users. Such spatialization efforts are increasingly looking to geography and GIS as a source of metaphors and practical technology solutions, even when non-georeferenced information is managed, analyzed, and visualized. When it comes to deploying spatialized representations online, web mapping and web GIS can provide practical technology solutions for interactive viewing of knowledge domain visualizations, from panning and zooming to the overlay of additional information. This thesis presents a novel combination of advanced natural language processing - in the form of topic modeling - with dimensionality reduction through self-organizing maps and the deployment of web mapping/GIS technology towards intuitive, GIS-like, exploration of a knowledge domain visualization. A complete workflow is proposed and implemented that processes any corpus of input text documents into a map form and leverages a web application framework to let users explore knowledge domain maps interactively. This workflow is implemented and demonstrated for a data set of more than 66,000 conference abstracts.

Content Familiarity and Gender-Neutral Texts in Foreign Language Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jalilehvand, Maryam; Samuel, Moses

2014-01-01

Based on the schema theory, it has been found that the background knowledge of males and females differs. This difference in background knowledge can affect the students' reading comprehension. In Iran, although boys and girls study in different schools, they follow the same curricula and syllabuses in all the schools. The present article reports…

Assessing Lexical Proficiency Using Analytic Ratings: A Case for Collocation Accuracy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crossley, Scott A.; Salsbury, Tom; Mcnamara, Danielle S.

2015-01-01

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of…

An information extraction framework for cohort identification using electronic health records.

PubMed

Liu, Hongfang; Bielinski, Suzette J; Sohn, Sunghwan; Murphy, Sean; Wagholikar, Kavishwar B; Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha R; Ravikumar, K E; Wu, Stephen T; Kullo, Iftikhar J; Chute, Christopher G

2013-01-01

Information extraction (IE), a natural language processing (NLP) task that automatically extracts structured or semi-structured information from free text, has become popular in the clinical domain for supporting automated systems at point-of-care and enabling secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs) for clinical and translational research. However, a high performance IE system can be very challenging to construct due to the complexity and dynamic nature of human language. In this paper, we report an IE framework for cohort identification using EHRs that is a knowledge-driven framework developed under the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). A system to extract specific information can be developed by subject matter experts through expert knowledge engineering of the externalized knowledge resources used in the framework.

The Influence of Linguistic Proficiency on Masked Text Recognition Performance in Adults With and Without Congenital Hearing Impairment.

PubMed

Huysmans, Elke; Bolk, Elske; Zekveld, Adriana A; Festen, Joost M; de Groot, Annette M B; Goverts, S Theo

2016-01-01

The authors first examined the influence of moderate to severe congenital hearing impairment (CHI) on the correctness of samples of elicited spoken language. Then, the authors used this measure as an indicator of linguistic proficiency and examined its effect on performance in language reception, independent of bottom-up auditory processing. In groups of adults with normal hearing (NH, n = 22), acquired hearing impairment (AHI, n = 22), and moderate to severe CHI (n = 21), the authors assessed linguistic proficiency by analyzing the morphosyntactic correctness of their spoken language production. Language reception skills were examined with a task for masked sentence recognition in the visual domain (text), at a readability level of 50%, using grammatically correct sentences and sentences with distorted morphosyntactic cues. The actual performance on the tasks was compared between groups. Adults with CHI made more morphosyntactic errors in spoken language production than adults with NH, while no differences were observed between the AHI and NH group. This outcome pattern sustained when comparisons were restricted to subgroups of AHI and CHI adults, matched for current auditory speech reception abilities. The data yielded no differences between groups in performance in masked text recognition of grammatically correct sentences in a test condition in which subjects could fully take advantage of their linguistic knowledge. Also, no difference between groups was found in the sensitivity to morphosyntactic distortions when processing short masked sentences, presented visually. These data showed that problems with the correct use of specific morphosyntactic knowledge in spoken language production are a long-term effect of moderate to severe CHI, independent of current auditory processing abilities. However, moderate to severe CHI generally does not impede performance in masked language reception in the visual modality, as measured in this study with short, degraded sentences. Aspects of linguistic proficiency that are affected by CHI thus do not seem to play a role in masked sentence recognition in the visual modality.

A Cognitive Neural Architecture Able to Learn and Communicate through Natural Language.

PubMed

Golosio, Bruno; Cangelosi, Angelo; Gamotina, Olesya; Masala, Giovanni Luca

2015-01-01

Communicative interactions involve a kind of procedural knowledge that is used by the human brain for processing verbal and nonverbal inputs and for language production. Although considerable work has been done on modeling human language abilities, it has been difficult to bring them together to a comprehensive tabula rasa system compatible with current knowledge of how verbal information is processed in the brain. This work presents a cognitive system, entirely based on a large-scale neural architecture, which was developed to shed light on the procedural knowledge involved in language elaboration. The main component of this system is the central executive, which is a supervising system that coordinates the other components of the working memory. In our model, the central executive is a neural network that takes as input the neural activation states of the short-term memory and yields as output mental actions, which control the flow of information among the working memory components through neural gating mechanisms. The proposed system is capable of learning to communicate through natural language starting from tabula rasa, without any a priori knowledge of the structure of phrases, meaning of words, role of the different classes of words, only by interacting with a human through a text-based interface, using an open-ended incremental learning process. It is able to learn nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns and other word classes, and to use them in expressive language. The model was validated on a corpus of 1587 input sentences, based on literature on early language assessment, at the level of about 4-years old child, and produced 521 output sentences, expressing a broad range of language processing functionalities.

Providing Controlled Exposure To Target Vocabulary through the Screening and Arranging of Texts.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghadirian, Sina

2002-01-01

Considers how to bring foreign language students with limited vocabulary knowledge, consisting mainly of high-frequency words, to where they can comprehend authentic texts in a target domain. Proposes bridging the vocabulary gap by determining which word families account for 95% of the target domain's running words, and having students learn these…

On Attitude and Language in Students' Talk and Their Impact on Students' Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lindahl, Mats Gunnar; Folkesson, Anne-Mari

2016-01-01

Students' learning is assumed to be promoted through peer-group discussion. Most studies show the presence of qualitative improvements in either oral or written reasoning as a result of such interactions. However, knowledge on the relationship between talk qualities and text qualities is scarce. We adopt an explorative design using statistical…

Growth of Text-Embedded Lexicon in Catalan: From Childhood to Adolescence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Llauradó, Anna; Tolchinsky, Liliana

2013-01-01

Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants (N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years…

Studies of Human Memory and Language Processing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collins, Allan M.

The purposes of this study were to determine the nature of human semantic memory and to obtain knowledge usable in the future development of computer systems that can converse with people. The work was based on a computer model which is designed to comprehend English text, relating the text to information stored in a semantic data base that is…

Bilingual approach to online cancer genetics education for deaf American Sign Language users produces greater knowledge and confidence than English text only: A randomized study

PubMed Central

Palmer, Christina G.S.; Boudreault, Patrick; Berman, Barbara A.; Wolfson, Alicia; Duarte, Lionel; Venne, Vickie L.; Sinsheimer, Janet S.

2016-01-01

Introduction Deaf American Sign Language-users (ASL) have limited access to cancer genetics information they can readily understand, increasing risk for health disparities. We compared effectiveness of online cancer genetics information presented using a bilingual approach (ASL with English closed captioning) and a monolingual approach (English text). Hypothesis Bilingual modality would increase cancer genetics knowledge and confidence to create a family tree; education would interact with modality. Methods We used a block 2:1 randomized pre-post study design stratified on education. 150 Deaf ASL-users ≥18 years old with computer and internet access participated online; 100 (70 high, 30 low education) and 50 (35 high, 15 low education) were randomized to the bilingual and monolingual modalities. Modalities provide virtually identical content on creating a family tree, using the family tree to identify inherited cancer risk factors, understanding how cancer predisposition can be inherited, and the role of genetic counseling and testing for prevention or treatment. 25 True/False items assessed knowledge; a Likert scale item assessed confidence. Data were collected within 2 weeks before and after viewing the information. Results Significant interaction of language modality, education, and change in knowledge scores was observed (p=.01). High education group increased knowledge regardless of modality (Bilingual: p<.001; d=.56; Monolingual: p<.001; d=1.08). Low education group increased knowledge with bilingual (p<.001; d=.85), but not monolingual (p=.79; d=.08) modality. Bilingual modality yielded greater confidence creating a family tree (p=.03). Conclusions Bilingual approach provides a better opportunity for lower educated Deaf ASL-users to access cancer genetics information than a monolingual approach. PMID:27594054

The psycholinguistics of developing text construction.

PubMed

Berman, Ruth A

2008-11-01

This paper outlines functionally motivated quantifiable criteria for characterizing different facets of discourse--global-level principles, categories of referential content, clause-linking complex syntax, local linguistic expression and overall discourse stance--in relation to the variables of development, genre and modality. Concern is with later, school-age language development, in the conviction that the long developmental route of language acquisition can profitably be examined in the context of extended discourse. Findings are reviewed from a cross-linguistic project that elicited narrative and expository texts in both speech and writing at four age groups: (9-10 years, 12-13, 16-17 and adults). Clear developmental patterns emerge from middle childhood to adulthood, with significant shifts in adolescence; global-level text organization is mastered earlier in narratives than in expository essays, but the latter promote more advanced use of local-level lexicon and syntax; and spoken texts are more spread out than their denser written counterparts in clause-linkage, referential content and lexical usage. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the growth and reorganization of knowledge about types of discourse and text-embedded language use.

The Extended Language Network: A Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies on Text Comprehension

PubMed Central

Ferstl, Evelyn C.; Neumann, Jane; Bogler, Carsten; von Cramon, D. Yves

2010-01-01

Language processing in context requires more than merely comprehending words and sentences. Important subprocesses are inferences for bridging successive utterances, the use of background knowledge and discourse context, and pragmatic interpretations. The functional neuroanatomy of these text comprehension processes has only recently been investigated. Although there is evidence for right-hemisphere contributions, reviews have implicated the left lateral prefrontal cortex, left temporal regions beyond Wernicke’s area, and the left dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) for text comprehension. To objectively confirm this extended language network and to evaluate the respective contribution of right hemisphere regions, meta-analyses of 23 neuroimaging studies are reported here. The analyses used replicator dynamics based on activation likelihood estimates. Independent of the baseline, the anterior temporal lobes (aTL) were active bilaterally. In addition, processing of coherent compared with incoherent text engaged the dmPFC and the posterior cingulate cortex. Right hemisphere activations were seen most notably in the analysis of contrasts testing specific subprocesses, such as metaphor comprehension. These results suggest task dependent contributions for the lateral PFC and the right hemisphere. Most importantly, they confirm the role of the aTL and the fronto-medial cortex for language processing in context. PMID:17557297

Never-Ending Learning for Deep Understanding of Natural Language

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-10-01

CA policy clarification memorandum dated 16 Jan 09. 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT This research has explored the thesis that very... thesis we have built on our earlier research on the Never Ending Language Learning (NELL) computer system, which has been running non- stop since... thesis that very significant amounts of background knowledge can lead to very substantial improvements in the accuracy of deep text analysis and

Text Mining in Biomedical Domain with Emphasis on Document Clustering

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Objectives With the exponential increase in the number of articles published every year in the biomedical domain, there is a need to build automated systems to extract unknown information from the articles published. Text mining techniques enable the extraction of unknown knowledge from unstructured documents. Methods This paper reviews text mining processes in detail and the software tools available to carry out text mining. It also reviews the roles and applications of text mining in the biomedical domain. Results Text mining processes, such as search and retrieval of documents, pre-processing of documents, natural language processing, methods for text clustering, and methods for text classification are described in detail. Conclusions Text mining techniques can facilitate the mining of vast amounts of knowledge on a given topic from published biomedical research articles and draw meaningful conclusions that are not possible otherwise. PMID:28875048

Meaning Negotiated Through Independently-Written Summaries and Oral Academic Conversations: Enhancing Comprehension of Science Text by Ninth-Grade, English Learners

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Burke, Edward Charles

English Learners experience challenges related to comprehension of science text particularly at the high school level. The language of science differs significantly from that of conversation and expository text. Students benefit from collaborative interpretation of readings. Additionally, there appears to be a need to train adolescents in the oral language skills requisite for academic discourse. This study employed a sample of high school physical science students (N = 75) whose first language was Spanish and who were currently developing English language proficiency. It used quasi-experimental methodology with treatment and comparison groups, during the normal operations of the public school classroom. It tested the effect of training with a textbook summarization method and with an academic conversation strategy on the comprehension of state-adopted science textbook readings. Posttest scores of both groups were analyzed using an ANOVA. Posttest scores of treatment group members were analyzed in relation to prior science knowledge, reading level, gender, and level of English proficiency using a factorial ANOVA. Findings suggest that the treatment had a positive impact on the achievement of students who had a low level of English language proficiency. In light of the at-risk nature of this population, given low socioeconomic status and that a high percentage of families are migrant workers, this in encouraging. The basic premise of the treatment appears promising. Evidence collected pertaining to its effect relative to students' general ESOL level, science background knowledge, literacy skills, and gender neither confirmed nor denied the viability of the strategy. The further significance of this study is that it adds to the body of research on strategies to support English Learners.

Fourth and fifth grade Latino(a) students making meaning of scientific informational texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Croce, Keri-Anne

Using a socio-psycholinguistic perspective of literacy and a social-semiotic analysis of texts, this study investigates how six students made meaning of informational texts. The students came to school from a variety of English and Spanish language backgrounds. The research question being asked was 'How do Latino(a) fourth and fifth grade students make meaning of English informational texts?' Miscue analysis was used as a tool to investigate how students who have been labeled non-struggling readers by their classroom teacher and are from various language backgrounds approached five informational texts. In order to investigate students' responses to the nature of informational texts, this dissertation draws on commonly occurring structures within texts. Primary data collected included read alouds and retellings of five texts, retrospective miscue analysis, and interviews with six participant students. Two of these participants are discussed within this dissertation. Secondary data included classroom observations and teacher interviews. This study proposes that non-native speakers may use scientific concept placeholders as they transact with informational texts. The use of scientific concept placeholders by a reader indicates that the reader is engaged in the meaning making process and possesses evolving scientific knowledge about a phenomenon. The findings suggest that Latino(a) students' understandings of English informational texts is influenced not only by a student's language development but also (1) the nature of the text; (2) the reading strategies that a student uses, such as the use of placeholders; (3) the influence of the researcher during the aided retelling. This study contributes methodological tools to assess English language learners' reading. The conclusions presented within this study also support the idea that students from a variety of language backgrounds slightly altered their reliance on certain cuing systems as they encountered various sub-genres within an informational text. I conclude that reading assessment should account for how a student approaches different structural elements of a text.

An Information Extraction Framework for Cohort Identification Using Electronic Health Records

PubMed Central

Liu, Hongfang; Bielinski, Suzette J.; Sohn, Sunghwan; Murphy, Sean; Wagholikar, Kavishwar B.; Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha R.; Ravikumar, K.E.; Wu, Stephen T.; Kullo, Iftikhar J.; Chute, Christopher G

Information extraction (IE), a natural language processing (NLP) task that automatically extracts structured or semi-structured information from free text, has become popular in the clinical domain for supporting automated systems at point-of-care and enabling secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs) for clinical and translational research. However, a high performance IE system can be very challenging to construct due to the complexity and dynamic nature of human language. In this paper, we report an IE framework for cohort identification using EHRs that is a knowledge-driven framework developed under the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). A system to extract specific information can be developed by subject matter experts through expert knowledge engineering of the externalized knowledge resources used in the framework. PMID:24303255

A Multicultural Social Studies Series for C.S.L. Students. Book 1. Europe.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chan, Yiu Man

This text is written primarily for students of Chinese as a second language who are continuing in the ESEA Title VII Chinese Bilingual Pilot Program at the secondary level, and introduces different aspects and general knowledge of Europe. The text is divided into twenty-five lessons, having the following headings: European Countries, Class, On the…

An Approach for Automatic Generation of Adaptive Hypermedia in Education with Multilingual Knowledge Discovery Techniques

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alfonseca, Enrique; Rodriguez, Pilar; Perez, Diana

2007-01-01

This work describes a framework that combines techniques from Adaptive Hypermedia and Natural Language processing in order to create, in a fully automated way, on-line information systems from linear texts in electronic format, such as textbooks. The process is divided into two steps: an "off-line" processing step, which analyses the source text,…

Mayo clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES): architecture, component evaluation and applications

PubMed Central

Masanz, James J; Ogren, Philip V; Zheng, Jiaping; Sohn, Sunghwan; Kipper-Schuler, Karin C; Chute, Christopher G

2010-01-01

We aim to build and evaluate an open-source natural language processing system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. We describe and evaluate our system, the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES), released open-source at http://www.ohnlp.org. The cTAKES builds on existing open-source technologies—the Unstructured Information Management Architecture framework and OpenNLP natural language processing toolkit. Its components, specifically trained for the clinical domain, create rich linguistic and semantic annotations. Performance of individual components: sentence boundary detector accuracy=0.949; tokenizer accuracy=0.949; part-of-speech tagger accuracy=0.936; shallow parser F-score=0.924; named entity recognizer and system-level evaluation F-score=0.715 for exact and 0.824 for overlapping spans, and accuracy for concept mapping, negation, and status attributes for exact and overlapping spans of 0.957, 0.943, 0.859, and 0.580, 0.939, and 0.839, respectively. Overall performance is discussed against five applications. The cTAKES annotations are the foundation for methods and modules for higher-level semantic processing of clinical free-text. PMID:20819853

UMLS content views appropriate for NLP processing of the biomedical literature vs. clinical text.

PubMed

Demner-Fushman, Dina; Mork, James G; Shooshan, Sonya E; Aronson, Alan R

2010-08-01

Identification of medical terms in free text is a first step in such Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks as automatic indexing of biomedical literature and extraction of patients' problem lists from the text of clinical notes. Many tools developed to perform these tasks use biomedical knowledge encoded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. We continue our exploration of automatic approaches to creation of subsets (UMLS content views) which can support NLP processing of either the biomedical literature or clinical text. We found that suppression of highly ambiguous terms in the conservative AutoFilter content view can partially replace manual filtering for literature applications, and suppression of two character mappings in the same content view achieves 89.5% precision at 78.6% recall for clinical applications. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Reliable Predictors of Reduced Redundancy Test Performance: The Interaction between Lexical Bonds and Test Takers' Depth and Breadth of Vocabulary Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Janebi Enayat, Mostafa; Babaii, Esmat

2018-01-01

The present study intended to investigate whether test takers' breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge can contribute to their efficient use of lexical bonds while restoring damaged texts in reduced redundancy tests. Moreover, the moderating role of general language proficiency was investigated in this interaction. In so doing, Vocabulary Levels…

Crossing borders: High school science teachers learning to teach the specialized language of science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Patrick, Jennifer Drake

The highly specialized language of science is both challenging and alienating to adolescent readers. This study investigated how secondary science teachers learn to teach the specialized language of science in their classrooms. Three research questions guided this study: (a) what do science teachers know about teaching reading in science? (b) what understanding about the unique language demands of science reading do they construct through professional development? and (c) how do they integrate what they have learned about these specialized features of science language into their teaching practices? This study investigated the experience of seven secondary science teachers as they participated in a professional development program designed to teach them about the specialized language of science. Data sources included participant interviews, audio-taped professional development sessions, field notes from classroom observations, and a prior knowledge survey. Results from this study suggest that science teachers (a) were excited to learn about disciplinary reading practices, (b) developed an emergent awareness of the specialized features of science language and the various genres of science writing, and (c) recognized that the challenges of science reading goes beyond vocabulary. These teachers' efforts to understand and address the language of science in their teaching practices were undermined by their lack of basic knowledge of grammar, availability of time and resources, their prior knowledge and experiences, existing curriculum, and school structure. This study contributes to our understanding of how secondary science teachers learn about disciplinary literacy and apply that knowledge in their classroom instruction. It has important implications for literacy educators and science educators who are interested in using language and literacy practices in the service of science teaching and learning. (Full text of this dissertation may be available via the University of Florida Libraries web site. Please check http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/etd.html)

Children’s Sensitivity to the Knowledge Expressed in Pedagogical and Non-Pedagogical Contexts

PubMed Central

Gelman, Susan A.; Ware, Elizabeth A.; Manczak, Erika M.; Graham, Susan A.

2013-01-01

The present studies test two hypotheses: (1) that pedagogical contexts especially convey generic information (Csibra & Gergely, 2009), and (2) that young children are sensitive to this aspect of pedagogy. We examined generic language (e.g., “Elephants live in Africa”) in three studies, focusing on: informational versus narrative children’s books (Study 1), the language of 6-year-old children and adults assuming either a pedagogical (teacher) or non-pedagogical (friend) role (Study 2), and the language of 5-year-old children and adults speaking to either an ignorant alien (pedagogical context) or a peer (non-pedagogical context; Study 3). Results suggest that generics are more frequent in informational than narrative texts. Furthermore, both adults and young children provide more generic language in pedagogical contexts and when assuming a pedagogical role. Together, the studies demonstrate that pedagogical contexts are distinctive in conveying generic information, and that children are sensitive to this aspect of the language input. We suggest that generic knowledge is more useful in making predictions about the future, and thus more highly valued during instruction. PMID:22468565

NOUS: A Knowledge Graph Management System

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Knowledge graphs represent information as entities and relationships between them. For tasks such as natural language question answering or automated analysis of text, a knowledge graph provides valuable context to establish the specific type of entities being discussed. It allow us to derive better context about newly arriving information and leads to intelligent reasoning capabilities. We address two primary needs: A) Automated construction of knowledge graphs is a technically challenging, expensive process; and B) The ability to synthesize new information by monitoring newly emerging knowledge is a transformational capability that does not exist in state of the art systems.

The linguistically aware teacher and the teacher-aware linguist.

PubMed

McCartney, Elspeth; Ellis, Sue

2013-07-01

This review evaluates issues of teacher linguistic knowledge relating to their work with children with speech, language and communication difficulties (SLCD). Information is from Ellis and McCartney [(2011a). Applied linguistics and primary school teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], a state-of-the-art text deriving from a British Association of Applied Linguistics/Cambridge University Press expert seminar series that details: linguistic research underpinning primary school curricula and pedagogy; the form of linguistic knowledge useful for teachers supporting children with SLCD in partnership with speech and language therapists; and how and when teachers acquire and learn to apply such knowledge. Critical analysis of the options presented for teacher learning indicate that policy enjoinders now include linguistic application as an expected part of teachers' professional knowledge, for all children including those with SLCD, but there is a large unmet learning need. It is concluded that there is a role for clinical linguists to disseminate useable knowledge to teachers in an accessible format. Ways of achieving this are considered.

Towards a semantic lexicon for biological language processing

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Verspoor, K.

It is well understood that natural language processing (NLP) applications require sophisticated lexical resources to support their processing goals. In the biomedical domain, we are privileged to have access to extensive terminological resources in the form of controlled vocabularies and ontologies, which have been integrated into the framework of the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System's (UMLS) Metathesaurus. However, the existence of such terminological resources does not guarantee their utility for NLP. In particular, we have two core requirements for lexical resources for NLP in addition to the basic enumeration of important domain terms: representation of morphosyntactic informationmore » about those terms, specifically part of speech information and inflectional patterns to support parsing and lemma assignment, and representation of semantic information indicating general categorical information about terms, and significant relations between terms to support text understanding and inference (Hahn et at, 1999). Biomedical vocabularies by and large commonly leave out morphosyntactic information, and where they address semantic considerations, they often do so in an unprincipled manner, for instance by indicating a relation between two concepts without indicating the type of that relation. But all is not lost. The UMLS knowledge sources include two additional resources which are relevant - the SPECIALIST lexicon, a lexicon addressing our morphosyntactic requirements, and the Semantic Network, a representation of core conceptual categories in the biomedical domain. The coverage of these two knowledge sources with respect to the full coverage of the Metathesaurus is, however, not entirely clear. Furthermore, when our goals are specifically to process biological text - and often more specifically, text in the molecular biology domain - it is difficult to say whether the coverage of these resources is meaningful. The utility of the UMLS knowledge sources for medical language processing (MLP) has been explored (Johnson, 1999; Friedman et al 2001); the time has now come to repeat these experiments with respect to biological language processing (BLP). To that end, this paper presents an analysis of ihe UMLS resources, specifically with an eye towards constructing lexical resources suitable for BLP. We follow the paradigm presented in Johnson (1999) for medical language, exploring overlap between the UMLS Metathesaurus and SPECIALIST lexicon to construct a morphosyntactic and semantically-specified lexicon, and then further explore the overlap with a relevant domain corpus for molecular biology.« less

A Knowledge-Based Approach to Language Production

DTIC Science & Technology

1985-08-01

representation -- the internal structures which the system is generating from. and (3) the choice problem -- how the intricate relationship between the...texts from several different internal representations. One example of the output produced by MUMBLE is the following text, produced from a...brackets. This notation is used to illustrate some templates which are encoded in Ace. The internal representation of these templates is achieved using

Knowledge Based Text Generation

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-08-01

Number 4, October-December, 1985, pp. 219-242. de Joia , A. and Stenton, A., Terms in Linguistics: A Guide to Halliday, London: Batsford Academic and...extraction of text schemata and their corresponding rhetorical predicates; design of a system motivated by the desire for domain and language independence...semantics and semantics effects syntax. Functional Linguistic Framework Page 19 The design of GENNY was guided by the functional paradigm. Provided a

The Effect of Text Translation on Perceived Musical Tension in Debussy's "Noel des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hackworth, Rhonda S.; Fredrickson, William E.

2010-01-01

The primary focus of the present study was to investigate the effect participants' (N = 100) knowledge of a text translation may have on their perceived musical tension while listening to a piece of choral music sung in another language. When examining the graphs that show the group mean responses of the participants, control (without text…

Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing (DIEW)

PubMed Central

Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Schatschneider, Christopher

2016-01-01

We investigated direct and indirect effects of component skills on writing (DIEW) using data from 193 children in Grade 1. In this model, working memory was hypothesized to be a foundational cognitive ability for language and cognitive skills as well as transcription skills, which, in turn, contribute to writing. Foundational oral language skills (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) and higher-order cognitive skills (inference and theory of mind) were hypothesized to be component skills of text generation (i.e., discourse-level oral language). Results from structural equation modeling largely supported a complete mediation model among four variations of the DIEW model. Discourse-level oral language, spelling, and handwriting fluency completely mediated the relations of higher-order cognitive skills, foundational oral language, and working memory to writing. Moreover, language and cognitive skills had both direct and indirect relations to discourse-level oral language. Total effects, including direct and indirect effects, were substantial for discourse-level oral language (.46), working memory (.43), and spelling (.37), followed by vocabulary (.19), handwriting (.17), theory of mind (.12), inference (.10), and grammatical knowledge (.10). The model explained approximately 67% of variance in writing quality. These results indicate that multiple language and cognitive skills make direct and indirect contributions, and it is important to consider both direct and indirect pathways of influences when considering skills that are important to writing. PMID:28260812

Understanding natural language for spacecraft sequencing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Katz, Boris; Brooks, Robert N., Jr.

1987-01-01

The paper describes a natural language understanding system, START, that translates English text into a knowledge base. The understanding and the generating modules of START share a Grammar which is built upon reversible transformations. Users can retrieve information by querying the knowledge base in English; the system then produces an English response. START can be easily adapted to many different domains. One such domain is spacecraft sequencing. A high-level overview of sequencing as it is practiced at JPL is presented in the paper, and three areas within this activity are identified for potential application of the START system. Examples are given of an actual dialog with START based on simulated data for the Mars Observer mission.

A Medieval Irish Treatise on Astronomy Recalled, with a Memoir of its Translator and Editor, Maura Power (1887-1916)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bruck, M. T.; Conway-Piskorski, M.

1998-01-01

A 15th century treatise on astronomy in Irish, an adaptation of a Latin translation of an older Arabic text, was transcribed and published together with an English translation and commentaries under the title An Irish Astronomical Tract in 1914. This work is familiar to Celtic language scholars but is little known among astronomers. Here we briefly describe the text, and include a memoir of its editor and translator Maura Power, a young woman who combined a specialist knowledge of the Irish language with an understanding of medieval science. We also recall two other Irish scholars - the geologist Maxwell Close and the astronomer John Ellard Gore - who played their part in recognizing the value of this early Irish scientific text.

Revisiting Fluctuations in L2 Article Choice in L1-Korean L2-English Learners.

PubMed

Sarker, Bijon K; Baek, Seunghyun

2017-04-01

The current study investigated the distinction of L2 (second language) English article choice sensitivity in fifty-three L1-Korean L2-English learners in semantic contexts. In the context of English as a foreign language, the participants were divided into two groups based on grammatical ability as determined by their performance on a cloze test. In addition, a forced-choice elicitation test and a writing production test were administered to assess, respectively, the participants' receptive and productive article choice abilities. Regardless of grammatical ability, the results disclosed the overuse of the indefinite a in the [[Formula: see text]definite, -specific] context and the definite the in the [-definite, [Formula: see text]specific] context on the forced-choice elicitation test. In the [[Formula: see text]definite, [Formula: see text]specific] and [-definite, -specific] contexts, however, the overuse of either the indefinite a or the definite the, respectively, was less likely. Furthermore, it was revealed on the writing test that the participants more accurately used the definite the than the indefinite a, and they were also found to unreasonably omit more articles than to add or substitute articles on the writing production test. The findings across the two tests indicate that L1-Korean L2-English learners are more likely to have intrinsic difficulties transferring their L1 noun phrase (NP) knowledge to L2 NP knowledge owing to structural discrepancies and complex interfaces between L1 NPs and L2 NPs with respect to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic/discourse language subsystems.

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use.

PubMed

Willits, Jon A; Amato, Michael S; MacDonald, Maryellen C

2015-05-01

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience ("language knowledge") and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world ("world knowledge"). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Medical Named Entity Recognition for Indonesian Language Using Word Representations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rahman, Arief

2018-03-01

Nowadays, Named Entity Recognition (NER) system is used in medical texts to obtain important medical information, like diseases, symptoms, and drugs. While most NER systems are applied to formal medical texts, informal ones like those from social media (also called semi-formal texts) are starting to get recognition as a gold mine for medical information. We propose a theoretical Named Entity Recognition (NER) model for semi-formal medical texts in our medical knowledge management system by comparing two kinds of word representations: cluster-based word representation and distributed representation.

Bilingual approach to online cancer genetics education for Deaf American Sign Language users produces greater knowledge and confidence than English text only: A randomized study.

PubMed

Palmer, Christina G S; Boudreault, Patrick; Berman, Barbara A; Wolfson, Alicia; Duarte, Lionel; Venne, Vickie L; Sinsheimer, Janet S

2017-01-01

Deaf American Sign Language-users (ASL) have limited access to cancer genetics information they can readily understand, increasing risk for health disparities. We compared effectiveness of online cancer genetics information presented using a bilingual approach (ASL with English closed captioning) and a monolingual approach (English text). Bilingual modality would increase cancer genetics knowledge and confidence to create a family tree; education would interact with modality. We used a parallel 2:1 randomized pre-post study design stratified on education. 150 Deaf ASL-users ≥18 years old with computer and internet access participated online; 100 (70 high, 30 low education) and 50 (35 high, 15 low education) were randomized to the bilingual and monolingual modalities. Modalities provide virtually identical content on creating a family tree, using the family tree to identify inherited cancer risk factors, understanding how cancer predisposition can be inherited, and the role of genetic counseling and testing for prevention or treatment. 25 true/false items assessed knowledge; a Likert scale item assessed confidence. Data were collected within 2 weeks before and after viewing the information. Significant interaction of language modality, education, and change in knowledge scores was observed (p = .01). High education group increased knowledge regardless of modality (Bilingual: p < .001; d = .56; Monolingual: p < .001; d = 1.08). Low education group increased knowledge with bilingual (p < .001; d = .85), but not monolingual (p = .79; d = .08) modality. Bilingual modality yielded greater confidence creating a family tree (p = .03). Bilingual approach provides a better opportunity for lower educated Deaf ASL-users to access cancer genetics information than a monolingual approach. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Chemical name extraction based on automatic training data generation and rich feature set.

PubMed

Yan, Su; Spangler, W Scott; Chen, Ying

2013-01-01

The automation of extracting chemical names from text has significant value to biomedical and life science research. A major barrier in this task is the difficulty of getting a sizable and good quality data to train a reliable entity extraction model. Another difficulty is the selection of informative features of chemical names, since comprehensive domain knowledge on chemistry nomenclature is required. Leveraging random text generation techniques, we explore the idea of automatically creating training sets for the task of chemical name extraction. Assuming the availability of an incomplete list of chemical names, called a dictionary, we are able to generate well-controlled, random, yet realistic chemical-like training documents. We statistically analyze the construction of chemical names based on the incomplete dictionary, and propose a series of new features, without relying on any domain knowledge. Compared to state-of-the-art models learned from manually labeled data and domain knowledge, our solution shows better or comparable results in annotating real-world data with less human effort. Moreover, we report an interesting observation about the language for chemical names. That is, both the structural and semantic components of chemical names follow a Zipfian distribution, which resembles many natural languages.

Knowledge representation and management: transforming textual information into useful knowledge.

PubMed

Rassinoux, A-M

2010-01-01

To summarize current outstanding research in the field of knowledge representation and management. Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2010. Four interesting papers, dealing with structured knowledge, have been selected for the section knowledge representation and management. Combining the newest techniques in computational linguistics and natural language processing with the latest methods in statistical data analysis, machine learning and text mining has proved to be efficient for turning unstructured textual information into meaningful knowledge. Three of the four selected papers for the section knowledge representation and management corroborate this approach and depict various experiments conducted to .extract meaningful knowledge from unstructured free texts such as extracting cancer disease characteristics from pathology reports, or extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical papers, as well as extracting knowledge for the support of hypothesis generation in molecular biology from the Medline literature. Finally, the last paper addresses the level of formally representing and structuring information within clinical terminologies in order to render such information easily available and shareable among the health informatics community. Delivering common powerful tools able to automatically extract meaningful information from the huge amount of electronically unstructured free texts is an essential step towards promoting sharing and reusability across applications, domains, and institutions thus contributing to building capacities worldwide.

Computational methods to extract meaning from text and advance theories of human cognition.

PubMed

McNamara, Danielle S

2011-01-01

Over the past two decades, researchers have made great advances in the area of computational methods for extracting meaning from text. This research has to a large extent been spurred by the development of latent semantic analysis (LSA), a method for extracting and representing the meaning of words using statistical computations applied to large corpora of text. Since the advent of LSA, researchers have developed and tested alternative statistical methods designed to detect and analyze meaning in text corpora. This research exemplifies how statistical models of semantics play an important role in our understanding of cognition and contribute to the field of cognitive science. Importantly, these models afford large-scale representations of human knowledge and allow researchers to explore various questions regarding knowledge, discourse processing, text comprehension, and language. This topic includes the latest progress by the leading researchers in the endeavor to go beyond LSA. Copyright © 2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

PubMed Central

Willits, Jon A.; Amato, Michael S.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.

2018-01-01

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience (“language knowledge”) and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world (“world knowledge”). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing. PMID:25791750

Reading Assessment and Instruction for All Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schumm, Jeanne Shay, Ed.

2006-01-01

Weaving together the latest knowledge and best practices for teaching children to read, this indispensable text and professional resource provides a complete guide to differentiated instruction for diverse learners. Uniquely integrative, the book places the needs of English language learners and students with disabilities front and center instead…

Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom Applications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Tom, Ed.

Noting that little in language can be understood without taking into consideration the wider picture of communicative purpose, content, context, and audience, this book address practical uses of various approaches to discourse analysis. Several assumptions run through the chapters: knowledge is socially constructed; the manner in which language…

Desiderata for ontologies to be used in semantic annotation of biomedical documents.

PubMed

Bada, Michael; Hunter, Lawrence

2011-02-01

A wealth of knowledge valuable to the translational research scientist is contained within the vast biomedical literature, but this knowledge is typically in the form of natural language. Sophisticated natural-language-processing systems are needed to translate text into unambiguous formal representations grounded in high-quality consensus ontologies, and these systems in turn rely on gold-standard corpora of annotated documents for training and testing. To this end, we are constructing the Colorado Richly Annotated Full-Text (CRAFT) Corpus, a collection of 97 full-text biomedical journal articles that are being manually annotated with the entire sets of terms from select vocabularies, predominantly from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library. Our efforts in building this corpus has illuminated infelicities of these ontologies with respect to the semantic annotation of biomedical documents, and we propose desiderata whose implementation could substantially improve their utility in this task; these include the integration of overlapping terms across OBOs, the resolution of OBO-specific ambiguities, the integration of the BFO with the OBOs and the use of mid-level ontologies, the inclusion of noncanonical instances, and the expansion of relations and realizable entities. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

[Big data, medical language and biomedical terminology systems].

PubMed

Schulz, Stefan; López-García, Pablo

2015-08-01

A variety of rich terminology systems, such as thesauri, classifications, nomenclatures and ontologies support information and knowledge processing in health care and biomedical research. Nevertheless, human language, manifested as individually written texts, persists as the primary carrier of information, in the description of disease courses or treatment episodes in electronic medical records, and in the description of biomedical research in scientific publications. In the context of the discussion about big data in biomedicine, we hypothesize that the abstraction of the individuality of natural language utterances into structured and semantically normalized information facilitates the use of statistical data analytics to distil new knowledge out of textual data from biomedical research and clinical routine. Computerized human language technologies are constantly evolving and are increasingly ready to annotate narratives with codes from biomedical terminology. However, this depends heavily on linguistic and terminological resources. The creation and maintenance of such resources is labor-intensive. Nevertheless, it is sensible to assume that big data methods can be used to support this process. Examples include the learning of hierarchical relationships, the grouping of synonymous terms into concepts and the disambiguation of homonyms. Although clear evidence is still lacking, the combination of natural language technologies, semantic resources, and big data analytics is promising.

Levels of text comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD): the influence of language phenotype.

PubMed

Lucas, Rebecca; Norbury, Courtenay Frazier

2014-11-01

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reading comprehension difficulties, but the level of processing at which comprehension is most vulnerable and the influence of language phenotype on comprehension skill is currently unclear. We explored comprehension at sentence and passage levels across language phenotypes. Children with ASD and age-appropriate language skills (n = 25) demonstrated similar syntactic and semantic facilitation to typically developing peers. In contrast, few children with ASD and language impairments (n = 25) could read beyond the single word level. Those who could read sentences benefited from semantic coherence, but were less sensitive to syntactic coherence. At the passage level, the strongest predictor of comprehension was vocabulary knowledge. This emphasizes that the intimate relationship between language competence and both decoding skill and comprehension is evident at the sentence, as well as the passage level, for children with ASD.

Schemata as a Reading Strategy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mustapha, Zaliha

Reading is a multileveled, interactive, and hypothesis-generating process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text by using their knowledge of the world and of language. If reading involves grasping the significance of an input depending on the reader's mental cognitive-perceptual situation, then there is a form of background…

English and Swedish in CLIL Student Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Falk, Maria Lim

2015-01-01

This study investigates Swedish students' ability to produce the discourse of the subject history, in a situation where they had to demonstrate historical knowledge in written explanations, and where both English and Swedish are involved. The students attend a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programme at the upper secondary school…

The Linguistically Aware Teacher and the Teacher-Aware Linguist

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCartney, Elspeth; Ellis, Sue

2013-01-01

This review evaluates issues of teacher linguistic knowledge relating to their work with children with speech, language and communication difficulties (SLCD). Information is from Ellis and McCartney [(2011a). "Applied linguistics and primary school teaching." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], a state-of-the-art text deriving from a British…

Guided Story Invention.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schnelle, Linda; Riley, James D.

Guided story invention is a strategy for whole language instruction. The strategy stimulates construction of story and storylike passages, and incorporates: (1) student knowledge of story structure; (2) the reading and writing of meaningful text; (3) a focus on meaning as a function of teacher coaching; and (4) encouragement of self-monitoring of…

Of Mice and Media

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Day, John

2010-01-01

Implementing multimedia in the high school language arts curriculum has become necessary so that teachers may build connections between the background knowledge of students and the printed texts that are thrust upon them. This idea comes from an area of research in cognitive science known commonly as schema theory, which contends that every…

Research on a Frame-Based Model of Reading Comprehension. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldstein, Ira

This report summarizes computational investigations of language comprehension based on Marvin Minsky's theory of frames, a recent advance in artifical intelligence theories about the representation of knowledge. The investigations discussed explored frame theory as a basis for text comprehension by implementing models of the theory and developing…

Multifaceted Assessment for Early Childhood Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wright, Robert J.

2010-01-01

The book is a highly readable integration of the latest assessment policies, and includes valuable information regarding young children with special needs and English Language Learners--topics that have rarely been touched upon in other textbooks. Focusing on practical applications of key concepts, this text provides a knowledge base of what every…

Learning second language vocabulary: neural dissociation of situation-based learning and text-based learning.

PubMed

Jeong, Hyeonjeong; Sugiura, Motoaki; Sassa, Yuko; Wakusawa, Keisuke; Horie, Kaoru; Sato, Shigeru; Kawashima, Ryuta

2010-04-01

Second language (L2) acquisition necessitates learning and retrieving new words in different modes. In this study, we attempted to investigate the cortical representation of an L2 vocabulary acquired in different learning modes and in cross-modal transfer between learning and retrieval. Healthy participants learned new L2 words either by written translations (text-based learning) or in real-life situations (situation-based learning). Brain activity was then measured during subsequent retrieval of these words. The right supramarginal gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus were involved in situation-based learning and text-based learning, respectively, whereas the left inferior frontal gyrus was activated when learners used L2 knowledge in a mode different from the learning mode. Our findings indicate that the brain regions that mediate L2 memory differ according to how L2 words are learned and used. Copyright 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Feasibility and Utility of Lexical Analysis for Occupational Health Text.

PubMed

Harber, Philip; Leroy, Gondy

2017-06-01

Assess feasibility and potential utility of natural language processing (NLP) for storing and analyzing occupational health data. Basic NLP lexical analysis methods were applied to 89,000 Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) free text records. Steps included tokenization, term and co-occurrence counts, term annotation, and identifying exposure-health effect relationships. Presence of terms in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) was assessed. The methods efficiently demonstrated common exposures, health effects, and exposure-injury relationships. Many workplace terms are not present in UMLS or map inaccurately. Use of free text rather than narrowly defined numerically coded fields is feasible, flexible, and efficient. It has potential to encourage workers and clinicians to provide more data and to support automated knowledge creation. The lexical method used is easily generalizable to other areas. The UMLS vocabularies should be enhanced to be relevant to occupational health.

Translation technology fills important niche.

PubMed

2007-06-01

Software systems that can interpret and translate foreign languages can augment existing services and be available immediately, when live interpreters or even phone services may not be. Knowledge of their capabilities and cost can help you narrow your decision. Systems will take you from registration process through triage to diagnosis. All systems will provide text and audio translation. The more sophisticated systems also offer video services and sign language for deaf patients. The cost can be more than $100,000, but local foundations may offer grants that will cover your expenses.

Text-based discovery in biomedicine: the architecture of the DAD-system.

PubMed

Weeber, M; Klein, H; Aronson, A R; Mork, J G; de Jong-van den Berg, L T; Vos, R

2000-01-01

Current scientific research takes place in highly specialized contexts with poor communication between disciplines as a likely consequence. Knowledge from one discipline may be useful for the other without researchers knowing it. As scientific publications are a condensation of this knowledge, literature-based discovery tools may help the individual scientist to explore new useful domains. We report on the development of the DAD-system, a concept-based Natural Language Processing system for PubMed citations that provides the biomedical researcher such a tool. We describe the general architecture and illustrate its operation by a simulation of a well-known text-based discovery: The favorable effects of fish oil on patients suffering from Raynaud's disease [1].

Language barriers and professional identity: A qualitative interview study of newly employed international medical doctors and Norwegian colleagues.

PubMed

Skjeggestad, Erik; Gerwing, Jennifer; Gulbrandsen, Pål

2017-08-01

To explore how language barriers influence communication and collaboration between newly-employed international medical doctors and Norwegian health personnel. Interviews were conducted with 16 doctors who had recently started working in Norway and 12 Norwegian born health personnel who had extensive experience working with international medical doctors. Analyses were consistent with principles of systematic text condensation. All participants experienced that language barriers caused difficulties in their everyday collaboration. Furthermore, the participants' descriptions of "language barriers" encompassed a wide range of topics, including semantics (e.g., specialized professional vocabulary, system knowledge), pragmatics (e.g., using language in doctor-patient and interprofessional interactions), and specific culturally sensitive topics. All participants described that language barriers provoked uncertainty about a doctor's competence. Newly employed international medical doctors and their colleagues are concerned by ineffective communication due to language barriers. Experiences of language barriers threaten professional identity as a competent and effective doctor. Newly employed doctors who are non-native speakers could benefit from support in understanding and handling the array of barriers related to language. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Integrating Literacy and Math: Strategies for K-6 Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fogelberg, Ellen; Skalinder, Carole; Satz, Patti; Hiller, Barbara; Bernstein, Lisa; Vitantonio, Sandra

2008-01-01

Many K-6 teachers and students still think of mathematics as a totally separate subject from literacy. Yet incorporating math content into the language arts block helps students gain skills for reading many kinds of texts. Bringing reading, writing, and talking into the math classroom supports the development of conceptual knowledge and problem…

Instructional Implications of Listening Comprehension Research. Reading Education Report No. 39.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pearson, P. David; Fielding, Linda

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

Student Storytelling through Sequential Art

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fay, David

2007-01-01

If you are interested in using sequential art forms such as comic books in your EFL classroom, this article is full of helpful advice. Reading sequential art is beneficial because students can work with authentic texts with real language and graphic support. Students can also apply research and cultural knowledge to the creation of their own…

Predicting Lexical Proficiency in Language Learner Texts Using Computational Indices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crossley, Scott A.; Salsbury, Tom; McNamara, Danielle S.; Jarvis, Scott

2011-01-01

The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy…

49 CFR 1103.27 - Candor and fairness in dealing with other litigants.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

...) SURFACE TRANSPORTATION BOARD, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION RULES OF PRACTICE PRACTITIONERS Canons of... the language or effect of a decision or a text book; or, with knowledge of its invalidity to cite as... come from postponing the proceeding. (f) A practitioner shall not ignore known customs or practice of...

Matrix frequency analysis and its applications to language classification of textual data for English and Hebrew

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Uchill, Joseph H.; Assadi, Amir H.

2003-01-01

The advent of the internet has opened a host of new and exciting questions in the science and mathematics of information organization and data mining. In particular, a highly ambitious promise of the internet is to bring the bulk of human knowledge to everyone with access to a computer network, providing a democratic medium for sharing and communicating knowledge regardless of the language of the communication. The development of sharing and communication of knowledge via transfer of digital files is the first crucial achievement in this direction. Nonetheless, available solutions to numerous ancillary problems remain far from satisfactory. Among such outstanding problems are the first few fundamental questions that have been responsible for the emergence and rapid growth of the new field of Knowledge Engineering, namely, classification of forms of data, their effective organization, and extraction of knowledge from massive distributed data sets, and the design of fast effective search engines. The precision of machine learning algorithms in classification and recognition of image data (e.g. those scanned from books and other printed documents) are still far from human performance and speed in similar tasks. Discriminating the many forms of ASCII data from each other is not as difficult in view of the emerging universal standards for file-format. Nonetheless, most of the past and relatively recent human knowledge is yet to be transformed and saved in such machine readable formats. In particular, an outstanding problem in knowledge engineering is the problem of organization and management--with precision comparable to human performance--of knowledge in the form of images of documents that broadly belong to either text, image or a blend of both. It was shown in that the effectiveness of OCR was intertwined with the success of language and font recognition.

A common type system for clinical natural language processing

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background One challenge in reusing clinical data stored in electronic medical records is that these data are heterogenous. Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays an important role in transforming information in clinical text to a standard representation that is comparable and interoperable. Information may be processed and shared when a type system specifies the allowable data structures. Therefore, we aim to define a common type system for clinical NLP that enables interoperability between structured and unstructured data generated in different clinical settings. Results We describe a common type system for clinical NLP that has an end target of deep semantics based on Clinical Element Models (CEMs), thus interoperating with structured data and accommodating diverse NLP approaches. The type system has been implemented in UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) and is fully functional in a popular open-source clinical NLP system, cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) versions 2.0 and later. Conclusions We have created a type system that targets deep semantics, thereby allowing for NLP systems to encapsulate knowledge from text and share it alongside heterogenous clinical data sources. Rather than surface semantics that are typically the end product of NLP algorithms, CEM-based semantics explicitly build in deep clinical semantics as the point of interoperability with more structured data types. PMID:23286462

A common type system for clinical natural language processing.

PubMed

Wu, Stephen T; Kaggal, Vinod C; Dligach, Dmitriy; Masanz, James J; Chen, Pei; Becker, Lee; Chapman, Wendy W; Savova, Guergana K; Liu, Hongfang; Chute, Christopher G

2013-01-03

One challenge in reusing clinical data stored in electronic medical records is that these data are heterogenous. Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays an important role in transforming information in clinical text to a standard representation that is comparable and interoperable. Information may be processed and shared when a type system specifies the allowable data structures. Therefore, we aim to define a common type system for clinical NLP that enables interoperability between structured and unstructured data generated in different clinical settings. We describe a common type system for clinical NLP that has an end target of deep semantics based on Clinical Element Models (CEMs), thus interoperating with structured data and accommodating diverse NLP approaches. The type system has been implemented in UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) and is fully functional in a popular open-source clinical NLP system, cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) versions 2.0 and later. We have created a type system that targets deep semantics, thereby allowing for NLP systems to encapsulate knowledge from text and share it alongside heterogenous clinical data sources. Rather than surface semantics that are typically the end product of NLP algorithms, CEM-based semantics explicitly build in deep clinical semantics as the point of interoperability with more structured data types.

Data-mining to build a knowledge representation store for clinical decision support. Studies on curation and validation based on machine performance in multiple choice medical licensing examinations.

PubMed

Robson, Barry; Boray, Srinidhi

2016-06-01

Extracting medical knowledge by structured data mining of many medical records and from unstructured data mining of natural language source text on the Internet will become increasingly important for clinical decision support. Output from these sources can be transformed into large numbers of elements of knowledge in a Knowledge Representation Store (KRS), here using the notation and to some extent the algebraic principles of the Q-UEL Web-based universal exchange and inference language described previously, rooted in Dirac notation from quantum mechanics and linguistic theory. In a KRS, semantic structures or statements about the world of interest to medicine are analogous to natural language sentences seen as formed from noun phrases separated by verbs, prepositions and other descriptions of relationships. A convenient method of testing and better curating these elements of knowledge is by having the computer use them to take the test of a multiple choice medical licensing examination. It is a venture which perhaps tells us almost as much about the reasoning of students and examiners as it does about the requirements for Artificial Intelligence as employed in clinical decision making. It emphasizes the role of context and of contextual probabilities as opposed to the more familiar intrinsic probabilities, and of a preliminary form of logic that we call presyllogistic reasoning. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Machine-aided indexing at NASA

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Silvester, June P.; Genuardi, Michael T.; Klingbiel, Paul H.

1994-01-01

This report describes the NASA Lexical Dictionary (NLD), a machine-aided indexing system used online at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI). This system automatically suggests a set of candidate terms from NASA's controlled vocabulary for any designated natural language text input. The system is comprised of a text processor that is based on the computational, nonsyntactic analysis of input text and an extensive knowledge base that serves to recognize and translate text-extracted concepts. The functions of the various NLD system components are described in detail, and production and quality benefits resulting from the implementation of machine-aided indexing at CASI are discussed.

Written Discourse in Scientific Communities: A conversation with two scientists about their views of science, use of language, role of writing in doing science, and compatibility between their epistemic views and language

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yore, Larry D.; Florence, Marilyn K.; Pearson, Terry W.; Weaver, Andrew J.

2006-02-01

This autobiographical case study of two scientists involved in earlier studies documents a profile of each scientist. These profiles were used to develop semi-structured interview protocols and email surveys for each scientist. The central issues of these data collections were whether these modern, evaluativist scientists believe that the review react revise process of publishing a peer-reviewed research report simply improves the quality of the language or actually changes the science, and how their metacognitive awareness and executive control were demonstrated in their science inquiry and science writing. The scientists served both as informants and co-authors. Both scientists believed that writing and revising research reports improved the science as well as the clarity of the text; that their use of absolutist language related to their beliefs about inquiry and not about science knowledge; that addressing comments about their writing forced them to assess, monitor, and regulate their science inquiries and research reports; and that traditional forms of knowledge about nature and natural events were valuable information sources that stress description rather than physical causality

The Development of Early Childhood Teachers' Language Knowledge in Different Educational Tracks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Strohmer, Janina; Mischo, Christoph

2015-01-01

Early childhood teachers should have extensive knowledge about language and language development, because these facets of professional knowledge are considered as important requirements for fostering language development in early childhood education settings. It is assumed that early childhood teachers acquire this knowledge during pre-service…

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology

PubMed Central

Bodenreider, Olivier

2004-01-01

The Unified Medical Language System (http://umlsks.nlm.nih.gov) is a repository of biomedical vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The UMLS integrates over 2 million names for some 900 000 concepts from more than 60 families of biomedical vocabularies, as well as 12 million relations among these concepts. Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus include the NCBI taxonomy, Gene Ontology, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), OMIM and the Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base. UMLS concepts are not only inter-related, but may also be linked to external resources such as GenBank. In addition to data, the UMLS includes tools for customizing the Metathesaurus (MetamorphoSys), for generating lexical variants of concept names (lvg) and for extracting UMLS concepts from text (MetaMap). The UMLS knowledge sources are updated quarterly. All vocabularies are available at no fee for research purposes within an institution, but UMLS users are required to sign a license agreement. The UMLS knowledge sources are distributed on CD-ROM and by FTP. PMID:14681409

A methodology for extending domain coverage in SemRep.

PubMed

Rosemblat, Graciela; Shin, Dongwook; Kilicoglu, Halil; Sneiderman, Charles; Rindflesch, Thomas C

2013-12-01

We describe a domain-independent methodology to extend SemRep coverage beyond the biomedical domain. SemRep, a natural language processing application originally designed for biomedical texts, uses the knowledge sources provided by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS©). Ontological and terminological extensions to the system are needed in order to support other areas of knowledge. We extended SemRep's application by developing a semantic representation of a previously unsupported domain. This was achieved by adapting well-known ontology engineering phases and integrating them with the UMLS knowledge sources on which SemRep crucially depends. While the process to extend SemRep coverage has been successfully applied in earlier projects, this paper presents in detail the step-wise approach we followed and the mechanisms implemented. A case study in the field of medical informatics illustrates how the ontology engineering phases have been adapted for optimal integration with the UMLS. We provide qualitative and quantitative results, which indicate the validity and usefulness of our methodology. Published by Elsevier Inc.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology.

PubMed

Bodenreider, Olivier

2004-01-01

The Unified Medical Language System (http://umlsks.nlm.nih.gov) is a repository of biomedical vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The UMLS integrates over 2 million names for some 900,000 concepts from more than 60 families of biomedical vocabularies, as well as 12 million relations among these concepts. Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus include the NCBI taxonomy, Gene Ontology, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), OMIM and the Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base. UMLS concepts are not only inter-related, but may also be linked to external resources such as GenBank. In addition to data, the UMLS includes tools for customizing the Metathesaurus (MetamorphoSys), for generating lexical variants of concept names (lvg) and for extracting UMLS concepts from text (MetaMap). The UMLS knowledge sources are updated quarterly. All vocabularies are available at no fee for research purposes within an institution, but UMLS users are required to sign a license agreement. The UMLS knowledge sources are distributed on CD-ROM and by FTP.

A multilingual gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition: the Mantra GSC

PubMed Central

Clematide, Simon; Akhondi, Saber A; van Mulligen, Erik M; Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich

2015-01-01

Objective To create a multilingual gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition. Materials and methods We selected text units from different parallel corpora (Medline abstract titles, drug labels, biomedical patent claims) in English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch. Three annotators per language independently annotated the biomedical concepts, based on a subset of the Unified Medical Language System and covering a wide range of semantic groups. To reduce the annotation workload, automatically generated preannotations were provided. Individual annotations were automatically harmonized and then adjudicated, and cross-language consistency checks were carried out to arrive at the final annotations. Results The number of final annotations was 5530. Inter-annotator agreement scores indicate good agreement (median F-score 0.79), and are similar to those between individual annotators and the gold standard. The automatically generated harmonized annotation set for each language performed equally well as the best annotator for that language. Discussion The use of automatic preannotations, harmonized annotations, and parallel corpora helped to keep the manual annotation efforts manageable. The inter-annotator agreement scores provide a reference standard for gauging the performance of automatic annotation techniques. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition in languages other than English. Other distinguishing features are the wide variety of semantic groups that are being covered, and the diversity of text genres that were annotated. PMID:25948699

Written Language Disorders: Speech-Language Pathologists' Training, Knowledge, and Confidence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blood, Gordon W.; Mamett, Callie; Gordon, Rebecca; Blood, Ingrid M.

2010-01-01

Purpose: This study examined speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') perceptions of their (a) educational and clinical training in evaluating and treating written language disorders, (b) knowledge bases in this area, (c) sources of knowledge about written language disorders, (d) confidence levels, and (e) predictors of confidence in working with…

Phrase Units as Determinants of Visual Processing in Music Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sloboda, John A.

1977-01-01

Keyboard musicians sight-read passages of music in which the amount of information about the presence of phrase units was systematically varied. Results suggest a clear analogy between the cognition of music and language, in that knowledge of abstract structure is of importance in the organization of immediate visual processing of text. (Editor/RK)

Robust Deep Semantics for Language Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

focus on five areas: deep learning, textual inferential relations, relation and event extraction by distant supervision , semantic parsing and...ontology expansion, and coreference resolution. As time went by, the program focus converged towards emphasizing technologies for knowledge base...natural logic methods for text understanding, improved mention coreference algorithms, and the further development of multilingual tools in CoreNLP.

Lexical Errors in Second Language Scientific Writing: Some Conceptual Implications

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carrió Pastor, María Luisa; Mestre-Mestre, Eva María

2014-01-01

Nowadays, scientific writers are required not only a thorough knowledge of their subject field, but also a sound command of English as a lingua franca. In this paper, the lexical errors produced in scientific texts written in English by non-native researchers are identified to propose a classification of the categories they contain. This study…

Automatic Domain Adaptation of Word Sense Disambiguation Based on Sublanguage Semantic Schemata Applied to Clinical Narrative

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patterson, Olga

2012-01-01

Domain adaptation of natural language processing systems is challenging because it requires human expertise. While manual effort is effective in creating a high quality knowledge base, it is expensive and time consuming. Clinical text adds another layer of complexity to the task due to privacy and confidentiality restrictions that hinder the…

Who Is the Real Owner? Or How a Simple Pepsi-Cola Story Can Help Students Build Critical Thinking Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Galetcaia, Tatiana; Thiessen, Loreena

2010-01-01

Besides language competence, international students must develop a systematic approach to processing information and follow up with co-construction of the knowledge acquired. Critical thinking is a crucial principle commonly required in North American universities for evaluating academic texts. This practice may present certain difficulties for…

Effect of Frequency and Idiomaticity on Second Language Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martinez, Ron; Murphy, Victoria A.

2011-01-01

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000-8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure…

A Study of a Collaborative Instructional Project Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory: Report Writing in Elementary Grades

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brisk, Maria Estela; Hodgson-Drysdale, Tracy; O'Connor, Cheryl

2011-01-01

This study examined the teaching of report writing in PreK-5 through the lens of systemic functional linguistics theory. Teachers were part of a university-public school collaboration that included professional development on teaching genres, text organization, and language features. Grounded in this knowledge, teachers explicitly taught report…

The Case of Composition Questions in the Examinations of Turkish Lesson

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taga, Tahir; Unlu, Suleyman; Ozturk, Huseyin

2016-01-01

Problem Statement: Writing is a skill area that is difficult to teach and evaluate. The fact that writing is a complex skill including many factors underlies on the basis of these difficulties. Such factors as grammar, writing and punctuation, language and expression, text linguistics and thinking skills, which are knowledge and skill areas all by…

Computer based extraction of phenoptypic features of human congenital anomalies from the digital literature with natural language processing techniques.

PubMed

Karakülah, Gökhan; Dicle, Oğuz; Koşaner, Ozgün; Suner, Aslı; Birant, Çağdaş Can; Berber, Tolga; Canbek, Sezin

2014-01-01

The lack of laboratory tests for the diagnosis of most of the congenital anomalies renders the physical examination of the case crucial for the diagnosis of the anomaly; and the cases in the diagnostic phase are mostly being evaluated in the light of the literature knowledge. In this respect, for accurate diagnosis, ,it is of great importance to provide the decision maker with decision support by presenting the literature knowledge about a particular case. Here, we demonstrated a methodology for automated scanning and determining of the phenotypic features from the case reports related to congenital anomalies in the literature with text and natural language processing methods, and we created a framework of an information source for a potential diagnostic decision support system for congenital anomalies.

"If We Lose Their Language We Lose Our History": Knowledge and Disposition in Maori Language Acquisition Policy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Albury, Nathan John

2018-01-01

Localising knowledge and dispositions helps to predict the likely success of top-down language policies. In so far as language acquisition is a pillar of language revitalisation policy, then community perspectives on learning a minority language deserve attention. This article presents the knowledge, dispositions, and ideas of around 1,300…

Investigating Principals' Knowledge and Perceptions of Second Language Programs for English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Padron, Yolanda N.; Waxman, Hersh C.

2016-01-01

This study examined principals' knowledge and perceptions of second language programs for English language learners (ELLs) operating in their schools. An open-ended survey and in-depth interviews were used to examine elementary school principals' knowledge of the second language programs implemented at their schools. The survey asked principals…

Using ontology network structure in text mining.

PubMed

Berndt, Donald J; McCart, James A; Luther, Stephen L

2010-11-13

Statistical text mining treats documents as bags of words, with a focus on term frequencies within documents and across document collections. Unlike natural language processing (NLP) techniques that rely on an engineered vocabulary or a full-featured ontology, statistical approaches do not make use of domain-specific knowledge. The freedom from biases can be an advantage, but at the cost of ignoring potentially valuable knowledge. The approach proposed here investigates a hybrid strategy based on computing graph measures of term importance over an entire ontology and injecting the measures into the statistical text mining process. As a starting point, we adapt existing search engine algorithms such as PageRank and HITS to determine term importance within an ontology graph. The graph-theoretic approach is evaluated using a smoking data set from the i2b2 National Center for Biomedical Computing, cast as a simple binary classification task for categorizing smoking-related documents, demonstrating consistent improvements in accuracy.

Comprehension and retrieval of failure cases in airborne observatories

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Alvarado, Sergio J.; Mock, Kenrick J.

1995-01-01

This paper describes research dealing with the computational problem of analyzing and repairing failures of electronic and mechanical systems of telescopes in NASA's airborne observatories, such as KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory) and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy). The research has resulted in the development of an experimental system that acquires knowledge of failure analysis from input text, and answers questions regarding failure detection and correction. The system's design builds upon previous work on text comprehension and question answering, including: knowledge representation for conceptual analysis of failure descriptions, strategies for mapping natural language into conceptual representations, case-based reasoning strategies for memory organization and indexing, and strategies for memory search and retrieval. These techniques have been combined into a model that accounts for: (a) how to build a knowledge base of system failures and repair procedures from descriptions that appear in telescope-operators' logbooks and FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis) manuals; and (b) how to use that knowledge base to search and retrieve answers to questions about causes and effects of failures, as well as diagnosis and repair procedures. This model has been implemented in FANSYS (Failure ANalysis SYStem), a prototype text comprehension and question answering program for failure analysis.

Comprehension and retrieval of failure cases in airborne observatories

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alvarado, Sergio J.; Mock, Kenrick J.

1995-05-01

This paper describes research dealing with the computational problem of analyzing and repairing failures of electronic and mechanical systems of telescopes in NASA's airborne observatories, such as KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory) and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy). The research has resulted in the development of an experimental system that acquires knowledge of failure analysis from input text, and answers questions regarding failure detection and correction. The system's design builds upon previous work on text comprehension and question answering, including: knowledge representation for conceptual analysis of failure descriptions, strategies for mapping natural language into conceptual representations, case-based reasoning strategies for memory organization and indexing, and strategies for memory search and retrieval. These techniques have been combined into a model that accounts for: (a) how to build a knowledge base of system failures and repair procedures from descriptions that appear in telescope-operators' logbooks and FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis) manuals; and (b) how to use that knowledge base to search and retrieve answers to questions about causes and effects of failures, as well as diagnosis and repair procedures. This model has been implemented in FANSYS (Failure ANalysis SYStem), a prototype text comprehension and question answering program for failure analysis.

Developmental, Component-Based Model of Reading Fluency: An Investigation of Predictors of Word-Reading Fluency, Text-Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension.

PubMed

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2015-01-01

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)-how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text reading fluency; (3) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text reading fluency vs. word reading fluency; and (4) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text reading fluency vs. reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; Mean age = 5;24 & 6;08) from Korean-speaking children ( N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text reading fluency at time 2, but not at time 1. At both times text reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text reading fluency over and above word reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and word reading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text reading fluency and reading comprehension whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension, but not text reading fluency. These results reveal developmental nature of relations and mechanism of text reading fluency in reading development.

Developmental, Component-Based Model of Reading Fluency: An Investigation of Predictors of Word-Reading Fluency, Text-Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension

PubMed Central

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2015-01-01

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)—how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text reading fluency; (3) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text reading fluency vs. word reading fluency; and (4) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text reading fluency vs. reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; Mean age = 5;24 & 6;08) from Korean-speaking children (N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text reading fluency at time 2, but not at time 1. At both times text reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text reading fluency over and above word reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and word reading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text reading fluency and reading comprehension whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension, but not text reading fluency. These results reveal developmental nature of relations and mechanism of text reading fluency in reading development. PMID:26435550

[Spatio-Temporal Bioelectrical Brain Activity Organization during Reading Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Collocations by Students with Different Foreign Language Proficiency].

PubMed

Sokolova, L V; Cherkasova, A S

2015-01-01

Texts or words/pseudowords are often used as stimuli for human verbal activity research. Our study pays attention to decoding processes of grammatical constructions consisted of two-three words--collocations. Russian and English collocation sets without any narrative were presented to Russian-speaking students with different English language skill. Stimulus material had two types of collocations: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. 30 students (average age--20.4 ± 0.22) took part in the study, they were divided into two equal groups depending on their English language skill (linguists/nonlinguists). During reading brain bioelectrical activity of cortex has been registered from 12 electrodes in alfa-, beta-, theta-bands. Coherent function reflecting cooperation of different cortical areas during reading collocations has been analyzed. Increase of interhemispheric and diagonal connections while reading collocations in different languages in the group of students with low knowledge of foreign language testifies of importance of functional cooperation between the hemispheres. It has been found out that brain bioelectrical activity of students with good foreign language knowledge during reading of all collocation types in Russian and English is characterized by economization of nervous substrate resources compared to nonlinguists. Selective activation of certain cortical areas has also been observed (depending on the grammatical construction type) in nonlinguists group that is probably related to special decoding system which processes presented stimuli. Reading Russian paradigmatic constructions by nonlinguists entailed increase between left cortical areas, reading of English syntagmatic collocations--between right ones.

Research in Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Understanding.

DTIC Science & Technology

1984-09-01

TYPE OF REPORT & PERIOO COVERED RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION Annual Report FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING 9/1/83 - 8/31/84 S. PERFORMING...nhaber) Artificial intelligence, natural language understanding , knowledge representation, semantics, semantic networks, KL-TWO, NIKL, belief and...attempting to understand and react to a complex, evolving situation. This report summarizes our research in knowledge representation and natural language

Query2Question: Translating Visualization Interaction into Natural Language.

PubMed

Nafari, Maryam; Weaver, Chris

2015-06-01

Richly interactive visualization tools are increasingly popular for data exploration and analysis in a wide variety of domains. Existing systems and techniques for recording provenance of interaction focus either on comprehensive automated recording of low-level interaction events or on idiosyncratic manual transcription of high-level analysis activities. In this paper, we present the architecture and translation design of a query-to-question (Q2Q) system that automatically records user interactions and presents them semantically using natural language (written English). Q2Q takes advantage of domain knowledge and uses natural language generation (NLG) techniques to translate and transcribe a progression of interactive visualization states into a visual log of styled text that complements and effectively extends the functionality of visualization tools. We present Q2Q as a means to support a cross-examination process in which questions rather than interactions are the focus of analytic reasoning and action. We describe the architecture and implementation of the Q2Q system, discuss key design factors and variations that effect question generation, and present several visualizations that incorporate Q2Q for analysis in a variety of knowledge domains.

Teacher Educators' Personal Practical Knowledge of Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Swart, Fenna; de Graaff, Rick; Onstenk, Jeroen; Knezic, Dubravka

2018-01-01

This paper describes teacher educators' understanding of language for classroom communication in higher education. We argue that teacher educators who are aware of their personal practical knowledge of language have a better understanding of their students' language use and provide better support for knowledge construction. Personal practical…

Opportunities for Academic Language and Literacy Development for Emergent Bilingual Students during Group Work

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Molle, Daniella; Lee, Naomi

2017-01-01

The present paper argues for a shift in teacher knowledge and beliefs about the role of group work in the teaching and learning of emergent bilingual students. Using case study data from an eighth grade classroom, the authors analyze the role of collaboration in the interaction with grade-level text of emergent bilingual students. The analysis…

A Schema-Theoretic View of Reading. Technical Report No. 32.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adams, Marilyn Jager; Collins, Allan

This paper provides a general description of schema-theoretic models of language comprehension and examines some extensions of such models to the study of reading. The goal of schema theory is to specify the interface between the reader and the text: to specify how the reader's knowledge interacts with and shapes the information on the page and to…

Academic Writing Development at the University Level: Phrasal and Clausal Complexity across Level of Study, Discipline, and Genre

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Staples, Shelley; Egbert, Jesse; Biber, Douglas; Gray, Bethany

2016-01-01

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing…

The Poetry of Dandelions: Merging Content-Area Literacy and Science Content Knowledge in a Fourth-Grade Science Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Madden, Lauren; Peel, Anne; Watson, Heather

2014-01-01

As teachers begin to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), they are challenged to focus on informational texts across the disciplines and engage children in critical thinking about complex scientific ideas. In this article, we present an integrated science-language arts lesson that explores…

Beyond the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Exploring New Paradigms in Media and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kenny, Robert F.

2011-01-01

There are those who agree with Tom Pettitt that we are entering into a period where text based literacy is no longer the only measure of intelligence, nor is it the only form of valuable communications and knowledge acquisition for today's media-centric children. As Prensky states, today's youth speak "digital" as their primary language. While his…

Measuring Teachers' Knowledge about Early Language and Literacy: Practical Implications and Considerations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hindman, Annemarie H.; Wasik, Barbara A.

2011-01-01

This study examined 1 tool for evaluating Head Start teachers' knowledge about early language and literacy. Results indicated that teachers varied in their knowledge. Teachers with more knowledge had more education, as did teachers who received language and literacy professional development. Teachers with greater knowledge also demonstrated higher…

Commentary on "Reading Comprehension Is Not a Single Ability": Implications for Child Language Intervention.

PubMed

Ukrainetz, Teresa A

2017-04-20

This commentary responds to the implications for child language intervention of Catts and Kamhi's (2017) call to move from viewing reading comprehension as a single ability to recognizing it as a complex constellation of reader, text, and activity. Reading comprehension, as Catts and Kamhi explain, is very complicated. In this commentary, I consider how comprehension has been taught and the directions in which it is moving. I consider how speech-language pathologists (SLPs), with their distinctive expertise and resources, can contribute to effective reading comprehension instruction. I build from Catts and Kamhi's emphasis on the importance of context and knowledge, using the approaches of staying on topic, close reading, and incorporating quality features of intervention. I consider whether and how SLPs should treat language skills and comprehension strategies to achieve noticeable changes in their students' reading comprehension. Within this multidimensional view of reading comprehension, SLPs can make strategic, meaningful contributions to improving the reading comprehension of students with language impairments.

A multilingual gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition: the Mantra GSC.

PubMed

Kors, Jan A; Clematide, Simon; Akhondi, Saber A; van Mulligen, Erik M; Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich

2015-09-01

To create a multilingual gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition. We selected text units from different parallel corpora (Medline abstract titles, drug labels, biomedical patent claims) in English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch. Three annotators per language independently annotated the biomedical concepts, based on a subset of the Unified Medical Language System and covering a wide range of semantic groups. To reduce the annotation workload, automatically generated preannotations were provided. Individual annotations were automatically harmonized and then adjudicated, and cross-language consistency checks were carried out to arrive at the final annotations. The number of final annotations was 5530. Inter-annotator agreement scores indicate good agreement (median F-score 0.79), and are similar to those between individual annotators and the gold standard. The automatically generated harmonized annotation set for each language performed equally well as the best annotator for that language. The use of automatic preannotations, harmonized annotations, and parallel corpora helped to keep the manual annotation efforts manageable. The inter-annotator agreement scores provide a reference standard for gauging the performance of automatic annotation techniques. To our knowledge, this is the first gold-standard corpus for biomedical concept recognition in languages other than English. Other distinguishing features are the wide variety of semantic groups that are being covered, and the diversity of text genres that were annotated. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.

STS Case Study Development Support

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rosa de Jesus, Dan A.; Johnson, Grace K.

2013-01-01

The Shuttle Case Study Collection (SCSC) has been developed using lessons learned documented by NASA engineers, analysts, and contractors. The SCSC provides educators with a new tool to teach real-world engineering processes with the goal of providing unique educational materials that enhance critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving skills. During this third phase of the project, responsibilities included: the revision of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) source code to ensure all pages follow World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and the addition and edition of website content, including text, documents, and images. Basic HTML knowledge was required, as was basic knowledge of photo editing software, and training to learn how to use NASA's Content Management System for website design. The outcome of this project was its release to the public.

Development of a CD-ROM on written language for the continuing education of elementary school teachers.

PubMed

Gonçalves, Thaís Dos Santos; Crenitte, Patrícia Abreu Pinheiro

2011-01-01

Distance education has emerged to minimize the anxiety of many professionals who need to update their knowledge, but do not have the time and opportunity to travel to educational centers. To describe the development of a CD-ROM to provide distance continuing education to basic school teachers that addresses issues related to written language. Previously, a script was developed with themes related to the acquisition and development of written language. Subsequently, a technical team transformed the texts in multimedia language. The titles of each content area addressed are available on buttons and links. The files can be viewed in a linear sequence, allowing the teacher to start learning at the desired moment and go straight to the file that he or she wants to access. Videos that show practical applications of the concepts available in text are included. Brazil is a developing country. The use of technologies for education reduces cultural isolation among education professionals. It is necessary to focus on making teaching materials for distance education. In order to provide an effective learning environment, the learners reality should be considered. A multidisciplinary team should prepare the materials. The development of educational material for distance education on the acquisition and development of written language seems not only appropriate, but also warranted to provide professional growth opportunity for teachers who need time flexibility and/or live far away from academic centers.

Language acquisition and use: learning and applying probabilistic constraints.

PubMed

Seidenberg, M S

1997-03-14

What kinds of knowledge underlie the use of language and how is this knowledge acquired? Linguists equate knowing a language with knowing a grammar. Classic "poverty of the stimulus" arguments suggest that grammar identification is an intractable inductive problem and that acquisition is possible only because children possess innate knowledge of grammatical structure. An alternative view is emerging from studies of statistical and probabilistic aspects of language, connectionist models, and the learning capacities of infants. This approach emphasizes continuity between how language is acquired and how it is used. It retains the idea that innate capacities constrain language learning, but calls into question whether they include knowledge of grammatical structure.

The Design of Lexical Database for Indonesian Language

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gunawan, D.; Amalia, A.

2017-03-01

Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI), an official dictionary for Indonesian language, provides lists of words with their meaning. The online version can be accessed via Internet network. Another online dictionary is Kateglo. KBBI online and Kateglo only provides an interface for human. A machine cannot retrieve data from the dictionary easily without using advanced techniques. Whereas, lexical of words is required in research or application development which related to natural language processing, text mining, information retrieval or sentiment analysis. To address this requirement, we need to build a lexical database which provides well-defined structured information about words. A well-known lexical database is WordNet, which provides the relation among words in English. This paper proposes the design of a lexical database for Indonesian language based on the combination of KBBI 4th edition, Kateglo and WordNet structure. Knowledge representation by utilizing semantic networks depict the relation among words and provide the new structure of lexical database for Indonesian language. The result of this design can be used as the foundation to build the lexical database for Indonesian language.

Foreign Language Teachers' Language Proficiency and Their Language Teaching Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Richards, Heather; Conway, Clare; Roskvist, Annelies; Harvey, Sharon

2013-01-01

Teachers' subject knowledge is recognized as an essential component of effective teaching. In the foreign language context, teachers' subject knowledge includes language proficiency. In New Zealand high schools, foreign languages (e.g. Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish) have recently been offered to learners earlier in their schooling,…

Research in Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-11-01

artificial intelligence, natural language understanding , parsing, syntax, semantics, speaker meaning, knowledge representation, semantic networks...TinB PAGE map M W006 1Report No. 4513 L RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING Annual Report 1 September 1979 to 31... understanding , knowledge representation, and knowledge based inference. The work that we have been doing falls into three classes, successively motivated by

Generating and Executing Complex Natural Language Queries across Linked Data.

PubMed

Hamon, Thierry; Mougin, Fleur; Grabar, Natalia

2015-01-01

With the recent and intensive research in the biomedical area, the knowledge accumulated is disseminated through various knowledge bases. Links between these knowledge bases are needed in order to use them jointly. Linked Data, SPARQL language, and interfaces in Natural Language question-answering provide interesting solutions for querying such knowledge bases. We propose a method for translating natural language questions in SPARQL queries. We use Natural Language Processing tools, semantic resources, and the RDF triples description. The method is designed on 50 questions over 3 biomedical knowledge bases, and evaluated on 27 questions. It achieves 0.78 F-measure on the test set. The method for translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries is implemented as Perl module available at http://search.cpan.org/ thhamon/RDF-NLP-SPARQLQuery.

Corpus Linguistics and the Design of a Response Message

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Atwell, E.

2002-01-01

Most research related to SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is focussed on techniques for detection of possible incoming signals from extra-terrestrial intelligent sources (e.g. Turnbull et al. 1999), and algorithms for analysis of these signals to identify intelligent language-like characteristics (e.g. Elliott and Atwell 1999, 2000). However, another issue for research and debate is the nature of our response, should a signal arrive and be detected. The design of potentially the most significant communicative act in history should not be decided solely by astrophysicists; the Corpus Linguistics research community has a contribution to make to what is essentially a Corpus design and implementation project. (Vakoch 1998) advocated that the message constructed to transmit to extraterrestrials should include a broad, representative collection of perspectives rather than a single viewpoint or genre; this should strike a chord with Corpus Linguists for whom a central principle is that a corpus must be "balanced" to be representative (Meyer 2001). One idea favoured by SETI researchers is to transmit an encyclopaedia summarising human knowledge, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to give ET communicators an overview and "training set" key to analysis of subsequent messages. Furthermore, this should be sent in several versions in parallel: the text; page-images, to include illustrations left out of the text-file and perhaps some sort of abstract linguistic representation of the text, using a functional or logic language (Ollongren 1999, Freudenthal 1960). The idea of "enriching" the message corpus with annotations at several levels should also strike a chord with Corpus Linguists who have long known that Natural language exhibits highly complex multi-layering sequencing, structural and functional patterns, as difficult to model as sequences and structures found in more traditional physical and biological sciences. Some corpora have been annotated with several levels or layers of linguistic knowledge, for example the SEC corpus (Taylor and Knowles 1988), the ISLE corpus (Menzel et al. 2000). Tagged and parsed corpus can be used by corpus linguists as a testbed to guide their development of grammars (e.g. Souter and Atwell 1994); and they can be used to train Natural Language Learning or data-mining models of complex sequence data (e.g. Brill 1993, Hughes 1993, Atwell 1996). Corpus linguists have a range of standards and tools for design and annotation of representative corpus resources, and experience of which annotation types are more amenable to Natural Language Learning algorithms. An Advisory panel of corpus linguists could help design and implement an extended Multi-annotated Interstellar Corpus of English, incorporating ideas from Corpus Linguistics such as: - Augment the Encyclopaedia Britannica with a collection of samples representing the diversity of language in real use. - As an additional "key", transmit a dictionary aimed at language learners which has also been a rich source for NLP - Supply our ET communicators with several levels of linguistic annotation, to give them a richer training set for their - Add translations of the English text into other human languages: Humanity should not be represented by English alone, This calls for a large-scale corpus annotation project, requiring an Interstellar Corpus Advisory Panel, analogous to the BNC or MATE advisory panels, to include experts in English grammar and semantics, English language learning, computational Natural language Learning algorithms, and corpus design, implementation, annotation, standardisation, and analysis.

Schematization and Sentence Processing by Foreign Language Learners: A Reading-Time Experiment and a Stimulated-Recall Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tode, Tomoko

2012-01-01

This article examines how learners of English as a foreign language process reduced relative clauses (RRCs) from the perspective of usage-based language learning, which posits that language knowledge forms a hierarchy from item-based knowledge consisting only of entrenched frequent exemplars to more advanced schematized knowledge. Twenty-eight…

Pre-Professional Students' Explicit Syntax Knowledge: Preliminary Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brimo, Danielle; Melamed, Tina

2017-01-01

Existing research concludes that educators have varying levels of language knowledge. Educators' varying levels of language knowledge may be related to the type of content knowledge they received while in school. The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of pre-professional speech-language pathology (SLP) students who have taken…

Improving Science and Vocabulary Learning of English Language Learners. CREATE Brief

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

August, Diane; Artzi, Lauren; Mazrum, Julie

2010-01-01

This brief reviews previous research related to the development of science knowledge and academic language in English language learners as well as the role of English language proficiency, learning in a second language, and first language knowledge in science learning. It also describes two successful CREATE interventions that build academic and…

The role of primary caregiver vocabulary knowledge in the development of bilingual children’s vocabulary skills

PubMed Central

Buac, Milijana; Gross, Megan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita

2015-01-01

Purpose The current study examined the impact of environmental factors (SES, the percent of language exposure to English and to Spanish, and primary caregivers’ vocabulary knowledge) on bilingual children’s vocabulary skills. Method We measured vocabulary skills of 58 bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 7 who spoke Spanish as their native language and English as their second language. Data related to language environment in the home, specifically the percent of language exposure to each language and SES, were obtained from primary caregiver interviews. Primary caregivers’ vocabulary knowledge was measured directly using expressive and receptive vocabulary assessments in both languages. Results Multiple regression analyses indicated that primary caregivers’ vocabulary knowledge, the child’s percent exposure to each language, and SES were robust predictors of children’s English, but not Spanish, vocabulary skills. Conclusions These findings indicate that in the early school age, primary caregiver vocabulary skills have a stronger impact on bilingual children’s second-language than native-language vocabulary. PMID:24824882

Powerful Learning Tools for ELLs: Using Native Language, Familiar Examples, and Concept Mapping to Teach English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dong, Yu Ren

2013-01-01

This article highlights how English language learners' (ELLs) prior knowledge can be used to help learn science vocabulary. The article explains that the concept of prior knowledge needs to encompass the ELL student's native language, previous science learning, native literacy skills, and native cultural knowledge and life experiences.…

Teachers' Beliefs about the Role of Prior Language Knowledge in Learning and How These Influence Teaching Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Angelis, Gessica

2011-01-01

The present study was developed to assess teachers' beliefs on (1) the role of prior language knowledge in language learning; (2) the perceived usefulness of language knowledge in modern society; and (3) the teaching practices to be used with multilingual students. Subjects were 176 secondary schoolteachers working in Italy (N = 103), Austria (N =…

Weak and Strong Novice Readers of English as a Foreign Language: Effects of First Language and Socioeconomic Status

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kahn-Horwitz, Janina; Shimron, Joseph; Sparks, Richard L.

2006-01-01

This study examined individual differences among beginning readers of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study concentrated on the effects of underlying first language (L1) knowledge as well as EFL letter and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological and morphological awareness, spelling, vocabulary knowledge, and word reading in Hebrew L1, in…

Generation of Signs within Semantic and Phonological Categories: Data from Deaf Adults and Children Who Use American Sign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beal-Alvarez, Jennifer S.; Figueroa, Daileen M.

2017-01-01

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

A Bag of Concepts Approach for Biomedical Document Classification Using Wikipedia Knowledge*. Spanish-English Cross-language Case Study.

PubMed

Mouriño-García, Marcos A; Pérez-Rodríguez, Roberto; Anido-Rifón, Luis E

2017-10-26

The ability to efficiently review the existing literature is essential for the rapid progress of research. This paper describes a classifier of text documents, represented as vectors in spaces of Wikipedia concepts, and analyses its suitability for classification of Spanish biomedical documents when only English documents are available for training. We propose the cross-language concept matching (CLCM) technique, which relies on Wikipedia interlanguage links to convert concept vectors from the Spanish to the English space. The performance of the classifier is compared to several baselines: a classifier based on machine translation, a classifier that represents documents after performing Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), and a classifier that uses a domain-specific semantic annotator (MetaMap). The corpus used for the experiments (Cross-Language UVigoMED) was purpose-built for this study, and it is composed of 12,832 English and 2,184 Spanish MEDLINE abstracts. The performance of our approach is superior to any other state-of-the art classifier in the benchmark, with performance increases up to: 124% over classical machine translation, 332% over MetaMap, and 60 times over the classifier based on ESA. The results have statistical significance, showing p-values < 0.0001. Using knowledge mined from Wikipedia to represent documents as vectors in a space of Wikipedia concepts and translating vectors between language-specific concept spaces, a cross-language classifier can be built, and it performs better than several state-of-the-art classifiers.

Cultivating Bilingual Learners' Language Arts Knowledge: A Framework for Successful Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Almaguer, Isela; Esquierdo, J. Joy

2013-01-01

It is essential to support bilingual learners' language and academic development; however, teaching second language learners English has taken precedence over teaching content area knowledge and vocabulary, specifically for language arts. The focus has shifted from content area instruction to primarily second language instruction due to an…

PASTE: patient-centered SMS text tagging in a medication management system.

PubMed

Stenner, Shane P; Johnson, Kevin B; Denny, Joshua C

2012-01-01

To evaluate the performance of a system that extracts medication information and administration-related actions from patient short message service (SMS) messages. Mobile technologies provide a platform for electronic patient-centered medication management. MyMediHealth (MMH) is a medication management system that includes a medication scheduler, a medication administration record, and a reminder engine that sends text messages to cell phones. The object of this work was to extend MMH to allow two-way interaction using mobile phone-based SMS technology. Unprompted text-message communication with patients using natural language could engage patients in their healthcare, but presents unique natural language processing challenges. The authors developed a new functional component of MMH, the Patient-centered Automated SMS Tagging Engine (PASTE). The PASTE web service uses natural language processing methods, custom lexicons, and existing knowledge sources to extract and tag medication information from patient text messages. A pilot evaluation of PASTE was completed using 130 medication messages anonymously submitted by 16 volunteers via a website. System output was compared with manually tagged messages. Verified medication names, medication terms, and action terms reached high F-measures of 91.3%, 94.7%, and 90.4%, respectively. The overall medication name F-measure was 79.8%, and the medication action term F-measure was 90%. Other studies have demonstrated systems that successfully extract medication information from clinical documents using semantic tagging, regular expression-based approaches, or a combination of both approaches. This evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of extracting medication information from patient-generated medication messages.

Teacher knowledge of basic language concepts and dyslexia.

PubMed

Washburn, Erin K; Joshi, R Malatesha; Binks-Cantrell, Emily S

2011-05-01

Roughly one-fifth of the US population displays one or more symptoms of dyslexia: a specific learning disability that affects an individual's ability to process written language. Consequently, elementary school teachers are teaching students who struggle with inaccurate or slow reading, poor spelling, poor writing, and other language processing difficulties. Findings from studies have indicated that teachers lack essential knowledge needed to teach struggling readers, particularly children with dyslexia. However, few studies have sought to assess teachers' knowledge and perceptions about dyslexia in conjunction with knowledge of basic language concepts related to reading instruction. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine elementary school teachers' knowledge of basic language concepts and their knowledge and perceptions about dyslexia. Findings from the present study indicated that teachers, on average, were able to display implicit skills related to certain basic language concepts (i.e. syllable counting), but failed to demonstrate explicit knowledge of others (i.e. phonics principles). Also, teachers seemed to hold the common misconception that dyslexia is a visual processing deficit rather than phonological processing deficit. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Translation between representation languages

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Vanbaalen, Jeffrey

1994-01-01

A capability for translating between representation languages is critical for effective knowledge base reuse. A translation technology for knowledge representation languages based on the use of an interlingua for communicating knowledge is described. The interlingua-based translation process consists of three major steps: translation from the source language into a subset of the interlingua, translation between subsets of the interlingua, and translation from a subset of the interlingua into the target language. The first translation step into the interlingua can typically be specified in the form of a grammar that describes how each top-level form in the source language translates into the interlingua. In cases where the source language does not have a declarative semantics, such a grammar is also a specification of a declarative semantics for the language. A methodology for building translators that is currently under development is described. A 'translator shell' based on this methodology is also under development. The shell has been used to build translators for multiple representation languages and those translators have successfully translated nontrivial knowledge bases.

VisualUrText: A Text Analytics Tool for Unstructured Textual Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zainol, Zuraini; Jaymes, Mohd T. H.; Nohuddin, Puteri N. E.

2018-05-01

The growing amount of unstructured text over Internet is tremendous. Text repositories come from Web 2.0, business intelligence and social networking applications. It is also believed that 80-90% of future growth data is available in the form of unstructured text databases that may potentially contain interesting patterns and trends. Text Mining is well known technique for discovering interesting patterns and trends which are non-trivial knowledge from massive unstructured text data. Text Mining covers multidisciplinary fields involving information retrieval (IR), text analysis, natural language processing (NLP), data mining, machine learning statistics and computational linguistics. This paper discusses the development of text analytics tool that is proficient in extracting, processing, analyzing the unstructured text data and visualizing cleaned text data into multiple forms such as Document Term Matrix (DTM), Frequency Graph, Network Analysis Graph, Word Cloud and Dendogram. This tool, VisualUrText, is developed to assist students and researchers for extracting interesting patterns and trends in document analyses.

Implicit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, and Achievement in Second Language (L2) Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gutierrez, Xavier

2012-01-01

Implicit and explicit knowledge of the second language (L2) are two central constructs in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in obtaining valid and reliable measures of L2 learners' implicit and explicit knowledge (e.g., Bowles, 2011; R. Ellis, 2005). The purpose of the present study…

Measuring Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge: What Can Heritage Language Learners Contribute?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bowles, Melissa A.

2011-01-01

Although claims about explicit and implicit language knowledge are central to many debates in SLA, little research has been dedicated to measuring the two knowledge types (R. Ellis, 2004, 2005). The purpose of this study was to validate the use of the battery of tests reported in Ellis (2005) to measure implicit and explicit language knowledge.…

[The role of Hunayn, physician and translator].

PubMed

Habbi, J

1994-01-01

Hunayn ibn Ishāq is one of the most important translators of scientific and medical texts in the 'abbāsid era. He played a fundamental role in the transmission of Greek medical science to the Arab world, because of his deep knowledge of the Syriac, Arabic and Persian languages. He translated about 300 texts, especially medical ones, and he founded a school in which many disciples were instructed in the art of translation, like his son Ishāq and his nephew Hubays. Hunayn composed a lexicon of scientific terminology, using a new method of translation which represents his great innovation.

Ontology driven modeling for the knowledge of genetic susceptibility to disease.

PubMed

Lin, Yu; Sakamoto, Norihiro

2009-05-12

For the machine helped exploring the relationships between genetic factors and complex diseases, a well-structured conceptual framework of the background knowledge is needed. However, because of the complexity of determining a genetic susceptibility factor, there is no formalization for the knowledge of genetic susceptibility to disease, which makes the interoperability between systems impossible. Thus, the ontology modeling language OWL was used for formalization in this paper. After introducing the Semantic Web and OWL language propagated by W3C, we applied text mining technology combined with competency questions to specify the classes of the ontology. Then, an N-ary pattern was adopted to describe the relationships among these defined classes. Based on the former work of OGSF-DM (Ontology of Genetic Susceptibility Factors to Diabetes Mellitus), we formalized the definition of "Genetic Susceptibility", "Genetic Susceptibility Factor" and other classes by using OWL-DL modeling language; and a reasoner automatically performed the classification of the class "Genetic Susceptibility Factor". The ontology driven modeling is used for formalization the knowledge of genetic susceptibility to complex diseases. More importantly, when a class has been completely formalized in an ontology, the OWL reasoning can automatically compute the classification of the class, in our case, the class of "Genetic Susceptibility Factors". With more types of genetic susceptibility factors obtained from the laboratory research, our ontologies always needs to be refined, and many new classes must be taken into account to harmonize with the ontologies. Using the ontologies to develop the semantic web needs to be applied in the future.

Language structures used by kindergartners with cochlear implants: relationship to phonological awareness, lexical knowledge and hearing loss.

PubMed

Nittrouer, Susan; Sansom, Emily; Low, Keri; Rice, Caitlin; Caldwell-Tarr, Amanda

2014-01-01

Listeners use their knowledge of how language is structured to aid speech recognition in everyday communication. When it comes to children with congenital hearing loss severe enough to warrant cochlear implants (CIs), the question arises of whether these children can acquire the language knowledge needed to aid speech recognition, in spite of only having spectrally degraded signals available to them. That question was addressed in the present study. Specifically, there were three goals: (1) to compare the language structures used by children with CIs to those of children with normal hearing (NH); (2) to assess the amount of variance in the language measures explained by phonological awareness and lexical knowledge; and (3) to assess the amount of variance in the language measures explained by factors related to the hearing loss itself and subsequent treatment. Language samples were obtained and transcribed for 40 children who had just completed kindergarten: 19 with NH and 21 with CIs. Five measures were derived from Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts: (1) mean length of utterance in morphemes, (2) number of conjunctions, excluding and, (3) number of personal pronouns, (4) number of bound morphemes, and (5) number of different words. Measures were also collected on phonological awareness and lexical knowledge. Statistics examined group differences, as well as the amount of variance in the language measures explained by phonological awareness, lexical knowledge, and factors related to hearing loss and its treatment for children with CIs. Mean scores of children with CIs were roughly one standard deviation below those of children with NH on all language measures, including lexical knowledge, matching outcomes of other studies. Mean scores of children with CIs were closer to two standard deviations below those of children with NH on two out of three measures of phonological awareness (specifically those related to phonemic structure). Lexical knowledge explained significant amounts of variance on three language measures, but only one measure of phonological awareness (sensitivity to word-final phonemic structure) explained any significant amount of unique variance beyond that, and on only one language measure (number of bound morphemes). Age at first implant, but no other factors related to hearing loss or its treatment, explained significant amounts of variance on the language measures, as well. In spite of early intervention and advances in implant technology, children with CIs are still delayed in learning language, but grammatical knowledge is less affected than phonological awareness. Because there was little contribution to language development measured for phonological awareness independent of lexical knowledge, it was concluded that children with CIs could benefit from intervention focused specifically on helping them learn language structures, in spite of the likely phonological deficits they experience as a consequence of having degraded inputs.

The Role of Reading in a Japanese Language Program: A Response to the MLA Ad Hoc Committee's Report (2007)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marcus, Ginger

2010-01-01

Reading is defined as a socio-cultural act negotiated between text and reader, and the act of reading is considered to be a cognitive process that involves knowledge not only of symbols/letters, vocabulary and structure, but also of culture. In other words, in order to understand the intentions of the author and to formulate meaning, the second…

Clinical Natural Language Processing in 2015: Leveraging the Variety of Texts of Clinical Interest.

PubMed

Névéol, A; Zweigenbaum, P

2016-11-10

To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2015 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). A systematic review of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section by searching bibliographic databases with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Section editors first selected a shortlist of candidate best papers that were then peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. The clinical NLP best paper selection shows that clinical NLP is making use of a variety of texts of clinical interest to contribute to the analysis of clinical information and the building of a body of clinical knowledge. The full review process highlighted five papers analyzing patient-authored texts or seeking to connect and aggregate multiple sources of information. They provide a contribution to the development of methods, resources, applications, and sometimes a combination of these aspects. The field of clinical NLP continues to thrive through the contributions of both NLP researchers and healthcare professionals interested in applying NLP techniques to impact clinical practice. Foundational progress in the field makes it possible to leverage a larger variety of texts of clinical interest for healthcare purposes.

BioCreative V track 4: a shared task for the extraction of causal network information using the Biological Expression Language.

PubMed

Rinaldi, Fabio; Ellendorff, Tilia Renate; Madan, Sumit; Clematide, Simon; van der Lek, Adrian; Mevissen, Theo; Fluck, Juliane

2016-01-01

Automatic extraction of biological network information is one of the most desired and most complex tasks in biological and medical text mining. Track 4 at BioCreative V attempts to approach this complexity using fragments of large-scale manually curated biological networks, represented in Biological Expression Language (BEL), as training and test data. BEL is an advanced knowledge representation format which has been designed to be both human readable and machine processable. The specific goal of track 4 was to evaluate text mining systems capable of automatically constructing BEL statements from given evidence text, and of retrieving evidence text for given BEL statements. Given the complexity of the task, we designed an evaluation methodology which gives credit to partially correct statements. We identified various levels of information expressed by BEL statements, such as entities, functions, relations, and introduced an evaluation framework which rewards systems capable of delivering useful BEL fragments at each of these levels. The aim of this evaluation method is to help identify the characteristics of the systems which, if combined, would be most useful for achieving the overall goal of automatically constructing causal biological networks from text. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

A Randomized Trial Examining Three Strategies for Supporting Health Insurance Decisions among the Uninsured.

PubMed

Politi, Mary C; Kaphingst, Kimberly A; Liu, Jingxia Esther; Perkins, Hannah; Furtado, Karishma; Kreuter, Matthew W; Shacham, Enbal; McBride, Timothy

2016-10-01

The Affordable Care Act allows uninsured individuals to select health insurance from numerous private plans, a challenging decision-making process. This study examined the effectiveness of strategies to support health insurance decisions among the uninsured. Participants (N = 343) from urban, suburban, and rural areas were randomized to 1 of 3 conditions: 1) a plain language table; 2) a visual condition where participants chose what information to view and in what order; and 3) a narrative condition. We administered measures assessing knowledge (true/false responses about key features of health insurance), confidence in choices (uncertainty subscale of the Decisional Conflict Scale), satisfaction (items from the Health Information National Trends Survey), preferences for insurance features (measured on a Likert scale from not at all important to very important), and plan choice. Although we did not find significant differences in knowledge, confidence in choice, or satisfaction across condition, participants across conditions made value-consistent choices, selecting plans that aligned with their preferences for key insurance features. In addition, those with adequate health literacy skills as measured by the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine-Short Form (REALM-SF) had higher knowledge overall ([Formula: see text] = 6.1 v. 4.8, P < 0.001) and preferred the plain language table to the visual (P = 0.04) and visual to narrative (P = 0.0002) conditions, while those with inadequate health literacy skills showed no preference for study condition. A similar pattern was seen for those with higher subjective numeracy skills and higher versus lower education with regard to health insurance knowledge. Individuals with higher income felt less confident in their choices ([Formula: see text] = 28.7 v. 10.0, where higher numbers indicate less confidence/more uncertainty; P = 0.004). Those developing materials about the health insurance marketplace to support health insurance decisions might consider starting with plain language tables, presenting health insurance terminology in context, and organizing information according to ways the uninsured might use and value insurance features. Individuals with limited health literacy and numeracy skills and those with lower education face unique challenges selecting health insurance and weighing tradeoffs between cost and coverage. © The Author(s) 2015.

Development of a CD-ROM on written language for the continuing education of elementary school teachers

PubMed Central

GONÇALVES, Thaís dos Santos; CRENITTE, Patrícia Abreu Pinheiro

2011-01-01

Distance education has emerged to minimize the anxiety of many professionals who need to update their knowledge, but do not have the time and opportunity to travel to educational centers. Objectives To describe the development of a CD-ROM to provide distance continuing education to basic school teachers that addresses issues related to written language. Material and Methods Previously, a script was developed with themes related to the acquisition and development of written language. Subsequently, a technical team transformed the texts in multimedia language. Results The titles of each content area addressed are available on buttons and links. The files can be viewed in a linear sequence, allowing the teacher to start learning at the desired moment and go straight to the file that he or she wants to access. Videos that show practical applications of the concepts available in text are included. Conclusions Brazil is a developing country. The use of technologies for education reduces cultural isolation among education professionals. It is necessary to focus on making teaching materials for distance education. In order to provide an effective learning environment, the learners reality should be considered. A multidisciplinary team should prepare the materials. The development of educational material for distance education on the acquisition and development of written language seems not only appropriate, but also warranted to provide professional growth opportunity for teachers who need time flexibility and/or live far away from academic centers. PMID:22230988

The Effects of Student and Text Characteristics on the Oral Reading Fluency of Middle-Grade Students

PubMed Central

Barth, Amy E.; Tolar, Tammy D.; Fletcher, Jack M.; Francis, David

2014-01-01

We evaluated the effects of student characteristics (sight word reading efficiency, phonological decoding, verbal knowledge, level of reading ability, grade, gender) and text features (passage difficulty, length, genre, and language and discourse attributes) on the oral reading fluency of a sample of middle-school students in Grades 6–8 (N = 1,794). Students who were struggling (n = 704) and typically developing readers (n = 1,028) were randomly assigned to read five 1-min passages from each of 5 Lexile bands (within student range of 550 Lexiles). A series of multilevel analyses showed that student and text characteristics contributed uniquely to oral reading fluency rates. Student characteristics involving sight word reading efficiency and level of decoding ability accounted for more variability than reader type and verbal knowledge, with small, but statistically significant effects of grade and gender. The most significant text feature was passage difficulty level. Interactions involving student text characteristics, especially attributes involving overall ability level and difficulty of the text, were also apparent. These results support views of the development of oral reading fluency that involve interactions of student and text characteristics and highlight the importance of scaling for passage difficulty level in assessing individual differences in oral reading fluency. PMID:24567659

Learning the Structure of Biomedical Relationships from Unstructured Text

PubMed Central

Percha, Bethany; Altman, Russ B.

2015-01-01

The published biomedical research literature encompasses most of our understanding of how drugs interact with gene products to produce physiological responses (phenotypes). Unfortunately, this information is distributed throughout the unstructured text of over 23 million articles. The creation of structured resources that catalog the relationships between drugs and genes would accelerate the translation of basic molecular knowledge into discoveries of genomic biomarkers for drug response and prediction of unexpected drug-drug interactions. Extracting these relationships from natural language sentences on such a large scale, however, requires text mining algorithms that can recognize when different-looking statements are expressing similar ideas. Here we describe a novel algorithm, Ensemble Biclustering for Classification (EBC), that learns the structure of biomedical relationships automatically from text, overcoming differences in word choice and sentence structure. We validate EBC's performance against manually-curated sets of (1) pharmacogenomic relationships from PharmGKB and (2) drug-target relationships from DrugBank, and use it to discover new drug-gene relationships for both knowledge bases. We then apply EBC to map the complete universe of drug-gene relationships based on their descriptions in Medline, revealing unexpected structure that challenges current notions about how these relationships are expressed in text. For instance, we learn that newer experimental findings are described in consistently different ways than established knowledge, and that seemingly pure classes of relationships can exhibit interesting chimeric structure. The EBC algorithm is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of problems in biomedical text mining. PMID:26219079

Rich Language Analysis for Counterterrorism

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guidère, Mathieu; Howard, Newton; Argamon, Shlomo

Accurate and relevant intelligence is critical for effective counterterrorism. Too much irrelevant information is as bad or worse than not enough information. Modern computational tools promise to provide better search and summarization capabilities to help analysts filter and select relevant and key information. However, to do this task effectively, such tools must have access to levels of meaning beyond the literal. Terrorists operating in context-rich cultures like fundamentalist Islam use messages with multiple levels of interpretation, which are easily misunderstood by non-insiders. This chapter discusses several kinds of such “encryption” used by terrorists and insurgents in the Arabic language, and how knowledge of such methods can be used to enhance computational text analysis techniques for use in counterterrorism.

A Natural Language Interface Concordant with a Knowledge Base.

PubMed

Han, Yong-Jin; Park, Seong-Bae; Park, Se-Young

2016-01-01

The discordance between expressions interpretable by a natural language interface (NLI) system and those answerable by a knowledge base is a critical problem in the field of NLIs. In order to solve this discordance problem, this paper proposes a method to translate natural language questions into formal queries that can be generated from a graph-based knowledge base. The proposed method considers a subgraph of a knowledge base as a formal query. Thus, all formal queries corresponding to a concept or a predicate in the knowledge base can be generated prior to query time and all possible natural language expressions corresponding to each formal query can also be collected in advance. A natural language expression has a one-to-one mapping with a formal query. Hence, a natural language question is translated into a formal query by matching the question with the most appropriate natural language expression. If the confidence of this matching is not sufficiently high the proposed method rejects the question and does not answer it. Multipredicate queries are processed by regarding them as a set of collected expressions. The experimental results show that the proposed method thoroughly handles answerable questions from the knowledge base and rejects unanswerable ones effectively.

Presentation planning using an integrated knowledge base

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Arens, Yigal; Miller, Lawrence; Sondheimer, Norman

1988-01-01

A description is given of user interface research aimed at bringing together multiple input and output modes in a way that handles mixed mode input (commands, menus, forms, natural language), interacts with a diverse collection of underlying software utilities in a uniform way, and presents the results through a combination of output modes including natural language text, maps, charts and graphs. The system, Integrated Interfaces, derives much of its ability to interact uniformly with the user and the underlying services and to build its presentations, from the information present in a central knowledge base. This knowledge base integrates models of the application domain (Navy ships in the Pacific region, in the current demonstration version); the structure of visual displays and their graphical features; the underlying services (data bases and expert systems); and interface functions. The emphasis is on a presentation planner that uses the knowledge base to produce multi-modal output. There has been a flurry of recent work in user interface management systems. (Several recent examples are listed in the references). Existing work is characterized by an attempt to relieve the software designer of the burden of handcrafting an interface for each application. The work has generally focused on intelligently handling input. This paper deals with the other end of the pipeline - presentations.

Is Word-Problem Solving a Form of Text Comprehension?

PubMed Central

Fuchs, Lynn S.; Fuchs, Douglas; Compton, Donald L.; Hamlett, Carol L.; Wang, Amber Y.

2015-01-01

This study’s hypotheses were that (a) word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension that involves language comprehension processes, working memory, and reasoning, but (b) WP solving differs from other forms of text comprehension by requiring WP-specific language comprehension as well as general language comprehension. At the start of the 2nd grade, children (n = 206; on average, 7 years, 6 months) were assessed on general language comprehension, working memory, nonlinguistic reasoning, processing speed (a control variable), and foundational skill (arithmetic for WPs; word reading for text comprehension). In spring, they were assessed on WP-specific language comprehension, WPs, and text comprehension. Path analytic mediation analysis indicated that effects of general language comprehension on text comprehension were entirely direct, whereas effects of general language comprehension on WPs were partially mediated by WP-specific language. By contrast, effects of working memory and reasoning operated in parallel ways for both outcomes. PMID:25866461

CLAMP - a toolkit for efficiently building customized clinical natural language processing pipelines.

PubMed

Soysal, Ergin; Wang, Jingqi; Jiang, Min; Wu, Yonghui; Pakhomov, Serguei; Liu, Hongfang; Xu, Hua

2017-11-24

Existing general clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems such as MetaMap and Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System have been successfully applied to information extraction from clinical text. However, end users often have to customize existing systems for their individual tasks, which can require substantial NLP skills. Here we present CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing), a newly developed clinical NLP toolkit that provides not only state-of-the-art NLP components, but also a user-friendly graphic user interface that can help users quickly build customized NLP pipelines for their individual applications. Our evaluation shows that the CLAMP default pipeline achieved good performance on named entity recognition and concept encoding. We also demonstrate the efficiency of the CLAMP graphic user interface in building customized, high-performance NLP pipelines with 2 use cases, extracting smoking status and lab test values. CLAMP is publicly available for research use, and we believe it is a unique asset for the clinical NLP community. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Knowledge Structure Measures of Reader's Situation Models across Languages: Translation Engenders Richer Structure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Kyung; Clariana, Roy B.

2015-01-01

In order to further validate and extend the application of recent knowledge structure (KS) measures to second language settings, this investigation explores how second language (L2, English) situation models are influenced by first language (L1, Korean) translation tasks. Fifty Korean low proficient English language learners were asked to read an…

Semantic-syntactic partial word knowledge growth through reading.

PubMed

Wagovich, Stacy A; Hill, Margaret S; Petroski, Gregory F

2015-02-01

Incidental reading provides a powerful opportunity for partial word knowledge growth in the school-age years. The extent to which children of differing language abilities can use reading experiences to glean partial knowledge of words is not well understood. The purpose of this study was to compare semantic-syntactic partial word knowledge growth of children with higher language skills (HL group; overall language standard scores of 85 or higher) to that of children with relatively lower language skills (LL group; overall receptive or expressive standard score below 85). Thirty-two children, 16 per group, silently read stories containing unfamiliar nouns and verbs 3 times over a 1-week period. Semantic-syntactic partial word knowledge growth was assessed after each reading and 2-3 days later to assess retention. Over time, both groups showed significant partial word knowledge growth, with the HL group showing significantly more growth. In addition, both groups retained knowledge several days later. Regardless of language skill level, children benefit from multiple exposures to unfamiliar words in reading in their development and retention of semantic-syntactic partial word knowledge growth.

Language, Language Development and Teaching English to Emergent Bilingual Users: Challenging the Common Knowledge Theory in Teacher Education & K-12 School Settings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Faltis, Christian

2013-01-01

Popular views about language and how children and youth learn language are based mainly in cognitive approaches in support of a common knowledge theory of language development. This common theory feeds into the efforts to increase teacher and learner accountability as measured on narrow assessments of what it means to use language well and in…

Methodology to build medical ontology from textual resources.

PubMed

Baneyx, Audrey; Charlet, Jean; Jaulent, Marie-Christine

2006-01-01

In the medical field, it is now established that the maintenance of unambiguous thesauri goes through ontologies. Our research task is to help pneumologists code acts and diagnoses with a software that represents medical knowledge through a domain ontology. In this paper, we describe our general methodology aimed at knowledge engineers in order to build various types of medical ontologies based on terminology extraction from texts. The hypothesis is to apply natural language processing tools to textual patient discharge summaries to develop the resources needed to build an ontology in pneumology. Results indicate that the joint use of distributional analysis and lexico-syntactic patterns performed satisfactorily for building such ontologies.

Problems of information support in scientific research

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shamaev, V. G.; Gorshkov, A. B.

2015-11-01

This paper reports on the creation of the open access Akustika portal (AKDATA.RU) designed to provide Russian-language easy-to-read and search information on acoustics and related topics. The absence of a Russian-language publication in foreign databases means that it is effectively lost for much of the scientific community. The portal has three interrelated sections: the Akustika information search system (ISS) (Acoustics), full-text archive of the Akusticheskii Zhurnal (Acoustic Journal), and 'Signal'naya informatsiya' ('Signaling information') on acoustics. The paper presents a description of the Akustika ISS, including its structure, content, interface, and information search capabilities for basic and applied research in diverse areas of science, engineering, biology, medicine, etc. The intended users of the portal are physicists, engineers, and engineering technologists interested in expanding their research activities and seeking to increase their knowledge base. Those studying current trends in the Russian-language contribution to international science may also find the portal useful.

Second Language Text Comprehension: Processing within a Multilayered System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Donin, Janet; Graves, Barbara; Goyette, Els

2004-01-01

The results of a within-subject cross-language study of text comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners are presented. Text comprehension and sentence reading time measures were obtained for matched narrative and procedural texts in English and French from adult learners of French as a second language (FSL) at two levels of French…

Form-Focused Discovery Activities in English Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ogeyik, Muhlise Cosgun

2011-01-01

Form-focused discovery activities allow language learners to grasp various aspects of a target language by contributing implicit knowledge by using discovered explicit knowledge. Moreover, such activities can assist learners to perceive and discover the features of their language input. In foreign language teaching environments, they can be used…

Generative and Item-Specific Knowledge of Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morgan, Emily Ida Popper

2016-01-01

The ability to generate novel utterances compositionally using generative knowledge is a hallmark property of human language. At the same time, languages contain non-compositional or idiosyncratic items, such as irregular verbs, idioms, etc. This dissertation asks how and why language achieves a balance between these two systems--generative and…

Do written mandatory accreditation standards for residential care positively model learning organizations? Textual and critical discourse analysis.

PubMed

Bell, Erica; Robinson, Andrew; See, Catherine

2013-11-01

Unprecedented global population ageing accompanied by increasing complexity of aged care present major challenges of quality in aged care. In the business literature, Senge's theory of adaptive learning organisations offers a model of organisational quality. However, while accreditation of national standards is an increasing mechanism for achieving quality in aged care, there are anecdotal concerns it creates a 'minimum standards compliance mentality' and no evidence about whether it reinforces learning organisations. The research question was 'Do mandatory national accreditation standards for residential aged care, as they are written, positively model learning organisations?'. Automatic text analysis was combined with critical discourse analysis to analyse the presence of learning concepts from Senge's learning organisation theory in an exhaustive sample of national accreditation standards from 7 countries. The two stages of analysis were: (1) quantitative mapping of the presence of learning organisation concepts in standards using Bayesian-based textual analytics software and (2) qualitative critical discourse analysis to further examine how the language of standards so identified may be modelling learning organisation concepts. The learning concepts 'training', 'development', 'knowledge', and 'systems' are present with relative frequencies of 19%, 11%, 10%, and 10% respectively in the 1944 instances, in paragraph-sized text blocks, considered. Concepts such as 'team', 'integration', 'learning', 'change' and 'innovation' occur with 7%, 6%, 5%, 5%, and 1% relative frequencies respectively. Learning concepts tend to co-occur with negative rather than positive sentiment language in the 3176 instances in text blocks containing sentiment language. Critical discourse analysis suggested that standards generally use the language of organisational change and learning in limited ways that appear to model 'learning averse' communities of practice and organisational cultures. The aged care quality challenge and the role of standards need rethinking. All standards implicitly or explicitly model an organisation of some type. If standards can model a limited and negative learning organisation language, they could model a well-developed and positive learning organisation language. In the context of the global aged care crisis, the modelling of learning organisations is probably critical for minimal competence in residential aged care and certainly achievable in the language of standards. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Locating the global: culture, language and science education for indigenous students

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McKinley, Elizabeth

2005-02-01

The international literature suggests the use of indigenous knowledge (IK) and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) contexts in science education to provide motivation and self-esteem for indigenous students is widespread. However, the danger of alienating culture (as knowledge) from the language in which the worldview is embedded seems to have been left out of the philosophical and pedagogical debates surrounding research and comment in the field. This paper argues that one of the main ways in which indigenous knowledge systems will survive and thrive is through the establishment of programmes taught through indigenous languages so that a dialectal relationship between language and knowledge is established that continues to act as the wellspring. The article concludes by reviewing the situation in Aotearoa New Zealand with respect to the indigenous population, Maori, and the recent science education initiatives in te reo Maori (Maori language).

PASTE: patient-centered SMS text tagging in a medication management system

PubMed Central

Johnson, Kevin B; Denny, Joshua C

2011-01-01

Objective To evaluate the performance of a system that extracts medication information and administration-related actions from patient short message service (SMS) messages. Design Mobile technologies provide a platform for electronic patient-centered medication management. MyMediHealth (MMH) is a medication management system that includes a medication scheduler, a medication administration record, and a reminder engine that sends text messages to cell phones. The object of this work was to extend MMH to allow two-way interaction using mobile phone-based SMS technology. Unprompted text-message communication with patients using natural language could engage patients in their healthcare, but presents unique natural language processing challenges. The authors developed a new functional component of MMH, the Patient-centered Automated SMS Tagging Engine (PASTE). The PASTE web service uses natural language processing methods, custom lexicons, and existing knowledge sources to extract and tag medication information from patient text messages. Measurements A pilot evaluation of PASTE was completed using 130 medication messages anonymously submitted by 16 volunteers via a website. System output was compared with manually tagged messages. Results Verified medication names, medication terms, and action terms reached high F-measures of 91.3%, 94.7%, and 90.4%, respectively. The overall medication name F-measure was 79.8%, and the medication action term F-measure was 90%. Conclusion Other studies have demonstrated systems that successfully extract medication information from clinical documents using semantic tagging, regular expression-based approaches, or a combination of both approaches. This evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of extracting medication information from patient-generated medication messages. PMID:21984605

People Use their Knowledge of Common Events to Understand Language, and Do So as Quickly as Possible

PubMed Central

McRae, Ken; Matsuki, Kazunaga

2011-01-01

People possess a great deal of knowledge about how the world works, and it is undoubtedly true that adults use this knowledge when understanding and producing language. However, psycholinguistic theories differ regarding whether this extra-linguistic pragmatic knowledge can be activated and used immediately, or only after a delay. The authors present research that investigates whether people immediately use their generalized knowledge of common events when understanding language. This research demonstrates that (i) individual isolated words immediately activate event-based knowledge; (ii) combinations of words in sentences immediately constrain people’s event-based expectations for concepts that are upcoming in language; (iii) syntax modulates people’s expectations for ensuing concepts; and (iv) event-based knowledge can produce expectations for ensuing syntactic structures. It is concluded that theories of sentence comprehension must allow for the rapid dynamic interplay among these sources of information. PMID:22125574

Reading the World through Words: Cultural Themes in Heritage Chinese Language Textbooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan

2008-01-01

This paper explores the social and cultural knowledge embedded in the textbooks for language and literacy education in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo School, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It examines how Chinese language arts textbooks introduce the child reader to cultural knowledge considered legitimate and valued in China as…

The Knowledge and Perceptions of Prospective Teachers and Speech Language Therapists in Collaborative Language and Literacy Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Leanne; McNeill, Brigid; Gillon, Gail T.

2015-01-01

Successful collaboration among speech and language therapists (SLTs) and teachers fosters the creation of communication friendly classrooms that maximize children's spoken and written language learning. However, these groups of professionals may have insufficient opportunity in their professional study to develop the shared knowledge, perceptions…

Bridging the Divide: Second Language Teachers, Pedagogy, Content Knowledge, and Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fryling, Margo J.

2013-01-01

This study examines the use of technology, pedagogy and content knowledge with second language teachers, and comparing Title 1 and non Title 1 schools. Technology can be used to provide unique learning opportunities for second language learners. Second language students can benefit from technology by practicing skills, increasing motivation,…

Documenting Indigenous Knowledge and Languages: Research Planning & Protocol.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leonard, Beth

2001-01-01

The author's experiences of learning her heritage language of Deg Xinag, an Athabascan language spoken in Alaska, serve as a backdrop for discussing issues in learning endangered indigenous languages. When Deg Xinag is taught by linguists, obvious differences between English and Deg Xinag are not articulated, due to the lack of knowledge of…

Views of Constructed Languages, with Special Reference to Esperanto: An Experimental Study.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Edwards, John; MacPherson, Lynn

1987-01-01

A study of college faculty and student attitudes toward artificial languages, particularly Esperanto, found faculty more knowledgeable but less enthusiastic than students about the languages. Faculty were less likely to see practical benefits in the knowledge and use of constructed languages, and less interested in seeing them taught or learning…

Disconnection between Language and Culture: A Case Study of Iranian English Textbooks.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Majdzadeh, Mojgan

This paper asserts that lack of cultural knowledge related to English among Iranian students who pursue advanced education abroad affects their English language proficiency. It examines whether the disconnection between the English language and the culture of that language embodied in Iranian English textbooks hinders students' knowledge and use…

Scaling laws and model of words organization in spoken and written language

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bian, Chunhua; Lin, Ruokuang; Zhang, Xiaoyu; Ma, Qianli D. Y.; Ivanov, Plamen Ch.

2016-01-01

A broad range of complex physical and biological systems exhibits scaling laws. The human language is a complex system of words organization. Studies of written texts have revealed intriguing scaling laws that characterize the frequency of words occurrence, rank of words, and growth in the number of distinct words with text length. While studies have predominantly focused on the language system in its written form, such as books, little attention is given to the structure of spoken language. Here we investigate a database of spoken language transcripts and written texts, and we uncover that words organization in both spoken language and written texts exhibits scaling laws, although with different crossover regimes and scaling exponents. We propose a model that provides insight into words organization in spoken language and written texts, and successfully accounts for all scaling laws empirically observed in both language forms.

Identification of threats using linguistics-based knowledge extraction.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chew, Peter A.

One of the challenges increasingly facing intelligence analysts, along with professionals in many other fields, is the vast amount of data which needs to be reviewed and converted into meaningful information, and ultimately into rational, wise decisions by policy makers. The advent of the world wide web (WWW) has magnified this challenge. A key hypothesis which has guided us is that threats come from ideas (or ideology), and ideas are almost always put into writing before the threats materialize. While in the past the 'writing' might have taken the form of pamphlets or books, today's medium of choice is themore » WWW, precisely because it is a decentralized, flexible, and low-cost method of reaching a wide audience. However, a factor which complicates matters for the analyst is that material published on the WWW may be in any of a large number of languages. In 'Identification of Threats Using Linguistics-Based Knowledge Extraction', we have sought to use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and other similar text analysis techniques to map documents from the WWW, in whatever language they were originally written, to a common language-independent vector-based representation. This then opens up a number of possibilities. First, similar documents can be found across language boundaries. Secondly, a set of documents in multiple languages can be visualized in a graphical representation. These alone offer potentially useful tools and capabilities to the intelligence analyst whose knowledge of foreign languages may be limited. Finally, we can test the over-arching hypothesis--that ideology, and more specifically ideology which represents a threat, can be detected solely from the words which express the ideology--by using the vector-based representation of documents to predict additional features (such as the ideology) within a framework based on supervised learning. In this report, we present the results of a three-year project of the same name. We believe these results clearly demonstrate the general feasibility of an approach such as that outlined above. Nevertheless, there are obstacles which must still be overcome, relating primarily to how 'ideology' should be defined. We discuss these and point to possible solutions.« less

Parenting Predictors of Cognitive Skills and Emotion Knowledge in Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Preschoolers

PubMed Central

Merz, Emily C.; Zucker, Tricia A.; Landry, Susan H.; Williams, Jeffrey M.; Assel, Michael; Taylor, Heather B.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Phillips, Beth M.; Clancy-Menchetti, Jeanine; Barnes, Marcia A.; Eisenberg, Nancy; de Villiers, Jill

2014-01-01

This study examined the concurrent and longitudinal associations of parental responsiveness and inferential language input with cognitive skills and emotion knowledge among socioeconomically disadvantaged preschoolers. Parents and 2- to 4-year-old children (mean age = 3.21 years; N=284) participated in a parent-child free play session, and children completed cognitive (language, early literacy, early mathematics) and emotion knowledge assessments. One year later, children completed the same assessment battery. Parental responsiveness was coded from the videotaped parent-child free play sessions, and parental inferential language input was coded from transcripts of a subset of 127 of these sessions. All analyses controlled for child age, gender, and parental education, and longitudinal analyses controlled for initial skill level. Parental responsiveness significantly predicted all concurrent cognitive skills as well as literacy, math, and emotion knowledge one year later. Parental inferential language input was significantly positively associated with children's concurrent emotion knowledge. In longitudinal analyses, an interaction was found such that for children with stronger initial language skills, higher levels of parental inferential language input facilitated greater vocabulary development, whereas for children with weaker initial language skills, there was no association between parental inferential language input and change in children's vocabulary skills. These findings further our understanding of the roles of parental responsiveness and inferential language input in promoting children's school readiness skills. PMID:25576967

Standard model of knowledge representation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yin, Wensheng

2016-09-01

Knowledge representation is the core of artificial intelligence research. Knowledge representation methods include predicate logic, semantic network, computer programming language, database, mathematical model, graphics language, natural language, etc. To establish the intrinsic link between various knowledge representation methods, a unified knowledge representation model is necessary. According to ontology, system theory, and control theory, a standard model of knowledge representation that reflects the change of the objective world is proposed. The model is composed of input, processing, and output. This knowledge representation method is not a contradiction to the traditional knowledge representation method. It can express knowledge in terms of multivariate and multidimensional. It can also express process knowledge, and at the same time, it has a strong ability to solve problems. In addition, the standard model of knowledge representation provides a way to solve problems of non-precision and inconsistent knowledge.

Examining EFL Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and the Adoption of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning: A Partial Least Square Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsu, Liwei

2016-01-01

This study examines EFL (English as a foreign Language) teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and how such knowledge affects the adoption of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL). A total of 158 in-service Taiwanese English teachers were surveyed. Two frameworks were employed to examine latent constructs: TPACK and the…

The Language Used to Articulate Content as an Aspect of Pedagogical Content Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chick, Helen

2015-01-01

Mathematical knowledge in classrooms is mediated through the use of both technical and informal language. This paper is a report of a study of the language use of teachers as they examine students' work and discuss teaching for the topic of fraction operations. This provides a window on their pedagogical content knowledge and also on the way in…

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children

PubMed Central

Shahar-Yames, Daphna; Eviatar, Zohar; Prior, Anat

2018-01-01

Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components. PMID:29515486

Preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs in Finland.

PubMed

Aro, Mikko; Björn, Piia Maria

2016-04-01

The aim of the study was to explore the Finnish preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs relevant for literacy acquisition. A total of 150 preservice teachers and 74 inservice teachers participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire that assessed self-perceived expertise in reading instruction, knowledge of phonology and phonics, and knowledge of morphology. The inservice teachers outperformed the preservice teachers in knowledge of phonology and phonics, as well as morphology. Both groups' knowledge of morphology was markedly lower than their knowledge of phonology and phonics. Because early reading instruction does not focus on the morphological level of language but is phonics-based, this result was expected. However, the findings also revealed a lack of explicit knowledge of basic phonological constructs and less-than-optimal phonemic awareness skills in both groups. Problems in phonemic skills manifested mostly as responding to the phonological tasks based on orthographic knowledge, which reflects an overreliance on the one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. The preservice teachers' perceptions of expertise were weakly related to their knowledge and skills. Among the inservice teachers, perceived expertise and knowledge of language constructs were completely unrelated. Although the study was exploratory, these findings suggest that within the Finnish teacher education there is a need to focus more on explicit content studies for language structures and the concepts relevant for literacy instruction, as well as phonological and phonemic skills.

Knowledge Base Editor (SharpKBE)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tikidjian, Raffi; James, Mark; Mackey, Ryan

2007-01-01

The SharpKBE software provides a graphical user interface environment for domain experts to build and manage knowledge base systems. Knowledge bases can be exported/translated to various target languages automatically, including customizable target languages.

Teachers' Professional Knowledge for Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Assessing the Outcomes of Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

König, Johannes; Lammerding, Sandra; Nold, Günter; Rohde, Andreas; Strauß, Sarah; Tachtsoglou, Sarantis

2016-01-01

Despite an increasing research interest in subject-specific teacher knowledge, the scientific understanding regarding teachers' professional knowledge for teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is very limited. This study therefore applies standardized tests to directly assess content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and…

Developing and Validating a Survey of Korean Early Childhood English Teachers' Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Jung In

2015-01-01

The main purpose of this study is to develop and validate a valid measure of the early childhood (EC) English teacher knowledge. Through extensive literature review on second/foreign language (L2/FL) teacher knowledge, early childhood teacher knowledge and early childhood language teacher knowledge, and semi-structured interviews from current…

Valx: A system for extracting and structuring numeric lab test comparison statements from text

PubMed Central

Hao, Tianyong; Liu, Hongfang; Weng, Chunhua

2017-01-01

Objectives To develop an automated method for extracting and structuring numeric lab test comparison statements from text and evaluate the method using clinical trial eligibility criteria text. Methods Leveraging semantic knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and domain knowledge acquired from the Internet, Valx takes 7 steps to extract and normalize numeric lab test expressions: 1) text preprocessing, 2) numeric, unit, and comparison operator extraction, 3) variable identification using hybrid knowledge, 4) variable - numeric association, 5) context-based association filtering, 6) measurement unit normalization, and 7) heuristic rule-based comparison statements verification. Our reference standard was the consensus-based annotation among three raters for all comparison statements for two variables, i.e., HbA1c and glucose, identified from all of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes trials in ClinicalTrials.gov. Results The precision, recall, and F-measure for structuring HbA1c comparison statements were 99.6%, 98.1%, 98.8% for Type 1 diabetes trials, and 98.8%, 96.9%, 97.8% for Type 2 Diabetes trials, respectively. The precision, recall, and F-measure for structuring glucose comparison statements were 97.3%, 94.8%, 96.1% for Type 1 diabetes trials, and 92.3%, 92.3%, 92.3% for Type 2 diabetes trials, respectively. Conclusions Valx is effective at extracting and structuring free-text lab test comparison statements in clinical trial summaries. Future studies are warranted to test its generalizability beyond eligibility criteria text. The open-source Valx enables its further evaluation and continued improvement among the collaborative scientific community. PMID:26940748

Valx: A System for Extracting and Structuring Numeric Lab Test Comparison Statements from Text.

PubMed

Hao, Tianyong; Liu, Hongfang; Weng, Chunhua

2016-05-17

To develop an automated method for extracting and structuring numeric lab test comparison statements from text and evaluate the method using clinical trial eligibility criteria text. Leveraging semantic knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and domain knowledge acquired from the Internet, Valx takes seven steps to extract and normalize numeric lab test expressions: 1) text preprocessing, 2) numeric, unit, and comparison operator extraction, 3) variable identification using hybrid knowledge, 4) variable - numeric association, 5) context-based association filtering, 6) measurement unit normalization, and 7) heuristic rule-based comparison statements verification. Our reference standard was the consensus-based annotation among three raters for all comparison statements for two variables, i.e., HbA1c and glucose, identified from all of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes trials in ClinicalTrials.gov. The precision, recall, and F-measure for structuring HbA1c comparison statements were 99.6%, 98.1%, 98.8% for Type 1 diabetes trials, and 98.8%, 96.9%, 97.8% for Type 2 diabetes trials, respectively. The precision, recall, and F-measure for structuring glucose comparison statements were 97.3%, 94.8%, 96.1% for Type 1 diabetes trials, and 92.3%, 92.3%, 92.3% for Type 2 diabetes trials, respectively. Valx is effective at extracting and structuring free-text lab test comparison statements in clinical trial summaries. Future studies are warranted to test its generalizability beyond eligibility criteria text. The open-source Valx enables its further evaluation and continued improvement among the collaborative scientific community.

Reading and Learning from L2 Text: Effects of Reading Goal, Topic Familiarity, and Language Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Horiba, Yukie; Fukaya, Keiko

2015-01-01

This study examined the effect of reading goal, topic-familiarity, and language proficiency on text comprehension and learning. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students with high and low topic-familiarity read and recalled a text. Some were told in advance to expect a recall task in a particular language--the first language (L1) or second…

The cross-linguistic transfer of early literacy skills: the role of initial L1 and L2 skills and language of instruction.

PubMed

Cárdenas-Hagan, Elsa; Carlson, Coleen D; Pollard-Durodola, Sharolyn D

2007-07-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of initial first and second language proficiencies as well as the language of instruction that a student receives on the relationship between native language ability of students who are English language learners (ELLs) and their development of early literacy skills and the second language. This study investigated the development of early language and literacy skills among Spanish-speaking students in 2 large urban school districts, 1 middle-size urban district, and 1 border district. A total of 1,016 ELLs in kindergarten participated in the study. Students were administered a comprehensive battery of tests in English and Spanish, and classroom observations provided information regarding the Spanish or English language use of the teacher. Findings from this study suggest that Spanish-speaking students with high Spanish letter name and sound knowledge tend to show high levels of English letter name and sound knowledge. ELLs with low Spanish and English letter name and sound knowledge tend to show high levels of English letter name and sound knowledge when they are instructed in English. Letter name and sound identification skills are fairly highly positively correlated across languages in the beginning of the kindergarten year. In addition, phonological awareness skills appear to be the area with the most significant and direct transfer of knowledge, and language skills do not appear to be a factor in the development of phonological awareness. Finally, the relationship between oral language skills across languages was low, suggesting little relationship between oral language skills across languages at the beginning of the kindergarten year. Results from this study suggest that pedagogical decisions for ELLs should not only consider effective instructional literacy strategies but also acknowledge that the language of instruction for Spanish-speaking ELLs may produce varying results for different students.

Theoretical foundations for information representation and constraint specification

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Menzel, Christopher P.; Mayer, Richard J.

1991-01-01

Research accomplished at the Knowledge Based Systems Laboratory of the Department of Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University is described. Outlined here are the theoretical foundations necessary to construct a Neutral Information Representation Scheme (NIRS), which will allow for automated data transfer and translation between model languages, procedural programming languages, database languages, transaction and process languages, and knowledge representation and reasoning control languages for information system specification.

Language-Independent and Language-Specific Aspects of Early Literacy: An Evaluation of the Common Underlying Proficiency Model.

PubMed

Goodrich, J Marc; Lonigan, Christopher J

2017-08-01

According to the common underlying proficiency model (Cummins, 1981), as children acquire academic knowledge and skills in their first language, they also acquire language-independent information about those skills that can be applied when learning a second language. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relevance of the common underlying proficiency model for the early literacy skills of Spanish-speaking language-minority children using confirmatory factor analysis. Eight hundred fifty-eight Spanish-speaking language-minority preschoolers (mean age = 60.83 months, 50.2% female) participated in this study. Results indicated that bifactor models that consisted of language-independent as well as language-specific early literacy factors provided the best fits to the data for children's phonological awareness and print knowledge skills. Correlated factors models that only included skills specific to Spanish and English provided the best fits to the data for children's oral language skills. Children's language-independent early literacy skills were significantly related across constructs and to language-specific aspects of early literacy. Language-specific aspects of early literacy skills were significantly related within but not across languages. These findings suggest that language-minority preschoolers have a common underlying proficiency for code-related skills but not language-related skills that may allow them to transfer knowledge across languages.

A Bag of Concepts Approach for Biomedical Document Classification Using Wikipedia Knowledge.

PubMed

Mouriño-García, Marcos A; Pérez-Rodríguez, Roberto; Anido-Rifón, Luis E

2017-01-01

The ability to efficiently review the existing literature is essential for the rapid progress of research. This paper describes a classifier of text documents, represented as vectors in spaces of Wikipedia concepts, and analyses its suitability for classification of Spanish biomedical documents when only English documents are available for training. We propose the cross-language concept matching (CLCM) technique, which relies on Wikipedia interlanguage links to convert concept vectors from the Spanish to the English space. The performance of the classifier is compared to several baselines: a classifier based on machine translation, a classifier that represents documents after performing Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), and a classifier that uses a domain-specific semantic an- notator (MetaMap). The corpus used for the experiments (Cross-Language UVigoMED) was purpose-built for this study, and it is composed of 12,832 English and 2,184 Spanish MEDLINE abstracts. The performance of our approach is superior to any other state-of-the art classifier in the benchmark, with performance increases up to: 124% over classical machine translation, 332% over MetaMap, and 60 times over the classifier based on ESA. The results have statistical significance, showing p-values < 0.0001. Using knowledge mined from Wikipedia to represent documents as vectors in a space of Wikipedia concepts and translating vectors between language-specific concept spaces, a cross-language classifier can be built, and it performs better than several state-of-the-art classifiers. Schattauer GmbH.

Representing Medical Knowledge in the Form of Structured Text: The Development of Current Disease Descriptions*

PubMed Central

Nelson, Stuart J.; Sherertz, David D.; Erlbaum, Mark S.; Tuttle, Mark S.

1989-01-01

As part of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) initiative, some 900 diseases have been described using “structured text.” Structured text is words and short phrases entered under labelled contexts. Vocabulary is not controlled. The contexts comprise a template for the disease description. The structured text is both manipulable by machine and readable by humans. Use of the template was natural, and only a few problems arose in using the template. Instructions to disease description composers must be explicit in definitions of the contexts. Diseases to be described are chosen, after clustering related diseases, according to the distinctions that physicians practicing in the area under question believe are important. Limiting disease descriptions to primitive observations and to entities otherwise described within the corpus appears to be both feasible and desirable.

Examination of the Relationship Between Autonomy and English Achievement as Mediated by Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety.

PubMed

Ghorbandordinejad, Farhad; Ahmadabad, Roghayyeh Moradian

2016-06-01

This study investigated the relationship between autonomy and English language achievement among third-grade high school students as mediated by foreign language classroom anxiety in a city in the north-west of Iran. A sample of 400 students (187 males, and 213 females) was assessed for their levels of autonomy and foreign language anxiety using the Autonomy Questionnaire and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), respectively. Participants' scores on their final English exam were also used as the measurement of their English achievement. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a strong correlation between learners' autonomy and their English achievement (r [Formula: see text] .406, n [Formula: see text] 400, [Formula: see text]). Also, foreign language classroom anxiety was found to be significantly and negatively correlated with English achievement (r [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text].472, n [Formula: see text] 400, [Formula: see text]). Hierarchical multiple regression was used to assess the ability of autonomy to predict language learning achievement, after controlling for the influence of anxiety. In sum, the results of hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that foreign language classroom anxiety significantly mediates the relationship between autonomy and English language achievement. Implications for both teachers and learners, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Concept recognition for extracting protein interaction relations from biomedical text

PubMed Central

Baumgartner, William A; Lu, Zhiyong; Johnson, Helen L; Caporaso, J Gregory; Paquette, Jesse; Lindemann, Anna; White, Elizabeth K; Medvedeva, Olga; Cohen, K Bretonnel; Hunter, Lawrence

2008-01-01

Background: Reliable information extraction applications have been a long sought goal of the biomedical text mining community, a goal that if reached would provide valuable tools to benchside biologists in their increasingly difficult task of assimilating the knowledge contained in the biomedical literature. We present an integrated approach to concept recognition in biomedical text. Concept recognition provides key information that has been largely missing from previous biomedical information extraction efforts, namely direct links to well defined knowledge resources that explicitly cement the concept's semantics. The BioCreative II tasks discussed in this special issue have provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of concept recognition in the field of biomedical language processing. Results: Through the modular construction of a protein interaction relation extraction system, we present several use cases of concept recognition in biomedical text, and relate these use cases to potential uses by the benchside biologist. Conclusion: Current information extraction technologies are approaching performance standards at which concept recognition can begin to deliver high quality data to the benchside biologist. Our system is available as part of the BioCreative Meta-Server project and on the internet . PMID:18834500

Comparison of LISP and MUMPS as implementation languages for knowledge-based systems

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Curtis, A.C.

1984-01-01

Major components of knowledge-based systems are summarized, along with the programming language features generally useful in their implementation. LISP and MUMPS are briefly described and compared as vehicles for building knowledge-based systems. The paper concludes with suggestions for extensions to MUMPS which might increase its usefulness in artificial intelligence applications without affecting the essential nature of the language. 8 references.

Points of Departure: Developing the Knowledge Base of ESL and FSL Teachers for K-12 Programs in Canada

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Faez, Farahnaz

2011-01-01

In this paper I examine similarities and differences between the required knowledge base of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) and French as a second language (FSL) for teaching in Kindergarten through Grade 12 programs in Canada. Drawing on knowledge base frameworks in language teacher education (Freeman and Johnson, 1998; Richards,…

Children's Comprehension of Object Relative Sentences: It's Extant Language Knowledge That Matters, Not Domain-General Working Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rusli, Yazmin Ahmad; Montgomery, James W.

2017-01-01

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether extant language (lexical) knowledge or domain-general working memory is the better predictor of comprehension of object relative sentences for children with typical development. We hypothesized that extant language knowledge, not domain-general working memory, is the better predictor. Method:…

The contribution of phonological knowledge, memory, and language background to reading comprehension in deaf populations

PubMed Central

Hirshorn, Elizabeth A.; Dye, Matthew W. G.; Hauser, Peter; Supalla, Ted R.; Bavelier, Daphne

2015-01-01

While reading is challenging for many deaf individuals, some become proficient readers. Little is known about the component processes that support reading comprehension in these individuals. Speech-based phonological knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension in hearing individuals, yet its role in deaf readers is controversial. This could reflect the highly varied language backgrounds among deaf readers as well as the difficulty of disentangling the relative contribution of phonological versus orthographic knowledge of spoken language, in our case ‘English,’ in this population. Here we assessed the impact of language experience on reading comprehension in deaf readers by recruiting oral deaf individuals, who use spoken English as their primary mode of communication, and deaf native signers of American Sign Language. First, to address the contribution of spoken English phonological knowledge in deaf readers, we present novel tasks that evaluate phonological versus orthographic knowledge. Second, the impact of this knowledge, as well as memory measures that rely differentially on phonological (serial recall) and semantic (free recall) processing, on reading comprehension was evaluated. The best predictor of reading comprehension differed as a function of language experience, with free recall being a better predictor in deaf native signers than in oral deaf. In contrast, the measures of English phonological knowledge, independent of orthographic knowledge, best predicted reading comprehension in oral deaf individuals. These results suggest successful reading strategies differ across deaf readers as a function of their language experience, and highlight a possible alternative route to literacy in deaf native signers. Highlights: 1. Deaf individuals vary in their orthographic and phonological knowledge of English as a function of their language experience. 2. Reading comprehension was best predicted by different factors in oral deaf and deaf native signers. 3. Free recall memory (primacy effect) better predicted reading comprehension in deaf native signers as compared to oral deaf or hearing individuals. 4. Language experience should be taken into account when considering cognitive processes that mediate reading in deaf individuals. PMID:26379566

Statistical Analysis of the Indus Script Using n-Grams

PubMed Central

Yadav, Nisha; Joglekar, Hrishikesh; Rao, Rajesh P. N.; Vahia, Mayank N.; Adhikari, Ronojoy; Mahadevan, Iravatham

2010-01-01

The Indus script is one of the major undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. The small size of the corpus, the absence of bilingual texts, and the lack of definite knowledge of the underlying language has frustrated efforts at decipherment since the discovery of the remains of the Indus civilization. Building on previous statistical approaches, we apply the tools of statistical language processing, specifically n-gram Markov chains, to analyze the syntax of the Indus script. We find that unigrams follow a Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution. Text beginner and ender distributions are unequal, providing internal evidence for syntax. We see clear evidence of strong bigram correlations and extract significant pairs and triplets using a log-likelihood measure of association. Highly frequent pairs and triplets are not always highly significant. The model performance is evaluated using information-theoretic measures and cross-validation. The model can restore doubtfully read texts with an accuracy of about 75%. We find that a quadrigram Markov chain saturates information theoretic measures against a held-out corpus. Our work forms the basis for the development of a stochastic grammar which may be used to explore the syntax of the Indus script in greater detail. PMID:20333254

Roles of Linguistic Knowledge, Metacognitive Knowledge and Metacognitive Strategy Use in Speaking and Listening Proficiency of Iranian EFL Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghapanchi, Zargham; Taheryan, Atefeh

2012-01-01

This study examined the influence of language knowledge, metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on speaking and listening proficiency. Ninety six freshman and sophomore Iranian university students (male = 6, female = 90) were participated in the study. Two kinds of questionnaire and one language knowledge test were administered.…

Evaluation, Use, and Refinement of Knowledge Representations through Acquisition Modeling

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pearl, Lisa

2017-01-01

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

From Scribbles to Scrabble: Preschool Children’s Developing Knowledge of Written Language

PubMed Central

Puranik, Cynthia S.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to concurrently examine the development of written language across several writing tasks and to investigate how writing features develop in preschool children. Emergent written language knowledge of 372 preschoolers was assessed using numerous writing tasks. The findings from this study indicate that children possess a great deal of writing knowledge before beginning school. Children appear to progress along a continuum from scribbling to conventional spelling, and this progression is linear and task dependent. There was clear evidence to support the claim that universal writing features develop before language-specific features. Children as young as 3 years possess knowledge regarding universal and language-specific writing features. There is substantial developmental continuity in literacy skills from the preschool period into early elementary grades. Implications of these findings on writing development are discussed. PMID:22448101

Using a visual programming language to bridge the cognitive gap between a novice's mental model and program code

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, Bryan J.

Current research suggests that many students do not know how to program very well at the conclusion of their introductory programming course. We believe that a reason novices have such difficulties learning programming is because engineering novices often learn through a lecture format where someone with programming knowledge lectures to novices, the novices attempt to absorb the content, and then reproduce it during exams. By primarily appealing to programming novices who prefer to understand visually, we research whether programming novices understand programming better if computer science concepts are presented using a visual programming language than if these programs are presented using a text-based programming language. This method builds upon previous research that suggests that most engineering students are visual learners, and we propose that using a flow-based visual programming language will address some of the most important and difficult topics to novices of programming. We use an existing flow-model tool, RAPTOR, to test this method, and share the program understanding results using this theory.

Between the confusion of tongues and the gift of tongues. Or working as a psychoanalyst in a foreign language.

PubMed

Jiménez, Juan Pablo

2004-12-01

The author worked as a psychoanalyst for 5 years in Germany. In this paper, he attempts to answer the question 'How was it possible that, in spite of his imperfect knowledge of German, notwithstanding a deepening understanding of the language during his residence in the country, he was able to successfully treat so many patients? ' He starts by putting forward some distinctions between the activity of interpretation as translation of the unconscious with the patient in session and the activity of translation of texts. After a brief exegetic review of the myths of Babel and Pentecost, he suggests that the analyst working in a foreign language moves between 'the confusion of tongues' and the 'gift of tongues', that is, between Babel and Pentecost. He presents some vignettes to illustrate typical situations he encountered in his practice. Finally, he draws some conclusions from this experience of psychoanalytic polyglotism, mainly on the basis of the communicative function that modern infant research assigns to affect attunement and verbal language.

Adaptation of a Vocabulary Test from British Sign Language to American Sign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mann, Wolfgang; Roy, Penny; Morgan, Gary

2016-01-01

This study describes the adaptation process of a vocabulary knowledge test for British Sign Language (BSL) into American Sign Language (ASL) and presents results from the first round of pilot testing with 20 deaf native ASL signers. The web-based test assesses the strength of deaf children's vocabulary knowledge by means of different mappings of…

Eloquence in the Marketplace: Erudition and Pragmatic Humanism in the Restoration of Chymia.

PubMed

Moran, Bruce T

2014-01-01

This chapter focuses upon the relation between textual and social practices that influenced the formation of a communal approach to acquiring chemical knowledge in the early seventeenth century. It also describes the utilitarian purpose of a humanist-inspired program of chemical learning that blended practices of textual/linguistic expertise and artisanal know-how. Humanism, made pragmatic, sought to define the principles for "making things well." In the design of Andreas Libavius (ca. 1555-1616), interpretive intuitions resulting from practiced reading of ancient and medieval texts combined with a knowledge of workshop language to build consensus about chymia's tools, procedures, and materials and to define its principia artificialia.

On the Composition of Public-Coin Zero-Knowledge Protocols

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-05-31

only languages in BPP have public-coin black-box zero-knowledge protocols that are secure under an unbounded (polynomial) number of parallel...only languages in BPP have public-coin black-box zero-knowledge protocols that are secure under an unbounded (polynomial) number of parallel repetitions...and Krawczyk [GK96b] show that only languages in BPP have constant-round public-coin (stand-alone) black-box ZK protocols with negligible soundness

Finding Relevant Data in a Sea of Languages

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-04-26

full machine-translated text , unbiased word clouds , query-biased word clouds , and query-biased sentence...and information retrieval to automate language processing tasks so that the limited number of linguists available for analyzing text and spoken...the crime (stock market). The Cross-LAnguage Search Engine (CLASE) has already preprocessed the documents, extracting text to identify the language

Are preservice teachers prepared to teach struggling readers?

PubMed

Washburn, Erin K; Joshi, R Malatesha; Binks Cantrell, Emily

2011-06-01

Reading disabilities such as dyslexia, a specific learning disability that affects an individual's ability to process written language, are estimated to affect 15-20% of the general population. Consequently, elementary school teachers encounter students who struggle with inaccurate or slow reading, poor spelling, poor writing, and other language processing difficulties. However, recent evidence may suggest that teacher preparation programs are not providing preservice teachers with information about basic language constructs and other components related to scientifically based reading instruction. As a consequence preservice teachers have not exhibited explicit knowledge of such concepts in previous studies. Few studies have sought to assess preservice teachers' knowledge about dyslexia in conjunction with knowledge of basic language concepts. The purpose of the present study was to examine elementary school preservice teachers' knowledge of basic language constructs and their perceptions and knowledge about dyslexia. Findings from the present study suggest that preservice teachers, on average, are able to display implicit skills related to certain basic language constructs (i.e., syllable counting), but fail to demonstrate explicit knowledge of others (i.e., phonics principles). Also, preservice teachers seem to hold the common misconception that dyslexia is a visual perception deficit rather than a problem with phonological processing. Implications for future research as well as teacher preparation are discussed.

A general natural-language text processor for clinical radiology.

PubMed Central

Friedman, C; Alderson, P O; Austin, J H; Cimino, J J; Johnson, S B

1994-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. DESIGN: The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. MEASUREMENTS: The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. RESULTS: Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system (combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70% and 87%. Training of the query component increased recall to 85% without changing precision. PMID:7719797

The text telephone as an empowering technology in the daily lives of deaf people-A qualitative study.

PubMed

Roos, Carin; Wengelin, Åsa

2016-01-01

Text-telephone technology (TTY) has been used for communication between deaf people since 1964. There is a gap in the scientific knowledge about the influence this may have had especially in relation to effective participation in society as well as the feeling of capability, confidence and collective meaningfulness. The aim of the present paper is, first, to disentangle the different aspects of TTY as an empowering artifact; and, second, to explore the role of TTY in their lives. To provide a framework for the empirical analysis, the paper draws on Empowerment Theory: personal control, a proactive approach to life, and a critical awareness of one's socio-political environment. Twenty-four people aged 16-64 with Swedish Sign Language (SSL) as their first language were interviewed. The findings indicate that the introduction of the TTY was of great importance for self-esteem, equality and independence. The findings show that feelings of empowerment are closely linked to language use and contextually driven, and it is in interaction between deaf and hearing that such feelings arise (or not). The results indicate the need for further research into Deaf people's use of other means of interacting, using modern technique for example in social digital media and interactive platforms.

Pragmatics & Language Learning. Volume 12

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kasper, Gabriele, Ed.; Nguyen, Hanh thi, Ed.; Yoshimi, Dina Rudolph, Ed.; Yoshioka, Jim K., Ed.

2010-01-01

This volume examines the organization of second language and multilingual speakers' talk and pragmatic knowledge across a range of naturalistic and experimental activities. Based on data collected on Danish, English, Hawai'i Creole, Indonesian, and Japanese as target languages, the contributions explore the nexus of pragmatic knowledge,…

Poor knowledge of methotrexate associated with older age and limited English-language proficiency in a diverse rheumatoid arthritis cohort

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Introduction Our objective was to determine rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients’ understanding of methotrexate and assess whether knowledge varies by age, education, English language proficiency, or other disease-related factors. Methods Adults with RA (n = 135) who were enrollees of an observational cohort completed a structured telephone interview in their preferred language between August 2007 and July 2009. All subjects who reported taking methotrexate were asked 11 questions about the medication in addition to demographics, education level, and language proficiency. Primary outcome was a total score below the 50th percentile (considered inadequate methotrexate knowledge). Bivariable and multivariable logistic regressions were performed. Covariates included demographics, language proficiency, education, and disease characteristics. Results Of 135 subjects, 83% were female, with a mean age of 55 ± 14 years. The majority spoke English (64%), followed by 22% Spanish and 14% Cantonese or Mandarin. Limited English language proficiency (LEP) was reported in 42%. Mean methotrexate knowledge score was 5.4 ± 2.6 (range, 0 to 10); 73 (54%) had a score lower than 5 (of 10). Age older than 55, less than high school education, LEP, better function, and biologic use were independently associated with poor knowledge. Conclusions In a diverse RA cohort, overall methotrexate knowledge was poor. Older age and limited proficiency in English were significant correlates of poor knowledge. Identification of language barriers and improved clinician-patient communication around methotrexate dosing and side effects may lead to improved safety and enhanced benefits of this commonly used RA medication. PMID:24432366

Representing Medical Knowledge in a Terminological Language is Difficult1

PubMed Central

Haimowits, Ira J.; Patil, Ramesh S.; Szolovits, Peter

1988-01-01

We report on an experiment to use a modern knowledge representation language, NIKL, to express the knowledge of a sophisticated medical reasoning program, ABEL. We are attempting to put the development of more capable medical programs on firmer representational grounds by moving from the ad hoc representations typical of current programs toward more principled representation languages now in use or under construction. Our experience with the project reported here suggests caution, however. Attempts at cleanliness and efficiency in the design of representation languages lead to a poverty of expressiveness that makes it difficult if not impossible to say in such languages what needs to be stated to support the application.

On the Use of Framed Knowledge in Language Comprehension.

DTIC Science & Technology

1978-09-01

knowledge In order to understand a certain stereotyped situation . We must , in other words , harmonize this idea with the opposite one of inodularhy. I...AD A Qb2 680 YAL E UNIV NEW HAVEN CONN DEPT OF cosPute. SCIENCE Fe’S 3/7 UNCLASSIFIED ON THE USE oc FRAMED KNOWLEDGE IN LANGUAGE COIflCHENSION.ftJ...DO JO? ~Jp~QDUC! L1GT3LY. ~~~~~~~~VERI# C) C.) w _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ON THE USE OF FRAMED KNOWLEDGE IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION Running t i t le

Enhancing Grammatical Structures in Web-Based Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zilio, Leonardo; Wilkens, Rodrigo; Fairon, Cédrick

2017-01-01

Presentation of raw text to language learners is not enough to ensure learning. Thus, we present the Smart and Immersive Language Learning Environment (SMILLE), a system that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for enhancing grammatical information in texts chosen by a given user. The enhancements, carried out by means of text highlighting, are…

English to Sanskrit Machine Translation Using Transfer Based approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pathak, Ganesh R.; Godse, Sachin P.

2010-11-01

Translation is one of the needs of global society for communicating thoughts and ideas of one country with other country. Translation is the process of interpretation of text meaning and subsequent production of equivalent text, also called as communicating same meaning (message) in another language. In this paper we gave detail information on how to convert source language text in to target language text using Transfer Based Approach for machine translation. Here we implemented English to Sanskrit machine translator using transfer based approach. English is global language used for business and communication but large amount of population in India is not using and understand the English. Sanskrit is ancient language of India most of the languages in India are derived from Sanskrit. Sanskrit can be act as an intermediate language for multilingual translation.

Lost in Translation? Comparative Education Research and the Production of Academic Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mazenod, Anna

2018-01-01

The worth of academic knowledge tends to be tested against global metrics of citations and articles published in high-ranking English language academic journals. This paper examines academic knowledge production in three local fields of research with different national languages (English, Finnish and French). It focuses on knowledge production on…

Clips as a knowledge based language

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Harrington, James B.

1987-01-01

CLIPS is a language for writing expert systems applications on a personal or small computer. Here, the CLIPS programming language is described and compared to three other artificial intelligence (AI) languages (LISP, Prolog, and OPS5) with regard to the processing they provide for the implementation of a knowledge based system (KBS). A discussion is given on how CLIPS would be used in a control system.

Complex Problem Solving in L1 Education: Senior High School Students' Knowledge of the Language Problem-Solving Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Velzen, Joke H.

2017-01-01

The solving of reasoning problems in first language (L1) education can produce an understanding of language, and student autonomy in language problem solving, both of which are contemporary goals in senior high school education. The purpose of this study was to obtain a better understanding of senior high school students' knowledge of the language…

"You never know who are Sami or speak Sami" Clinicians' experiences with language-appropriate care to Sami-speaking patients in outpatient mental health clinics in Northern Norway.

PubMed

Dagsvold, Inger; Møllersen, Snefrid; Stordahl, Vigdis

2016-01-01

The Indigenous population in Norway, the Sami, have a statutory right to speak and be spoken to in the Sami language when receiving health services. There is, however, limited knowledge about how clinicians deal with this in clinical practice. This study explores how clinicians deal with language-appropriate care with Sami-speaking patients in specialist mental health services. This study aims to explore how clinicians identify and respond to Sami patients' language data, as well as how they experience provision of therapy to Sami-speaking patients in outpatient mental health clinics in Sami language administrative districts. Data were collected using qualitative method, through individual interviews with 20 therapists working in outpatient mental health clinics serving Sami populations in northern Norway. A thematic analysis inspired by systematic text reduction was employed. Two themes were identified: (a) identification of Sami patients' language data and (b) experiences with provision of therapy to Sami-speaking patients. Findings indicate that clinicians are not aware of patients' language needs prior to admission and that they deal with identification of language data and offer of language-appropriate care ad hoc when patients arrive. Sami-speaking participants reported always offering language choice and found more profound understanding of patients' experiences when Sami language was used. Whatever language Sami-speaking patients may choose, they are found to switch between languages during therapy. Most non-Sami-speaking participants reported offering Sami-speaking services, but the patients chose to speak Norwegian. However, a few of the participants maintained language awareness and could identify language needs despite a patient's refusal to speak Sami in therapy. Finally, some non-Sami-speaking participants were satisfied if they understood what the patients were saying. They left it to patients to address language problems, only to discover patients' complaints in retrospect. Consequently, language-appropriate care depends on individual clinicians' language assessment and offering of language choice.

Finnish and UK English Pre-Teen Children's Text Message Language and Its Relationship with Their Literacy Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Plester, B.; Lerkkanen, M.-K.; Linjama, L. J.; Rasku-Puttonen, H.; Littleton, K.

2011-01-01

The aim of the study was to demonstrate the style of text language used by Finnish pre-teen texters (n = 65) and determine how their text language related to their traditional literacy skills, and compare descriptively these results with earlier results from work with young English texters. Three kinds of text messages (natural texts, elicited…

A tale of two analogues: learning at a distance from the ancient greeks and maya and the problem of deciphering extraterrestrial radio transmissions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Finney, Ben; Bentley, Jerry

The transmission of ancient Greek learning and science to medieval western Europe via the translation of Greek and Arab texts is often cited as a terrestrial example of "learning at a distance" that could occur by means of the decipherment of radio messages from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. However, the translation between such closely related languages as Greek, Latin and Arabic and the decipherment of radio messages from an extraterrestrial civilization to the point where humans could understand them are only nominally analogous tasks. A terrestrial example of such "learning at a distance" from an ancient civilization that perhaps better prepares us for thinking about the immense task inherent in any interstellar knowledge transmission is provided by the lengthy and troubled efforts of western scholars to decipher the inscriptions left by the ancient Maya and to learn from them about this ancient civilization. Only recently, with the rejection of the ideographic fallacy that Maya glyphs symbolized ideas directly without the mediation of language and with the application of linguistic knowledge of Maya languages has it been possible to decipher the Maya inscriptions and learn from them about their science and culture. This experience suggests that without any knowledge of languages in which extraterrestrial messages might be composed, their decipherment could be most problematic. The Maya case is also relevant to the common suggestion that advanced extraterrestrials would deliberately compose messages not in their own natural languages but in artificial ones using logic, numbers, and scientific constants presumably shared among all intelligent civilizations, or at least those in their radio-communicative phases. Numbers and calendrical dating system were the first parts of the Mayan inscriptions to be translated, albeit with the aid of partial "Rosetta stones" left by the Spanish conquerors. This success served, however, to reinforce the ideographic fallacy, and led to rather fantastic notions that the inscriptions dealt only with mathematical, astronomical and mystical domains, when in fact most deal with dynastic history. Examination of the Maya case suggests that if we are to employ terrestrial examples to help us think about extraterrestrial knowledge transmission, we should explore the range of human experience and not just focus upon those examples which support our hopes.

Teachers' Knowledge of Second Language and Curriculum: A Narrative Experience (Conocimiento de los profesores acerca de la segunda lengua y el currículo: una experiencia narrativa)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mendieta Aguilar, Jenny Alexandra

2011-01-01

This study was carried out with a group of three teachers who work for the foreign languages department of a private university in Colombia. It was aimed at unveiling and characterizing the narrative knowledge these teachers hold about language teaching and learning processes as well as the role this knowledge plays in the constant construction…

New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hall, Robert A., Jr.

This text focuses on the nature of language learning in the light of modern linguistic analysis. Common linguistic problems encountered by students of eight major languages are examined--Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian. The text discusses the nature of language, building new language habits, overcoming…

Knowledge of Connectors as Cohesion in Text: A Comparative Study of Native English and ESL (English as a Second Language) Speakers

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-08-18

for public release; distribution 2b. DECLASSIFICATION / DOWNGRADING SCHEDULE ufnl i mi ted. 4. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) S. MONITORING... ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER(S) 6a. NAME OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION 6b OFFICE SYMBOL 7a. NAME OF MONITORING ORGANIZATION University of California (if...OF FUNDING/SPONSORING 8b OFFICE SYMBOL 9 PROCUREMENT INSTRUMENT IDENTIFICATION NUMBER ORGANIZATION (If applicable) N00014-85-K0562 8c. ADDRESS (City

Cross-Sectional Evaluation of English Language Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yuksel, Ismail; Yasin, Elif

2014-01-01

The current study aims to identify the language teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge and to examine their competency levels in terms of gender, length of service, and workplace. This cross-sectional evaluation study was conducted with 124 language teachers in Eskisehir, Turkey. Participants were administered Technological…

Causal Connections between Mathematical Language and Mathematical Knowledge: A Dialogic Reading Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Purpura, David J.; Napoli, Amy R.; Wehrspann, Elizabeth A.; Gold, Zachary S.

2017-01-01

The acquisition of early mathematical knowledge is critical for successful long-term academic development. Mathematical language is one of the strongest predictors of children's early mathematical success. Findings from previous studies have provided correlational evidence supporting the importance of mathematical language to the development of…

Wikis for Building Content Knowledge in the Foreign Language Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pellet, Stephanie H.

2012-01-01

Most pedagogical applications of wikis in foreign language education draw on this collaborative tool to improve (formal) writing skills or to develop target language cultural sensitivity, missing largely on the opportunity to support student-developed L2 content knowledge. Seeking an alternative to traditional teacher-centered approaches, this…

KARL: A Knowledge-Assisted Retrieval Language. Presentation visuals. M.S. Thesis Final Report, 1 Jul. 1985 - 31 Dec. 1987

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dominick, Wayne D. (Editor); Triantafyllopoulos, Spiros

1985-01-01

A collection of presentation visuals associated with the companion report entitled KARL: A Knowledge-Assisted Retrieval Language, is presented. Information is given on data retrieval, natural language database front ends, generic design objectives, processing capababilities and the query processing cycle.

Deaf College Students' Mathematical Skills Relative to Morphological Knowledge, Reading Level, and Language Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kelly, Ronald R.; Gaustad, Martha G.

2007-01-01

This study of deaf college students examined specific relationships between their mathematics performance and their assessed skills in reading, language, and English morphology. Simple regression analyses showed that deaf college students' language proficiency scores, reading grade level, and morphological knowledge regarding word segmentation and…

Community Intelligence in Knowledge Curation: An Application to Managing Scientific Nomenclature

PubMed Central

Zou, Dong; Li, Ang; Liu, Guocheng; Chen, Fei; Wu, Jiayan; Xiao, Jingfa; Wang, Xumin; Yu, Jun; Zhang, Zhang

2013-01-01

Harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation bears significant promise in dealing with communication and education in the flood of scientific knowledge. As knowledge is accumulated at ever-faster rates, scientific nomenclature, a particular kind of knowledge, is concurrently generated in all kinds of fields. Since nomenclature is a system of terms used to name things in a particular discipline, accurate translation of scientific nomenclature in different languages is of critical importance, not only for communications and collaborations with English-speaking people, but also for knowledge dissemination among people in the non-English-speaking world, particularly young students and researchers. However, it lacks of accuracy and standardization when translating scientific nomenclature from English to other languages, especially for those languages that do not belong to the same language family as English. To address this issue, here we propose for the first time the application of community intelligence in scientific nomenclature management, namely, harnessing collective intelligence for translation of scientific nomenclature from English to other languages. As community intelligence applied to knowledge curation is primarily aided by wiki and Chinese is the native language for about one-fifth of the world’s population, we put the proposed application into practice, by developing a wiki-based English-to-Chinese Scientific Nomenclature Dictionary (ESND; http://esnd.big.ac.cn). ESND is a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform, exploiting the whole power of the scientific community in collectively and collaboratively managing scientific nomenclature. Based on community curation, ESND is capable of achieving accurate, standard, and comprehensive scientific nomenclature, demonstrating a valuable application of community intelligence in knowledge curation. PMID:23451119

Community intelligence in knowledge curation: an application to managing scientific nomenclature.

PubMed

Dai, Lin; Xu, Chao; Tian, Ming; Sang, Jian; Zou, Dong; Li, Ang; Liu, Guocheng; Chen, Fei; Wu, Jiayan; Xiao, Jingfa; Wang, Xumin; Yu, Jun; Zhang, Zhang

2013-01-01

Harnessing community intelligence in knowledge curation bears significant promise in dealing with communication and education in the flood of scientific knowledge. As knowledge is accumulated at ever-faster rates, scientific nomenclature, a particular kind of knowledge, is concurrently generated in all kinds of fields. Since nomenclature is a system of terms used to name things in a particular discipline, accurate translation of scientific nomenclature in different languages is of critical importance, not only for communications and collaborations with English-speaking people, but also for knowledge dissemination among people in the non-English-speaking world, particularly young students and researchers. However, it lacks of accuracy and standardization when translating scientific nomenclature from English to other languages, especially for those languages that do not belong to the same language family as English. To address this issue, here we propose for the first time the application of community intelligence in scientific nomenclature management, namely, harnessing collective intelligence for translation of scientific nomenclature from English to other languages. As community intelligence applied to knowledge curation is primarily aided by wiki and Chinese is the native language for about one-fifth of the world's population, we put the proposed application into practice, by developing a wiki-based English-to-Chinese Scientific Nomenclature Dictionary (ESND; http://esnd.big.ac.cn). ESND is a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform, exploiting the whole power of the scientific community in collectively and collaboratively managing scientific nomenclature. Based on community curation, ESND is capable of achieving accurate, standard, and comprehensive scientific nomenclature, demonstrating a valuable application of community intelligence in knowledge curation.

Intelligent Text Retrieval and Knowledge Acquisition from Texts for NASA Applications: Preprocessing Issues

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2002-01-01

A system that retrieves problem reports from a NASA database is described. The database is queried with natural language questions. Part-of-speech tags are first assigned to each word in the question using a rule based tagger. A partial parse of the question is then produced with independent sets of deterministic finite state a utomata. Using partial parse information, a look up strategy searches the database for problem reports relevant to the question. A bigram stemmer and irregular verb conjugates have been incorporated into the system to improve accuracy. The system is evaluated by a set of fifty five questions posed by NASA engineers. A discussion of future research is also presented.

Automatic theory generation from analyst text files using coherence networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shaffer, Steven C.

2014-05-01

This paper describes a three-phase process of extracting knowledge from analyst textual reports. Phase 1 involves performing natural language processing on the source text to extract subject-predicate-object triples. In phase 2, these triples are then fed into a coherence network analysis process, using a genetic algorithm optimization. Finally, the highest-value sub networks are processed into a semantic network graph for display. Initial work on a well- known data set (a Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln) has shown excellent results without any specific tuning. Next, we ran the process on the SYNthetic Counter-INsurgency (SYNCOIN) data set, developed at Penn State, yielding interesting and potentially useful results.

For You and Your Baby (4YYB): Adapting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Text4Baby Program for Saudi Arabia.

PubMed

Bahanshal, Soha; Coughlin, Steven; Liu, Benyuan

2017-02-28

Poor birth outcomes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have been found to be partially due to missed prenatal appointments as well as lack of knowledge of healthy pregnancy behaviors. The objectives are to summarize birth outcomes and the antenatal care system in KSA, summarize research related to the US Text4Baby mobile health program, and outline the development of an Arabic version of the Text4baby app, For You and Your Baby (4YYB). First, birth outcomes, health care access, and smartphone usage among Saudi Arabian women are reviewed. Next, the current evidence behind Text4Baby is described. Finally, a plan to develop and test 4YYB is proposed. In the plan, studies will need to be conducted to determine the effectiveness of 4YYB in educating pregnant Saudi women on healthy knowledge and behaviors. This will create an evidence base behind 4YYB before it is launched as a full-scale public health effort in KSA. The KSA offers public medical services but remaining challenges include poor birth outcomes and health care access barriers. An estimated 73% to 84% of Saudi women of child-bearing age use smartphone social media apps. A total of 13 published articles on Text4Baby were identified and reviewed. Due to design limitations, the studies provide only limited evidence about the effectiveness of the program in increasing healthy pregnancy knowledge and behaviors. To be useful for Saudi women, the educational messages in 4YYB will need to be translated from English to Arabic and tailored for cultural norms. Developing the 4YYB Arabic-language app for use by pregnant Saudi Arabian women based on Text4Baby is a viable approach, but a rigorous study design is needed to determine its effectiveness in improving healthy pregnancy knowledge and behaviors. ©Soha Bahanshal, Steven Coughlin, Benyuan Liu. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (http://www.researchprotocols.org), 28.02.2017.

What can Natural Language Processing do for Clinical Decision Support?

PubMed Central

Demner-Fushman, Dina; Chapman, Wendy W.; McDonald, Clement J.

2009-01-01

Computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) aims to aid decision making of health care providers and the public by providing easily accessible health-related information at the point and time it is needed. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is instrumental in using free-text information to drive CDS, representing clinical knowledge and CDS interventions in standardized formats, and leveraging clinical narrative. The early innovative NLP research of clinical narrative was followed by a period of stable research conducted at the major clinical centers and a shift of mainstream interest to biomedical NLP. This review primarily focuses on the recently renewed interest in development of fundamental NLP methods and advances in the NLP systems for CDS. The current solutions to challenges posed by distinct sublanguages, intended user groups, and support goals are discussed. PMID:19683066

Natural Language Processing Methods and Systems for Biomedical Ontology Learning

PubMed Central

Liu, Kaihong; Hogan, William R.; Crowley, Rebecca S.

2010-01-01

While the biomedical informatics community widely acknowledges the utility of domain ontologies, there remain many barriers to their effective use. One important requirement of domain ontologies is that they must achieve a high degree of coverage of the domain concepts and concept relationships. However, the development of these ontologies is typically a manual, time-consuming, and often error-prone process. Limited resources result in missing concepts and relationships as well as difficulty in updating the ontology as knowledge changes. Methodologies developed in the fields of natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval and machine learning provide techniques for automating the enrichment of an ontology from free-text documents. In this article, we review existing methodologies and developed systems, and discuss how existing methods can benefit the development of biomedical ontologies. PMID:20647054

Lessons in the Korean Language and Culture for Teachers of English as a Second Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Chang Whan

This language text is designed to introduce the Korean language and culture to Peace Corps trainees and volunteers who will be teachers of English as a second language to Korean students. The disciplines of language training, cross-cultural training, and TESL are combined in a single volume into one integrated curriculum. The text contains 100…

Foreign Language Circles of Knowledge.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schiffer, Deana

1981-01-01

Describes use of Circles of Knowledge designed to generate excitement about foreign language learning as technique for individualized instruction. Includes guidelines for using, organizing, and implementing this method. (BK)

Incidental Learning of Gender Agreement in L2.

PubMed

Denhovska, Nadiia; Serratrice, Ludovica

2017-10-01

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to the learners). Both receptive and productive knowledge and the mediating role of working memory (WM) in learning were measured. Speakers of the ungendered language were able to successfully acquire receptive but not productive grammatical knowledge in a new language under incidental exposure. WM was engaged in production but not in a grammaticality judgment task in the incidental learning condition, indicating cognitive effort during knowledge retrieval.

Physiological patterns during practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique compared with patterns while reading Sanskrit and a modern language.

PubMed

Travis, F; Olson, T; Egenes, T; Gupta, H K

2001-07-01

This study tested the prediction that reading Vedic Sanskrit texts, without knowledge of their meaning, produces a distinct physiological state. We measured EEG, breath rate, heart rate, and skin conductance during: (1) 15-min Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice; (2) 15-min reading verses of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit; and (3) 15-min reading the same verses translated in German, Spanish, or French. The two reading conditions were randomly counterbalanced, and subjects filled out experience forms between each block to reduce carryover effects. Skin conductance levels significantly decreased during both reading Sanskrit and TM practice, and increased slightly during reading a modern language. Alpha power and coherence were significantly higher when reading Sanskrit and during TM practice, compared to reading modern languages. Similar physiological patterns when reading Sanskrit and during practice of the TM technique suggests that the state gained during TM practice may be integrated with active mental processes by reading Sanskrit.

Children's Comprehension of Object Relative Sentences: It's Extant Language Knowledge That Matters, Not Domain-General Working Memory.

PubMed

Rusli, Yazmin Ahmad; Montgomery, James W

2017-10-17

The aim of this study was to determine whether extant language (lexical) knowledge or domain-general working memory is the better predictor of comprehension of object relative sentences for children with typical development. We hypothesized that extant language knowledge, not domain-general working memory, is the better predictor. Fifty-three children (ages 9-11 years) completed a word-level verbal working-memory task, indexing extant language (lexical) knowledge; an analog nonverbal working-memory task, representing domain-general working memory; and a hybrid sentence comprehension task incorporating elements of both agent selection and cross-modal picture-priming paradigms. Images of the agent and patient were displayed at the syntactic gap in the object relative sentences, and the children were asked to select the agent of the sentence. Results of general linear modeling revealed that extant language knowledge accounted for a unique 21.3% of variance in the children's object relative sentence comprehension over and above age (8.3%). Domain-general working memory accounted for a nonsignificant 1.6% of variance. We interpret the results to suggest that extant language knowledge and not domain-general working memory is a critically important contributor to children's object relative sentence comprehension. Results support a connectionist view of the association between working memory and object relative sentence comprehension. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5404573.

A survey of functional programming language principles

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Holloway, C. M.

1986-01-01

Research in the area of functional programming languages has intensified in the 8 years since John Backus' Turing Award Lecture on the topic was published. The purpose of this paper is to present a survey of the ideas of functional programming languages. The paper assumes the reader is comfortable with mathematics and has knowledge of the basic principles of traditional programming languages, but does not assume any prior knowledge of the ideas of functional languages. A simple functional language is defined and used to illustrate the basic ideas. Topics discussed include the reasons for developing functional languages, methods of expressing concurrency, the algebra of functional programming languages, program transformation techniques, and implementations of functional languages. Existing functional languages are also mentioned. The paper concludes with the author's opinions as to the future of functional languages. An annotated bibliography on the subject is also included.

Long-range correlations and burstiness in written texts: Universal and language-specific aspects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Constantoudis, Vassilios; Kalimeri, Maria; Diakonos, Fotis; Karamanos, Konstantinos; Papadimitriou, Constantinos; Chatzigeorgiou, Manolis; Papageorgiou, Harris

2016-08-01

Recently, methods from the statistical physics of complex systems have been applied successfully to identify universal features in the long-range correlations (LRCs) of written texts. However, in real texts, these universal features are being intermingled with language-specific influences. This paper aims at the characterization and further understanding of the interplay between universal and language-specific effects on the LRCs in texts. To this end, we apply the language-sensitive mapping of written texts to word-length series (wls) and analyse large parallel (of same content) corpora from 10 languages classified to four families (Romanic, Germanic, Greek and Uralic). The autocorrelation functions of the wls reveal tiny but persistent LRCs decaying at large scales following a power-law with a language-independent exponent ˜0.60-0.65. The impact of language is displayed in the amplitude of correlations where a relative standard deviation >40% among the analyzed languages is observed. The classification to language families seems to play a significant role since, the Finnish and Germanic languages exhibit more correlations than the Greek and Roman families. To reveal the origins of the LRCs, we focus on the long words and perform burst and correlation analysis in their positions along the corpora. We find that the universal features are linked more to the correlations of the inter-long word distances while the language-specific aspects are related more to their distributions.

Teacher Learning across Boundaries: A Challenge to the Legitimacy of Language Teachers' Disciplinary Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Han, Chunyan; Wu, Zongjie

2015-01-01

The legitimate forms of knowledge recognised for language teachers in Chinese universities are differentiated by strong academic boundaries, subject only to disciplinary authority and fashion. Classroom practice on the whole tends not to be informed by research. For many language teachers, a disconnect exists between the academic discipline in…

Transferred L1 Strategies and L2 Syntactic Structure in L2 Sentence Comprehension.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koda, Keiko

1993-01-01

The application of language processing skills between 2 languages with dissimilar morphosyntactic features was investigated with 72 American university students learning Japanese. Results suggest that learners' first- and second-language knowledge both play a significant role and that the linguistic knowledge and coding capability for text…

Constructing a Language Assessment Knowledge Base: A Focus on Language Assessment Courses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Inbar-Lourie, Ofra

2008-01-01

The competencies required for conducting assessment in the educational context have recently been reformulated in view of social constructivist perspectives and the acknowledgement of the role of classroom assessment in promoting learning. These changes have impacted the knowledge base language assessors need to obtain, and hence the contents of…

Knowledge, programming, and programming cultures: LISP, C, and Ada

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rochowiak, Daniel

1990-01-01

The results of research 'Ada as an implementation language for knowledge based systems' are presented. The purpose of the research was to compare Ada to other programming languages. The report focuses on the programming languages Ada, C, and Lisp, the programming cultures that surround them, and the programming paradigms they support.

Elementary Teachers' Science Knowledge and Instructional Practices: Impact of an Intervention Focused on English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Okhee; Llosa, Lorena; Jiang, Feng; Haas, Alison; O'Connor, Corey; Van Booven, Christopher D.

2016-01-01

As part of a three-year curricular and professional development intervention focused on English language learners (ELLs), this study examined the intervention's effect on teachers' science knowledge and instructional practices after one year of implementation. The P-SELL (Promoting Science Among English Language Learners) intervention comprised…

Speech-Language Pathologists' Knowledge and Skills Regarding Hearing Aids.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woodford, Charles M.

1987-01-01

Speech-language pathologists (n=49) and speech-language pathology graduate students (n=53) were administered a written examination on hearing aids and a practical examination concerning the functioning of two types of hearing aids. The majority lacked basic knowledge and skills necessary to assist hearing-impaired students with their hearing aids.…

A Study of Public Awareness of Speech-Language Pathology in Amman

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mahmoud, Hana; Aljazi, Aya; Alkhamra, Rana

2014-01-01

Background: Statistical levels of awareness and knowledge of speech-language pathology and of communication disorders are currently unknown among the public in the Middle East, including Jordan. Aims: This study reports the results of an investigation of public awareness and knowledge of speech-language pathology in Amman-Jordan. It also…

From Scribbles to Scrabble: Preschool Children's Developing Knowledge of Written Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Puranik, Cynthia S.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to concurrently examine the development of written language across different writing tasks and to investigate how writing features develop in preschool children. Emergent written language knowledge of 372 preschoolers was assessed using numerous writing tasks. The findings from this study indicate that children…

Using Funds of Knowledge to Build Trust between a Teacher and Parents of Language-Delayed Preschoolers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gonzalez, Alissa Zoraida

2014-01-01

Preschool children with language delays often struggle to learn new concepts. Proven strategies such as modeling, prompting, reinforcing responses, direct teaching, and hands-on experience matter to young children with language delays. Also important are social interactions and shared experiences with more knowledgeable persons. Within a cultural…

Automated Extraction of Substance Use Information from Clinical Texts.

PubMed

Wang, Yan; Chen, Elizabeth S; Pakhomov, Serguei; Arsoniadis, Elliot; Carter, Elizabeth W; Lindemann, Elizabeth; Sarkar, Indra Neil; Melton, Genevieve B

2015-01-01

Within clinical discourse, social history (SH) includes important information about substance use (alcohol, drug, and nicotine use) as key risk factors for disease, disability, and mortality. In this study, we developed and evaluated a natural language processing (NLP) system for automated detection of substance use statements and extraction of substance use attributes (e.g., temporal and status) based on Stanford Typed Dependencies. The developed NLP system leveraged linguistic resources and domain knowledge from a multi-site social history study, Propbank and the MiPACQ corpus. The system attained F-scores of 89.8, 84.6 and 89.4 respectively for alcohol, drug, and nicotine use statement detection, as well as average F-scores of 82.1, 90.3, 80.8, 88.7, 96.6, and 74.5 respectively for extraction of attributes. Our results suggest that NLP systems can achieve good performance when augmented with linguistic resources and domain knowledge when applied to a wide breadth of substance use free text clinical notes.

Assessing Metacognitive Knowledge in Web-Based Call: A Neural Network Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yeh, Siou-Wen; Lo, Jia-Jiunn

2005-01-01

The assessment of learners' metacognitive knowledge level is crucial when developing computer-assisted language learning systems. Currently, many systems assess learners' metacognitive knowledge level with pre-instructional questionnaires or metacognitive interviews. However, learners with limited language proficiency may be at a disadvantage in…

Document Exploration and Automatic Knowledge Extraction for Unstructured Biomedical Text

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chu, S.; Totaro, G.; Doshi, N.; Thapar, S.; Mattmann, C. A.; Ramirez, P.

2015-12-01

We describe our work on building a web-browser based document reader with built-in exploration tool and automatic concept extraction of medical entities for biomedical text. Vast amounts of biomedical information are offered in unstructured text form through scientific publications and R&D reports. Utilizing text mining can help us to mine information and extract relevant knowledge from a plethora of biomedical text. The ability to employ such technologies to aid researchers in coping with information overload is greatly desirable. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in automatic biomedical concept extraction [1, 2] and intelligent PDF reader tools with the ability to search on content and find related articles [3]. Such reader tools are typically desktop applications and are limited to specific platforms. Our goal is to provide researchers with a simple tool to aid them in finding, reading, and exploring documents. Thus, we propose a web-based document explorer, which we called Shangri-Docs, which combines a document reader with automatic concept extraction and highlighting of relevant terms. Shangri-Docsalso provides the ability to evaluate a wide variety of document formats (e.g. PDF, Words, PPT, text, etc.) and to exploit the linked nature of the Web and personal content by performing searches on content from public sites (e.g. Wikipedia, PubMed) and private cataloged databases simultaneously. Shangri-Docsutilizes Apache cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) [4] and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to automatically identify and highlight terms and concepts, such as specific symptoms, diseases, drugs, and anatomical sites, mentioned in the text. cTAKES was originally designed specially to extract information from clinical medical records. Our investigation leads us to extend the automatic knowledge extraction process of cTAKES for biomedical research domain by improving the ontology guided information extraction process. We will describe our experience and implementation of our system and share lessons learned from our development. We will also discuss ways in which this could be adapted to other science fields. [1] Funk et al., 2014. [2] Kang et al., 2014. [3] Utopia Documents, http://utopiadocs.com [4] Apache cTAKES, http://ctakes.apache.org

What can we talk about, in which language, in what way and with whom? Sami patients' experiences of language choice and cultural norms in mental health treatment.

PubMed

Dagsvold, Inger; Møllersen, Snefrid; Stordahl, Vigdis

2015-01-01

The Sami in Norway have a legal right to receive health services adapted to Sami language and culture. This calls for a study of the significance of language choice and cultural norms in Sami patients' encounters with mental health services. To explore the significance of language and cultural norms in communication about mental health topics experienced by Sami patients receiving mental health treatment to enhance our understanding of linguistic and cultural adaptation of health services. Data were collected through individual interviews with 4 Sami patients receiving mental health treatment in Northern Norway. A systematic text reduction and a thematic analysis were employed. Two themes were identified:(I) Language choice is influenced by language competence, with whom one talks and what one talks about.Bilingualism was a resource and natural part of the participants' lives, but there were limited possibilities to speak Sami in encounters with health services. A professional working relationship was placed on an equal footing with the possibility to speak Sami. Sami patients' language choice in different communication situations is influenced by a complexity of social and cultural factors. Sami patients have varying opinions about and preferences for what they can talk about, in which language, in what way and with whom. Bilingualism and knowledge about both Sami and Norwegian culture provide latitude and enhanced possibilities for both patients and the health services. The challenge for the health services is to allow for and safeguard such individual variations within the cultural framework of the patients.

An Overview of Biomolecular Event Extraction from Scientific Documents

PubMed Central

Vanegas, Jorge A.; Matos, Sérgio; González, Fabio; Oliveira, José L.

2015-01-01

This paper presents a review of state-of-the-art approaches to automatic extraction of biomolecular events from scientific texts. Events involving biomolecules such as genes, transcription factors, or enzymes, for example, have a central role in biological processes and functions and provide valuable information for describing physiological and pathogenesis mechanisms. Event extraction from biomedical literature has a broad range of applications, including support for information retrieval, knowledge summarization, and information extraction and discovery. However, automatic event extraction is a challenging task due to the ambiguity and diversity of natural language and higher-level linguistic phenomena, such as speculations and negations, which occur in biological texts and can lead to misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation. Many strategies have been proposed in the last decade, originating from different research areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics. This review summarizes the most representative approaches in biomolecular event extraction and presents an analysis of the current state of the art and of commonly used methods, features, and tools. Finally, current research trends and future perspectives are also discussed. PMID:26587051

Prekindergarten teachers' verbal references to print during classroom-based, large-group shared reading.

PubMed

Zucker, Tricia A; Justice, Laura M; Piasta, Shayne B

2009-10-01

The frequency with which adults reference print when reading with preschool-age children is associated with growth in children's print knowledge (e.g., L.M. Justice & H.K. Ezell, 2000, 2002). This study examined whether prekindergarten (pre-K) teachers naturally reference print during classroom shared reading and if verbal print references occur at similar rates across different types of books. The relation between frequency of print referencing and quality of teachers' language instruction was also studied. Seventeen pre-K teachers were randomly assigned to a regular reading condition as part of a larger study, and 92 videos of their large-group, shared-reading sessions were analyzed for print-referencing utterances and quality of language instruction. Teachers' verbal print references were compared across texts that were purposefully sampled to include different levels of print salience. Teachers discussed all domains of print studied; however, their rate of print referencing was relatively low. More verbal print references were observed when the teachers read books exhibiting higher amounts of print-salient features. When reading books, there was no apparent relation between teachers' use of print referencing and their quality of language instruction. It is unclear whether this low rate of explicit, verbal print referencing would impact children's print knowledge. Nonetheless, print-salient books appear to offer a natural context for discussions about print. Implications for educational practice are considered.

Reader, Text, Translation, and Interpretive Potentials.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dollerup, Cay; And Others

No matter what pains translators take to produce a target-language text "identical" to the source-language text, criticism and/or translation of an original literary work cannot be the same in different language communities. That translation may change potentialities in the textual experience is particularly obvious in literature with a…

Weak and strong novice readers of English as a foreign language: effects of first language and socioeconomic status.

PubMed

Kahn-Horwitz, Janina; Shimron, Joseph; Sparks, Richard L

2006-06-01

This study examined individual differences among beginning readers of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study concentrated on the effects of underlying first language (L1) knowledge as well as EFL letter and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological and morphological awareness, spelling, vocabulary knowledge, and word reading in Hebrew L1, in addition to knowledge of EFL letters and EFL vocabulary, were measured. The study also investigated the effect of socioeconomic background (SES) on beginning EFL readers. Participants included 145 fourth graders from three schools representing two socioeconomic backgrounds in the north of Israel. The results indicate that knowledge of English letters played a more prominent role than knowledge of Hebrew L1 components in differentiating between strong and weak EFL readers. The Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis was supported by L1 phonological awareness, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge appearing as part of discriminating functions. The presence of English vocabulary knowledge as part of the discriminant functions provides support for English word reading being more than just a decoding task for EFL beginner readers. Socioeconomic status differentiated the groups for EFL word recognition but not for EFL reading comprehension.

At the Interface: Dynamic Interactions of Explicit and Implicit Language Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellis, Nick C.

2005-01-01

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence…

A Comparison of Schools: Teacher Knowledge of Explicit Code-Based Reading Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen, Rebecca A.; Mather, Nancy; Schneider, Deborah A.; White, Jennifer M.

2017-01-01

One-hundred-fourteen kindergarten through third-grade teachers from seven different schools were surveyed using "The Survey of Preparedness and Knowledge of Language Structure Related to Teaching Reading to Struggling Students." The purpose was to compare their definitions and application knowledge of language structure, phonics, and…

Language development in a non-vocal child.

PubMed

Rogow, S M

1994-01-01

Many children who cannot speak, comprehend both oral and written language. Having knowledge of language is not the same as being able to use language for social transactions. Non-vocal children learn to use augmented and assisted systems, but they experience specific difficulties in initiating and maintaining conversations and making use of the pragmatic functions of language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the semantic and syntactic knowledge of a child with severe multiple disabilities who can read and write and comprehend two languages, but does not initiate conversation. The study demonstrates that high levels of language comprehension and ability to read and write do not automatically transfer to conversational competence or narrative ability.

A semantic model for multimodal data mining in healthcare information systems.

PubMed

Iakovidis, Dimitris; Smailis, Christos

2012-01-01

Electronic health records (EHRs) are representative examples of multimodal/multisource data collections; including measurements, images and free texts. The diversity of such information sources and the increasing amounts of medical data produced by healthcare institutes annually, pose significant challenges in data mining. In this paper we present a novel semantic model that describes knowledge extracted from the lowest-level of a data mining process, where information is represented by multiple features i.e. measurements or numerical descriptors extracted from measurements, images, texts or other medical data, forming multidimensional feature spaces. Knowledge collected by manual annotation or extracted by unsupervised data mining from one or more feature spaces is modeled through generalized qualitative spatial semantics. This model enables a unified representation of knowledge across multimodal data repositories. It contributes to bridging the semantic gap, by enabling direct links between low-level features and higher-level concepts e.g. describing body parts, anatomies and pathological findings. The proposed model has been developed in web ontology language based on description logics (OWL-DL) and can be applied to a variety of data mining tasks in medical informatics. It utility is demonstrated for automatic annotation of medical data.

Secondary Mathematics Teachers' Beliefs, Attitudes, Knowledge Base, and Practices in Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gann, Linda

2013-01-01

The research centered on secondary mathematics teachers' beliefs, attitudes, knowledge base, and practices in meeting the academic and language needs of English language learners. Using socio-cultural theory and social practice theory to frame the study, the research design employed a mixed methods approach incorporating self-reported surveys,…

Semantic Radical Knowledge and Word Recognition in Chinese for Chinese as Foreign Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Su, Xiaoxiang; Kim, Young-Suk

2014-01-01

In the present study, we examined the relation of knowledge of semantic radicals to students' language proficiency and word reading for adult Chinese-as-a-foreign language students. Ninety-seven college students rated their proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Chinese, and were administered measures of receptive and…

From Cultural Knowledge to Intercultural Communicative Competence: Changing Perspectives on the Role of Culture in Foreign Language Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Piatkowska, Katarzyna

2015-01-01

Approaches to the concept of culture and teaching cultural competence in a foreign language classroom have been changing over the last decades. The paper summarises, compares, contrasts and evaluates four major approaches to teaching cultural competence in foreign language teaching, that is, knowledge-based approach, contrastive approach,…

Empowering Non-Licensed-in-English Language Teachers to Construct Professional Knowledge in Their Actual and Imagined Communities of Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aguirre-Garzón, Edgar Augusto; Castañeda-Peña, Harold Andrés

2017-01-01

Research has accumulated important knowledge over recent decades on how licensed language teachers develop and learn from cognitive and socio-cultural stances. Yet, relatively little evidence exists on how non-licensed-in-English language teachers (NLELTs) grow professionally in their communities. Similarly, few studies have yet investigated the…

Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Knowledge Using a Temporal Method

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tanabe, Masayuki

2016-01-01

The present study addressed the role of speed as a factor in tests of second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, presupposing that speed of performance is important in actual language use. Research questions were: (a) Do learners with a larger vocabulary size answer faster on an L2 vocabulary breadth test than smaller vocabulary sized learners?;…

Vocabulary Knowledge and Growth in Immersion and Regular Language-Learning Programmes in Hong Kong

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lo, Yuen Yi; Murphy, Victoria A.

2010-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate vocabulary knowledge and growth across two different language-learning programmes in Hong Kong. The two programmes compared were English immersion programmes (IM) and regular English second-language programmes (RL2). While previous research has identified an overall advantage to IM with respect to language…

Classroom Conversation Analysis and Critical Reflective Practice: Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk Framework in Focus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghafarpour, Hajar

2017-01-01

The uniqueness of the Language Classroom and its complexity raises a need for foreign language teachers to develop necessary skills and knowledge to observe, analyse and evaluate their classroom discourse. Hence, interactional awareness of language teachers is an integral part of pedagogical and practical knowledge. In this article, the…

Leveling L2 Texts through Readability: Combining Multilevel Linguistic Features with the CEFR

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sung, Yao-Ting; Lin, Wei-Chun; Dyson, Scott Benjamin; Chang, Kuo-En; Chen, Yu-Chia

2015-01-01

Selecting appropriate texts for L2 (second/foreign language) learners is an important approach to enhancing motivation and, by extension, learning. There is currently no tool for classifying foreign language texts according to a language proficiency framework, which makes it difficult for students and educators to determine the precise…

Arbeitsmittel fur den Deutschunterricht an Auslander (Materials for German Instruction to Foreigners).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaufmann, Gerhard, Comp.

This annotated German bibliography of textbooks for use in language programs includes a wide variety of instructional media. Materials are classified under: (1) language texts, (2) teachers' texts, (3) language texts for foreigners, (4) exercise books and tapes, (5) testing materials, (6) radio courses, (7) instructional films, (8) vocational…

Is Word-Problem Solving a Form of Text Comprehension?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fuchs, Lynn S.; Fuchs, Douglas; Compton, Donald L.; Hamlett, Carol L.; Wang, Amber Y.

2015-01-01

This study's hypotheses were that (a) word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension that involves language comprehension processes, working memory, and reasoning, but (b) WP solving differs from other forms of text comprehension by requiring WP-specific language comprehension as well as general language comprehension. At the start of…

Direct and Mediated Effects of Language and Cognitive Skills on Comprehension or Oral Narrative Texts (Listening Comprehension) for Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2016-01-01

We investigated component language and cognitive skills of oral language comprehension of narrative texts (i.e., listening comprehension). Using the construction--integration model of text comprehension as an overarching theoretical framework, we examined direct and mediated relations of foundational cognitive skills (working memory and…

Using Short Texts to Teach English as Second Language: An Integrated Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kembo, Jane

2016-01-01

The teacher of English Language is often hard pressed to find interesting and authentic ways to present language to target second language speakers. While language can be taught and learned, part of it must be acquired and short texts provide powerful tools for doing so and reinforcing what has been taught/learned. This paper starts from research,…

Knowledge bases built on web languages from the point of view of predicate logics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vajgl, Marek; Lukasová, Alena; Žáček, Martin

2017-06-01

The article undergoes evaluation of formal systems created on the base of web (ontology/concept) languages by simplifying the usual approach of knowledge representation within the FOPL, but sharing its expressiveness, semantic correct-ness, completeness and decidability. Evaluation of two of them - that one based on description logic and that one built on RDF model principles - identifies some of the lacks of those formal systems and presents, if possible, corrections of them. Possibilities to build an inference system capable to obtain new further knowledge over given knowledge bases including those describing domains by giant linked domain databases has been taken into account. Moreover, the directions towards simplifying FOPL language discussed here has been evaluated from the point of view of a possibility to become a web language for fulfilling an idea of semantic web.

Validation of an instrument for assessing teacher knowledge of basic language constructs of literacy.

PubMed

Binks-Cantrell, Emily; Joshi, R Malatesha; Washburn, Erin K

2012-10-01

Recent national reports have stressed the importance of teacher knowledge in teaching reading. However, in the past, teachers' knowledge of language and literacy constructs has typically been assessed with instruments that are not fully tested for validity. In the present study, an instrument was developed; and its reliability, item difficulty, and item discrimination were computed and examined to identify model fit by applying exploratory factor analysis. Such analyses showed that the instrument demonstrated adequate estimates of reliability in assessing teachers' knowledge of language constructs. The implications for professional development of in-service teachers as well as preservice teacher education are also discussed.

The Effect of Language Specific Factors on Early Written Composition: The Role of Spelling, Oral Language and Text Generation Skills in a Shallow Orthography

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arfé, Barbara; Dockrell, Julie E.; De Bernardi, Bianca

2016-01-01

Spelling skills have been identified as one of the major barriers to written text production in young English writers. By contrast oral language skills and text generation have been found to be less influential in the texts produced by beginning writers. To date, our understanding of the role of spelling skills in transparent orthographies is…

The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism

PubMed Central

Lindquist, Kristen A.; MacCormack, Jennifer K.; Shablack, Holly

2015-01-01

Common sense suggests that emotions are physical types that have little to do with the words we use to label them. Yet recent psychological constructionist accounts reveal that language is a fundamental element in emotion that is constitutive of both emotion experiences and perceptions. According to the psychological constructionist Conceptual Act Theory (CAT), an instance of emotion occurs when information from one’s body or other people’s bodies is made meaningful in light of the present situation using concept knowledge about emotion. The CAT suggests that language plays a role in emotion because language supports the conceptual knowledge used to make meaning of sensations from the body and world in a given context. In the present paper, we review evidence from developmental and cognitive science to reveal that language scaffolds concept knowledge in humans, helping humans to acquire abstract concepts such as emotion categories across the lifespan. Critically, language later helps individuals use concepts to make meaning of on-going sensory perceptions. Building on this evidence, we outline predictions from a psychological constructionist model of emotion in which language serves as the “glue” for emotion concept knowledge, binding concepts to embodied experiences and in turn shaping the ongoing processing of sensory information from the body and world to create emotional experiences and perceptions. PMID:25926809

Automatic Text Summarization for Indonesian Language Using TextTeaser

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gunawan, D.; Pasaribu, A.; Rahmat, R. F.; Budiarto, R.

2017-04-01

Text summarization is one of the solution for information overload. Reducing text without losing the meaning not only can save time to read, but also maintain the reader’s understanding. One of many algorithms to summarize text is TextTeaser. Originally, this algorithm is intended to be used for text in English. However, due to TextTeaser algorithm does not consider the meaning of the text, we implement this algorithm for text in Indonesian language. This algorithm calculates four elements, such as title feature, sentence length, sentence position and keyword frequency. We utilize TextRank, an unsupervised and language independent text summarization algorithm, to evaluate the summarized text yielded by TextTeaser. The result shows that the TextTeaser algorithm needs more improvement to obtain better accuracy.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) based approach for speech therapy of aphasic patients: A review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jamal, Norezmi; Shanta, Shahnoor; Mahmud, Farhanahani; Sha'abani, MNAH

2017-09-01

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art an automatic speech recognition (ASR) based approach for speech therapy of aphasic patients. Aphasia is a condition in which the affected person suffers from speech and language disorder resulting from a stroke or brain injury. Since there is a growing body of evidence indicating the possibility of improving the symptoms at an early stage, ASR based solutions are increasingly being researched for speech and language therapy. ASR is a technology that transfers human speech into transcript text by matching with the system's library. This is particularly useful in speech rehabilitation therapies as they provide accurate, real-time evaluation for speech input from an individual with speech disorder. ASR based approaches for speech therapy recognize the speech input from the aphasic patient and provide real-time feedback response to their mistakes. However, the accuracy of ASR is dependent on many factors such as, phoneme recognition, speech continuity, speaker and environmental differences as well as our depth of knowledge on human language understanding. Hence, the review examines recent development of ASR technologies and its performance for individuals with speech and language disorders.

Academic Language, Power and the Impact of Western Knowledge Production on Indigenous Student Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Brien, Karen

2008-01-01

This paper explores the prescriptive, distancing and separating qualities that exist in Western systems of knowledge production. It examines scientific language and how discrimination takes place in the university setting and explores the ways in which academic knowledge production affects the learning experiences, participation and completion…

A knowledge base browser using hypermedia

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pocklington, Tony; Wang, Lui

1990-01-01

A hypermedia system is being developed to browse CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) knowledge bases. This system will be used to help train flight controllers for the Mission Control Center. Browsing this knowledge base will be accomplished either by having navigating through the various collection nodes that have already been defined, or through the query languages.

Enhancing the Metalinguistic Abilities of Pre-Service Teachers via Coursework Targeting Language Structure Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Purvis, Caralyn J.; McNeill, Brigid C.; Everatt, John

2016-01-01

Low metalinguistic knowledge of pre-service and in-service teachers is likely to restrict the provision of evidence-based literacy instruction in the classroom. Despite such concerns, relatively few studies have examined the effects of teacher preparation coursework in building pre-service teachers' language structure knowledge. This study…

Preservice and Inservice Teachers' Knowledge of Language Constructs in Finland

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aro, Mikko; Björn, Piia Maria

2016-01-01

The aim of the study was to explore the Finnish preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs relevant for literacy acquisition. A total of 150 preservice teachers and 74 inservice teachers participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire that assessed self-perceived expertise in reading instruction, knowledge of…

Integrated Knowledge of Agreement in Early and Late English-Spanish Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foote, Rebecca

2011-01-01

Research suggests that late bilinguals may have persistent difficulties with the automatic access and use of some second language structures because of a lack of underlying integrated knowledge of those structures. In contrast, early bilinguals show advantages in aspects of language use that require this type of automatic knowledge. This study…

Locating the Global: Culture, Language and Science Education for Indigenous Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McKinley, Elizabeth

2005-01-01

The international literature suggests the use of indigenous knowledge (IK) and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) contexts in science education to provide motivation and self-esteem for indigenous students is widespread. However, the danger of alienating culture (as knowledge) from the language in which the worldview is embedded seems to have…

A Discourse Based Approach to the Language Documentation of Local Ecological Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Odango, Emerson Lopez

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a discourse-based approach to the language documentation of local ecological knowledge (LEK). The knowledge, skills, beliefs, cultural worldviews, and ideologies that shape the way a community interacts with its environment can be examined through the discourse in which LEK emerges. 'Discourse-based' refers to two components:…

Metalinguistic Knowledge and Cognitive Style in Polish Classroom Learners of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zietek, Agnieszka A.; Roehr, Karen

2011-01-01

In this exploratory study, we investigated the relationship between level of English metalinguistic knowledge, or explicit knowledge about the English language, and cognitive style on the wholist/analytic dimension in an intact group of young adult Polish learners of English as a foreign language. Contrary to expectation, metalinguistic knowledge…

Supporting the Transference of Knowledge about Language within Teacher Education Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fenwick, Lisl; Endicott, Michele; Quinn, Marie; Humphrey, Sally

2014-01-01

Teacher education is effective when pre-service teachers are able to transfer knowledge from content areas to practice. This study investigates the extent to which curriculum and assessment designs, along with teaching practices, supported pre-service teachers to transfer knowledge gained about language from a first-year course into a second-year…

The Effect of Collocation on Meaning Representation of Adjectives Such as Big and Large in Translation from Two Languages Used in the Article to English Language Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Minaabad, Malahat Shabani

2011-01-01

Translation is the process to transfer written or spoken source language (SL) texts to equivalent written or spoken target language (TL) texts. Translation studies (TS) relies so heavily on a concept of meaning, that one may claim that there is no TS without any reference to meanings. People's understanding of the meaning of sentences is far more…

Impacts of parent-implemented early-literacy intervention for Spanish-speaking children with language impairment.

PubMed

Pratt, Amy S; Justice, Laura M; Perez, Ashanty; Duran, Lillian K

2015-01-01

Children with language impairment (LI) often have lags in development of print knowledge, an important early-literacy skill. This study explores impacts of a print-focused intervention for Spanish-speaking children with LI in Southeastern Mexico. Aims were twofold. First, we sought to describe the print knowledge (print-concept knowledge, alphabet knowledge) of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Second, we determined the extent to which print-referencing intervention delivered by children's parents could improve print knowledge. Using a pre-test-post-test delayed treatment research design, 13 parent-child dyads were assigned to an intervention (n = 8) versus control (n = 5) condition. Children were drawn from a speech-language clinic and all were receiving services for LI. Caregivers in the intervention group implemented an 8-week home-reading programme following a systematic scope and sequence for improving children's print knowledge. Children showed individual differences in their print knowledge based on three baseline measures examining print-concept knowledge, alphabet knowledge and letter-sound knowledge. Those whose caregivers implemented the 8-week programme showed statistically and practically significant gains on two of the three measures over the intervention period. The results presented here may stimulate future research on the print knowledge of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Sources of individual differences are important to determine. Caregivers may use the intervention presented here as a potential avenue for improving children's print knowledge. © 2015 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

76 FR 14954 - National Professional Development Program; Office of English Language Acquisition, Language...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-03-18

... Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited English Proficient Students; Overview... to provide instruction that accelerates ELs' acquisition of language, literacy, and content knowledge.... Rosalinda Barrera, Assistant Deputy Secretary and Director for English Language Acquisition, Language...

Chinese EFL teachers' knowledge of basic language constructs and their self-perceived teaching abilities.

PubMed

Zhao, Jing; Joshi, R Malatesha; Dixon, L Quentin; Huang, Liyan

2016-04-01

The present study examined the knowledge and skills of basic language constructs among elementary school teachers who were teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. Six hundred and thirty in-service teachers completed the adapted Reading Teacher Knowledge Survey. Survey results showed that English teachers' self-perceived ability to teach vocabulary was the highest and self-perceived ability to teach reading to struggling readers was the lowest. Morphological knowledge was positively correlated with teachers' self-perceived teaching abilities, and it contributed unique variance even after controlling for the effects of ultimate educational attainment and years of teaching. Findings suggest that elementary school EFL teachers in China, on average, were able to display implicit skills related to certain basic language constructs, but less able to demonstrate explicit knowledge of other skills, especially sub-lexical units (e.g., phonemic awareness and morphemes). The high self-perceived ability of teaching vocabulary and high scores on syllable counting reflected the focus on larger units in the English reading curriculum.

Children's comprehension skill and the understanding of nominal metaphors.

PubMed

Seigneuric, Alix; Megherbi, Hakima; Bueno, Steve; Lebahar, Julie; Bianco, Maryse

2016-10-01

According to Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model, understanding figurative language is explained by the same processes and background knowledge that are required for literal language. In this study, we investigated the relation between children's comprehension skill and the ability to understand referential nominal metaphors. Two groups of poor versus good comprehenders (8- to 10-year-olds) matched for word reading and vocabulary skills were invited to identify the referent of nouns used metaphorically or literally in short texts. Compared with good comprehenders, performance of poor comprehenders showed a substantial decrease in the metaphoric condition. Moreover, their performance was strongly affected by the degree of semantic incongruence between the terms of the nominal metaphor. These findings are discussed in relation to several factors, in particular the ability to use contextual information and semantic processing. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Detection of Practice Pattern Trends through Natural Language Processing of Clinical Narratives and Biomedical Literature

PubMed Central

Chen, Elizabeth S.; Stetson, Peter D.; Lussier, Yves A.; Markatou, Marianthi; Hripcsak, George; Friedman, Carol

2007-01-01

Clinical knowledge, best evidence, and practice patterns evolve over time. The ability to track these changes and study practice trends may be valuable for performance measurement and quality improvement efforts. The goal of this study was to assess the feasibility and validity of methods to generate and compare trends in biomedical literature and clinical narrative. We focused on the challenge of detecting trends in medication usage over time for two diseases: HIV/AIDS and asthma. Information about disease-specific medications in published randomized control trials and discharge summaries at New York-Presbyterian Hospital over a ten-year period were extracted using Natural Language Processing. This paper reports on the ability of our semi-automated process to discover disease-drug practice pattern trends and interpretation of findings across the biomedical and clinical text sources. PMID:18693810

A Knowledge Discovery framework for Planetary Defense

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Y.; Yang, C. P.; Li, Y.; Yu, M.; Bambacus, M.; Seery, B.; Barbee, B.

2016-12-01

Planetary Defense, a project funded by NASA Goddard and the NSF, is a multi-faceted effort focused on the mitigation of Near Earth Object (NEO) threats to our planet. Currently, there exists a dispersion of information concerning NEO's amongst different organizations and scientists, leading to a lack of a coherent system of information to be used for efficient NEO mitigation. In this paper, a planetary defense knowledge discovery engine is proposed to better assist the development and integration of a NEO responding system. Specifically, we have implemented an organized information framework by two means: 1) the development of a semantic knowledge base, which provides a structure for relevant information. It has been developed by the implementation of web crawling and natural language processing techniques, which allows us to collect and store the most relevant structured information on a regular basis. 2) the development of a knowledge discovery engine, which allows for the efficient retrieval of information from our knowledge base. The knowledge discovery engine has been built on the top of Elasticsearch, an open source full-text search engine, as well as cutting-edge machine learning ranking and recommendation algorithms. This proposed framework is expected to advance the knowledge discovery and innovation in planetary science domain.

Language Deficit in English and Lack of Creative Education as Impediments to Nigeria's Breakthrough into the Knowledge Era

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mowarin, Macaulay; Tonukari, Emmanuel Ufuoma

2010-01-01

This essay discusses the linguistic and cultural factors that have acted as impediments to Nigeria's breakthrough into the knowledge era. It identifies language deficit in English by most Nigerians, under-developed state of most Nigerian languages, absence of creative education and the presence of certain cultural taboos which stifles the…

Real-Time Sentence Processing in Children with Specific Language Impairment: The Contribution of Lexicosemantic, Syntactic, and World-Knowledge Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pizzioli, Fabrizio; Schelstraete, Marie-Anne

2013-01-01

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

iPads in the Second Language Classroom: An Examination of iPad Use by Teachers through TPACK and Teacher Perception Lenses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sharp, Steven Kary

2017-01-01

Research indicates a need for teacher education programs which include embedded computer assisted language learning (CALL) to support teachers' technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) of how to employ technology in classroom settings. Researchers also indicate a need to better understand the knowledge-base of language teacher…

Development and Validation of Early Childhood Language Teacher Knowledge: A Survey Study of Korean Teachers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Jung In

2013-01-01

As English becomes an international language in the world, there is a growing interest in developing English skills from early childhood. In Korea, the demand for English as a foreign language education for young children has increased considerably in the past decade. However, little is still known about the professional knowledge of an early…

Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism: Digging Deeper for the Contributions of Language Dominance, Linguistic Knowledge, Socio-Economic Status and Cognitive Abilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C.; Thomas, Enlli Mon; Jones, Leah; Guasch, Nestor Vinas; Young, Nia; Hughes, Emma K.

2010-01-01

This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh-English bilingual and English monolingual…

Genre-Based Tasks in Foreign Language Writing: Developing Writers' Genre Awareness, Linguistic Knowledge, and Writing Competence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yasuda, Sachiko

2011-01-01

This study examines how novice foreign language (FL) writers develop their genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence in a genre-based writing course that incorporates email-writing tasks. To define genre, the study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that sees language as a resource for making meaning in a particular…

Learning to Read Setswana and English: Cross-Language Transference of Letter Knowledge, Phonological Awareness and Word Reading Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lekgoko, Olemme; Winskel, Heather

2008-01-01

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

Developing a Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) Assessment for Preservice Teachers Learning to Teach English as a Foreign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baser, Derya; Kopcha, Theodore J.; Ozden, M. Yasar

2016-01-01

This paper reports the development and validation process of a self-assessment survey that examines technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) among preservice teachers learning to teach English as a foreign language (EFL). The survey, called TPACK-EFL, aims to provide an assessment tool for preservice foreign language teachers that…

Win-win: advancing written language knowledge and practice through university clinics.

PubMed

Katz, Lauren A; Fallon, Karen A

2015-02-01

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are uniquely suited for assessing and treating individuals with both spoken and written language disorders. Yet as students move from the elementary grades into the middle and high school grades, SLPs tend to provide fewer direct language services to them. Although spoken language disorders become written language disorders, SLP are not receiving sufficient training in the area of written language, and this is reflected in the extent to which they believe they have the knowledge and skills to provide services to struggling readers and writers on their caseloads. In this article, we discuss these problems and present effective methods for addressing them. Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

Neurally and mathematically motivated architecture for language and thought.

PubMed

Perlovsky, L I; Ilin, R

2010-01-01

Neural structures of interaction between thinking and language are unknown. This paper suggests a possible architecture motivated by neural and mathematical considerations. A mathematical requirement of computability imposes significant constraints on possible architectures consistent with brain neural structure and with a wealth of psychological knowledge. How language interacts with cognition. Do we think with words, or is thinking independent from language with words being just labels for decisions? Why is language learned by the age of 5 or 7, but acquisition of knowledge represented by learning to use this language knowledge takes a lifetime? This paper discusses hierarchical aspects of language and thought and argues that high level abstract thinking is impossible without language. We discuss a mathematical technique that can model the joint language-thought architecture, while overcoming previously encountered difficulties of computability. This architecture explains a contradiction between human ability for rational thoughtful decisions and irrationality of human thinking revealed by Tversky and Kahneman; a crucial role in this contradiction might be played by language. The proposed model resolves long-standing issues: how the brain learns correct words-object associations; why animals do not talk and think like people. We propose the role played by language emotionality in its interaction with thought. We relate the mathematical model to Humboldt's "firmness" of languages; and discuss possible influence of language grammar on its emotionality. Psychological and brain imaging experiments related to the proposed model are discussed. Future theoretical and experimental research is outlined.

Neurally and Mathematically Motivated Architecture for Language and Thought

PubMed Central

Perlovsky, L.I; Ilin, R

2010-01-01

Neural structures of interaction between thinking and language are unknown. This paper suggests a possible architecture motivated by neural and mathematical considerations. A mathematical requirement of computability imposes significant constraints on possible architectures consistent with brain neural structure and with a wealth of psychological knowledge. How language interacts with cognition. Do we think with words, or is thinking independent from language with words being just labels for decisions? Why is language learned by the age of 5 or 7, but acquisition of knowledge represented by learning to use this language knowledge takes a lifetime? This paper discusses hierarchical aspects of language and thought and argues that high level abstract thinking is impossible without language. We discuss a mathematical technique that can model the joint language-thought architecture, while overcoming previously encountered difficulties of computability. This architecture explains a contradiction between human ability for rational thoughtful decisions and irrationality of human thinking revealed by Tversky and Kahneman; a crucial role in this contradiction might be played by language. The proposed model resolves long-standing issues: how the brain learns correct words-object associations; why animals do not talk and think like people. We propose the role played by language emotionality in its interaction with thought. We relate the mathematical model to Humboldt’s “firmness” of languages; and discuss possible influence of language grammar on its emotionality. Psychological and brain imaging experiments related to the proposed model are discussed. Future theoretical and experimental research is outlined. PMID:21673788

Reading Comprehension Assessment through Retelling: Performance Profiles of Children with Dyslexia and Language-Based Learning Disability

PubMed Central

Kida, Adriana de S. B.; de Ávila, Clara R. B.; Capellini, Simone A.

2016-01-01

Purpose: To study reading comprehension performance profiles of children with dyslexia as well as language-based learning disability (LBLD) by means of retelling tasks. Method: One hundred and five children from 2nd to 5th grades of elementary school were gathered into six groups: Dyslexia group (D; n = 19), language-based learning disability group (LBLD; n = 16); their respective control groups paired according to different variables – age, gender, grade and school system (public or private; D-control and LBLD-control); and other control groups paired according to different reading accuracy (D-accuracy; LBLD-accuracy). All of the children read an expository text and orally retold the story as they understood it. The analysis quantified propositions (main ideas and details) and retold links. A retelling reference standard (3–0) was also established from the best to the worst performance. We compared both clinical groups (D and LBLD) with their respective control groups by means of Mann–Whitney tests. Results: D showed the same total of propositions, links and reference standards as D-control, but performed better than D-accuracy in macro structural (total of links) and super structural (retelling reference standard) measures. Results suggest that dyslexic children are able to use their linguistic competence and their own background knowledge to minimize the effects of their decoding deficit, especially at the highest text processing levels. LBLD performed worse than LBLD-control in all of the retelling measures and LBLD showed worse performance than LBLD-accuracy in the total retold links and retelling reference standard. Those results suggest that both decoding and linguistic difficulties affect reading comprehension. Moreover, the linguistic deficits presented by LBLD students do not allow these pupils to perform as competently in terms of text comprehension as the children with dyslexia do. Thus, failure in the macro and super-structural information processing of the expository text were evidenced. Conclusion: Each clinical group showed a different retelling profile. Such findings support the view that there are differences between these two clinical populations in the non-phonological dimensions of language. PMID:27313551

Txt Lang: Texting, Textism Use and Literacy Abilities in Adolescents with and without Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durkin, K.; Conti-Ramsden, G.; Walker, A. J.

2011-01-01

The present study examined text messaging in adolescence, in particular relationships among textism use, language and literacy skills. Forty-seven typically developing (TD) 17-year-olds and 47 adolescents of the same age with specific language impairment (SLI) participated. Participants completed standardised assessments of cognitive, language and…

Language and Ageing--Exploring Propositional Density in Written Language--Stability over Time

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spencer, Elizabeth; Craig, Hugh; Ferguson, Alison; Colyvas, Kim

2012-01-01

This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…

Knowledge, language and subjectivities in a discourse community: Ideas we can learn from elementary children about science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kurth, Lori Ann

2000-10-01

In light of continuing poor performance by American students in school science, feminists and sociocultural researchers have demonstrated that we need to look beyond content to address the science needs of all school children. In this study I examined issues of discourse norms, knowledge, language and subjectivities (meaning personal and social observations and characteristics) in elementary science. Over a two-year period, I used an interpretive methodological approach to investigate science experiences in two first-second and second grade classrooms. I first established some of the norms and characteristics of the discourse communities through case studies of new students attempting to gain entry to whole class conversations. I then examined knowledge, a central focus of science education addressed by a variety of theoretical approaches. In these classrooms students co-constructed and built knowledge in their whole class science conversations sometimes following convergent (similar knowledge) and, at other times, divergent (differing knowledge) paths allowing for broader discourse. In both paths, there was gendered construction of knowledge in which same gender students elaborated the reasoning of previous speakers. In conjunction with these analyses, I examined what knowledge sources the students used in their science conversations. Students drew on a variety of informal and formal knowledge sources including personal experiences, other students, abstract logic and thought experiments, all of which were considered valid. In using sources from both in and out of school, students' knowledge bases were broader than traditional scientific content giving greater access and richness to their conversations. The next analysis focused on students' use of narrative and paradigmatic language forms in the whole class science conversations. Traditionally, only paradigmatic language forms have been used in science classrooms. The students in this study used both narrative and paradigmatic language by drawing on stories of personal experience as well as canonical scientific argument. As had the varied knowledge paths and sources, the use of both language forms contributed to a broader and richer scientific discourse. Finally, in studying students' written discourse through their journals, I found that students had expanded views of science as they incorporated many aspects of their subjective selves including self and human elements, thinking, emotions, etc. in their writing and drawing. The enactment of knowledge, language and subjectivities in these discourse communities was unique, rich and meaningful highlighting a broader, more accessible vision of science. I advocate that knowledge, language and subjectivities should be central concepts in the practices of science communities as demonstrated in these classrooms. In establishing and integrating these concepts, the use of alternative and traditional modes of expression should be supported as both necessary and complementary. Students and teachers must also jointly construct classroom discourse norms, talk and writing in specific ways in order to provide a safe, comfortable and meaningful learning environment. Many teachers, students and scientists would benefit from broader visions of science, which enrich scientific knowledge and practice and engage and value participants from many backgrounds.

“You never know who are Sami or speak Sami” Clinicians’ experiences with language-appropriate care to Sami-speaking patients in outpatient mental health clinics in Northern Norway

PubMed Central

Dagsvold, Inger; Møllersen, Snefrid; Stordahl, Vigdis

2016-01-01

Background The Indigenous population in Norway, the Sami, have a statutory right to speak and be spoken to in the Sami language when receiving health services. There is, however, limited knowledge about how clinicians deal with this in clinical practice. This study explores how clinicians deal with language-appropriate care with Sami-speaking patients in specialist mental health services. Objectives This study aims to explore how clinicians identify and respond to Sami patients’ language data, as well as how they experience provision of therapy to Sami-speaking patients in outpatient mental health clinics in Sami language administrative districts. Method Data were collected using qualitative method, through individual interviews with 20 therapists working in outpatient mental health clinics serving Sami populations in northern Norway. A thematic analysis inspired by systematic text reduction was employed. Findings Two themes were identified: (a) identification of Sami patients’ language data and (b) experiences with provision of therapy to Sami-speaking patients. Conclusion Findings indicate that clinicians are not aware of patients’ language needs prior to admission and that they deal with identification of language data and offer of language-appropriate care ad hoc when patients arrive. Sami-speaking participants reported always offering language choice and found more profound understanding of patients’ experiences when Sami language was used. Whatever language Sami-speaking patients may choose, they are found to switch between languages during therapy. Most non-Sami-speaking participants reported offering Sami-speaking services, but the patients chose to speak Norwegian. However, a few of the participants maintained language awareness and could identify language needs despite a patient's refusal to speak Sami in therapy. Finally, some non-Sami-speaking participants were satisfied if they understood what the patients were saying. They left it to patients to address language problems, only to discover patients’ complaints in retrospect. Consequently, language-appropriate care depends on individual clinicians’ language assessment and offering of language choice. PMID:27836018

Vocabulary Knowledge and Morphological Awareness in Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) Reading Comprehension Ability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Haomin; Koda, Keiko

2018-01-01

This study explored the role of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in reading comprehension ability of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) learners. One hundred ninety five CHL students participated in this study and completed a series of measures including two sets of vocabulary knowledge (one consisting of items pertaining to…

You Are Your Words: Modeling Students' Vocabulary Knowledge with Natural Language Processing Tools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Allen, Laura K.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2015-01-01

The current study investigates the degree to which the lexical properties of students' essays can inform stealth assessments of their vocabulary knowledge. In particular, we used indices calculated with the natural language processing tool, TAALES, to predict students' performance on a measure of vocabulary knowledge. To this end, two corpora were…

An Overview of OWL, a Language for Knowledge Representation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Szolovits, Peter; And Others

This is a description of the motivation and overall organization of the OWL language for knowledge representation. OWL consists of a linguistic memory system (LMS), a memory of concepts in terms of which all English phrases and all knowledge of an application domain are represented; a theory of English grammar which tells how to map English…

Teacher Language Awareness and the Professional Knowledge Base of the L2 Teacher

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andrews, Stephen

2003-01-01

This paper provides an introduction to teacher language awareness (TLA) and a personal reconceptualisation of the relationship between TLA and other dimensions of teacher knowledge, revisiting issues discussed in Andrews (2001). In the first part of the paper, knowledge of subject matter is identified as the core of TLA. Given the increased…

Measuring Preschool Teachers' Perceived Competency and Knowledge of Oral Language Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Prestwich, Dian Teer

2012-01-01

Research has demonstrated the impact of early oral language development on a child's later reading comprehension. Additionally, research has suggested that teachers' knowledge of effective practices in literacy plays an important role in students' ability to learn to read. The problem is that preschool teachers' knowledge of…

What can we talk about, in which language, in what way and with whom? Sami patients' experiences of language choice and cultural norms in mental health treatment

PubMed Central

Dagsvold, Inger; Møllersen, Snefrid; Stordahl, Vigdis

2015-01-01

Background The Sami in Norway have a legal right to receive health services adapted to Sami language and culture. This calls for a study of the significance of language choice and cultural norms in Sami patients’ encounters with mental health services. Objectives To explore the significance of language and cultural norms in communication about mental health topics experienced by Sami patients receiving mental health treatment to enhance our understanding of linguistic and cultural adaptation of health services. Methods Data were collected through individual interviews with 4 Sami patients receiving mental health treatment in Northern Norway. A systematic text reduction and a thematic analysis were employed. Findings Two themes were identified: (I) Language choice is influenced by language competence, with whom one talks and what one talks about. Bilingualism was a resource and natural part of the participants’ lives, but there were limited possibilities to speak Sami in encounters with health services. A professional working relationship was placed on an equal footing with the possibility to speak Sami. (II) Cultural norms influence what one talks about, in what way and to whom. However, norms could be bypassed, by talking about norm-regulated topics in Norwegian with health providers. Conclusion Sami patients’ language choice in different communication situations is influenced by a complexity of social and cultural factors. Sami patients have varying opinions about and preferences for what they can talk about, in which language, in what way and with whom. Bilingualism and knowledge about both Sami and Norwegian culture provide latitude and enhanced possibilities for both patients and the health services. The challenge for the health services is to allow for and safeguard such individual variations within the cultural framework of the patients. PMID:25976741

ADO: a disease ontology representing the domain knowledge specific to Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Malhotra, Ashutosh; Younesi, Erfan; Gündel, Michaela; Müller, Bernd; Heneka, Michael T; Hofmann-Apitius, Martin

2014-03-01

Biomedical ontologies offer the capability to structure and represent domain-specific knowledge semantically. Disease-specific ontologies can facilitate knowledge exchange across multiple disciplines, and ontology-driven mining approaches can generate great value for modeling disease mechanisms. However, in the case of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, there is a lack of formal representation of the relevant knowledge domain. Alzheimer's disease ontology (ADO) is constructed in accordance to the ontology building life cycle. The Protégé OWL editor was used as a tool for building ADO in Ontology Web Language format. ADO was developed with the purpose of containing information relevant to four main biological views-preclinical, clinical, etiological, and molecular/cellular mechanisms-and was enriched by adding synonyms and references. Validation of the lexicalized ontology by means of named entity recognition-based methods showed a satisfactory performance (F score = 72%). In addition to structural and functional evaluation, a clinical expert in the field performed a manual evaluation and curation of ADO. Through integration of ADO into an information retrieval environment, we show that the ontology supports semantic search in scientific text. The usefulness of ADO is authenticated by dedicated use case scenarios. Development of ADO as an open ADO is a first attempt to organize information related to Alzheimer's disease in a formalized, structured manner. We demonstrate that ADO is able to capture both established and scattered knowledge existing in scientific text. Copyright © 2014 The Alzheimer's Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Why segmentation matters: experience-driven segmentation errors impair “morpheme” learning

PubMed Central

Finn, Amy S.; Hudson Kam, Carla L.

2015-01-01

We ask whether an adult learner’s knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners’ ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically triggered variation of morphemes. We find that learning is impaired when words and component morphemes are structured to conflict with a learner’s native-language phonotactic system, but not when native-language phonotactics do not conflict with morpheme boundaries in the artificial language. A learner’s native-language knowledge can therefore have a cascading impact affecting word segmentation and the morphological variation that relies upon proper segmentation. These results show that getting word segmentation right early in learning is deeply important for learning other aspects of language, even those (morphology) that are known to pose a great difficulty for adult language learners. PMID:25730305

How Does an Interactive Approach to Literary Texts Work in an English as a Foreign Language Context? Learners' Perspectives in Close-Up

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nguyen, Ha Thi Thu

2016-01-01

Interactive approaches to literary texts in second/foreign language education have enjoyed wide theoretical and empirical support. However, the teaching of literary texts in traditional English as a foreign language contexts still remains information-oriented, with a focus on the transmission and replication of an objectified interpretation of a…

ESP Students' Views on Online Language Resources for L2 Text Production Purposes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kozlova, Inna; Presas, Marisa

2013-01-01

The use of online language resources for L2 text production purposes is a recent phenomenon and has not yet been studied in depth. Increasing availability of new online resources seems to be changing the very nature of L2 text production. The traditional dictionary, hitherto a default resource to help with language doubts, is being left behind…

The interface between spoken and written language: developmental disorders.

PubMed

Hulme, Charles; Snowling, Margaret J

2014-01-01

We review current knowledge about reading development and the origins of difficulties in learning to read. We distinguish between the processes involved in learning to decode print, and the processes involved in reading for meaning (reading comprehension). At a cognitive level, difficulties in learning to read appear to be predominantly caused by deficits in underlying oral language skills. The development of decoding skills appears to depend critically upon phonological language skills, and variations in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and rapid automatized naming each appear to be causally related to problems in learning to read. Reading comprehension difficulties in contrast appear to be critically dependent on a range of oral language comprehension skills (including vocabulary knowledge and grammatical, morphological and pragmatic skills).

Home Literacy Environment and Word Knowledge Development: A Study of Young Learners of Chinese as a Heritage Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Dongbo; Koda, Keiko

2011-01-01

This study examined young Heritage Language (HL) learners' home literacy environment and its impact on HL word-knowledge development, focusing on a group of Chinese-English bilingual children learning to read in Chinese as a Heritage Language in the United States. A home literacy survey revealed that parents mostly used HL to talk to children,…

How Word Decoding, Vocabulary and Prior Topic Knowledge Predict Reading Comprehension. A Study of Language-Minority Students in Norwegian Fifth Grade Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rydland, Veslemoy; Aukrust, Vibeke Grover; Fulland, Helene

2012-01-01

This study examined the contribution of word decoding, first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) vocabulary and prior topic knowledge to L2 reading comprehension. For measuring reading comprehension we employed two different reading tasks: Woodcock Passage Comprehension and a researcher-developed content-area reading assignment (the Global…

From "Bored Witless" to "Rhetorical Nous": Teacher Orientation to Knowledge about Language and Strengthening Student Persuasive Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Love, Kristina; Sandiford, Carmel; Macken-Horarik, Mary; Unsworth, Len

2014-01-01

We report in this paper on one aspect of a project designed to support teachers with the demands of the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum for English as this guides their development of a coherent account of knowledge about language and their implementation of this in building their students' literacy repertoires. We map the changing…

Multilingualism and Affordances: Variation in Self-Perceived Communicative Competence and Communicative Anxiety in French L1, L2, L3 and L4

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dewaele, Jean-Marc

2010-01-01

In this contribution, I investigate the effect of the knowledge of other languages on self-perceived communicative competence and communicative anxiety in the French of 953 users. I tested the hypothesis that knowledge of more languages, specifically other Romance languages, create stronger or clearer affordances (Singleton & Aronin, Innovation in…

The Relationship Between Speech, Language, and Phonological Awareness in Preschool-Age Children With Developmental Disabilities.

PubMed

Barton-Hulsey, Andrea; Sevcik, Rose A; Romski, MaryAnn

2018-05-03

A number of intrinsic factors, including expressive speech skills, have been suggested to place children with developmental disabilities at risk for limited development of reading skills. This study examines the relationship between these factors, speech ability, and children's phonological awareness skills. A nonexperimental study design was used to examine the relationship between intrinsic skills of speech, language, print, and letter-sound knowledge to phonological awareness in 42 children with developmental disabilities between the ages of 48 and 69 months. Hierarchical multiple regression was done to determine if speech ability accounted for a unique amount of variance in phonological awareness skill beyond what would be expected by developmental skills inclusive of receptive language and print and letter-sound knowledge. A range of skill in all areas of direct assessment was found. Children with limited speech were found to have emerging skills in print knowledge, letter-sound knowledge, and phonological awareness. Speech ability did not predict a significant amount of variance in phonological awareness beyond what would be expected by developmental skills of receptive language and print and letter-sound knowledge. Children with limited speech ability were found to have receptive language and letter-sound knowledge that supported the development of phonological awareness skills. This study provides implications for practitioners and researchers concerning the factors related to early reading development in children with limited speech ability and developmental disabilities.

Graphical qualities of educational technology: Using drag-and-drop and text-based programs for introductory computer science.

PubMed

DiSalvo, Betsy

2014-01-01

To determine appropriate computer science curricula, educators sought to better understand the different affordances of teaching with a visual programming language (Alice) or a text-based language (Jython). Although students often preferred one language, that language wasn't necessarily the one from which they learned the most.

A Study on the Aesthetic Value of Texts in Turkish Language Textbooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pilav, Salim

2016-01-01

One of the main objectives of education is to enable the individual to obtain an aesthetic perspective by using language. It is through such classes as Turkish Language and Literature that students not only explore skill-based aspects of Turkish language but also get acquainted with its artistic properties. Therefore, the texts used in these…

CPP-TRS(C): On using visual cognitive symbols to enhance communication effectiveness

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tonfoni, Graziella

1994-01-01

Communicative Positioning Program/Text Representation Systems (CPP-TRS) is a visual language based on a system of 12 canvasses, 10 signals and 14 symbols. CPP-TRS is based on the fact that every communication action is the result of a set of cognitive processes and the whole system is based on the concept that you can enhance communication by visually perceiving text. With a simple syntax, CPP-TRS is capable of representing meaning and intention as well as communication functions visually. Those are precisely invisible aspects of natural language that are most relevant to getting the global meaning of a text. CPP-TRS reinforces natural language in human machine interaction systems. It complements natural language by adding certain important elements that are not represented by natural language by itself. These include communication intention and function of the text expressed by the sender, as well as the role the reader is supposed to play. The communication intention and function of a text and the reader's role are invisible in natural language because neither specific words nor punctuation conveys them sufficiently and unambiguously; they are therefore non-transparent.

Language and Culture in the Multi-Ethnic Community: Spoken-Language Assessment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matluck, Joseph H.; Mace-Matluck, Betty J.

1975-01-01

Describes the research approach used to develop the MAT-SEA-CAL Oral Proficiency tests designed by the authors. Language test performance depends on both language proficiency and knowledge of the culture. (TL)

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems

PubMed Central

Li, Shan; Lin, Ruokuang; Bian, Chunhua; Ma, Qianli D. Y.

2016-01-01

Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language. PMID:28006026

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.

PubMed

Li, Shan; Lin, Ruokuang; Bian, Chunhua; Ma, Qianli D Y; Ivanov, Plamen Ch

2016-01-01

Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.

Knowledge foundations for beginning reading teachers in EFL.

PubMed

Goldfus, Carol

2012-10-01

This study examined the knowledge that teachers need in order to become successful early reading teachers in English as a foreign language. The findings showed that in-service teachers had better content knowledge than pre-service teachers, although the results indicated overall low performance and insufficiently developed concepts about the structure of language, spelling rules, and academic terminology in both groups.

Language and Reading Instruction in Early Years' Classrooms: The Knowledge and Self-Rated Ability of Australian Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stark, Hannah L.; Snow, Pamela C.; Eadie, Patricia A.; Goldfeld, Sharon R.

2016-01-01

This study sought to investigate the level of knowledge of language constructs in a cohort of Australian teachers and to examine their self-rated ability and confidence in that knowledge. Seventy-eight teachers from schools across the Australian state of Victoria completed a questionnaire which included items from existing measures, as well as…

Speech-Language Pathologists' Knowledge of Genetics: Perceived Confidence, Attitudes, Knowledge Acquisition and Practice-Based Variables

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tramontana, G. Michael; Blood, Ingrid M.; Blood, Gordon W.

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the general knowledge bases demonstrated by school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the area of genetics, (b) the confidence levels of SLPs in providing services to children and their families with genetic disorders/syndromes, (c) the attitudes of SLPs regarding genetics and communication…

The Role of Parent Education and Parenting Knowledge in Children's Language and Literacy Skills among White, Black, and Latino Families

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rowe, Meredith L.; Denmark, Nicole; Harden, Brenda Jones; Stapleton, Laura M.

2016-01-01

This study investigated the role of parenting knowledge of infant development in children's subsequent language and pre-literacy skills among White, Black and Latino families of varying socioeconomic status. Data come from 6,150 participants in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. Mothers' knowledge of infant development was…

Providing English Foreign Language Teachers with Content Knowledge to Facilitate Decoding and Spelling Acquisition: A Longitudinal Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kahn-Horwitz, Janina

2016-01-01

This quasi-experimental study adds to the small existing literature on orthographic-related teacher knowledge in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. The study examined the impact of a course on English orthography on predominantly non-native-speaking EFL preservice and inservice teachers' orthographic content knowledge, and the extent…

Cortical circuits for mathematical knowledge: evidence for a major subdivision within the brain's semantic networks.

PubMed

Amalric, Marie; Dehaene, Stanislas

2017-02-19

Is mathematical language similar to natural language? Are language areas used by mathematicians when they do mathematics? And does the brain comprise a generic semantic system that stores mathematical knowledge alongside knowledge of history, geography or famous people? Here, we refute those views by reviewing three functional MRI studies of the representation and manipulation of high-level mathematical knowledge in professional mathematicians. The results reveal that brain activity during professional mathematical reflection spares perisylvian language-related brain regions as well as temporal lobe areas classically involved in general semantic knowledge. Instead, mathematical reflection recycles bilateral intraparietal and ventral temporal regions involved in elementary number sense. Even simple fact retrieval, such as remembering that 'the sine function is periodical' or that 'London buses are red', activates dissociated areas for math versus non-math knowledge. Together with other fMRI and recent intracranial studies, our results indicated a major separation between two brain networks for mathematical and non-mathematical semantics, which goes a long way to explain a variety of facts in neuroimaging, neuropsychology and developmental disorders.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'. © 2017 The Author(s).

Litterature: Retour au texte (Literature: Return to the Text).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Noe, Alfred

1993-01-01

Choice of texts for use in French language instruction is discussed. It is argued that the text's format (e.g., advertising, figurative poetry, journal article, play, prose, etc.) is instrumental in bringing attention to the language in it, and this has implications for the best uses of different text types. (MSE)

Information retrieval and terminology extraction in online resources for patients with diabetes.

PubMed

Seljan, Sanja; Baretić, Maja; Kucis, Vlasta

2014-06-01

Terminology use, as a mean for information retrieval or document indexing, plays an important role in health literacy. Specific types of users, i.e. patients with diabetes need access to various online resources (on foreign and/or native language) searching for information on self-education of basic diabetic knowledge, on self-care activities regarding importance of dietetic food, medications, physical exercises and on self-management of insulin pumps. Automatic extraction of corpus-based terminology from online texts, manuals or professional papers, can help in building terminology lists or list of "browsing phrases" useful in information retrieval or in document indexing. Specific terminology lists represent an intermediate step between free text search and controlled vocabulary, between user's demands and existing online resources in native and foreign language. The research aiming to detect the role of terminology in online resources, is conducted on English and Croatian manuals and Croatian online texts, and divided into three interrelated parts: i) comparison of professional and popular terminology use ii) evaluation of automatic statistically-based terminology extraction on English and Croatian texts iii) comparison and evaluation of extracted terminology performed on English manual using statistical and hybrid approaches. Extracted terminology candidates are evaluated by comparison with three types of reference lists: list created by professional medical person, list of highly professional vocabulary contained in MeSH and list created by non-medical persons, made as intersection of 15 lists. Results report on use of popular and professional terminology in online diabetes resources, on evaluation of automatically extracted terminology candidates in English and Croatian texts and on comparison of statistical and hybrid extraction methods in English text. Evaluation of automatic and semi-automatic terminology extraction methods is performed by recall, precision and f-measure.

Effects of Different Text Difficulty Levels on EFL Learners' Foreign Language Reading Anxiety and Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bahmani, Roghayeh; Farvardin, Mohammad Taghi

2017-01-01

This study aimed to examine the effects of different text difficulty levels on foreign language reading anxiety (FLRA) and reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. To this end, 50 elementary EFL learners were selected from two intact classes (n = 25 each). Each class was assigned to a text difficulty level (i.e.,…

Organization and integration of biomedical knowledge with concept maps for key peroxisomal pathways.

PubMed

Willemsen, A M; Jansen, G A; Komen, J C; van Hooff, S; Waterham, H R; Brites, P M T; Wanders, R J A; van Kampen, A H C

2008-08-15

One important area of clinical genomics research involves the elucidation of molecular mechanisms underlying (complex) disorders which eventually may lead to new diagnostic or drug targets. To further advance this area of clinical genomics one of the main challenges is the acquisition and integration of data, information and expert knowledge for specific biomedical domains and diseases. Currently the required information is not very well organized but scattered over biological and biomedical databases, basic text books, scientific literature and experts' minds and may be highly specific, heterogeneous, complex and voluminous. We present a new framework to construct knowledge bases with concept maps for presentation of information and the web ontology language OWL for the representation of information. We demonstrate this framework through the construction of a peroxisomal knowledge base, which focuses on four key peroxisomal pathways and several related genetic disorders. All 155 concept maps in our knowledge base are linked to at least one other concept map, which allows the visualization of one big network of related pieces of information. The peroxisome knowledge base is available from www.bioinformaticslaboratory.nl (Support-->Web applications). Supplementary data is available from www.bioinformaticslaboratory.nl (Research-->Output--> Publications--> KB_SuppInfo)

Encoding Standards for Linguistic Corpora.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ide, Nancy

The demand for extensive reusability of large language text collections for natural languages processing research requires development of standardized encoding formats. Such formats must be capable of representing different kinds of information across the spectrum of text types and languages, capable of representing different levels of…

On the role of words in the network structure of texts: Application to authorship attribution

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Akimushkin, Camilo; Amancio, Diego R.; Oliveira, Osvaldo N.

2018-04-01

Well-established automatic analyses of texts mainly consider frequencies of linguistic units, e.g. letters, words, and bigrams. In a recent, alternative approach, medium and large-scale text structures were used in opposition to the belief that text structure is dominated by the language features. In this paper, we introduce a generalized similarity measure to compare texts which accounts for both the network structure of texts and the role of individual words in the networks. The similarity measure is used for authorship attribution of three collections of books, each composed of 8 authors and 10 books per author. High accuracy rates were obtained with typical values between 90% and 98 . 75%, much higher than with the traditional term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) approach for the same collections. These accuracies are also higher than those obtained solely with the topology of networks. We conclude that the different properties of specific words on the macroscopic scale structure of a whole text are as relevant as their frequency of appearance; conversely, considering the identity of nodes brings further knowledge about a piece of text represented as a network.

Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory

PubMed Central

Cutler, Anne; Broersma, Mirjam

2017-01-01

Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth-language patterns. Understanding the nature of this knowledge can shed light on how language is acquired. Here, international adoptees from Korea with Dutch as their current language, and matched Dutch-native controls, provided speech production data on a Korean consonantal distinction unlike any Dutch distinctions, at the outset and end of an intensive perceptual training. The productions, elicited in a repetition task, were identified and rated by Korean listeners. Adoptees' production scores improved significantly more across the training period than control participants' scores, and, for adoptees only, relative production success correlated significantly with the rate of learning in perception (which had, as predicted, also surpassed that of the controls). Of the adoptee group, half had been adopted at 17 months or older (when talking would have begun), while half had been prelinguistic (under six months). The former group, with production experience, showed no advantage over the group without. Thus the adoptees' retained knowledge of Korean transferred from perception to production and appears to be abstract in nature rather than dependent on the amount of experience. PMID:28280567

Mobile-Assisted Second Language Learning: Developing a Learner-Centered Framework

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leow, Choy Khim; Yahaya, Wan Ahmad Jaafar Wan; Samsudin, Zarina

2014-01-01

The Mobile Assisted Language Learning concept has offered infinite language learning opportunities since its inception 20 years ago. Second Language Acquisition however embraces a considerably different body of knowledge from first language learning. While technological advances have optimized the psycholinguistic environment for language…

Neural correlates of language comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: when language conflicts with world knowledge.

PubMed

Tesink, Cathelijne M J Y; Buitelaar, Jan K; Petersson, Karl Magnus; van der Gaag, Rutger Jan; Teunisse, Jan-Pieter; Hagoort, Peter

2011-04-01

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language comprehension occur. Therefore, in the current fMRI study, we investigated the neural correlates of the integration of contextual information during auditory language comprehension in 24 adults with ASD and 24 matched control participants. Different levels of context processing were manipulated by using spoken sentences that were correct or contained either a semantic or world knowledge anomaly. Our findings demonstrated significant differences between the groups in inferior frontal cortex that were only present for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly. Relative to the ASD group, the control group showed significantly increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly compared to correct sentences. This effect possibly indicates reduced integrative capacities of the ASD group. Furthermore, world knowledge anomalies elicited significantly stronger activation in right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) in the control group compared to the ASD group. This additional RIFG activation probably reflects revision of the situation model after new, conflicting information. The lack of recruitment of RIFG is possibly related to difficulties with exception handling in the ASD group. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Investigating the Measurement of Grammatical Knowledge and Civics Content Knowledge in the Context of an English-for Specific-Purposes Program Designed for Adult Learners with Low English Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dakin, Jee Wha

2010-01-01

In the context of adult learners with low English proficiency enrolled in an organization offering instruction in both language and civics content, the purpose of the study was to determine. (1) the nature of grammatical knowledge in the context in the learners' second language (L2) and the nature of civics content knowledge in the learners' first…

A study of the effects of English language proficiency and scientific reasoning skills on the acquisition of science content knowledge of Hispanic English language learners and native English language-speaking students participating in grade 10 science classes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Torres, Hector Neftali, Sr.

2000-11-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of English language proficiency and levels of scientific reasoning skills of Hispanic English language learners and native English language speaking students on their acquisition of science content knowledge as measured by a state-wide standardized science test. The researcher studied a group of high school Hispanic English language learners and native English language speaking students participating in Grade 10 science classes. The language proficiency of the students was to be measured through the use of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) instrument. A Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning developed by Lawson (1978) was administered in either English or Spanish to the group of Hispanic English language learners and in English to the group of native English language-speaking students in order to determine their levels of scientific reasoning skills. The students' acquisition of science content knowledge was measured through the use of statewide-standardized science test developed by the State's Department of Education. This study suggests that the levels of English language proficiency appear to influence the acquisition of science content knowledge of Hispanic English language learners in the study. The results of the study also suggest that with regards to scientific reasoning skills, students that showed high levels or reflective reasoning skills for the most part performed better on the statewide-standardized science test than students with intuitive or transitional reasoning skills. This assertion was supported by the studies conducted by Lawson and his colleagues, which showed that high levels of reasoning or reflective reasoning skills are prerequisite for most high school science courses. The findings in this study imply that high order English language proficiency combined with high levels of reasoning skills enhances students' abilities to learn science content subject matter. This lends support to Cummins' theoretical framework, which indicates that learning science content subject matter requires cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). The study also indicates that CALP maybe the combination of high order English language proficiency and high levels of reasoning skills. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Modern Languages and Antiracism.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Shaughnessy, Martin

1988-01-01

Discusses a school language department's antiracist/multicultural policy for modern languages. The policy stresses the need for a multicultural curriculum, exploration of racism, acceptance of all languages, recognition of specialized knowledge, and positive images of people from ethnic minority groups. (CB)

Translating medical documents into plain language enhances communication skills in medical students--A pilot study.

PubMed

Bittner, Anja; Jonietz, Ansgar; Bittner, Johannes; Beickert, Luise; Harendza, Sigrid

2015-09-01

To train and assess undergraduate medical students' written communication skills by exercises in translating medical reports into plain language for real patients. 27 medical students participated in a newly developed communication course. They attended a 3-h seminar including a briefing on patient-centered communication and an introduction to working with the internet platform http://washabich.de. In the following ten weeks, participants "translated" one medical report every fortnight on this platform receiving feedback by a near-peer supervisor. A pre- and post-course assignment consisted of a self-assessment questionnaire on communication skills, analysis of a medical text with respect to medical jargon, and the translation of a medical report into plain language. In the self-assessment, students rated themselves in most aspects of patient-centered communication significantly higher after attending the course. After the course they marked significantly more medical jargon terms correctly than before (p<0.001). In a written plain language translation of a medical report they scored significantly higher with respect to communicative aspects (p<0.05) and medical correctness (p<0.001). Translating medical reports into plain language under near-peer supervision is associated with improved communication skills and medical knowledge in undergraduate medical students. To include translation exercises in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Insights into Second Language Acquisition Theory and Different Approaches to Language Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ponniah, Joseph

2010-01-01

This paper attempts to review second language acquisition theory and some of the methods practiced in language classes. The review substantiates that comprehensible input as the crucial determining factor for language acquisition and consciously learned linguistic knowledge can be used only to edit the output of the acquired language sometimes…

Modelling Teaching Strategies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Major, Nigel

1995-01-01

Describes a modelling language for representing teaching strategies, based in the context of the COCA intelligent tutoring system. Examines work on meta-reasoning in knowledge-based systems and describes COCA's architecture, giving details of the language used for representing teaching knowledge. Discusses implications for future work. (AEF)

Ada as an implementation language for knowledge based systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rochowiak, Daniel

1990-01-01

Debates about the selection of programming languages often produce cultural collisions that are not easily resolved. This is especially true in the case of Ada and knowledge based programming. The construction of programming tools provides a desirable alternative for resolving the conflict.

Semantic computing and language knowledge bases

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Lei; Wang, Houfeng; Yu, Shiwen

2017-09-01

As the proposition of the next-generation Web - semantic Web, semantic computing has been drawing more and more attention within the circle and the industries. A lot of research has been conducted on the theory and methodology of the subject, and potential applications have also been investigated and proposed in many fields. The progress of semantic computing made so far cannot be detached from its supporting pivot - language resources, for instance, language knowledge bases. This paper proposes three perspectives of semantic computing from a macro view and describes the current status of affairs about the construction of language knowledge bases and the related research and applications that have been carried out on the basis of these resources via a case study in the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University.

The generic task toolset: High level languages for the construction of planning and problem solving systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chandrasekaran, B.; Josephson, J.; Herman, D.

1987-01-01

The current generation of languages for the construction of knowledge-based systems as being at too low a level of abstraction is criticized, and the need for higher level languages for building problem solving systems is advanced. A notion of generic information processing tasks in knowledge-based problem solving is introduced. A toolset which can be used to build expert systems in a way that enhances intelligibility and productivity in knowledge acquistion and system construction is described. The power of these ideas is illustrated by paying special attention to a high level language called DSPL. A description is given of how it was used in the construction of a system called MPA, which assists with planning in the domain of offensive counter air missions.

Identifying Suicide Ideation and Suicidal Attempts in a Psychiatric Clinical Research Database using Natural Language Processing.

PubMed

Fernandes, Andrea C; Dutta, Rina; Velupillai, Sumithra; Sanyal, Jyoti; Stewart, Robert; Chandran, David

2018-05-09

Research into suicide prevention has been hampered by methodological limitations such as low sample size and recall bias. Recently, Natural Language Processing (NLP) strategies have been used with Electronic Health Records to increase information extraction from free text notes as well as structured fields concerning suicidality and this allows access to much larger cohorts than previously possible. This paper presents two novel NLP approaches - a rule-based approach to classify the presence of suicide ideation and a hybrid machine learning and rule-based approach to identify suicide attempts in a psychiatric clinical database. Good performance of the two classifiers in the evaluation study suggest they can be used to accurately detect mentions of suicide ideation and attempt within free-text documents in this psychiatric database. The novelty of the two approaches lies in the malleability of each classifier if a need to refine performance, or meet alternate classification requirements arises. The algorithms can also be adapted to fit infrastructures of other clinical datasets given sufficient clinical recording practice knowledge, without dependency on medical codes or additional data extraction of known risk factors to predict suicidal behaviour.

Automatic Analysis of Critical Incident Reports: Requirements and Use Cases.

PubMed

Denecke, Kerstin

2016-01-01

Increasingly, critical incident reports are used as a means to increase patient safety and quality of care. The entire potential of these sources of experiential knowledge remains often unconsidered since retrieval and analysis is difficult and time-consuming, and the reporting systems often do not provide support for these tasks. The objective of this paper is to identify potential use cases for automatic methods that analyse critical incident reports. In more detail, we will describe how faceted search could offer an intuitive retrieval of critical incident reports and how text mining could support in analysing relations among events. To realise an automated analysis, natural language processing needs to be applied. Therefore, we analyse the language of critical incident reports and derive requirements towards automatic processing methods. We learned that there is a huge potential for an automatic analysis of incident reports, but there are still challenges to be solved.

Phonologic-graphemic transcodifier for Portuguese Language spoken in Brazil (PLB)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fragadasilva, Francisco Jose; Saotome, Osamu; Deoliveira, Carlos Alberto

An automatic speech-to-text transformer system, suited to unlimited vocabulary, is presented. The basic acoustic unit considered are the allophones of the phonemes corresponding to the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil (PLB). The input to the system is a phonetic sequence, from a former step of isolated word recognition of slowly spoken speech. In a first stage, the system eliminates phonetic elements that don't belong to PLB. Using knowledge sources such as phonetics, phonology, orthography, and PLB specific lexicon, the output is a sequence of written words, ordered by probabilistic criterion that constitutes the set of graphemic possibilities to that input sequence. Pronunciation differences of some regions of Brazil are considered, but only those that cause differences in phonological transcription, because those of phonetic level are absorbed, during the transformation to phonological level. In the final stage, all possible written words are analyzed for orthography and grammar point of view, to eliminate the incorrect ones.

Incorporating domain knowledge in chemical and biomedical named entity recognition with word representations.

PubMed

Munkhdalai, Tsendsuren; Li, Meijing; Batsuren, Khuyagbaatar; Park, Hyeon Ah; Choi, Nak Hyeon; Ryu, Keun Ho

2015-01-01

Chemical and biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential prerequisite task before effective text mining can begin for biochemical-text data. Exploiting unlabeled text data to leverage system performance has been an active and challenging research topic in text mining due to the recent growth in the amount of biomedical literature. We present a semi-supervised learning method that efficiently exploits unlabeled data in order to incorporate domain knowledge into a named entity recognition model and to leverage system performance. The proposed method includes Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks for text preprocessing, learning word representation features from a large amount of text data for feature extraction, and conditional random fields for token classification. Other than the free text in the domain, the proposed method does not rely on any lexicon nor any dictionary in order to keep the system applicable to other NER tasks in bio-text data. We extended BANNER, a biomedical NER system, with the proposed method. This yields an integrated system that can be applied to chemical and drug NER or biomedical NER. We call our branch of the BANNER system BANNER-CHEMDNER, which is scalable over millions of documents, processing about 530 documents per minute, is configurable via XML, and can be plugged into other systems by using the BANNER Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) interface. BANNER-CHEMDNER achieved an 85.68% and an 86.47% F-measure on the testing sets of CHEMDNER Chemical Entity Mention (CEM) and Chemical Document Indexing (CDI) subtasks, respectively, and achieved an 87.04% F-measure on the official testing set of the BioCreative II gene mention task, showing remarkable performance in both chemical and biomedical NER. BANNER-CHEMDNER system is available at: https://bitbucket.org/tsendeemts/banner-chemdner.

GeoSegmenter: A statistically learned Chinese word segmenter for the geoscience domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huang, Lan; Du, Youfu; Chen, Gongyang

2015-03-01

Unlike English, the Chinese language has no space between words. Segmenting texts into words, known as the Chinese word segmentation (CWS) problem, thus becomes a fundamental issue for processing Chinese documents and the first step in many text mining applications, including information retrieval, machine translation and knowledge acquisition. However, for the geoscience subject domain, the CWS problem remains unsolved. Although a generic segmenter can be applied to process geoscience documents, they lack the domain specific knowledge and consequently their segmentation accuracy drops dramatically. This motivated us to develop a segmenter specifically for the geoscience subject domain: the GeoSegmenter. We first proposed a generic two-step framework for domain specific CWS. Following this framework, we built GeoSegmenter using conditional random fields, a principled statistical framework for sequence learning. Specifically, GeoSegmenter first identifies general terms by using a generic baseline segmenter. Then it recognises geoscience terms by learning and applying a model that can transform the initial segmentation into the goal segmentation. Empirical experimental results on geoscience documents and benchmark datasets showed that GeoSegmenter could effectively recognise both geoscience terms and general terms.

Beyond Policy and Language Choice: An Analysis of Texts in Four Instructional Contexts in East Africa. Special Studies in Comparative Education, Number Eighteen.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mbuyi, Dennis M.

This study compares the English and Swahili language texts used in the primary grades in Kenya and Tanzania in order to ascertain the role of language in determining the content of instruction and to relate the content of these texts to significant characteristics of governmental educational policy and the values underlying them. The introductory…

Video to Text (V2T) in Wide Area Motion Imagery

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-09-01

microtext) or a document (e.g., using Sphinx or Apache NLP ) as an automated approach [102]. Previous work in natural language full-text searching...language processing ( NLP ) based module. The heart of the structured text processing module includes the following seven key word banks...Features Tracker MHT Multiple Hypothesis Tracking MIL Multiple Instance Learning NLP Natural Language Processing OAB Online AdaBoost OF Optic Flow

Using Unscripted Spoken Texts in the Teaching of Second Language Listening

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wagner, Elvis

2014-01-01

Most spoken texts that are used in second language (L2) listening classroom activities are scripted texts, where the text is written, revised, polished, and then read aloud with artificially clear enunciation and slow rate of speech. This article explores the field's overreliance on these scripted texts, at the expense of including unscripted…

Authentic Text Types and Corresponding Activities: A List for the Foreign Language Instructor.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geltrich-Ludgate, Brigitta; Tovar, Deanna

1987-01-01

The study of authentic texts gives students the opportunity to become functional in target-language situations. An exhaustive alphabetical list of authentic text types and corresponding learning activities are presented. Text types include: advertisements, bank materials, bills and receipts, calendars, captions, comics, commercials, decals, forms,…

Innovations in Measuring Peer Conflict Resolution Knowledge in Children with LI: Exploring the Accessibility of a Visual Analogue Rating Scale

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Wenonah N.; Skarakis-Doyle, Elizabeth

2011-01-01

This preliminary study explored peer conflict resolution knowledge in children with and without language impairment (LI). Specifically, it evaluated the utility of a visual analogue scale (VAS) for measuring nuances in such knowledge. Children aged 9-12 years, 26 with typically developing language (TLD) and 6 with LI, completed a training protocol…

Effects of Prior Economic Education, Native Language, and Gender on Economic Knowledge of First-Year Students in Higher Education. A Comparative Study between Germany and the USA

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brückner, Sebastian; Förster, Manuel; Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Olga; Walstad, William B.

2015-01-01

The assessment of university students' economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students' economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings…

The Interface of Explicit and Implicit Knowledge in a Second Language: Insights from Individual Differences in Cognitive Aptitudes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suzuki, Yuichi; DeKeyser, Robert

2017-01-01

Recent research has called for the use of fine-grained measures that distinguish implicit knowledge from automatized explicit knowledge. In the current study, such measures were used to determine how the two systems interact in a naturalistic second language (L2) acquisition context. One hundred advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan…

Reading Comprehension Level and Development in Native and Language Minority Adolescent Low Achievers: Roles of Linguistic and Metacognitive Knowledge and Fluency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trapman, Mirjam; van Gelderen, Amos; van Schooten, Erik; Hulstijn, Jan

2017-01-01

In a longitudinal design, we measured 50 low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension development from Grades 7 to 9. There were 24 native Dutch and 26 language minority students. In addition, we assessed the roles of (a) linguistic knowledge, (b) metacognitive knowledge, and (c) reading fluency in predicting both the level and growth of…

US Urban Elementary Teachers' Knowledge and Practices in Teaching Science to English Language Learners: Results from the First Year of a Professional Development Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Santau, Alexandra O.; Secada, Walter; Maerten-Rivera, Jaime; Cone, Neporcha; Lee, Okhee

2010-01-01

The study examined US elementary teachers' knowledge and practices in four key domains of science instruction with English language learning (ELL) students. The four domains included: (1) teachers' knowledge of science content, (2) teaching practices to promote scientific understanding, (3) teaching practices to promote scientific inquiry, and (4)…

Probing the Statistical Properties of Unknown Texts: Application to the Voynich Manuscript

PubMed Central

Amancio, Diego R.; Altmann, Eduardo G.; Rybski, Diego; Oliveira, Osvaldo N.; Costa, Luciano da F.

2013-01-01

While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g., written in an unknown alphabet) is compatible with a natural language and to which language it could belong. The approach is based on three types of statistical measurements, i.e. obtained from first-order statistics of word properties in a text, from the topology of complex networks representing texts, and from intermittency concepts where text is treated as a time series. Comparative experiments were performed with the New Testament in 15 different languages and with distinct books in English and Portuguese in order to quantify the dependency of the different measurements on the language and on the story being told in the book. The metrics found to be informative in distinguishing real texts from their shuffled versions include assortativity, degree and selectivity of words. As an illustration, we analyze an undeciphered medieval manuscript known as the Voynich Manuscript. We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts. We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it. Because we were able to identify statistical measurements that are more dependent on the syntax than on the semantics, the framework may also serve for text analysis in language-dependent applications. PMID:23844002

Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich Manuscript.

PubMed

Amancio, Diego R; Altmann, Eduardo G; Rybski, Diego; Oliveira, Osvaldo N; Costa, Luciano da F

2013-01-01

While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g., written in an unknown alphabet) is compatible with a natural language and to which language it could belong. The approach is based on three types of statistical measurements, i.e. obtained from first-order statistics of word properties in a text, from the topology of complex networks representing texts, and from intermittency concepts where text is treated as a time series. Comparative experiments were performed with the New Testament in 15 different languages and with distinct books in English and Portuguese in order to quantify the dependency of the different measurements on the language and on the story being told in the book. The metrics found to be informative in distinguishing real texts from their shuffled versions include assortativity, degree and selectivity of words. As an illustration, we analyze an undeciphered medieval manuscript known as the Voynich Manuscript. We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts. We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it. Because we were able to identify statistical measurements that are more dependent on the syntax than on the semantics, the framework may also serve for text analysis in language-dependent applications.

An Ontology-Enabled Natural Language Processing Pipeline for Provenance Metadata Extraction from Biomedical Text (Short Paper).

PubMed

Valdez, Joshua; Rueschman, Michael; Kim, Matthew; Redline, Susan; Sahoo, Satya S

2016-10-01

Extraction of structured information from biomedical literature is a complex and challenging problem due to the complexity of biomedical domain and lack of appropriate natural language processing (NLP) techniques. High quality domain ontologies model both data and metadata information at a fine level of granularity, which can be effectively used to accurately extract structured information from biomedical text. Extraction of provenance metadata, which describes the history or source of information, from published articles is an important task to support scientific reproducibility. Reproducibility of results reported by previous research studies is a foundational component of scientific advancement. This is highlighted by the recent initiative by the US National Institutes of Health called "Principles of Rigor and Reproducibility". In this paper, we describe an effective approach to extract provenance metadata from published biomedical research literature using an ontology-enabled NLP platform as part of the Provenance for Clinical and Healthcare Research (ProvCaRe). The ProvCaRe-NLP tool extends the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES) platform using both provenance and biomedical domain ontologies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ProvCaRe-NLP tool using a corpus of 20 peer-reviewed publications. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that the ProvCaRe-NLP tool has significantly higher recall in extracting provenance metadata as compared to existing NLP pipelines such as MetaMap.

Comparative Difficulties with Non-Scientific General Vocabulary and Scientific/Medical Terminology in English as a Second Language (ESL) Medical Students.

PubMed

Heming, Thomas A; Nandagopal, Shobha

2012-11-01

Medical education requires student comprehension of both technical (scientific/medical) and non-technical (general) vocabulary. Our experience with "English as a second language" (ESL) Arab students suggested they often have problems comprehending scientific statements because of weaknesses in their understanding of non-scientific vocabulary. This study aimed to determine whether ESL students have difficulties with general vocabulary that could hinder their understanding of scientific/medical texts. A survey containing English text was given to ESL students in the premedical years of an English-medium medical school in an Arabic country. The survey consisted of sample questions from the Medical College Admission Test (USA). Students were instructed to identify all unknown words in the text. ESL students commenced premedical studies with substantial deficiencies in English vocabulary. Students from English-medium secondary schools had a selective deficiency in scientific/medical terminology which disappeared with time. Students from Arabic-medium secondary schools had equal difficulty with general and scientific/medical vocabulary. Deficiencies in both areas diminished with time but remained even after three years of English-medium higher education. Typically, when teaching technical subjects to ESL students, attention is focused on subject-unique vocabulary and associated modifiers. This study highlights that ESL students also face difficulties with the general vocabulary used to construct statements employing technical words. Such students would benefit from increases in general vocabulary knowledge.

Issues in L2: Theory as Practice/Practice as Theory. Proceedings of the Delaware Symposium on Language Studies (7th, Newark, Delaware, October 1985).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Labarca, Angela, Ed.; Bailey, Leslie M., Ed.

Papers from the symposium on applied linguistics include: "Roles in the Foreign Language Classroom" (Robert J. DiPietro); "The Importance of Native Language in Light of Second-Language Studies" (Alexander Z. Guiora); "A Model of L2 Text Reconstruction: The Recall of Literary Text by Learners of German" (Elizabeth B.…

Sharing Expository Texts with Preschool Children in Special Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Breit-Smith, Allison; Busch, Jamie; Guo, Ying

2015-01-01

Although a general limited availability of expository texts currently exists in preschool special education classrooms, expository tests offer speech-language pathologists (SLPs) a rich context for addressing the language goals of preschool children with language impairment on their caseloads. Thus, this article highlights the differences between…

Learning for Life, a Structured and Motivational Process of Knowledge Construction in the Acquisition/Learning of English as a Foreign Language in Native Spanish Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mino-Garces, Fernando

2009-01-01

As language learning theory has shifted from a highly guided to a more open learning process, this paper presents the teaching/learning philosophy called Learning for Life (L for L) as a great way to motivate native Spanish speaker students learning English as a foreign language, and to help them be the constructors of their own knowledge. The…

Spanish Teacher Education Programs and Community Engagement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jovanovi, Ana; Filipovi, Jelena

2013-01-01

Theories of situated knowledge support that knowledge involves experience of practices rather than just accumulated information. While an important segment of foreign language teacher education programs focuses on the theoretical component of second/foreign language acquisition theories and relevant methodological concerns, it is mainly through…

Learning Lodge Institute: Montana Colleges Empower Cultures To Save Languages.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boyer, Paul

2000-01-01

Describes the Learning Lodge Institute, a collaboration of seven Montana tribal colleges that utilizes language courses to promote and strengthen knowledge of traditional culture. Also discusses documenting the loss of language and building support for tribal languages. The institute supports existing language instruction programs to make them…

Language Assessment Literacy: Implications for Language Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Giraldo, Frank

2018-01-01

Recently, the applied linguistics field has examined the knowledge, skills, and principles needed for assessment, defined as language assessment literacy. Two major issues in language assessment literacy have been addressed but not fully resolved--what exactly language assessment literacy is and how it differs among stakeholders (e.g., students…

Evaluation of PROforma as a language for implementing medical guidelines in a practical context

PubMed Central

Sutton, David R; Taylor, Paul; Earle, Kenneth

2006-01-01

Background PROforma is one of several languages that allow clinical guidelines to be expressed in a computer-interpretable manner. How these languages should be compared, and what requirements they should meet, are questions that are being actively addressed by a community of interested researchers. Methods We have developed a system to allow hypertensive patients to be monitored and assessed without visiting their GPs (except in the most urgent cases). Blood pressure measurements are performed at the patients' pharmacies and a web-based system, created using PROforma, makes recommendations for continued monitoring, and/or changes in medication. The recommendations and measurements are transmitted electronically to a practitioner with authority to issue and change prescriptions. We evaluated the use of PROforma during the knowledge acquisition, analysis, design and implementation of this system. The analysis focuses on the logical adequacy, heuristic power, notational convenience, and explanation support provided by the PROforma language. Results PROforma proved adequate as a language for the implementation of the clinical reasoning required by this project. However a lack of notational convenience led us to use UML activity diagrams, rather than PROforma process descriptions, to create the models that were used during the knowledge acquisition and analysis phases of the project. These UML diagrams were translated into PROforma during the implementation of the project. Conclusion The experience accumulated during this study highlighted the importance of structure preserving design, that is to say that the models used in the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system should be structurally similar to those created during knowledge acquisition and analysis. Ideally the same language should be used for all of these models. This means that great importance has to be attached to the notational convenience of these languages, by which we mean the ease with which they can be read, written, and understood by human beings. The importance of notational convenience arises from the fact that a language used during knowledge acquisition and analysis must be intelligible to the potential users of a system, and to the domain experts who provide the knowledge that will be used in its construction. PMID:16597341

Evaluation of PROforma as a language for implementing medical guidelines in a practical context.

PubMed

Sutton, David R; Taylor, Paul; Earle, Kenneth

2006-04-05

PROforma is one of several languages that allow clinical guidelines to be expressed in a computer-interpretable manner. How these languages should be compared, and what requirements they should meet, are questions that are being actively addressed by a community of interested researchers. We have developed a system to allow hypertensive patients to be monitored and assessed without visiting their GPs (except in the most urgent cases). Blood pressure measurements are performed at the patients' pharmacies and a web-based system, created using PROforma, makes recommendations for continued monitoring, and/or changes in medication. The recommendations and measurements are transmitted electronically to a practitioner with authority to issue and change prescriptions. We evaluated the use of PROforma during the knowledge acquisition, analysis, design and implementation of this system. The analysis focuses on the logical adequacy, heuristic power, notational convenience, and explanation support provided by the PROforma language. PROforma proved adequate as a language for the implementation of the clinical reasoning required by this project. However a lack of notational convenience led us to use UML activity diagrams, rather than PROforma process descriptions, to create the models that were used during the knowledge acquisition and analysis phases of the project. These UML diagrams were translated into PROforma during the implementation of the project. The experience accumulated during this study highlighted the importance of structure preserving design, that is to say that the models used in the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system should be structurally similar to those created during knowledge acquisition and analysis. Ideally the same language should be used for all of these models. This means that great importance has to be attached to the notational convenience of these languages, by which we mean the ease with which they can be read, written, and understood by human beings. The importance of notational convenience arises from the fact that a language used during knowledge acquisition and analysis must be intelligible to the potential users of a system, and to the domain experts who provide the knowledge that will be used in its construction.

Knowledge discovery for Deep Phenotyping serious mental illness from Electronic Mental Health records.

PubMed

Jackson, Richard; Patel, Rashmi; Velupillai, Sumithra; Gkotsis, George; Hoyle, David; Stewart, Robert

2018-01-01

Background: Deep Phenotyping is the precise and comprehensive analysis of phenotypic features in which the individual components of the phenotype are observed and described. In UK mental health clinical practice, most clinically relevant information is recorded as free text in the Electronic Health Record, and offers a granularity of information beyond what is expressed in most medical knowledge bases. The SNOMED CT nomenclature potentially offers the means to model such information at scale, yet given a sufficiently large body of clinical text collected over many years, it is difficult to identify the language that clinicians favour to express concepts. Methods: By utilising a large corpus of healthcare data, we sought to make use of semantic modelling and clustering techniques to represent the relationship between the clinical vocabulary of internationally recognised SMI symptoms and the preferred language used by clinicians within a care setting. We explore how such models can be used for discovering novel vocabulary relevant to the task of phenotyping Serious Mental Illness (SMI) with only a small amount of prior knowledge.  Results: 20 403 terms were derived and curated via a two stage methodology. The list was reduced to 557 putative concepts based on eliminating redundant information content. These were then organised into 9 distinct categories pertaining to different aspects of psychiatric assessment. 235 concepts were found to be expressions of putative clinical significance. Of these, 53 were identified having novel synonymy with existing SNOMED CT concepts. 106 had no mapping to SNOMED CT. Conclusions: We demonstrate a scalable approach to discovering new concepts of SMI symptomatology based on real-world clinical observation. Such approaches may offer the opportunity to consider broader manifestations of SMI symptomatology than is typically assessed via current diagnostic frameworks, and create the potential for enhancing nomenclatures such as SNOMED CT based on real-world expressions.

Towards linking patients and clinical information: detecting UMLS concepts in e-mail.

PubMed

Brennan, Patricia Flatley; Aronson, Alan R

2003-01-01

The purpose of this project is to explore the feasibility of detecting terms within the electronic messages of patients that could be used to effectively search electronic knowledge resources and bring health information resources into the hands of patients. Our team is exploring the application of the natural language processing (NLP) tools built within the Lister Hill Center at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to the challenge of detecting relevant concepts from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) within the free text of lay people's electronic messages (e-mail). We obtained a sample of electronic messages sent by patients participating in a randomized field evaluation of an internet-based home care support service to the project nurse, and we subjected elements of these messages to a series of analyses using several vocabularies from the UMLS Metathesaurus and the selected NLP tools. The nursing vocabularies provide an excellent starting point for this exercise because their domain encompasses patient's responses to health challenges. In successive runs we augmented six nursing vocabularies (NANDA Nursing Diagnosis, Nursing Interventions Classification, Nursing Outcomes Classification, Home Health Classification, Omaha System, and the Patient Care Data Set) with selected sets of clinical terminologies (International Classification of Primary Care; International Classification of Primary Care- American English; Micromedex DRUGDEX; National Drug Data File; Thesaurus of Psychological Terms; WHO Adverse Drug Reaction Terminology) and then additionally with either Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) or SNOMED International terms. The best performance was obtained when the nursing vocabularies were complemented with selected clinical terminologies. These findings have implications not only for facilitating lay people's access to electronic knowledge resources but may also be of assistance in developing new tools to aid in linking free text (e.g., clinical notes) to lexically complex knowledge resources such as those emerging from the Human Genome Project.

Knowledge discovery for Deep Phenotyping serious mental illness from Electronic Mental Health records

PubMed Central

Jackson, Richard; Patel, Rashmi; Velupillai, Sumithra; Gkotsis, George; Hoyle, David; Stewart, Robert

2018-01-01

Background: Deep Phenotyping is the precise and comprehensive analysis of phenotypic features in which the individual components of the phenotype are observed and described. In UK mental health clinical practice, most clinically relevant information is recorded as free text in the Electronic Health Record, and offers a granularity of information beyond what is expressed in most medical knowledge bases. The SNOMED CT nomenclature potentially offers the means to model such information at scale, yet given a sufficiently large body of clinical text collected over many years, it is difficult to identify the language that clinicians favour to express concepts. Methods: By utilising a large corpus of healthcare data, we sought to make use of semantic modelling and clustering techniques to represent the relationship between the clinical vocabulary of internationally recognised SMI symptoms and the preferred language used by clinicians within a care setting. We explore how such models can be used for discovering novel vocabulary relevant to the task of phenotyping Serious Mental Illness (SMI) with only a small amount of prior knowledge.  Results: 20 403 terms were derived and curated via a two stage methodology. The list was reduced to 557 putative concepts based on eliminating redundant information content. These were then organised into 9 distinct categories pertaining to different aspects of psychiatric assessment. 235 concepts were found to be expressions of putative clinical significance. Of these, 53 were identified having novel synonymy with existing SNOMED CT concepts. 106 had no mapping to SNOMED CT. Conclusions: We demonstrate a scalable approach to discovering new concepts of SMI symptomatology based on real-world clinical observation. Such approaches may offer the opportunity to consider broader manifestations of SMI symptomatology than is typically assessed via current diagnostic frameworks, and create the potential for enhancing nomenclatures such as SNOMED CT based on real-world expressions. PMID:29899974

Language differences in verbal short-term memory do not exclusively originate in the process of subvocal rehearsal.

PubMed

Thorn, A S; Gathercole, S E

2001-06-01

Language differences in verbal short-term memory were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, bilinguals with high competence in English and French and monolingual English adults with extremely limited knowledge of French were assessed on their serial recall of words and nonwords in both languages. In all cases recall accuracy was superior in the language with which individuals were most familiar, a first-language advantage that remained when variation due to differential rates of articulation in the two languages was taken into account. In Experiment 2, bilinguals recalled lists of English and French words with and without concurrent articulatory suppression. First-language superiority persisted under suppression, suggesting that the language differences in recall accuracy were not attributable to slower rates of subvocal rehearsal in the less familiar language. The findings indicate that language-specific differences in verbal short-term memory do not exclusively originate in the subvocal rehearsal process. It is suggested that one source of language-specific variation might relate to the use of long-term knowledge to support short-term memory performance.

Language Acquisition and Language Learning: Developing the System of External and Internal Perspectives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zascerinska, Jelena

2010-01-01

Introduction. The use of three-five languages is of the greatest importance in order to form varied cooperative networks for the creation of new knowledge. Aim of the paper is to analyze the synergy between language acquisition and language learning. Materials and Methods. The search for the synergy between language acquisition and language…

A Working Model for Assessing Spanish Heritage Language Learners' Language Proficiency through a Placement Exam

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fairclough, Marta

2012-01-01

Having a clear idea of the knowledge in the heritage language that a student brings to the classroom is essential for a successful language-learning experience; for that reason, research in heritage language education has been focusing increasingly on assessment issues, especially language placement exams. Professionals debate whether assessment…

iSTAR: The International STudy on Astronomy Reasoning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tatge, Coty B.; Slater, Timothy F.; Slater, Stephanie J.

2015-08-01

This paper reports the first steps taken in the International STudy on Astronomy Reasoning (iSTAR). The iSTAR Project is an attempt to look beyond traditional wisdom and practices in astronomy education, to discover the ways in which cognitive abilities and human culture interact to impact individuals’ understanding of and relationship to astronomy content knowledge. In contrast to many international studies that seek to rank nations by student performance on standardized tests, the iSTAR Project seeks to find ways that culture may unexpectedly enhance performance in astronomy. Using the Test of Astronomy Standards (TOAST) as a reasonable, initial proxy for the content knowledge a well educated person might know in astronomy, the iSTAR team then defined culture as a construct with five components: practices, traditional knowledge, historical and genealogical relationships, place-based knowledge, and language. Given the complexity of this construct, Stage 1 of the project focuses on the cultural component of language, and assumed that prior to the collection of data from students, the process of translating the TOAST could provide valuable expert-based information on the impact of language on astronomy knowledge. As such, the work began with a study of the translation process. For each of the languages used in the testing phase of the iSTAR protocol, a succession of translators and analysts were engaged, including two educated, non-astronomer native speakers, a native speaking astronomer, and a native speaking linguistics expert. Multiple translations were analyzed in order to make relevant meaning of differences in the translations, and provide commentary on the ways in which metaphor, idiom, cultural history are embedded in the language, providing potential advantages in the learning of astronomy. The first test languages were German, Hawaiian, and American Sign Language, and initial findings suggest that each of these languages provide specific advantages, related to a reduction in astronomy vocabulary, and encoded directionality related to the cardinal directions and the celestial sphere.

A rights-based approach to science literacy using local languages: Contextualising inquiry-based learning in Africa

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Babaci-Wilhite, Zehlia

2017-06-01

This article addresses the importance of teaching and learning science in local languages. The author argues that acknowledging local knowledge and using local languages in science education while emphasising inquiry-based learning improve teaching and learning science. She frames her arguments with the theory of inquiry, which draws on perspectives of both dominant and non-dominant cultures with a focus on science literacy as a human right. She first examines key assumptions about knowledge which inform mainstream educational research and practice. She then argues for an emphasis on contextualised learning as a right in education. This means accounting for contextualised knowledge and resisting the current trend towards de-contextualisation of curricula. This trend is reflected in Zanzibar's recent curriculum reform, in which English replaced Kiswahili as the language of instruction (LOI) in the last two years of primary school. The author's own research during the initial stage of the change (2010-2015) revealed that the effect has in fact proven to be counterproductive, with educational quality deteriorating further rather than improving. Arguing that language is essential to inquiry-based learning, she introduces a new didactic model which integrates alternative assumptions about the value of local knowledge and local languages in the teaching and learning of science subjects. In practical terms, the model is designed to address key science concepts through multiple modalities - "do it, say it, read it, write it" - a "hands-on" experiential combination which, she posits, may form a new platform for innovation based on a unique mix of local and global knowledge, and facilitate genuine science literacy. She provides examples from cutting-edge educational research and practice that illustrate this new model of teaching and learning science. This model has the potential to improve learning while supporting local languages and culture, giving local languages their rightful place in all aspects of education.

The relationship between peer conflict resolution knowledge and peer victimization in school-age children across the language continuum.

PubMed

Campbell, Wenonah N; Skarakis-Doyle, Elizabeth

2011-01-01

Peer victimization, or bullying, has been identified as a significant child health priority and children with language impairment (LI) are among those who are vulnerable. Given the mandate of educators to provide support for all students who are bullied regardless of language status, research is needed that integrates the study of risk factors for peer victimization among children who are developing typically and children who have LI. Accordingly, this preliminary study explored the degree to which one potential risk factor, peer conflict resolution knowledge, was related to peer victimization in children across the language continuum, and considered whether or not individual differences in language ability influenced that relationship. Participants included 17 girls and 15 boys aged 9-12 years with a wide range of language abilities, six meeting criteria for LI. Participants completed a hypothetical peer conflict resolution task and a measure of peer victimization. Correlational analyses revealed very different patterns of relationships for boys and girls. Whereas boys' reports of peer victimization were meaningfully related to how they responded to hypothetical peer conflicts, girls' reports were most strongly associated with language ability. These preliminary findings suggest that it is important to consider gender when conceptualizing how factors such as peer conflict resolution knowledge might influence children's risk of being bullied. Readers will be able to: (1) provide a definition of peer victimization and give examples of different forms of peer victimization; (2) recognize that inadequate peer conflict resolution knowledge may be a risk factor for peer victimization; (3) describe the relationships between peer conflict resolution knowledge, language ability, and peer victimization in this study, and explain how these relationships differed for boys and girls; and (4) identify at least three opportunities for future research that would help to clarify risk factors for peer victimization in boys and girls. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sentiments analysis at conceptual level making use of the Narrative Knowledge Representation Language.

PubMed

Zarri, Gian Piero

2014-10-01

This paper illustrates some of the knowledge representation structures and inference procedures proper to a high-level, fully implemented conceptual language, NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language). The aim is to show how these tools can be used to deal, in a sentiment analysis/opinion mining context, with some common types of human (and non-human) "behaviors". These behaviors correspond, in particular, to the concrete, mutual relationships among human and non-human characters that can be expressed under the form of non-fictional and real-time "narratives" (i.e., as logically and temporally structured sequences of "elementary events"). Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Impact of Language Ability and Text Variables on Sixth-Grade Students' Comprehension.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Penning, Marge J.; Raphael, Taffy E.

1991-01-01

Examines differences in language ability between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with reading comprehension problems. Poor comprehending students differed from normal achievers for all language measures and in the manner that reader- and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results supported the positive role…

Text Manipulation Techniques and Foreign Language Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walker, Ronald W.

1982-01-01

Discusses an approach to teaching second language composition which emphasizes (1) careful analysis of model texts from a limited, but well-defined perspective and (2) the application of text manipulation techniques developed by the word processing industry to student compositions. (EKN)

Text Comprehension and Oral Language as Predictors of Word-Problem Solving: Insights into Word-Problem Solving as a Form of Text Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fuchs, Lynn S.; Gilbert, Jennifer K.; Fuchs, Douglas; Seethaler, Pamela M.; N. Martin, BrittanyLee

2018-01-01

This study was designed to deepen insights on whether word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension (TC) and on the role of language in WPs. A sample of 325 second graders, representing high, average, and low reading and math performance, was assessed on (a) start-of-year TC, WP skill, language, nonlinguistic reasoning, working memory,…

Topical Knowledge and ESL Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

He, Ling; Shi, Ling

2012-01-01

This study investigates the effects of topical knowledge on ESL (English as a Second Language) writing performance in the English Language Proficiency Index (LPI), a standardized English proficiency test used by many post-secondary institutions in western Canada. The participants were 50 students with different levels of English proficiency…

Aboriginal Language Knowledge and Youth Suicide

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hallett, Darcy; Chandler, Michael J.; Lalonde, Christopher E.

2007-01-01

This brief report details a preliminary investigation into how community-level variability in knowledge of Aboriginal languages relate to "band"-level measures of youth suicide. In Canada, and, more specifically, in the province of British Columbia (BC), Aboriginal youth suicide rates vary substantially from one community to another. The…

Language Teacher Educators' Pedagogical Knowledge: Validating a Proposed Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moradkhani, Shahab

2017-01-01

The aim of the current study was twofold: identifying the constituent components of language teacher educators' pedagogical knowledge, and investigating possible differences among teachers, teacher educators, and university professors' opinions about these components. Data were collected from 436 participants using a questionnaire. The results of…

Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children on the LITMUS-CLT task.

PubMed

Altman, Carmit; Goldstein, Tamara; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

2017-01-01

While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.

Text Readability and Intuitive Simplification: A Comparison of Readability Formulas

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crossley, Scott A.; Allen, David B.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2011-01-01

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…

A Guided Summary Completion Test for Long Academic Texts.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bensoussan, Marsha

Because testing comprehension of long (5- to 10-page) second-language texts is more complex than testing shorter texts, an alternative form of second language reading comprehension test is needed. In a guided summary completion test, students are presented with a greatly shortened version of the text (e.g., one-paragraph summary), containing…

Relating UMLS semantic types and task-based ontology to computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines.

PubMed

Kumar, Anand; Ciccarese, Paolo; Quaglini, Silvana; Stefanelli, Mario; Caffi, Ezio; Boiocchi, Lorenzo

2003-01-01

Medical knowledge in clinical practice guideline (GL) texts is the source of task-based computer-interpretable clinical guideline models (CIGMs). We have used Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types (STs) to understand the percentage of GL text which belongs to a particular ST. We also use UMLS semantic network together with the CIGM-specific ontology to derive a semantic meaning behind the GL text. In order to achieve this objective, we took nine GL texts from the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and marked up the text dealing with a particular ST. The STs we took into consideration were restricted taking into account the requirements of a task-based CIGM. We used DARPA Agent Markup Language and Ontology Inference Layer (DAML + OIL) to create the UMLS and CIGM specific semantic network. For the latter, as a bench test, we used the 1999 WHO-International Society of Hypertension Guidelines for the Management of Hypertension. We took into consideration the UMLS STs closest to the clinical tasks. The percentage of the GL text dealing with the ST "Health Care Activity" and subtypes "Laboratory Procedure", "Diagnostic Procedure" and "Therapeutic or Preventive Procedure" were measured. The parts of text belonging to other STs or comments were separated. A mapping of terms belonging to other STs was done to the STs under "HCA" for representation in DAML + OIL. As a result, we found that the three STs under "HCA" were the predominant STs present in the GL text. In cases where the terms of related STs existed, they were mapped into one of the three STs. The DAML + OIL representation was able to describe the hierarchy in task-based CIGMs. To conclude, we understood that the three STs could be used to represent the semantic network of the task-bases CIGMs. We identified some mapping operators which could be used for the mapping of other STs into these.

Beyond Comprehension Strategy Instruction: What's Next?

PubMed

Elleman, Amy M; Compton, Donald L

2017-04-20

In this article, we respond to Catts and Kamhi's (2017) argument that reading comprehension is not a single ability. We provide a brief review of the impact of strategy instruction, the importance of knowledge in reading comprehension, and possible avenues for future research and practice. We agree with Catts and Kamhi's argument that reading comprehension is a complex endeavor and that current recommended practices do not reflect the complexity of the construct. Knowledge building, despite its important role in comprehension, has been relegated to a back seat in reading comprehension instruction. In the final section of the article, we outline possible avenues for research and practice (e.g., generative language instruction, dialogic approaches to knowledge building, analogical reasoning and disciplinary literacy, the use of graphics and media, inference instruction) for improving reading-comprehension outcomes. Reading comprehension is a complex ability, and comprehension instruction should reflect this complexity. If we want to have an impact on long-term growth in reading comprehension, we will need to expand our current repertoire of instructional methods to include approaches that support the acquisition and integration of knowledge across a variety of texts and topics.

Language and Social Factors in the Use of Cell Phone Technology by Adolescents with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Conti-Ramsden, Gina; Durkin, Kevin; Simkin, Zoe

2010-01-01

Purpose: This study aimed to compare cell phone use (both oral and text-based) by adolescents with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and examine the extent to which language and social factors affect frequency of use. Method: Both interview and diary methods were used to compare oral and text-based communication using cell phones by…

The Impact of Text Structure Reading Strategy Instruction in a Second Language: Benefits across Languages

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwartz, Ana Isabel; Mendoza, Laura; Meyer, Bonnie

2017-01-01

The goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of learning a text structure strategy (TSS) for improving reading comprehension and recall for second language (L2) learners, as well as to test for transfer of the strategy to the native language (L1). University L2 learners of English completed a five-session course on using the TSS to…

FastScript3D - A Companion to Java 3D

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Koenig, Patti

2005-01-01

FastScript3D is a computer program, written in the Java 3D(TM) programming language, that establishes an alternative language that helps users who lack expertise in Java 3D to use Java 3D for constructing three-dimensional (3D)-appearing graphics. The FastScript3D language provides a set of simple, intuitive, one-line text-string commands for creating, controlling, and animating 3D models. The first word in a string is the name of a command; the rest of the string contains the data arguments for the command. The commands can also be used as an aid to learning Java 3D. Developers can extend the language by adding custom text-string commands. The commands can define new 3D objects or load representations of 3D objects from files in formats compatible with such other software systems as X3D. The text strings can be easily integrated into other languages. FastScript3D facilitates communication between scripting languages [which enable programming of hyper-text markup language (HTML) documents to interact with users] and Java 3D. The FastScript3D language can be extended and customized on both the scripting side and the Java 3D side.

ScienceCentral: open access full-text archive of scientific journals based on Journal Article Tag Suite regardless of their languages.

PubMed

Huh, Sun

2013-01-01

ScienceCentral, a free or open access, full-text archive of scientific journal literature at the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies, was under test in September 2013. Since it is a Journal Article Tag Suite-based full text database, extensible markup language files of all languages can be presented, according to Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit encoding. It is comparable to PubMed Central: however, there are two distinct differences. First, its scope comprises all science fields; second, it accepts all language journals. Launching ScienceCentral is the first step for free access or open access academic scientific journals of all languages to leap to the world, including scientific journals from Croatia.

Phonological Awareness and Print Knowledge of Preschool Children with Cochlear Implants

PubMed Central

Ambrose, Sophie E.; Fey, Marc E.; Eisenberg, Laurie S.

2012-01-01

Purpose To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36 to 60 months, participated. Children’s print knowledge, phonological awareness, language, speech production, and speech perception abilities were assessed. Results For phonological awareness, the CI group’s mean score fell within 1 standard deviation of the TOPEL’s normative sample mean but was more than 1 standard deviation below our NH group mean. The CI group’s performance did not differ significantly from that of the NH group for print knowledge. For the CI group, phonological awareness and print knowledge were significantly correlated with language, speech production, and speech perception. Together, these predictor variables accounted for 34% of variance in the CI group’s phonological awareness but no significant variance in their print knowledge. Conclusions Children with CIs have the potential to develop age-appropriate early literacy skills by preschool-age but are likely to lag behind their NH peers in phonological awareness. Intervention programs serving these children should target these skills with instruction and by facilitating speech and language development. PMID:22223887

Automatic natural acquisition of a semantic network for information retrieval systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Enguehard, Chantal; Malvache, Pierre; Trigano, Philippe

1992-03-01

The amount of information is becoming greater and greater, in industries where complex processes are performed it is becoming increasingly difficult to profit from all the documents produced when fresh knowledge becomes available (reports, experiments, findings). This situation causes a considerable and expensive waste of precious time lost searching for documents or, quite simply, results in outright repeating what has been done. One solution is to transform all paper information into computerized information. We might imagine that we are in a science-fiction world and that we have the perfect computer. We tell it everything we know, we make it read all the books, and if we ask it any question, it will find the response if that response exists. But unfortunately, we are in the real world and the last four decades have taught us to minimize our expectations of computers. During the 1960s, the information retrieval systems appeared. Their purpose is to provide access to any desired documents, in response to a question about a subject, even if it is not known to exist. Here we focus on the problem of selecting items to index the documents. In 1966, Salton identified this problem as crucial when he saw that his system, Medlars, did not find a relevant text because of the wrong indexation. Faced with this problem, he imagined a guide to help authors choose the correct indexation, but he anticipated the automation of this operation with the SMART system. It was stated previously that a manual language analysis for information items by subjects experts is likely to prove impractical in the long run. After a brief survey of the existing responses to the index choice problem, we shall present the system automatic natural acquisition (ANA) which chooses items to index texts by using as little knowledge as possible- -just by learning the language. This system does not use any grammar or lexicon, so the selected indexes will be very close to the field concerned in the texts.

Knowledge-based approach to video content classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Yu; Wong, Edward K.

2001-01-01

A framework for video content classification using a knowledge-based approach is herein proposed. This approach is motivated by the fact that videos are rich in semantic contents, which can best be interpreted and analyzed by human experts. We demonstrate the concept by implementing a prototype video classification system using the rule-based programming language CLIPS 6.05. Knowledge for video classification is encoded as a set of rules in the rule base. The left-hand-sides of rules contain high level and low level features, while the right-hand-sides of rules contain intermediate results or conclusions. Our current implementation includes features computed from motion, color, and text extracted from video frames. Our current rule set allows us to classify input video into one of five classes: news, weather, reporting, commercial, basketball and football. We use MYCIN's inexact reasoning method for combining evidences, and to handle the uncertainties in the features and in the classification results. We obtained good results in a preliminary experiment, and it demonstrated the validity of the proposed approach.

Knowledge-based approach to video content classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Yu; Wong, Edward K.

2000-12-01

A framework for video content classification using a knowledge-based approach is herein proposed. This approach is motivated by the fact that videos are rich in semantic contents, which can best be interpreted and analyzed by human experts. We demonstrate the concept by implementing a prototype video classification system using the rule-based programming language CLIPS 6.05. Knowledge for video classification is encoded as a set of rules in the rule base. The left-hand-sides of rules contain high level and low level features, while the right-hand-sides of rules contain intermediate results or conclusions. Our current implementation includes features computed from motion, color, and text extracted from video frames. Our current rule set allows us to classify input video into one of five classes: news, weather, reporting, commercial, basketball and football. We use MYCIN's inexact reasoning method for combining evidences, and to handle the uncertainties in the features and in the classification results. We obtained good results in a preliminary experiment, and it demonstrated the validity of the proposed approach.

Engaging the Discourse of International Language Recognition through ISO 639-3 Signed Language Change Requests

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parks, Elizabeth

2015-01-01

Linguistic ideologies that are left unquestioned and unexplored, especially as reflected and produced in marginalized language communities, can contribute to inequality made real in decisions about languages and the people who use them. One of the primary bodies of knowledge guiding international language policy is the International Organization…

Conflicting Knowledges: Barriers to Language Continuation in the Kimberley

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bedford, Patsy Ngalu; Casson, Siobhan K.

2010-01-01

The Kimberley Language Resource Centre (KLRC) earned its status over three decades as the representative body for Kimberley languages. In 2004, the organisation started to respond to grassroots concerns about the lack of language speakers in the younger generations. Aboriginal people are also connecting loss of languages to loss of bio-cultural…

Linguistic Predictors of Cultural Identification in Bilinguals

PubMed Central

Schroeder, Scott R.; Lam, Tuan Q.; Marian, Viorica

2016-01-01

Most of the world's population has knowledge of at least two languages. Many of these bilinguals are also exposed to and identify with at least two cultures. Because language knowledge enables participation in cultural practices and expression of cultural beliefs, bilingual experience and cultural identity are interconnected. However, the specific links between bilingualism and cultural identity remain largely unidentified. The current study examined which aspects of bilingualism relate to identification with first- and second-language cultures. Two-hundred-and-nine bilinguals completed a questionnaire probing linguistic background and cultural affiliations. Regression analyses indicated that cultural identification was predicted by age of language acquisition, language proficiency, foreign-accentedness, and contexts of long-term language immersion and current language exposure. Follow-up analyses revealed that the language-culture relations were mediated by the age and manner in which the second language was acquired. These findings are situated within a proposed framework of bilingual cultural identity. By identifying features of bilingualism that are relevant for cultural identity, the current research increases our understanding of the relationship between language and culture. PMID:28936014

American Sign Language Teachers: Practices and Perceptions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Newell, William J.

1995-01-01

Reports on a survey of 359 teachers of American Sign Language (ASL) conducted in 1993-94. Results found that the ability to apply appropriate methods, professional knowledge of ASL teaching practice, and bilingual skills in ASL and English were considered very important. Knowledge of theoretical issues and classroom management skills were viewed…

Knowledge Base of Pronunciation Teaching: Staking out the Territory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baker, Amanda; Murphy, John

2011-01-01

Despite decades of advocacy for greater investigative attention, research into pronunciation instruction in the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) continues to be limited. This limitation is particularly evident in explorations of teacher cognition (e.g., teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and…

Effects of Morphological Awareness on Second Language Vocabulary Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akbulut, Fatma Demiray

2017-01-01

This research has analysed the impact of morphological treatment in English morphological awareness task. The main aim of this study is to understand the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of university preparatory class students. In second language learning environment, fifty-two preparatory class students have…

Event-Based Plausibility Immediately Influences On-Line Language Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matsuki, Kazunaga; Chow, Tracy; Hare, Mary; Elman, Jeffrey L.; Scheepers, Christoph; McRae, Ken

2011-01-01

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…

Epistemics and Expertise in Peer Tutoring Interactions: Co-Constructing Knowledge of Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Back, Michele

2016-01-01

Peer tutoring is viewed as a valuable component of additional language learning due to the presence of a more knowledgeable interlocutor. Yet researchers and language program directors alike often ignore the linguistic and cultural differences that peer tutors possess, instead categorizing them homogeneously as "experts" or "native…

Linguistic Predictors of Cultural Identification in Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schroeder, Scott R.; Lam, Tuan Q.; Marian, Viorica

2017-01-01

Most of the world's population has knowledge of at least two languages. Many of these bilinguals are also exposed to and identify with at least two cultures. Because language knowledge enables participation in cultural practices and expression of cultural beliefs, bilingual experience and cultural identity are interconnected. However, the specific…

Sequencing in SLA: Phonological Memory, Chunking, and Points of Order.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellis, Nick C.

1996-01-01

Argues that much of language acquisition is sequence learning and that the resultant long-term knowledge base of language sequences serves as the database for grammar acquisition. The article also proposes mechanisms to analyze sequence information that result in knowledge of underlying grammar. (184 references) (Author/CK)

Practical Knowledge Growth in Communicative Language Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wyatt, Mark

2009-01-01

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is promoted in teacher education programmes around the world, although the appropriateness of this methodology in contexts outside the English-speaking West has been questioned, often from a theoretical perspective. In fact, very little empirical research has been conducted into the practical knowledge of CLT…

Improving Content Knowledge and Comprehension for English Language Learners: Findings from a Randomized Control Trial

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vaughn, Sharon; Martinez, Leticia R.; Wanzek, Jeanne; Roberts, Greg; Swanson, Elizabeth; Fall, Anna-Mária

2017-01-01

Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through…

The Representation of Pragmatic Knowledge in Recent ELT Textbooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ren, Wei; Han, Zhengrui

2016-01-01

Pragmatic competence has become an increasingly crucial component of language pedagogy. This article reports on a quantitative and qualitative study of ten English language textbooks used in Chinese universities with a particular focus on their coverage of pragmatic knowledge. Detailed analysis focused specifically on the mention of pragmatic…

Sensitivity and Specificity of French Language and Processing Measures for the Identification of Primary Language Impairment at Age 5

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thordardottir, Elin; Kehayia, Eva; Mazer, Barbara; Lessard, Nicole; Majnemer, Annette; Sutton, Ann; Trudeau, Natacha; Chilingaryan, Gevorg

2011-01-01

Purpose: Research on the diagnostic accuracy of different language measures has focused primarily on English. This study examined the sensitivity and specificity of a range of measures of language knowledge and language processing for the identification of primary language impairment (PLI) in French-speaking children. Because of the lack of…

Prospective English Language Teachers' Perceptions of the Target Language and Culture in Relation to Their Socioeconomic Status

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arikan, Arda

2011-01-01

Prospective foreign language teachers need to have an accurate knowledge and a positive perception of the target language and target culture so that they can help their students gain further insight on culture by and large. Hence, by means of a questionnaire, prospective English language teachers' (n= 412) perceptions of the target language and…