Computer “reading” of natural languages is a growing research topic with numerous applications, ranging from areas of artificial intelligence to linguistics. A successful “reading” of natural languages can be interpreted in two ways: 1) extracting facts out of a passage and 2) capturing “meaning” of a text. We focus on the latter interpretation, defining “meaning” as is done in humans, namely, ...

Commonsense question answering (CQA) aims to test if models can answer questions regarding commonsense knowledge that everyone knows. Prior works incorporate external bases have shown promising results, but are expensive construct and often limited a fixed set of relations. In this paper, we instead focus on better utilizing the implicit stored in pre-trained language models. While researchers ...

This study aimed at investigating differential item functioning (DIF) on the Special English Test of the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE). The effect of gender and subject area was taken into account. The study utilized one-parameter IRT model with a sample of 36000 students who sat for the INUEE Special English Test in 2004 and/or 2005. The findings confirmed the presence of D...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...

Prediction or expectancy is thought to play an important role in both music and language processing. However, prediction is currently studied independently in the two domains, limiting research on relations between predictive mechanisms in music and language. One limitation is a difference in how expectancy is quantified. In language, expectancy is typically measured using the cloze probability...

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attentions. However, existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. To add diversity in reading comprehension datasets, in this paper we propose a new Chinese reading comprehension dataset for accelerating related research in the community. The proposed dataset contains two diff...