This paper describes University of Washington NLP’s submission for the Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics (LSDSem 2017) shared task—the Story Cloze Task. Our system is a linear classifier with a variety of features, including both the scores of a neural language model and style features. We report 75.2% accuracy on the task. A further discussion of our results c...

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of modified cloze procedure on writing proficiency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 110 participants studying at Semnan University majoring in English literature were tested on CELT proficiency test. 65 participants who were found to be homogenous were selected and assigned randomly to two groups...

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

Children with phonological disorders often display difficulty in other domains of language. Language-based approaches focus on all aspects of language; therefore, little attention may be drawn to sound errors and these may not be specific targets of intervention. These approaches involve a variety of naturalistic, conversationally based techniques such as focused stimulation in the form of expa...

This paper examines the effect of gender and type of stem on Iranian test takers’ performance on the grammar section of a nation-wide language proficiency test. In so doing, the scores of 2931 examinees (1107 female and 1824 male) who sat Tarbiat Modares English proficiency test were obtained. The examinees’ scores on three types of MC grammar items with different kinds of stems (i.e., blank fi...

We investigate whether a medical writer can simplify text by only changing the grammatical structure. Based on a user study, we find that while the sentences look simpler after simplification, they are not easier to understand. For grammatical simplification, better tools are needed to provide more concrete guidance and feedback. Introduction Providing text to patients and health information co...