E-rater is an operational automated essay scoring application that combines several NLP tools for the purpose of identifying linguistic features in essay responses to assess the quality of the text. The application currently identifies a variety of syntactic, discourse, and topical analysis features. We have maintained two clear visions of e-rater’s development. First, new linguistically-based ...

• We describe in this paper a new text planner that has been designed to address several problems we had encountered in previous systems. Motivating factors include a clearer and more explicit separation of the declarative and procedural knowledge used in a text generation system as well as the identification of the distinct types of knowledge necessary to generate coherent discourse, such as c...

We take an experience of educational failure in school mathematics to illustrate the liberal capitalist ideology at work in educational institutions. This will be done by means of confronting the official discourse, which posits inclusion and equity as fundamental goals of mathematics education, with its actualization within a secondary school, whose student-intake can be labeled as marginalise...

Authentic experiences encourage the student to cognitively engage the content by actively trying to make sense and to integrate the experience. This chapter describes a range of currently available and emerging mediated communication technologies for supporting both didactic and constructivist approaches to language acquisition. Even though CMC has several unique characteristics that make it su...

UNLABELLED This qualitative study had the purpose to increase the discussions about the constitution of competences in the education of nurses so that they can work in the mental healthcare area. GOALS to analyze the representations of the research subjects about mental healthcare competences. METHOD qualitative research. SETTING The nursing department in a public university in the state ...

I argue that a synthetic explanatory strategy is an important step forward for developing a more comprehensive understanding of human language, in particular natural language performance. By considering some statistical definitions of the notion of synergy, I argue that we should expect very low-level units of measure, such as voice or body movement, to predict higher-level units of measure, su...

What does it take to argue well? The goal of this series of studies was to better understand the cognitive skills entailed in argument, and their course of development, isolated from the verbal and social demands that argumentive discourse also entails. Findings indicated that young adolescents are less able than adults to coordinate attention to both positions in an argument, an agerelated pat...

Much computational work has been done on identifying and interpreting the meaning of metaphors, but little work has been done on understanding the motivation behind the use of metaphor. To computationally model discourse and social positioning in metaphor, we need a corpus annotated with metaphors relevant to speaker intentions. This paper reports a corpus study as a first step towards computat...

To respond to an utterance, a listener must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Misunderstandings occur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. Our work combines intentional and social accounts of discourse, unifying theories of speech act production, interpretation, and the repair of misunderstandings. A unified theory has been developed by c...