This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an ...

Most metazoan microRNAs (miRNAs) target many genes for repression, but the nematode lsy-6 miRNA is much less proficient. Here, we show that the low proficiency of lsy-6 can be recapitulated in HeLa cells and that miR-23 (a mammalian miRNA) also has low proficiency in these cells. Reporter results and array data both indicate two properties of these miRNAs that impart low proficiency: their weak...

Determining the language proficiency level required to understand a given text is a key requirement in vetting documents for use in second language learning. In this work, we describe our approach for developing an automatic text analytic to estimate the text difficulty level using the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale. The approach we take is to use machine translation to...

We consider the setting of prediction with expert advice with an additional assumption that each expert generates its losses i.i.d. according to some distribution. We first identify a class of “admissible” strategies, which we call permutation invariant, and show that every strategy outside this class will perform not better than some permutation invariant strategy. We then show that when the l...

1 S fl ow simulations have a multitude of applications at various scales, from irrigation scheduling to obtaining global climate change estimates. Modeling of fl ow in variably saturated soils requires water retention and hydraulic conductivity parameters that are impractical to measure for largescale projects. As opposed to saturated fl ow, the nonlinearity of the unsaturated fl ow constitutiv...

Language proficiency tests are a useful tool for evaluating learner progress, if the test difficulty fits the level of the learner. In this work, we describe a generalized framework for test difficulty prediction that is applicable to several languages and test types. In addition, we develop two ranking strategies for candidate evaluation inspired by automatic solving methods based on language ...

The performance of gene finding from genome sequences strongly depends on the accuracy of splice site prediction. Recent gene finding programs, however, still do not reach enough levels. To improve the accuracy of splice site prediction, it is required to understand the splicing mechanism and to make a model from clear experimental evidences. For this purpose, genomic full-length precursor mRNA...