It has been observed that languages with huge numbers of speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities can sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, an apparent opposite pattern appears to be observed in relation to non-structural properties of language such as number of content words. These apparent contradictory patterns pose a challenge fo...

The interface speciication of a procedure describes the procedure's behavior using pre-and postconditions. These pre-and postconditions are written using various functions. If some of these functions are partial, or underspec-iied, then the procedure speciication may not be well-deened. We show how to write pre-and postcondition speciications that avoid such problems, by having the precondition...

Terminological knowledge representation formalisms are intended to capture the analytic relationships between terms of a vocabulary intended to describe a domain. A term whose deenition refers, either directly or indirectly, to the term itself presents a problem for most terminological representation systems because it is obvious neither whether such a term is meaningful, nor how it could be ha...

Designing appropriate materials and activities to enhance vocabulary learning is one of the primary goals of language courses. Among the claims about efficient pedagogical tasks is the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) according to which vocabulary development is contingent on the amount of cognitive process a task involves. Building on the previous research on this hypothes...

Background noise can have a significant impact on the performance of speech recognition systems. A range of fast featurespace and model-based schemes have been investigated to increase robustness. Model-based approaches typically achieve lower error rates, but at an increased computational load compared to feature-based approaches. Thismakes their use inmany situations impractical. The uncertai...

This study examines several linguistic factors as possible contributors to perceived word difficulty in second language learners in an experimental setting. The investigated factors include: (1) frequency of word usage in the first language, (2) word length, (3) number of syllables in a word, and (4) number of consonant clusters in a word. Word frequency is often treated as the quantifiable cor...

abstractthis study investigated the effect of digital games on vocabulary acquisition of low-proficiency iranian male and female efl learners. in order to select homogeneous learners in terms of their english language proficiency, the standard nelson proficiency test was administered, and based on the obtained results, 60 low-proficiency efl learners were selected (31 females and 29 males). the...

this study investigates the effect of different types of subtitle on incidental vocabulary learning among iranian efl learners. to this end, 60 high school students in behbahan were selected after taking a proficiency test. the test was administered to ensure participants' homogeneity. participants were randomly assigned to three experimental groups, namely, bimodal group (a), standard gro...

this study was an attempt to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on intermediate efl learners’ vocabulary retention. to fulfill the purpose of this study, 72 male and female students within the age range of 17 to 32 years studying at farzan and farzanegan language schools in tehran at intermediate level were selected from a total number of 114 par...

LTCB is the Large Text Compression Benchmark, consisting of the first billion bytes of a particular Wikipedia dump (Mahoney, 2009). Originally developed to study text compression, it is now commonly used as a language modeling benchmark where the task is to predict the next word in the sequence. We limit the vocabulary to 80000 words plus a single out-of-vocabulary indicator; utilize a model li...