It holds true that a flourishing fieldof Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (Corner, 1996).  Very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 English newspapers: one non-Iranian (The Times) and one ...

The present study aimed at investigating the possible impact ofZone of Proximal Development (ZPD) on the learners’ performance. Forty-sixIranian university students participated in this study by taking two types of readingcomprehension tests (i.e., the main idea and Wh-question type). The researchersused the Winstep program to analyze the data and estimate the learners’ Raschmeasure in pre, pos...

Purpose – This study investigates the ways in which effectiveness of answers in Yahoo! Answers, one of the largest community question answering sites (CQAs), is related to question types and answerer reputation. Effective answers are defined as those that are detailed, readable, superior in quality, and contributed promptly. Five question types that were studied include factoid, list, definitio...

E pidemiology is the study and analysis of distribution and determinants of health-related conditions or events including diseases, and the practice of this study to the control of diseases and other health problems (1). One of the basic issues in epidemiology and the beginning of a research project is conducting a suitable design for our study (2). The aim of this study is to brief e...

The analagous class for surfaces are the K3 surfaces. All K3 surfaces are homeomorphic: there is one underlying topological type. On the other hand, there are a large number of topological types of minimal Calabi-Yau threefolds, but it is an open question of whether there are a finite number of such types. A stronger question would be to ask whether there are a finite number of families of alge...

In order to represent, compute and reason with advanced data types one must go beyond the traditional treatment of data types as being inductive types and, instead, consider them as inductive families. Strictly positive types (SPTs) form a grammar for defining inductive types and, consequently, a fundamental question in the the theory of inductive families is what constitutes a corresponding gr...

In this paper, we investigate how an accurate question classifier contributes to a question answering system. We first present a Maximum Entropy (ME) based question classifier which makes use of head word features and their WordNet hypernyms. We show that our question classifier can achieve the state of the art performance in the standard UIUC question dataset. We then investigate quantitativel...

We address the challenge of automatically generating questions from reading materials for educational practice and assessment. Our approach is to overgenerate questions, then rank them. We use manually written rules to perform a sequence of general purpose syntactic transformations (e.g., subject-auxiliary inversion) to turn declarative sentences into questions. These questions are then ranked ...

Within a Question Answering (QA) framework, Question Context plays a vital role. We define Question Context to be background knowledge that can be used to represent the user’s information need more completely than the terms in the query alone. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses statistical language modeling techniques to develop a semantic Question Context which we then incorporate ...