This article explores the question of why competent evaluators award the ratings they do to college students' expository essays. Essays were rewritten to be stronger or weaker in four categories: content, organization, sentence structure, and mechanics. Twelve evaluators first used a 4-point holistic rating scale to judge the essays' quality. Then they rated whether each of the four rewriting c...

According to the official adult literacy report conducted in 24 highly-developed countries, more than 50% adults, on average, can only understand basic vocabulary, short sentences, and syntactic constructions. Everyday information found news articles is thus inaccessible many people, impeding their social inclusion informed decision-making. Systems for automatic sentence simplification aim prov...

In this paper we describe an automatic sentence boundary detector, which inserts a period (sentence boundary marker) to a word sequence output by a speech recognizer. The state-ofthe-art automatic sentence boundary detectors insert a period at a position selected by a word tri-gram model from among candidates (long pauses) offered by an accoustic model. In contrast, the automatic sentence bound...

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on genre-based approaches to writing instruction. However, scant attention has been paid to the use of genre-based scaffolding in the realm of academic writing. Hence, in an attempt to tackle the problems prevalent in academic writing, this study set out to investigate the effect of genre-based scaffolding through sentence start...

We propose a direct interpretation for constraint-based linguistic formalisms in which the notions of derivation and hierarchy give way to the more flexible notion of property satisfaction between categories. Such frameworks define sentence acceptability in terms of the properties that must be satisfied by groups of categories (e.g. English noun phrases can be described in Property Grammar term...

The article focuses on the factors that cause linear and vertical sentence extension of multiple complex-compound sentences used in English fictional literature. Considering the sentence structure as a combination of 2 Units – paratactic and hypotactic the authors define the structural peculiarities of paratactic and hypotactic units including the number of clauses and its bonds. The extension ...