Lexical chunks have in recent years become widely recognized as a crucial aspect of second language competence. We address two major sorts of challenge that chunks pose for lexicography and describe computational approaches to addressing these challenges. The first challenge is lexical knowledge discovery, that is, the need to uncover which strings of words constitute chunks worthy of learners’...

We extended the work of Anderson et al. (in press) by modeling how people learn from “over-the-shoulder” instructions – instructions given immediately after actions were executed – while participants were working on a AntiAir Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) task. Specifically, we modeled the incremental top-down influence of instructions on the visual search process. We constructed a model that firs...

We describe a novel approach to examplebased machine translation that makes use of marker-based chunks, in which the decoder is a memory-based classifier. The classifier is trained to map trigrams of source-language chunks onto trigrams of target-language chunks; then, in a second decoding step, the predicted trigrams are rearranged according to their overlap. We present the first results of th...

Complex motor skill often consists of a fixed sequence of movements. Recent studies show that a stereotyped temporal pattern or rhythm emerges as we learn to perform a motor sequence. This is because the sequence is reorganized during learning as serial chunks of movements in both a sequence-specific and subject-specific manner. On the basis of human imaging studies we propose that the formatio...

Exploring the hierarchical control relationship between different levels of representation and processing is important for understanding how the mind controls itself. In the present study, the relationship between chunking (a sequence-level process) and task-set inhibition (a task-level process) in the performance of task sequences was investigated to evaluate the hypothesis that within-chunk f...

A multi-disciplinary approach integrating computational linguistic techniques is necessary to elaborate indicators of research topic evolution. We describe a system which bases clustering on linguistic relations, instead of the usual co-occurrence paradigm. The interesting features of this approach, embodied in the TermWatch system, lie in the combination of state-of-the-art techniques in compu...

Thirty-six participants practiced a task in which they continuously cycled through a fixed series of nine keypresses, each carried out by a single finger (cf. Keele & Summers, 1976). The results of the first experimental phase, the practice phase, support the notion that pauses between successive keypresses at fixed locations induces the development of integrated sequence representations (i.e.,...

We extended the work of Anderson et al. (in press) by modeling how people learn from “over-the-shoulder” instructions – instructions given immediately after actions were executed – while participants were working on a AntiAir Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) task. Specifically, we modeled the incremental top-down influence of instructions on the visual search process. We constructed a model that firs...

Peer-to-peer networks have been commonly used for tasks such as file sharing or file distribution. We study a class of cooperative file distribution systems where a file is broken up into many chunks that can be downloaded independently. The different peers cooperate by mutually exchanging the different chunks of the file, each peer being client and server at the same time. While such systems a...

Sequence production tasks are a standard tool to analyze motor learning, consolidation, and habituation. As sequences are learned, movements are typically grouped into subsets or chunks. For example, most Americans memorize telephone numbers in two chunks of three digits, and one chunk of four. Studies generally use response times or error rates to estimate how subjects chunk, and these estimat...