Recent studies have shown that children as young as age 3% use category membership as the basis of their inductive inferences. The present studies examine how children determine which category-based inductive inferences are warranted and which are unwarranted. Preschool and elementary school children learned various facts (e.g., “This apple has pectin inside”) and reported whether they thought ...

The logical ordering of events facilitates the processing of narratives. If readers are going to perform an inference in order to make easier their assimilation of an upcoming text, it seems likely that they will perform an inference closely related to the causal coherence of the narrative. Therefore, an appropriate approach to this issue should determine the contexts in which readers perform e...

Variability of semantic expression is a fundamental phenomenon of a natural language where same meaning can be expressed by different texts. Natural Language Processing applications like Question Answering, Summarization, Information Retrieval systems etc. often demand a generic framework to capture major semantic inferences in order to deal with the challenges created by this phenomenon. Textu...

This paper discusses a system capable of detecting when answers for specific questions are supported by snippets, all provided by Question Answering (QA) systems. This task is known as the Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) track within the Cross– language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The system uses a set of regular expressions in order to join the question and the answer into an affirmative sentenc...

Contributions are made along two main lines. Firstly a method is proposed for using a regression model to learn relationships within the scores of a machine learning classifier, which can then be applied to future classifier output for the purpose of improving recognition accuracy. The method is termed r-norm and strong empirical results are obtained from its application to several text-indepen...

The abstract is an essential and most read part of the paper. It should be printed on a separate page, up to 200 words, factual, free of abbreviations (except as specifically defined within the abstract text at first use) and should be structured as follows: Objectives: Should describe the purpose of the study and the problem addressed; should include at least one sentence providing the rationa...

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text,...

Iarg-AnCora aims to annotate the implicit arguments of deverbal nominalizations in AnCora corpus. This corpus will be the basis for systems of automatic semantic role labeling based on machine learning techniques. Semantic analyzers are essential components in the current applications of language technologies, in which it is important to obtain a deeper understanding of the text to make inferen...

Aging may be associated with an increase in generalized text processing, particularly in adults older than 75 years. The current study examined text comprehension in young, young-old, and old-old adults. Experiment 1 included a comprehension measure (product) and Experiment 2 examined inferences generated during reading (process). Comprehension scores were lowest in old-old adults. Generalized ...

Our goal in this project is to develop a better understanding of young readers’ difficulties in comprehending text, and how those difficulties vary as a function of reader aptitudes and text genre. Therefore, we examined the effects of reading decoding abilities and world knowledge (assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achievement) on 61 third-grade readers’ comprehension of narrati...