We present the project of classification of Prague Discourse Treebank documents (Czech journalistic texts) for their genres. Our main interest lies in opening the possibility to observe how text coherence is realized in different types (in the genre sense) of language data and, in the future, in exploring the ways of using genres as a feature for multi-sentence-level language technologies. In t...

Length constraints impose implicit requirements on the type of content that can be included in a text. Here we propose the first model to computationally assess if a text deviates from these requirements. Specifically, our model predicts the appropriate length for texts based on content types present in a snippet of constant length. We consider a range of features to approximate content type, i...

Human rights situation in the Middle East (ME) is a central concern in contemporary political as well as academic discourses. There is a considerable amount of literature on the subject, both academic and journalistic, in the Western world. A large part of that literature blames the ME in different ways for its ‘terrible’ conception and treatment of human rights norms. They typically, do not he...

Nagy (1988) states that vocabulary is a prerequisite factor in comprehension. Drawing upon a reductionist approach and having in mind the prospects for material development, this study aimed at creating an English for Academic Purposes Word List (EAPWL). The corpus of this study was compiled from a corpus containing 6479 pages of texts, 2,081,678 million tokens (running words) and 63825 types (...

This paper describes the theoretical foundation, design philosophy, and development process for a product to assist in the development of students’ cognitive self-regulatory skills when engaging in reading activities at a tertiary level. Mark-UP is an on-line tool, developed using MySQL and PHP and delivered in an OS X server environment, to facilitate students’ engagement with academic texts. ...

BACKGROUND The use of 'easy-to-read' materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to...

Research on the special relationship between the United States and Israel hasusually been focused on strategic aspects, whilst fewer scholars have focusedon non-material dimensions of the relationship. In addition, the existingresearch is mostly confined to the political and decision-making realms, withvery few excursions into the academic arena. The current article aims...