Automatically learning script knowledge has proved difficult, with previous work not or just barely beating a most-frequent baseline. Script knowledge is a type of world knowledge which can however be useful for various task in NLP and psycholinguistic modelling. We here propose a model that includes participant information (i.e., knowledge about which participants are relevant for a script) an...

The LSDSem’17 shared task is the Story Cloze Test, a new evaluation for story understanding and script learning. This test provides a system with a four-sentence story and two possible endings, and the system must choose the correct ending to the story. Successful narrative understanding (getting closer to human performance of 100%) requires systems to link various levels of semantics to common...

Advances in text simplification depend on reliable judgments of sentence difficulty. The ability of untrained native English speakers to judge sentence difficulty in the presence of variation in semantic similarity is examined using cloze tests and a forced-choice comparison task. Judgments from participants in web-based experiments demonstrate ability to assess sentence difficulty of professio...

This article presents the Provo Corpus, a corpus of eye-tracking data with accompanying predictability norms. The predictability norms for the Provo Corpus differ from those of other corpora. In addition to traditional cloze scores that estimate the predictability of the full orthographic form of each word, the Provo Corpus also includes measures of the predictability of the morpho-syntactic an...