We consider the problem of learning rules from natural language text sources. These sources, such as news articles, journal articles, and web texts, are created by a writer to communicate information to a reader, where the writer and reader share substantial domain knowledge. Consequently, the texts tend to be concise and mention the minimum information necessary for the reader to draw the corr...

Text comprehension skills and strategies develop enormously from the age of 7-8 until the age of 11, when children advance as independent readers. Nowadays, more and more young children turn out to be poor (text) comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inferencemaking skills, despite proficiency in word decoding and other low-level cognitive skills. Though th...

When engaging with a textbook, students are inclined to highlight key content. Although students believe that highlighting and subsequent review of the highlights will further their educational goals, the psychological literature provides no evidence of benefits. Nonetheless, a student’s choice of text for highlighting may serve as a window into their mental state—their level of comprehension, ...

Identifying duplicate texts is important in many areas like plagiarism detection, information retrieval, text summarization, and question answering. Current approaches are mostly surface-oriented (or use only shallow syntactic representations) and see each text only as a token list. In this work however, we describe a deep, semantically oriented method based on semantic networks which are deriv...

According to psychological experimentation, there is evidence of automatic elaborative inferential activity, as well as of incompleteness in backward inference making (anaphora, causal structuring). McKoon & Ratcliff (1992) have argued for a “minimalist” theory of inference in reading, contrasting it with “constructionist” theories, including theories based on mental or situation model. But, mi...

Modulo formatting, this document constitutes a portion of my application for tenure (“section 5”). It details my research, teaching, and service efforts and goals. It is not exhaustive, and it reflects my view of my activities in late May 2013. 1 Research My research goal is to automate inference from natural language text, including: • algorithms that interpret text into abstract linguistic st...

Description EXCITEMENT is a 3-year research project (1/2012-12/2014) funded by the European Commission under FP7. The project consortium includes NICE Systems LTD (Israel) as coordinator, four academic partners, University of Bar Ilan (Israel), DFKI (Germany), FBK (Italy), University of Heidelberg (Germany), and two industrial partners, Almawave S.R.L. (Italy) and OMQ GmbH (Germany). The main t...

Introduction. Multiple-text task-oriented reading is using several texts to perform an assigned task. It involves two core processes, namely, comprehending text contents and discriminating the that are relevant for We explored these processes in primary school students. Method. had 150 students from grades fourth (9-10 years old) sixth (11-12 use three learn about question. After texts, they to...

Human reasoning goes beyond knowledge about individual entities, extending to inferences based on relations between entities. Here we focus the use of in verbal analogical mapping, sketching a general approach assessing similarity patterns semantic words. This combines research artificial intelligence with work psychology and cognitive science, aim minimizing hand coding text inputs for tasks. ...

Taxonomy-based representations are widely used to model compactly large amounts of textual data. While current methods allow organizing knowledge at the lexical level (keywords/concepts/topics), there is an increasing demand to move towards more informative representations, which express properties of concepts and relations among them. This demand triggered our research on statement entailment ...