In this paper we present how the automatic extraction of events from text can be used to both classify narrative texts according to plot quality and produce advice in an interactive learning environment intended to help students with story writing. We focus on the story rewriting task, in which an exemplar story is read to the students and the students rewrite the story in their own words. The ...

An abundance of high quality data sets requiring heavy tailed models necessitates reliable methods of estimating the shape parameter governing the degree of tail heaviness. The Hill estimator is a popular method for doing this but its practical use is encumbered by several diiculties. We show that an alternative method of plotting Hill estimator values is more revealing than the standard method...

iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction  Data  Identifying the Spatial Pattern and its Dynamics  Methods  Results  Modelling the Spatial Pattern and its Dynamics  Methods  Results  Discussion  Conclusion  Literature Cited  tables . Summary information about the nine study plots  . Estimated parameters for the Poisson cluster processes  figures . Plot   . Plot   3. Pl...