Computer-based instructional interventions are increasingly popular in classroom curricula. For students to benefit from these interventions, it is vital that they are properly trained to use the software. We investigate the effects of using active versus passive training techniques to familiarize users with a graphical programming environment, Alice. We examine the impact using measures of kno...

In three experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgement task the question was investigated of what role morphological ambiguity plays for syntactic ambiguity resolution. The stimuli were German verb-final clauses which are locally ambiguous between a subject-object and an object-subject reading and where the ambiguity is not caused by phrase-structural differences but by differing case-as...

We investigate with German data how the use of temporary agency work has helped establishments to manage the economic and financial crisis in 2008/09. We examine the (regular) workforce development, use of short-time work, and business performance of establishments that made differential use of temporary agency work prior to the crisis. Overall, our results suggest that establishments with a gr...

Scanning recent news sources, anyone preparing for the upcoming celebration of Christmas might wonder how exactly we can manage to celebrate wholeheartedly in a global climate of terrorist attacks, massive migrations of traumatized war victims and economic refugees, and generalized fear for the future. Commentators, syndicated columnists and political cartoonists in recent times have highlighte...

We report on our ongoing work in developing the Irish Dependency Treebank, describe the results of two Inter-annotator Agreement (IAA) studies, demonstrate improvements in annotation consistency which have a knock-on effect on parsing accuracy, and present the final set of dependency labels. We then go on to investigate the extent to which active learning can play a role in treebank and parser ...