This paper presents an online system for recognizing isolated, hand-sketched Urdu characters drawn on a Tablet PC. Attributes of Urdu characters are analyzed to define a set of features which are then trained and classified using a weighted, linear classifier. As a proof of concept, we have integrated our recognition algorithm into an application used to help people learn the Urdu language. Pre...

In this paper we introduce the AMADEUS strategy, which has been used to produce scientific writing tools for non-native users of English for 15 years, and emphasize a learnby-doing approach through which students and novice writers can improve their scientific writing. More specifically, we provide a 9-step recipe for the students to compile writing material according to a procedure that has pr...

research article (ra) genre has been a significant area of research in academic writing over past decades. however, authors’ identity in ras has not received much attention, especially in soft sciences like applied linguistics. this paper reports a corpus analysis of iranian writers’ authorial presence markers in ras in the field of applied linguistics. the corpus comprised 30 ras (200,000 word...

No published studies have sufficiently focused on essay topic writability from the perspective of college writers of the new millennium including native English speakers and ESL speakers. In this study, 500 college writers in Metro Toronto in Canada were interviewed to uncover if they found some essay topics easier than other topics. The results indicate that over 90% of them did. The interview...

The present paper explores how the Indian writing in English has gone through various phases to be what it is today. It was difficult for non-native writers culture and context into a language which not their own. In this process, there emerged expressions were linguistically awkward from point of native users Standard English. Nevertheless, over years achieved level where began only accepted b...

We show that it is possible to learn to identify, with high accuracy, the native language of English test takers from the content of the essays they write. Our method uses standard text classification techniques based on multiclass logistic regression, combining individually weak indicators to predict the most probable native language from a set of 11 possibilities. We describe the various feat...