The UC Berkeley team participated in the SemEval 2007 Task #4, with an approach that leverages the vast size of the Web in order to build lexically-specific features. The idea is to determine which verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions are used in sentences containing a target word pair, and to compare those to features extracted for other word pairs in order to determine which are most similar...

Abstract This study investigated the validity of processability theory proposed by Pienemann (1998/2015) among Iranian EFL learners’ oral performance. The theory defines six procedural stages for learners in the process of second language acquisition. In order to conduct the study, 10 intermediate EFL learners were selected based on their performance on Oxford Placement Test. Then, they partici...

This research is carried out jointly by the Software Engineering Institute, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, sponsored by the Department of Defense, and by the Department of Computer Science, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 4976, monitored by the Air Force Avionics Laboratory Under Contract F33615-84-K-1520. Additional support ...

Thanks to the profusion of freely available tools, it recently became fairly easy to built a statistical machine translation (SMT) engine given a bitext. The expectations we can have on the quality of such a system may however greatly vary from one pair of languages to another. We report on our experiments in building phrase-based translation engines for the four pairs of languages we had to co...

Robot systems must achieve high level goals while remaining reactive to contingencies and new opportunities. This typically requires robot systems to coordinate concurrent activities, monitor the environment, and deal with exceptions. We have developed a new language to support such task-level control. The language, TDL, is an extension of C++ that provides syntactic support for task decomposit...

The purpose of this research project was to provide occupational therapists with preliminary descriptive data on the spherical grip strength of 3- to 5 1/2-year-old children using the Martin Vigorimeter. Three hundred and eighty boys and girls were tested. Standardized positioning and instructions were followed. The mean of three trials was used as the grip strength score for each hand. The rig...

Companies, governmental agencies and scientists produce a large amount of quantitative (research) data, consisting of measurements ranging from e.g. the surface temperatures of an ocean to the viscosity of a sample of mayonnaise. Such measurements are stored in tables in e.g. spreadsheet files and research reports. To integrate and reuse such data, it is necessary to have a semantic description...

This study uses gamification as the carrier of understanding the motivational benefits of applying the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) in social adaptive e-learning, by proposing motivational gamification strategies rooted in SDT, as well as developing and testing these strategies. Results show high perceived motivation amongst the students, and identify a high usability of the implementation, ...