This study explored the effect of input vs. collaborative output tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy and their willingness to communicate (WTC). In so doing, the study utilized 3 input (i.e., textual enhancement, processing instruction, and discourse) and 3 collaborative output (i.e., dictogloss, reconstruction cloze task, and jigsaw) tasks and compared their effects on 5 Englis...

Computer “reading” of natural languages is a growing research topic with numerous applications, ranging from areas of artificial intelligence to linguistics. A successful “reading” of natural languages can be interpreted in two ways: 1) extracting facts out of a passage and 2) capturing “meaning” of a text. We focus on the latter interpretation, defining “meaning” as is done in humans, namely, ...

Abstract Idioms are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most which consist four Chinese characters. Due to the properties non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, idioms hard be understood by children non-native speakers. This study proposes novel task, denoted as Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims rephrase idiom-containing sentences non-idiomatic ones under premise preserving orig...

Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to answer the natural language question about a given image by understanding multimodal content. However, quality of most existing visual-language pre-training (VLP) methods is still limited, mainly due to: (1) Incompatibility. Upstream tasks are generally incompatible with downstream answering tasks, which makes knowledge from model not well transferable an...

*Correspondence: Fabrizio Consorti , Department of Surgical Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Viale del Policlinico, Rome 00161, Italy e-mail: [email protected] Distance learning is used in medical education, even if some recent meta-analyses indicated that it is no more effective than traditional methods. To exploit the technological capabilities, adaptive distance learning sy...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...

O teste de Cloze é amplamente utilizado na avaliação da compreensão leitura escolares. Estudos indicam que os resultados do por razão fixa se relacionam com a escrita, sugerindo esse formato dependente dessa habilidade linguística. Destarte, o objetivo desta pesquisa foi investigar interferência dos erros escrita para desempenho no fixa. Participaram deste estudo 1842 alunos, provenientes das c...

We consider the ROC story cloze task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016) and present several findings. We develop a model that uses hierarchical recurrent networks with attention to encode the sentences in the story and score candidate endings. By discarding the large training set and only training on the validation set, we achieve an accuracy of 74.7%. Even when we discard the story plots (sentences b...

As Schmidt (2008) states, deeper engagement with new vocabulary as induced by tasks clearly increases the chances of learning those words. This engagement is theoretically clarified by the involvement load hypothesis (ILH, Laufer and Hulstijn, 2001), based on which the involvement index of each task can be measured. The present study was designed to test ILH by evaluating the impact of 4 differ...