This study was a qualitative exploration of the effect of multiple-choice glosses and periodic second language (L2) text reconstruction on lexical acquisition. L2 readers of German engaged in a think-aloud procedure while reading a short text and retelling its content in German after each of four short sections. In each section, four unfamiliar target words (TWs) were embedded. Half of the part...

For the past two decades linguists working within the framework of systemic functional linguistics have been developing appraisal theory as a tool for analysing evaluation in discourse. In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current model and then move on to address a number of the challenges that have arisen over the years including distinguishing inscribed from invoked attitude, ...

Previous studies have examined the online research behaviors of graduate students in terms of how they seek and retrieve research-related information on the Web across diverse disciplines. However, few have focused on graduate students’ searching activities, and particularly for their research tasks. Drawing on Kuiper, Volman, and Terwel’s (2008) three aspects of web literacy skills (searching,...

The AdS/CFT conjecture states that to every such manifold (L, gL) there is a dual superconformal field theory in four dimensions. This may be thought of as living on the Penrose conformal boundary of anti–de Sitter space, in the usual way. The AdS/CFT correspondence then makes some remarkable connections between field theory and geometry, some of which I have uncovered over the last year or so....

This paper examines the composing processes of a learner of modern Greek from two different perspectives, that of a strategies researcherand that of the writer herself. The researcher uses established typologies to examine the data, and the writer produces a ‘thick’ analysis of the same material. The main aim of the study was to juxtapose these two separate analyses in order to evaluate the dif...

As advanced analytics has become more mainstream in enterprises, usability and system-managed performance optimizations are critical for its wide adoption. As a result, there is an active interest in the design of declarative languages in several analytics areas. In this talk I will describe the efforts in IBM around three areas namely Information Extraction, Entity Resolution and Machine Learn...

In this talk I will discuss the analysis of several semantic phenomena that need meaning representations that can describe attributes of propositional contexts. I will do this in a version of Discourse Representation Theory, using a universal semantic tagset developed as part of a project that aims to produce a large meaning bank (a semantically-annotated corpus) for four languages (English, Du...

Computer Science students who have one or more years of basic programming experience and little or no exposure to abstractions above the code level, often struggle to grasp modeling concepts and practices in more advanced software development courses. In this talk I discuss some of the factors that contribute to this situation and propose a learning process in which the abstraction gap between ...

How do people imagine the possibilities in which an assertion would be true and the possibilities in which it would be false? We argue that the mental representation of the meanings of connectives, such as “and”, “or”, and “if”, specify how to construct the true possibilities for simple assertions containing just a single connective. It follows that the false possibilities are constructed by in...

Finding a creative solution to a design problem (e.g. designing a device for taking water samples at different depths) often depends on finding a fruitful representation of the problem space. For instance, a problem space in which the device is assumed to be motor-driven might be less fruitful than one in which the mechanism for motion is not specified or could be one of several possibilities. ...