Standard models of language learning are concerned with weak learning: the learner, receiving as input only information about the strings in the language, must learn to generalise and to generate the correct, potentially infinite, set of strings generated by some target grammar. Here we define the corresponding notion of strong learning: the learner, again only receiving strings as input, must ...

Learner corpora are receiving special attention as an invaluable source of educational feedback and are expected to improve teaching materials and methodology. However, they include various types of incorrect sentences. Error type classification is an important task in learner corpora which enables clarifying for learners why a certain sentence is classified as incorrect in order to help learne...

This paper presents the open learner modelling capabilities offered by an adaptive web testing tool. Adaptation decisions are based on user customizable compound rules requiring the identification of several learner characteristics which are then displayed graphically and textually to learners and educators. The open learner modelling capabilities include anonymous access to models of peers and...

Learner-centered education becomes more and more popular. One way of offering learner-centered education is to have assignments where learners can select from a pool of learning tasks with different difficulty levels (e.g., many easy tasks, few challenging tasks, etc.). However, a problem that learners can face in such assignments is to select the tasks that are most appropriate for them. In th...

Three potential sources of comprehensible input for second language acquisition are examined: Modified Input, Interactionally Modified Input and Modified Output. To this end, an attempt is made to closely investigate how each type of linguistic environment facilitates learner comprehension, and subsequently, acquisition. Different theoretical claims as well as a number of empirical studies are ...

Successfully promoting engagement within learning environments is a subject of increasing attention within the AI in Education community. Evidence is mounting that game-based learning environments hold great potential to engage students, but disengaged behavior is still observed. Devising adaptive strategies to re-engage students in the learning task is a key open research question. Toward that...

Boosting is a popular way to derive powerful learners from simpler hypothesis classes. Following previous work (Mason et al., 1999; Friedman, 2000) on general boosting frameworks, we analyze gradient-based descent algorithms for boosting with respect to any convex objective and introduce a new measure of weak learner performance into this setting which generalizes existing work. We present the ...

The importance of computer learner corpora for research in both second language acquisition and foreign language teaching is rapidly increasing. Computer learner corpora can provide us with data to describe the learner’s interlanguage system at different points of its development and they can be used to create pedagogical tools. In this paper, we first present a new computer learner corpora in ...

This paper describes how graduate students used paper-based support tools to help them acquire a complex cognitive skill during unsupervised practice, and explains why the tools were able to support the practice. The paper also explains how to design such tools and describes a comparable computer-based performance support system. Ohlsson’s (1996) theory of learning from performance errors state...