Introduction WestEd has been contracted by the National Assessment Governing Board to study the extent to which the grade 12 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is aligned in content and complexity to SAT and ACCUPLACER in reading and in mathematics. This project is part of the Governing Board's 12th grade preparedness initiative and will yield information on using the grade 12 N...

In the framework of bilingual lexicon acquisition from cross-lingually relevant news articles on the Web, it is relatively harder to reliably estimate bilingual term correspondences for low frequency terms. Considering such a situation, this paper proposes to complementarily use much larger monolingual Web documents collected by search engines, as a resource for reliably re-estimating bilingual...

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status have not been properly controlled. To address this ...

A user-friendly interface to search bilingual resources is of great help to NLP developers as well as pure-linguists. Using bilingual resources is difficult for linguists who are unfamiliar with computation, which hampers capabilities of bilingual resources. NLP developers sometimes need a kind of workbench to check their resources. The online interface this paper introduces can satisfy these n...

A new method has been developed for extracting word correspondences from a bilingual corpus. First, the co-occurrence infi~rmation for each word in both languages is extracted li'om the corpus. Then, the correlations between the co-occurrence features of the words are calculated pairwisely with tile assistance of a basic word bilingual dictionary. Finally, the pairs of words with the highest co...

In this paper, we address the task of calculating monoand bilingual semantic similarity. We introduce a method that, in order to arrive at a measure of semantic relatedness, exploits the information implicitly contained in bilingual dictionaries. Through experiments we show that our method performs well, with a performance comparable to approaches based on hierarchical knowledge bases and corpu...

Existing discourse research only focuses on the monolingual languages and the inconsistency between languages limits the power of the discourse theory in multilingual applications such as machine translation. To address this issue, we design and build a bilingual discource corpus in which we are currently defining and annotating the bilingual elementary discourse units (BEDUs). The BEDUs are th...

Building bilingual lexica from non-parallel data is a longstanding natural language processing research problem that could benefit thousands of resource-scarce languages which lack parallel data. Recent advances of continuous word representations have opened up new possibilities for this task, e.g. by establishing cross-lingual mapping between word embeddings via a seed lexicon. The method is h...

This study investigates L1-L2 interactions in relatively young Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) bilingual children through comparing their static and dynamic vowel acoustic features with those of age-matched corresponding monolingual children. Two groups of sequential bilingual children aged 5-6 years (one with low proficiency in English and the other with high proficiency in English) were recorded p...

Recent work in learning bilingual representations tend to tailor towards achieving good performance on bilingual tasks, most often the crosslingual document classification (CLDC) evaluation, but to the detriment of preserving clustering structures of word representations monolingually. In this work, we propose a joint model to learn word representations from scratch that utilizes both the conte...