This paper reviews the various multiple-choice formats used in testing foreign language vocabulary with special reference to the underlying constructs of vocabulary competence. While all formats are argued to categorically measure recognition of second language word meaning, they are claimed to differ with respect to whether they measure receptive recognition or productive recognition, followin...

This article concerns a corpus-based lexical study that is aimed at teaching academic vocabulary to address the specific needs of Chinese undergraduates majoring in information engineering. A 1,024,882-word corpus of Information Engineering English Corpus (IEEC) was built on the basis of university-level textbook materials drawn from ten compulsory courses for information engineering students. ...

Vocabulary is considered essential to language learning, thus English word lists and tests based on frequency information have become the centre of attention for researchers, teachers and learners alike. As a result, it is argued hereby that frequency based word lists and tests should be adapted and regarded as key elements for teaching and learning Romanian as an additional language as well. S...

Most current speech recognition systems use Viterbi beam search in the decoding stage. We study here the Histogram Pruning technique to reduce computational requirements of these Viterbi-based speech recognition systems. This technique uses a histogram of the hypothesis scores and a pruning threshold to keep the number of active hypotheses below a previously deened limit. We present results on ...

Language input is crucial for language acquisition and especially for children's vocabulary size. Bilingual children receive reduced input in each of their languages, compared to monolinguals, and are reported to have smaller vocabularies, at least in one of their languages. Vocabulary acquisition in trilingual children has been largely understudied; only a few case studies have been published ...

Lexical approaches to Academic and Technical English have been well documented by scholars from as early as Cowie (1978). More recent work demonstrates how computer technology can assist in the effective analysis of corpus-based data (Cowie, 1998; Pedersen, 1995; Scott, 2000). For teaching purposes, this recent research has shown that the distinction between common coreness and diversity is a c...

This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study on the vocabulary used in journalistic Chinese. Based on a 20-million character corpus of more than 27,000 news texts collected between mid 2003 and the end of 2004 from various Chinese media sources in different countries and regions, a character frequency list and three word and phrase frequency lists with two, three and fourcharacters w...

This article considers the problem of how to bring foreign language students with a limited vocabulary knowledge, consisting mainly of high-frequency words, to the point where they are able to adequately comprehend authentic texts in a target domain or genre. It proposes bridging the vocabulary gap by first determining which word families account for 95% of the target domain's running words, an...

This paper presents a novel latent semantic learning algorithm for action recognition. Through efficient sparse coding, we can learn latent semantics (i.e. high-level features) from a large vocabulary of abundant mid-level features (i.e. visual keywords). More importantly, we can capture the manifold structure hidden among midlevel features by incorporating hypergraph regularization into sparse...