This paper presents an investigation of lexical chaining (Morris and Hirst, 1991) for measuring discourse coherence quality in test-taker essays. We hypothesize that attributes of lexical chains, as well as interactions between lexical chains and explicit discourse elements, can be harnessed for representing coherence. Our experiments reveal that performance achieved by our new lexical chain fe...

Utterances that are close in time are more likely to share the same referent. A word learner who is using information about the speaker’s intended referents should be able to take advantage of this continuity and learn words more efficiently by aggregating information across multiple utterances. In the current study we use corpus data to explore the continuity of reference in caregivers’ speech...

Three experiments investigated how font emphasis influences reading and remembering discourse. Although past work suggests that contrastive pitch contours benefit memory by promoting encoding of salient alternatives, it is unclear both whether this effect generalizes to other forms of linguistic prominence and how the set of alternatives is constrained. Participants read discourses in which som...

The current study addresses the growing importance of grammar assessment in educational settings and diverse scoring methods employed by teachers for test tasks. Through a questionnaire administered to 40 high school teachers, research aims determine reliability these identify grammatical areas prioritized evaluation. reveals that gap-filling, matching, dialogue completion, multiple-choice task...

Discourse connectives can be analyzed as discourse level predicates which project predicate-argument structure on a par with verbs at the sentence level. The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) reflects this view in its design providing annotation of the discourse connectives and their arguments. Like verbs, discourse connectives have multiple senses. We present a set of manual sense annotation stud...

This paper addresses the specific features of Chinese discourse connectives, including types (word-pair and single-word), linking directions (forward and backward linking), positions and ambiguous degrees, and discusses how they affect the discourse relation recognition. A semisupervised learning method is proposed to learn the probability distributions of discourse functions of connectives fro...

the effects of formalin as a peripheral noxious stimulus on the activity of lateral paragigantocellularis nucleus (lpgi) neurons were examined. spontaneous activity oflpgi neurons was recorded after confirmation of their responsiveness to acute pain, and thereafter formalin (50 µl, 2.5%) was injected in the contralateral hindpaw. the response of the lpgi neurons was monitored for 60 min. a biph...

background: multiple sclerosis (ms) is a chronic demyelinating disease that can affect cognitive function. the purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of ginkgo biloba (gb) on improvement of memory impairment and quality of life in patients with ms. methods: this study was an 8-week, open study of patients with ms. thirty patients was recruited from a variety of outpatient settings. al...

This research is aimed at understanding the dynamics of collaborative multi-party discourse across multiple communication modalities. Before we can truly make significant strides in devising collaborative communication systems, there is a need to understand how typical users utilize computationally supported communications mechanisms such as email, instant messaging, video conferencing, chat ro...

this study compares the amount and type of direct and indirect strategies and peripheral modifications employed by persian speakers and persian language learners in the request speech act, in different contexts (concerning formality, familiarity and importance of the subject of request). a discourse completion test, as well as direct observation, was used as the main instrument for data collect...