one important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. one of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of english learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

There is currently considerable controversy in evolutionary ecology revolving around whether social familiarity brings attraction when a female chooses a mate. The topic of familiarity is significant because by avoiding or preferring familiar individuals as mates, the potential for local adaptation may be reduced or favoured. The topic becomes even more interesting if we simultaneously analyse ...

We focused on InfoVis research due to relevance, scope and familiarity. Analysis of academic publications is one of the common real-world uses of topic modeling (Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004). Our familiarity with the InfoVis community allowed us to contact experts capable of exhaustively enumerating its research areas. InfoVis has a single primary conference, simplifying the construction and ana...

This paper reports on experiments that attempt to characterize the relationship between users and their knowledge of the search topic in a Question Answering (QA) system. It also investigates user search behavior with respect to the length of answers presented by a QA system. Two lengths of answers were compared; snippets (one to two sentences of text) and exact answers. A user test was conduct...

This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...

Students differ in how much they already know about topics within and across their courses. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between participants' levels of knowledge across topics (i.e., their "domain familiarity") and their learning of information from those topics, their study choices related to those topics, and their subjective self-assessments of their learning about t...

One important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. One of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of English learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

This work aims at measuring familiarity to contribute to the formalization of trust. Trust has always been bundled with familiarity to become a popular topic in the areas of psychology, sociology and computer science. Correlation between familiarity and trust has been explored and proved by many studies from different perspectives. A new model of trust has been proposed by Carter and Ghorbani t...