This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably matched control condition, in which no change can possibly have taken place. Our analysis shows that the effects reported in recent literature must be substantially revi...

This study introduces the Constructed Response Analysis Tool (CRAT), a freely available tool to automatically assess student responses in online tutoring systems. The study tests CRAT on a dataset of chemistry responses collected in the ChemVLab+. The findings indicate that CRAT can differentiate and classify student responses based on semantic overlap with student input and indices related to ...

In an earlier paper, we have described final part-word repetitions in the conversational speech of two school-age boys of normal intelligence with no known neurological lesions. In this paper we explore in more detail the phonetic and linguistic characteristics of the speech of the boys. The repeated word fragments were more likely to be preceded by a pause than followed by one. The word immedi...

It is accepted to rank words on absolute (or proportional) frequency, when making frequency lists of words, occuring in the texts. At the same time, the researchers, feeling imperfection of frequency as unconditional indicator of word "importance", consider also other characteristics of usage for revealing the basic zone of frequency list, for example the range, i.e. the number of categories, i...

We present a graph-based approach to discover and extend semantic relationships found in a mathematics curriculum to more general network structures that can illuminate relationships within the instructional material. Using words representative of a secondary level mathematics curriculum we identified in separate work, we constructed two similarity networks of word problems in a mathematics tex...