Education
Automatic Natural Language Processing and the Detection of Reading Skills and Reading Comprehension
Boonthum-Denecke, Chutima (Hampton University) | McCarthy, Philip (University of Memphis) | Lamkin, Travis (University of Memphis) | Jackson, G. Tanner (University of Memphis) | Magliano, Joseph P. (Northern Illinois University) | McNamara, Danielle S. (University of Memphis)
The primary goal of this study is to assess two approaches for detecting comprehension processes in R-SAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool). One approach is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) while the other is a combination of literal word matching and soundex. A secondary goal is to assess the potential for detecting specific reading comprehension strategies, either in isolation or combination. Participants typed “think-aloud” protocols while reading texts presented on computers. Human judges rated these protocols for the presence of the various reading comprehension strategies. LSA, word, and combined algorithms were compared and the results showed that a combination of both approaches yielded the best results. However, performance of the combined algorithm varied in terms of the type of processes and the grain size of the human coding system. Lastly, the use of reading strategies (either in isolation or combination) is positivity related to students’ Gates–MacGinitie reading comprehension scores, which illustrates the merit of this approach for assessing comprehension skill.
Special Track on Applied Natural Language Processing
Lintean, Mihai (University of Memphis) | Rus, Vasile (University of Memphis)
The track on applied natural language processing is a forum for researchers working in natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics (CL), and related areas. The rapid pace of development of online materials, most of them in textual form or text combined with other media, has led to a revived interest for tools capable of understanding, organizing and mining those materials. Novel human-computer interfaces (such as talking heads), can benefit from language understanding and generation techniques. Dialoguebased intelligent tutoring systems require advanced dialogue processing, language understanding and generation components in order to assess students' natural language inputs and provide appropriate feedback. Moreover, language can facilitate human-computer interaction for the handicapped (no typing needed) and elderly leading to an ever increasing user base for computer systems.
The Utility of Combinatory Categorial Grammar in Designing a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Languages
Delamarre, Simon (Telecom Bretagne)
This paper intends to demonstrate how Applicative and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (ACCG) can be drawn on to design powerful software applications for the teaching of languages. To this end, we present some modules from our “pictographic translator”, a software that performs syntactical analysis of sentences in natural language directly written by the user, and then dynamically displays series of pictograms that illustrate the words and structure of the user’s sentences. After a short presentation of our application and an introduction to ACCG, we will examine how this formalism enables the building of several high-level functions in our system, such as disambiguation, structure exhibition and grammatical correction/validation. We finally open a short discussion concerning the potential (and limits) of this architecture with regards to multilingualism.
Cognitive Load Theory: Implications for Affective Computing
Kalyuga, Slava (University of New South Wales)
It has been also demonstrated that emotional In its basic underpinning assumptions, cognitive load states (e.g., negative mood or anxiety) directly influence theory relies on the analogy between the information cognitive task performance and the operation of working processing aspects of evolution by natural selection and memory, while less evidence exists about the effect of the human cognition (Sweller & Sweller, 2006). It considers emotional content of the processed information (e.g., both biological evolution and human cognition as Kensinger & Corkin, 2003).
Invited Talk Abstracts
Landauer, Thomas K. (Pearson Knowledge Technologies) | Picard, Rosalind W. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Touretzky, David S. (Carnegie Mellon University) | Baker, Ryan (Worcester Ploytechnic Institute) | Holte, Robert C. (University of Alberta) | Stent, Amanda J. (AT&T Labs - Research) | Vanderveken, Daniel (University of Quebec)
Thomas K. Landauer (Pearson Knowledge Technologies) The recently created word maturity (WM) metric uses the computational language model LSA to mimic the average evolutionary growth of individual word and paragraph knowledge as a function of the total amount and order of simulated reading. The simulator traces the separate growth trajectories of an unlimited number of different words from the beginning of reading to adult level.
Preface
McCarthy, Philip M. (University of Memphis) | Murray, Chas (Carnegie Learning)
The call for papers were Yutao Wang and Neil Heffernan for "The attracted 179 submissions, across 13 different'Assistance' Model: Leveraging How Many tracks. Special tracks are a vital part of the Hints and Attempts a Student Needs," a submission FLAIRS conferences, with 12 held at FLAIRSto the Special Track on Intelligent Tutoring 24. Over 90 percent of the papers were reviewed Systems; Simon Delamarre for "The Utility of by four or more reviewers, and all papers were Combinatory Categorical Grammar in Designing reviewed by at least three. These reviews were a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Languages," coordinated by the program committees of the a submission to the Special Track on Computation general conference and the special tracks. The Linguistics; and Rachel M. Rufenacht, accepted submissions include 94 papers and 37 Philip M. McCarthy, and Travis A. Lamkin for poster papers that appear in these proceedings.
(PDF) What is AIED and why does Education need it?
Challenges for Computing include Learning for Life (Taylor et al, 2008). Grand Research Challenges in Information Systems identifies the need to "provide a teacher for These are amongst the key challenges that AIED responds to. What will next generation AIED learning environments be like? GROE report (Woolf, 2010), in order to highlight the expected role of AIED research.
Scaling up Heuristic Planning with Relational Decision Trees
De la Rosa, T., Jimenez, S., Fuentetaja, R., Borrajo, D.
Current evaluation functions for heuristic planning are expensive to compute. In numerous planning problems these functions provide good guidance to the solution, so they are worth the expense. However, when evaluation functions are misguiding or when planning problems are large enough, lots of node evaluations must be computed, which severely limits the scalability of heuristic planners. In this paper, we present a novel solution for reducing node evaluations in heuristic planning based on machine learning. Particularly, we define the task of learning search control for heuristic planning as a relational classification task, and we use an off-the-shelf relational classification tool to address this learning task. Our relational classification task captures the preferred action to select in the different planning contexts of a specific planning domain. These planning contexts are defined by the set of helpful actions of the current state, the goals remaining to be achieved, and the static predicates of the planning task. This paper shows two methods for guiding the search of a heuristic planner with the learned classifiers. The first one consists of using the resulting classifier as an action policy. The second one consists of applying the classifier to generate lookahead states within a Best First Search algorithm. Experiments over a variety of domains reveal that our heuristic planner using the learned classifiers solves larger problems than state-of-the-art planners.