We present an approach to patent claim simplification which segments claim sentences into clausal discourse units, transforms them into complete sentences, establishes coreference relations and builds a discourse structure between discourse units. The four stages are necessary to allow for the syntactic analysis of otherwise unparsable claim sentences and their regeneration using discourse structure and coreference relations in order to ensure the production of a cohesive and coherent paraphrase/summary.

The education community is moving towards constructed or free-text responses and computer-based assessment. At the same time, progress in natural language processing and knowledge representation has made it possible to consider free-text or constructed responses without having to fully understand the text. c-rater is a technology at Educational Testing Service (ETS) used for automatic content scoring for short, free-text responses. This paper describes some of the major developments made in c-rater recently.

This study evaluates the robustness of established computational indices used to assess text relatedness in user-language. The original User-Language Paraphrase Corpus (ULPC) was compared to a corrected version, in which each paraphrase was corrected for typographical and grammatical errors. Error correction significantly affected values for each of five computational indices, indicating greater similarity of the target sentence to the corrected paraphrase than to the original paraphrase. Moreover, misspelled target words accounted for a large proportion of the differences. This study also evaluated potential effects on correlations between computational indices and human ratings of paraphrases. The corrections did not yield assessments that were any more or less comparable to trained human raters than were the original paraphrases containing typographical or grammatical errors. The results suggest that although correcting for errors may optimize certain computational indices, the corrections are not necessary for comparing the indices to expert ratings.

Two sentences are paraphrases if their meanings are equivalent but their words and syntax are different. Paraphrasing can be used to aid comprehension, stimulate prior knowledge, and assist in writing skills development. While automated paraphrase assessment is both common-place and useful, research has centered solely on artificial, edited paraphrases and has used only binary dimensions (i.e., is or is-not a paraphrase). In this study, we use 1998 natural paraphrases generated by high school students that have been assessed along 10 dimensions of paraphrase (e.g., semantic completeness). This study investigates the components of paraphrase quality emerging from these dimensions, and examines whether computational approaches (e.g. LSA, MED) can simulate those human evaluations. The results suggest that semantic and syntactic evaluations are the primary components of paraphrase quality, and that computationally light systems such as LSA (semantics) and MED (syntax) present promising approaches to simulating human evaluations of paraphrases.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the validity of measuring grammatical diversity with a specifically designed Lexical Diversity Assessment Tool (LDAT). A secondary objective is to use LDAT to determine if the level of difficulty assigned to English as a Second Language (ESL) texts corresponds to increases in grammatical, lexical, and temporal diversity. Other methods of lexical diversity assessment, such as type-token ratio (TTR), have been used with varying accuracy in an effort to determine the complexity or level of texts. We analyzed 120 ESL texts independently assigned by their sources to one of four levels (Beginner, Lower-intermediate, Upper-intermediate, and Advanced). We demonstrated that LDAT significantly reflected the grammatical diversity within these texts. While the findings conflicted with the prediction that grammatical and lexical diversity would increase with assigned level, we concluded that the implementation of LDAT in text design could provide reliable assessments of grammatical diversity.

In this paper, we propose a universal solution to web search and web browsing on handheld devices for visually impaired people. For this purpose, we propose (1) to automatically cluster web page results and (2) to summarize all the information in web pages so that speech-to-speech interaction is used efficiently to access information.

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, for example higher incomes, lower costs and more interesting and fairer seasons. This paper presents a successful solution method to schedule the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league. The solution method is an improved version of the method used to schedule the Finnish major ice hockey league. The method is a combination of local search heuristics and evolutionary methods. An analyzer for the quality of the produced schedules will be introduced. Finally, we propose a set of test instances that we hope the researchers of the sports scheduling problems would adopt. The generated schedule for the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league is currently in use for the season 2008-2009.

This paper addresses the problem of how a group of agents cooperating on a complex plan with interdependent actions can coordinate their scheduling and execution of those actions, particularly in domains where actions may fail or have uncertain durations.  If actions fail (or fail to meet their deadlines), the repercussions for the rest of the team's plan can be dramatic.  This paper presents a pro-active strategy, called Just-in-Time Backfilling (JIT-BF), that agents can use to increase the fault tolerance of their interdependent schedules by identifying actions in danger of failing and inserting redundant (or back-up) actions into their schedules.  The insertion of redundant actions can be done locally (i.e., by the agent whose action is in danger of failing) or through negotiations with the rest of the team. The computations performed by agents following the JIT-BF strategy depend on probabilistic models of action durations and the ``quality'' achieved by successfully executing actions.  The paper presents an experimental evaluation of the JIT-BF strategy within a simulated real-time dynamic environment that demonstrates that teams using the pro-active JIT-BF strategy significantly out-perform teams that rely solely on reactive strategies.

Computer Science has a bad reputation among non-CS majors. This paper describes three assignments from a gentle introduction to programming course for non-majors that uses robots and simple game programming as a hook to get students interested in the subject. In each of the assignments presented, what might be considered a trivial twist to an instructor was a key factor in making an otherwise standard project into something that is more engaging.

The field of artificial intelligence needs to attract new researchers to the field to continue current explorations and look for novel approaches to tomorrow's problems. One approach involves providing students with learning tools that excite their imagination and help them obtain an appreciation for what artificial intelligence can do. The tools described here are used in an undergraduate course at Sam Houston State University. They include heuristic-driven search in a potential game's terrain map, reinforcement learning in a tank battle game, and game tree search techniques in tic-tac-toe.