Reading comprehension is a challenging task in natural language processing and requires a set of skills to be solved. While current approaches focus on solving the task as a whole, in this paper, we propose to use a neural network ‘skill’ transfer approach. We transfer knowledge from several lower-level language tasks (skills) including textual entailment, named entity recognition, paraphrase d...

The number skills of groups of 7 to 9 year old children with specific language impairment (SLI) attending mainstream or special schools are compared with an age and nonverbal reasoning matched group (AC), and a younger group matched on oral language comprehension. The SLI groups performed below the AC group on every skill. They also showed lower working memory functioning and had received lower...

Article History The paper received on: 07/07/2014 Accepted after peer-review on: 24/08/2014 Published on: 01/09/2014 Of the four major language skills, speaking is regarded as the most crucial and central one as it enables the learner to establish successful communication in that language, which is often the main aim of learning any foreign language. That is why it forms the focus of att...

[Foreign trade involves tasks that may be subject to language barriers, such as researching foreign markets, communicating with counterparties and marketing products to foreign consumers. Language skills have a wage premium that is determined by local and worldwide supply and demand for language services, and the premium is specific to each country and pair of languages. I construct a novel mea...

On average, children from low socioeconomic status (SES) homes and children from homes in which a language other than English is spoken have language development trajectories that are different from those of children from middle-class, monolingual English-speaking homes. Children from low-SES and language minority homes have unique linguistic strengths, but many reach school age with lower leve...

The present study examined the components of end of kindergarten writing, using data from 242 kindergartners. Specifically of interest was the importance of spelling, letter writing fluency, reading, and word- and syntax-level oral language skills in writing. The results from structural equation modeling revealed that oral language, spelling, and letter writing fluency were positively and uniqu...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for reinforcement learning agents in continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to an end-of-task reward. We demonstrate experimentally that skill chaining is able to create appropriate skills in a challenging continuous domain and that doing so results in performance gains.