Our goal in this project is to develop a better understanding of young readers’ difficulties in comprehending text, and how those difficulties vary as a function of reader aptitudes and text genre. Therefore, we examined the effects of reading decoding abilities and world knowledge (assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achievement) on 61 third-grade readers’ comprehension of narrati...

O'Brien, Shank, Myers, and Rayner (1988) reported that readers generated elaborative inferences only when a text contained characteristics that virtually eliminated the possibility of an inference being disconfirmed. We reanalyzed the data of O'Brien et al. (1988) and also conducted an experiment in which we varied (a) whether or not there was an anaphoric relation between a target word and its...

We are developing a system that aims to perform the same inferences as a human reader, on car-crash reports. More precisely, we expect it to determine the causes of the accident as they appear from the text. We describe the general semantic framework in which our study takes place, the linguistic and semantic levels of analysis, and the inference rules used by the system. Mots-clés : sémantique...

This paper argues that local textual inferences come in three well-defined varieties (entailments, conventional implicatures/presuppositions, and conversational implicatures) and one less clearly defined one, generally available world knowledge. Based on this taxonomy, it discusses some of the examples in the PASCAL text suite and shows that these examples do not fall into any of them. It propo...

While there is a strong intuition that word alignments (e.g. synonymy, hyperonymy) play a relevant role in recognizing textto-text semantic inferences (e.g. textual entailment, semantic similarity), this intuition is often not reflected in the system performances and there is a general need of a deeper comprehension of the role of lexical resources. This paper provides an empirical analysis of ...

Research has extensively studied how children epistemically evaluate people as secondhand information sources, but less is known about they knowledge artifacts, (nonhuman sources; e.g., books). Recent studies indicate that many young prefer to learn from text presented by puppet informants, little why display this preference. Across three studies, we examine factors may influence the likelihood...

We investigated the effects of readers' goals on inference generation and memory for expository text. College students (N = 82) read texts for the purpose of either study or entertainment. On-line inference generation was recorded via think-aloud procedures, and off-line memory was assessed via free recall. Reading goal strongly influenced inferential activity: Readers with a study goal produce...

One of the goals in automated multimedia presentation planning is to tailor the presentations to the individual reader. Therefore, it can be useful for an intelligent multimedia presentation system to know whether the presentation techniques used will be understood. Reading multimedia presentations requires a decoding of the meaning conveyed through all relevant information carriers in presenta...

To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of events A, B where A physically causes B (X drop, X break), to pairs of events where A causes emotional state B (Y saw X, Y felt fear). Previous work on learning n...

This paper identifies the problem of analyses of message content as one of making specific inferences from recorded text to characteristics of a source that are not directly observable. The problem is common to a variety of analytical situations in the humanities and in the social sciences; and the way adequate solutions are found therefore deserves systematic attention. Choices among investiga...