Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic cha...

Some scholars have hypothesized that writing style, the special language of writing, is acquired, or subconsciously absorbed, through reading (Krashen, 1984, 2004; Smith, 1988, 2004). The language of writing, it is argued, is too complex to be consciously learned, and there are compelling case histories of those who developed high levels of competence in the written language through reading alo...

AIMS The European Association of Echocardiography (EAE) launched its Accreditation scheme in echocardiography in December 2003. Currently there are accreditations in Adult Transthoracic Echocardiography and Transesophageal Echocardiography and an Accreditation in Echocardiography for Congenital Disease will be launched in December 2006. METHODS AND RESULTS Over the past 3years 350 applicants ...

AIM To examine the associations of test anxiety (TA) in written vs oral exam situations with social anxiety (SA). METHODS A convenience sample of 204 students was recruited at the Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden, Germany) and contacted via e-mail asking to complete a cross-sectional online survey based on established questionnaires. The study protocol was approved by the ethics com...

The purpose of this retrospective study was to evaluate the quantitative assessment of a structured essay and standardized oral examination and its correlation to the final-year graduating exam in the Department of Pediatric Dentistry, Meenakshi Ammal Dental College and Hospital, Chennai, India. The records of 531 students from 2005 to 2009 were collected. Students were categorized based on the...

Inconsistent results in the field of bilingualism and cognition may be largely influenced by variation in the nature of bilingual language proficiency. Here we explore the relationship between inhibitory control and bilingual proficiency in 43 8-year-old English-Chinese children in Singapore where bilingualism is prolific. Proficiency estimates are based on Oral and Written exam scores and care...

This paper introduces an overview of the RITE (Recognizing Inference in TExt) task in NTCIR-9. We evaluate systems that automatically recognize entailment, paraphrase, and contradiction between two texts written in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese. The task consists of four subtasks: Binary classification of entailment (BC); Multi-class classification including paraphrase an...

We consider the problem of assigning the test variants of a written exam to the desks of a classroom in such a way that desks that are close-by receive different variants. The problem is a generalization of the Vertex Coloring and we model it as a binary quadratic problem. Exact solution methods based on reformulating the problem in a convex way and applying a general-purpose solver are discuss...