Reading comprehension has embraced a booming in recent NLP research. Several institutes have released the Cloze-style reading comprehension data, and these have greatly accelerated the research of machine comprehension. In this work, we firstly present Chinese reading comprehension datasets, which consist of People Daily news dataset and Children’s Fairy Tale (CFT) dataset. Also, we propose a c...

Many students with autism spectrum disorders show good decoding combined with poor comprehension. Twenty adolescent students with autism spectrum disorders participated in a study concerning the effects of three kinds of facilitation on reading comprehension. In a within-subjects design, each students read passages under four conditions: answering prereading questions, completing cloze sentence...

Does producing a word slow performance of a concurrent, unrelated task? In 2 experiments, 108 participants named pictures and discriminated tones. In Experiment 1, pictures were named after cloze sentences; the durations of the word-production stages of lemma and phonological word-form selection were manipulated with high- and low-constraint cloze sentences and high- and low-frequency-name pict...

Efficient language processing may involve generating expectations about upcoming input. To investigate the extent to which prediction might facilitate reading, a large-scale survey provided cloze scores for all 2689 words in 55 different text passages. Highly predictable words were quite rare (5% of content words), and most words had a more-expected competitor. An eye-tracking study showed sens...

A writer’s style depends not just on personal traits but also on her intent and mental state. In this paper, we show how variants of the same writing task can lead to measurable differences in writing style. We present a case study based on the story cloze task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016a), where annotators were assigned similar writing tasks with different constraints: (1) writing an entire st...

When younger and older adults were allowed to adjust the speech rate of time-compressed and time-expanded speech passages, older adults tended to select as preferred rates significantly slower speech rates than the younger adults. Both age groups, however, selected slower rates for difficult speech passages (low cloze predictability) than for easy passages (high cloze predictability). Recall pe...