Many programs designed to compute the readability of texts are narrowly based on surface-level linguistic features and take too little account of the processes which a reader brings to the text. This study is an exploratory examination of the use of Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis. It i...

The Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is a common neuropsychological measure sensitive to cognitive changes and functional skills (e.g., driving test performance) among older adults. However, normative data have not been adequately developed. We report the distribution of CDT scores using three common scoring systems [Mendez, M. F., Ala, T., & Underwood, K. L. (1992). Development of scoring criteria for...

We investigate linguistic features that correlate with the readability of texts for adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). Based on a corpus of texts (including some experimentally measured for comprehension by adults with ID), we analyze the significance of novel discourselevel features related to the cognitive factors underlying our users’ literacy challenges. We develop and evaluate a t...

Providing sets of semantically related words in the lexical entries of an electronic dictionary should help language learners quickly understand the meaning of the target words. Relational information might also improve memorisation, by allowing the generation of structured vocabulary study lists. However, an open issue is which semantic relations are cognitively most salient, and should theref...

Pain is an understudied problem in frail elderly patients, especially those with cognitive impairment, delirium, or dementia. The focus of this study was to describe the pain experienced by patients in skilled nursing homes, which have a high prevalence of cognitive impairment. A random sample of 325 subjects was selected from ten community skilled nursing homes. Subjects underwent a cross-sect...

The rich contributions made in the field of human computer interaction (HCI) have played a pivotal role in shifting the attention of the industry to the interaction between users and computers (Myers, 1998). However, technologies that include hypertext, multimedia, and manipulation of graphical objects were designed and presented to the users without referring to critical findings made in the f...

This overview article reviews the structure of a fully statistical spoken dialogue system (SDS), using as illustration, various systems and components built at Cambridge over the last few years. Most of the components in an SDS are essentially classifiers which can be trained using supervised learning. However, the dialogue management component must track the state of the dialogue and optimise ...