Second language acquisition research since the 90s has emphasized the importance of supporting awareness of language categories and forms, and input enhancement techniques have been proposed to make target language features more salient for the learner. We present an NLP architecture and webbased implementation providing automatic visual input enhancement for web pages. Learners freely choose t...

Abstract Armed with technological development, the present study aimed at gauging the effectiveness of exposure to news and movies as two types of audiovisual programs in improving language learners’ listening comprehension at the intermediate level. To this end, a listening comprehension test was administered to 108 language learners and finally 60 language learners were selected as intermedia...

The parser described in t h i s paper is a conceptua l parser . I t s pr imary concern i s t o e x p l i cate the under ly ing meaning and conceptual r e l a t i onsh ips present in a piece of discourse in any n a t u r a l language. I t s output is a language-free network cons i s t i ng of unambiguous concepts and t h e i r r e l a t i o n s to other concepts. Pieces o f d is course w i t h i...

It is often argued that a set of standard linguistic processing functionalities should be identified, with each of them given a formal specification. We would benefit from the formal specifications; for example, the semi-automated composition of a complex language processing workflow could be enabled in due time. This paper extracts a standard set of linguistic processing functionalities and tr...

Building NLG systems, in particular statistical ones, requires parallel data (paired inputs and outputs) which do not generally occur naturally. In this paper, we investigate the idea of automatically extracting parallel resources for data-to-text generation from comparable corpora obtained from the Web. We describe our comparable corpus of data and texts relating to British hills and the techn...

This paper examines the political, economic, and institutional variables associated with the presence of state laws that mandate the use of public input in local budgeting. The results show that political and institutional variables can help explain the presence of such laws, but the relationships between variables of interest shift depending on whether laws aimed at cities or counties are the ...

Allowing users to interact through language borders is an interesting challenge for information technology. For the purpose of a computer assisted language learning system, we have chosen icons for representing meaning on the input interface, since icons do not depend on a particular language. However, a key limitation of this type of communication is the expression of articulated ideas instead...