A deeper understanding of what is going on in a given text is still one of the most interesting and challenging goals in NLP. Sentiment analysis has recently started to contribute to this area. We no longer just try to predict the polarity of whole product reviews but to distinguish various perspectives inherent to a text, namely, what the author is telling us, how he implicitly or explictely e...

Writing is "good" when it anticipates the knowledge that its readers will bring to it-the questions they will implicitly ask-and tailors its content and form accordingly. A large part of this tailoring involves the careful use of "discourse clues": choices of wording, patterns of phrasing, and specific discourse connectives that signal the structure and intent of a text to the audience. We begi...

The role of individual differences in bridging-inference processing was studied. Students (n = 135) read passages of short to moderate length. After each one, they answered corresponding questions about inferences that bridged causally related ideas that were either near or far apart in the text. The main hypothesis was that local bridging-inference processing is facilitated by the reader's pre...

In this paper, we propose a new framework for constructing text metrics which can be used to compare and support inferences among terms and sets of terms. Our metric is derived from data-driven kernels on graphs that let us capture global relations among terms and sets of terms, regardless of their complexity and size. To compute the metric efficiently for any two subsets of terms, we develop a...

As we age, our differences in cognitive skills become more visible, an effect especially true for memory and problem solving skills (i.e., fluid intelligence). However, by contrast with fluid intelligence, few studies have examined variability in measures that rely on one's world knowledge (i.e., crystallized intelligence). The current study investigated whether age increased the variability in...

Is Skim reading effective? How do readers allocate their attention selectively? The authors report 3 experiments that use expository texts and allow readers only enough time to read half of each document. Experiment 1 found that, relative to reading half the text, skimming improved memory for important ideas from a text but did not improve memory of less important details or of inferences made ...

Mostly, the conversations taking place in chat mediums bear important information concerning the speakers. This information can vary in many fields such as tendencies, habits, attitudes, guilt situations, and intentions of the speakers. Therefore, analysis and processing of these conversations are of much importance. Many social and semantic inferences can be made from these conversations. In d...

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.041 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Laboratoire Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs EA 3082, Université Lyon(2) – 5, Av. Mendès-France, 69676 Bron Cédex, France. Tel.: +33 478772437. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (J. Ecalle). 1 ’’Some tasks at this level...

Multimodal documents combining language and graphs are wide-spread in print media as well as in electronic media. One of the most important tasks to be solved in comprehending graph-text combinations is construction of causal chains among the meaning entities provided by modalities. In this study we focus on the role of annotation position and shape of graph lines in simple line graphs on causa...

We describe WHIRL, an \information representation language" that synergistically combines properties of logic-based and text-based representation systems. WHIRL is a subset of non-recursive Datalog that has been extended by introducing an atomic type for textual entities, an atomic operation for computing textual similarity, and a \soft" semantics; that is, inferences in WHIRL are associated wi...