Identifying given and new information within a text has long been addressed as a research issue. However, there has previously been no accurate computational method for assessing the degree to which constituents in a text contain given versus new information. This study develops a method for automatically categorizing noun phrases into one of three categories of givenness/newness, using the tax...

Traditional expository texts typically follow formats that have been well established and predictable. However, design of hypertext systems depend to a large extent on the epistemological, instructional and design perspectives that the design team espouses. Therefore, one of the important differences in learning from hypertext compared to learning from traditional text is that students need to ...

In this review of the literature we examine empirical studies designed to teach the structure strategy to increase reading comprehension of expository texts. First, we review the research that has served as a foundation for many of the studies examining the effects of text structure instruction. Text structures generally can be grouped into six categories: comparison, problem-and-solution, caus...

This investigation assessed the written keystroke savings of five available assistive communication technologies (ACTs): E Z Keys, Predictive Linguistic Program, Words Strategy, Write 100, and a generic encoding technique. Each ACT was used to type 20 written expository texts composed by nondisabled individuals from four grade levels (4th, 8th, 12th, and college). Evaluation of keystroke saving...

An under-addressed question regarding the usage of small devices is how information gathering from such devices is limited or changed relative to a full-size display? This study explores how factual recall from a text interacts with display size and other text characteristics. In this experiment, participants read several expository texts on either small or normal size displays, and font size w...

Brain activation associated with normal and speeded comprehension of expository texts on familiar and unfamiliar topics was investigated in reading and listening. The goal was to determine how brain activation and the comprehension processes it reflects are modulated by comprehension speed and topic familiarity. Passages on more familiar topics differentially activated a set of areas in the ant...

To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the discourse unfolds. We introduce a framework with these properties, which has been applied to both mathematical dialogues and expository texts. The framework can reco...

The following seven articles describe new educational tools that rely on a unique capability of computer programs to abstract knowledge relationships from vast quantities of text, and using this, to determine the similarity of knowledge expressed in two or more texts. The tools can make comparisons among instructional sources and expository student writing, and use the results to assess the qua...

This paper presents the newly released Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC), a Chinese match for the FLOB and Frown corpora of British and American English. We first discuss the major decisions we took when building the corpus. These relate to sampling, text collection, mark-up, and annotation. Following from this we use the corpus to study aspect marking in Chinese and British/American ...

We report three randomised and pre-registered experiments examining the effects of narrative fiction (vs. non-fiction vs. expository non-fiction) on concern for animal welfare. In Experiment 1a (N = 363) there was no significant increase in welfare or willingness to donate an charity among participants who read a text about monkey's plight texts monkey). 1b =121) greater after reading compared ...