Text adaptation is a normal activity of teachers to facilitate reading comprehension of specific contents; the general approaches for it are Text Simplification and Text Elaboration (TE). TE aims at clarifying, explaining information and making connections explicit in texts. In this paper, we present a new approach for TE: an automatic question categorization system which assigns wh-question la...

In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3 person neuter wh-pronoun was in the matrix (Spec,CP) position, instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that 'expletive' was serves as a placeholder for a contentful whexpression lower down in the sentence, which substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, howeve...

In this study we investigate the intonational characteristics of the four utterance types statement, wh-question, yes/no-question and declarative question. Readings of two German scripted dialogues were examined to ascertain characteristic features of the F0 contour for each utterance type. Final boundary tone, nuclear pitch accent, F0 offset, F0 onset, F0 range, and the slopes of a topline and...

Text adaptation is a normal activity of teachers to facilitate reading comprehension of specific contents; the general approaches for it are Text Simplification and Text Elaboration (TE). TE aims at clarifying, explaining information and making connections explicit in texts. In this paper, we present a new approach for TE: an automatic question categorization system which assigns wh-question la...

We propose a new, modal interpretation of questions. The idea of interpreting questions via modal logic goes back to Hintikka (1976) and Åqvist (1965), who interpret a question as a request for knowledge: “bring it about that I know whether . . . ”. Such a request is composed of an imperative part and an epistemic part. Focusing on the latter, we interpret a question as the knowledge condition ...

Using a Feature-Based Lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar (FB-LTAG), we present an approach for generating pairs of sentences that are related by a syntactic transformation and we apply this approach to create language learning exercises. We argue that the derivation trees of an FB-LTAG provide a good level of representation for capturing syntactic transformations. We relate our approach to prev...

and Applied Analysis 3 In scientific and engineering computations, many eigenvalue problems have the following first type of mixed variational formulation: find λ, u, σ ∈ R × V × W , u, σ / 0, 0 , such that a ( u, ψ ) b ( ψ, σ ) λ ( u, ψ ) D, ∀ψ ∈ V, 2.3 b u, v 0, ∀v ∈ W. 2.4 In order to solve problem 2.3 2.4 , one should construct finite element spaces Vh ⊂ V and Wh ⊂ W . Restricting 2.3 2.4 o...