The goal of DARPA’s Machine Reading (MR) program is nothing less than making the world’s natural language corpora available for formal processing. Most text processing research has focused on locating mission-relevant text (information retrieval) and on techniques for enriching text by transforming it to other forms of text (translation, summarization) – always for use by humans. In contrast, M...

The purposes of this study were to develop a theoretical-based, comprehension process assessment and to measure children’s reading comprehension processes. This assessment was based on Hannon & Daneman’s (2001) paradigm and Hannon & Frias’ (2012) component processes tasks, including the memory measure, the inference measure, knowledge access and integration measure, and modified to two parts in...

Performing typical network tasks such as node scanning and path tracing can be difficult in large and dense graphs. To alleviate this problem we use eye-tracking as an interactive input to detect tasks that users intend to perform and then produce unobtrusive visual changes that support these tasks. First, we introduce a novel fovea based filtering that dims out edges with endpoints far removed...

Reading comprehension is a challenging task in natural language processing and requires a set of skills to be solved. While current approaches focus on solving the task as a whole, in this paper, we propose to use a neural network ‘skill’ transfer approach. We transfer knowledge from several lower-level language tasks (skills) including textual entailment, named entity recognition, paraphrase d...

Recent studies have suggested that age of acquisition (AoA) has an impact on skilled reading independent of factors such as frequency. This result raises questions about previous studies in which AoA was not controlled, and about current theories in which it is not addressed. Analyses of the materials used in previous studies suggest that the observed AoA effects may have been due to other fact...

Reading comprehension is critical in life-long learning as well as in the workplace. In this paper, we describe how multidimensional k-means clustering combined with Bloom’s Taxonomy can be used to determine positive and negative cognitive skill sets with respect to reading comprehension tasks. This information could be used to inform environments that support students improving their meta-cogn...

Many children with reading difficulties display phonological deficits and struggle to acquire non-lexical reading skills. However, not all children with reading difficulties have these problems, such as children with selective letter position dyslexia (LPD), who make excessive migration errors (such as reading slime as "smile"). Previous research has explored three possible loci for the deficit...