Reading comprehension is a question answering task where the answer is to be found in a given passage about entities and events not mentioned in general knowledge sources. A significant number of neural architectures for this task (neural readers) have recently been developed and evaluated on large cloze-style datasets. We present experiments supporting the emergence of “predication structure” ...

The current report demonstrates the importance of formally accounting for passage difficulty when using the tracking procedure. Cloze responses to 82 encyclopedia excerpts (343-349 words each) were obtained from a large pool of normal-hearing adults and scored verbatim. Passage difficulty, derived via ANOVA, was then defined as the deviation of a passage's mean Cloze score from the score for al...

When students study for multiple-choice cloze tests as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), they tend to repeatedly tackle questions of the same type. In such situations, students can effectively solve questions related to their incorrectly answered questions. However, since they need several different kinds of knowledge and a large vocabulary to derive answers, it is in...

Representation and learning of commonsense knowledge is one of the foundational problems in the quest to enable deep language understanding. This issue is particularly challenging for understanding casual and correlational relationships between events. While this topic has received a lot of interest in the NLP community, research has been hindered by the lack of a proper evaluation framework. T...

A readability formula is obtained that can be used by computer programs for style checking of Japanese texts and need not syntactic or semantic information. The formula is derived as a linear combination of tile surface characteristics of the text that are related to its readability: (1) the average number of characters per sentence, (2) for each type of characters (Roman alphabets, kanzis, hir...

Gamma-band neuronal synchronization during sentence-level language comprehension has previously been linked with semantic unification. Here, we attempt to further narrow down the functional significance of gamma during language comprehension, by distinguishing between two aspects of semantic unification: successful integration of word meaning into the sentence context, and prediction of upcomin...

one of the major criticisms leveled at task-based language teaching (tblt), despite its countless merits, is developing fluency at the cost of accuracy. the post-task stage affords a number of options to counteract this downside through task repetition and task recycling. these two options are considered to positively affect learners' oral performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexi...

Previous studies have shown that comprehenders use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but less is known about how comprehenders integrate different sources of information to generate predictions in real time. The current study examines the time course with which the lexical meaning and structural roles of preverbal arguments impact comprehenders’ lexical semant...