this study aimed to investigate how iranian efl learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. this query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. for this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a...

Decision times for sentences or word pairs involving direct (e.g., boy-girl) or indirect (e.g., boy-sister) antonyms were measured in a sentence verification task and a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1 false sentences involving the direct antonyms were disconfirmed faster than sentences involving the indirect antonyms, even though the former were rated as more closely related in meaning. ...

We build a virtual agent for learning language in a 2D maze-like world. The agent sees images of the surrounding environment, listens to a virtual teacher, and takes actions to receive rewards. It interactively learns the teacher’s language from scratch based on two language use cases: sentence-directed navigation and question answering. It learns simultaneously the visual representations of th...

Assisting in foreign language learning is one of the major areas in which natural language processing technology can contribute. This paper proposes a computerized method of measuring communicative skill in English as a foreign language. The proposed method consists of two parts. The first part involves a test sentence selection part to achieve precise measurement with a small test set. The sec...

Information Extraction is an important task in Natural Language Processing, consisting of finding a structured representation for the information expressed in natural language text. Two key steps in information extraction are identifying the entities mentioned in the text, and the relations among those entities. In the context of Information Extraction for the World Wide Web, unsupervised relat...

In an ERP study, following stimuli with a world knowledge violation we added a sentence-level context which made a world knowledge violation more acceptable in order to investigate how participants processed the subsequent sentence context. Sentences consisting of five Chinese words were of three experimental types: correct sentences with correct world knowledge and coherent sentence meaning, i...

This study investigated the impact of semantic clustering on Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary retention at advanced level. Participants were female learners randomly assigned to two groups of 15. Four instruments (TOEFL test; vocabulary pretest; immediate posttest, and delayed recall posttest) were used. The experimental group underwent semantic clustering vocabulary presentation in which the l...