The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three...

Multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-w...

[1] Introduction: We would like to argue in this paper, first, that in order to make syntactic tests for scope interpretation of wh-questions in Japanese repeatable, we must take prosody into consideration. Second, we propose that focused wh-phrases come to be associated with some formal feature showing up in a higher functional projection at LF, which is distinct from any version of wh-movemen...

This thesis investigates computational approaches for analysing the semantic relations in compound nouns and other noun-noun constructions. Compound nouns in particular have received a great deal of attention in recent years due to the challenges they pose for natural language processing systems. One reason for this is that the semantic relation between the constituents of a compound is not exp...

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts •bout mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called "common...

Comparative expressions (CEs) such as "bigger than" and "more oranges than" are highly ambiguous, and their meaning is context dependent. Thus, they pose problems for the semantic interpretation algorithms typically used in natural language database interfaces. We focus on the comparison attribute ambiguities that occur with CEs. To resolve these ambiguities our natural language interface inter...

On both empirical and theoretical grounds, we argue that the affirmative answer of McClelland et al. [1] is premature. Contrary to the predictions of the TRACE model, which postulates interactive processing in speech perception, there is no lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation when there is a lexical bias in interpretation of the preceding fricative [2]. This cannot be dismissed w...

The paper defends the notion that semantic tagging should be viewed as more than disambiguation between senses. Instead, semantic tagging should be a first step in the interpretation process by assigning each lexical item a representation of all of its systematically related senses, from which further semantic processing steps can derive discourse dependent interpretations. This leads to a new ...

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89– 134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (20...