This study is about the development of a learner-focused text readability indexing tool for second language learners (L2) of English. Student essays are used to calibrate the system, making it capable of providing realistic approximation of L2s’ actual reading ability spectrum. The system aims to promote self-directed (i.e. selfstudy) language learning and help even those L2s who can not afford...

Yelp online reviews are invaluable source of information for users to choose where to visit or what to eat among numerous available options. But due to overwhelming number of reviews, it is almost impossible for users to go through all reviews and find the information they are looking for. To provide a business’ overview, one solution is to give the business a 1-5 star(s). This rating can be su...

We present an algorithm for grouping multipart symbols dashed lines and character strings for extraction from line drawings The image under goes a lossless raster to vector conversion creating as its vector representa tion an undirected graph a so called run graph Next the image elements of the run graph are extracted and classi ed probabilistically based upon their geometric features using a d...

The theory of regular cost functions is a quantitative extension to the classical notion of regularity. A cost function associates to each input a non-negative integer value (or infinity), as opposed to languages which only associate to each input the two values “inside” and “outside”. This theory is a continuation of the works on distance automata and similar models. These models of automata h...

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. In his seminal paper 'Words', David Kaplan addresses a pair of questions that have been largely neglected by the philosophical community: (i) Under what conditions are two utterances utterances of the same word? (ii) What are wor...

Part Of Speech (POS) tagger is an essential preprocessing step in many natural language applications. In this paper, we investigate the best configuration of trigram Hidden Markov Model (HMM) Arabic POS tagger when small tagged corpus is available. With small training data, unknown word POS guessing is the main problem. This problem becomes more serious in languages which have huge size of voca...