Online discussion forums have become a popular medium for users to discuss with and seek information from other users having similar interests. A typical discussion thread consists of a sequence of posts posted by multiple users. All the posts in a thread are not equally useful and serve a different purpose providing different types of information (some posts contain questions, some answers, et...

this study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate efl learners’ idiom learning. the participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in zabansara language school in khorramabad based on their scores on a preliminary english test (pet) and an idiom test piloted in...

The paper describes a new conversation management approach which may apply to a class of mixed initiative information seeking applications. It employs an application-independent conversation model inspired by the conversation theory of Grosz and Sidner [1]. Based on the model, we design a multi-layer conversation manager which employs instance-based learning (IBL) to determine conversation plan...

Objectives: The spontaneous language sample analysis is an important part of the language assessment protocol. Language samples give us useful information about how children use language in the natural situations of daily life. The purpose of this study was to compare Conversation, Freeplay, and narrative speech in aspects of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Type-token ratio (TTR), and the numbe...

This paper explores the transformative capacity of engaging teachers in constructive dialogue within ICT professional development activity. The paper reports on one aspect of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage project that is concerned with models of teacher Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) professional development that result in multiliterate teaching practices. The ...

The basic hypothesis of this research project is that since the perception and appropriation of affordances vary across cultural dimensions, representational guidance may be culturally relative. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate this hypothesis. The study design consisted of three independent groups of dyads from similar or different cultures (American-American, American-Chinese, ...

Annotated email corpora are necessary for evaluation and training of machine learning summarization techniques. The scarcity of corpora has been a limiting factor for research in this field. We describe our process of creating a new annotated email thread corpus that will be made publicly available. We present the trade-offs of the different annotation methods that could be used.

We consider a preferential cluster growth in a one-dimensional stochastic model describing the dynamics of a binary chain with long-range memory. The model is driven by data corresponding to emotional patterns observed during online communities' discussions. The system undergoes a dynamical phase transition. For low values of the preference exponent, both states are observed during the string e...

The utilization of social media material in journalistic workflows is increasing, demanding automated methods for the identification of misand disinformation. Since textual contradiction across social media posts can be a signal of rumorousness, we seek to model how claims in Twitter posts are being textually contradicted. We identify two different contexts in which contradiction emerges: its b...