the present study aimed to analyze reprint request e-mail messages written by postgraduates (ma students) of two fields of study, namely physics and efl, to realize the differences and similarities between the two email types. to investigate the purpose of the study, a sample of 100 e-mail messages, 50 physics and 50 efl, were analyzed according to swales’ (1990) model for reprint requests and ...

This paper describes the design of a backchannel feedback corpus and its evaluation, aiming at realizing in-car spoken dialogue systems with high responsiveness. We constructed our corpus by annotating the existing in-car spoken dialogue data with back-channel feedback timing information in an off-line environment. Our corpus can be practically used in developing dialogue systems which can prov...

In this paper we present a survey of some most significant spoken English learner corpora created up to date. Spoken learner corpora which include speech generated by learners are important in many areas of research and practice, in particular, for identifying typical pronunciation errors of learners of English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), or English as a lin...

Automated computerized scoring systems (ACSSs) are being increasingly used to analyze text in many educational settings. Nevertheless, the impact of misspelled words (MSW) on scoring accuracy remains to be investigated in many domains, particularly jargon-rich disciplines such as the life sciences. Empirical studies confirm that MSW are a pervasive feature of human-generated text and that despi...

Communicative feedback refers to unobtrusive (usually short) vocal or bodily expressions whereby a recipient of information can inform a contributor of information about whether he/she is able and willing to communicate, perceive the information, and understand the information. This paper provides a theory for embodied communicative feedback, describing the different dimensions and features inv...

TREC’s Spam Track uses a standard testing framework that presents a set of chronologically ordered email messages a spam filter for classification. In the filtering task, the messages are presented one at at time to the filter, which yields a binary judgment (spam or ham [i.e. non-spam]) which is compared to a humanadjudicated gold standard. The filter also yields a spamminess score, intended t...

This paper presents two new corpus-based studies of feedback in the domain of teaching Spanish as a foreign language, concentrating on the type and frequency of different feedback moves, as well as what happens in the moves that follow the feedback. In particular, as well as looking at positive feedback, it concentrates on two general kinds of negative feedback strategies: (1) Giving-Answer Str...

Understanding how to structure the “Statement-of-the-Problem” (SP) section of a thesis is necessary for EFL students to develop a logical argumentation for a problem statement. This study intended to compare Move structures of SP sections of theses written by native speakers of Persian (NSPs) and English (NSEs). To this end, 100 SP sections (50 SP sections written by NSE...