There is a growing interest in automatically predicting the gender and age of authors from texts. However, most research so far ignores that language use is related to the social identity of speakers, which may be different from their biological identity. In this paper, we combine insights from sociolinguistics with data collected through an online game, to underline the importance of approachi...

One important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. One of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of English learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

There has been awareness of gender asymmetry in some texts including those in ELT materials. Many studies indicate similar results that the representation of males in the texts outnumbers the females (Peterson & Lach, 1990; Kortenhaus & Demarest, 1993; Wharton, 2005). Males are also likely to be described as positive, active, and competent, whilst females are likely to be described as negative,...

This paper introduces a method for the automatic acquisition from free text of a rich case representation for process-oriented case-based reasoning. Case engineering is among the most complicated and costly tasks in implementing a case-based reasoning system. This is especially so for process-oriented case-based reasoning, where more expressive case representations are normally used and, in our...