OBJECTIVE To explore the way the doctor-patient communication process may be improved by adopting the patients' conversational style in the development of written materials for surgical patients. METHODS Written information prepared by doctors, specialists in abdominal surgery, was tested for comprehension on patients undergoing cholecystectomy, using the standard Cloze test procedure. At the...

1 We report experience in applying techniques for natural language processing to algorithmically generating test items for both reading and listening cloze items. We propose a word sense disambiguationbased method for locating sentences in which designated words carry specific senses, and apply a collocation-based method for selecting distractors that are necessary for multiple-choice cloze ite...

While aging is associated with increased knowledge, it is also associated with decreased semantic integration. To investigate brain activation changes during semantic integration, a sample of forty-eight 25-75 year-old adults read sentences with high cloze (HC) and low cloze (LC) probability while functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted. Significant age-related reduction of cloze ef...

Cloze questions are questions containing sentences with one or more blanks and multiple choices listed to pick an answer from. In this work, we present an automatic Cloze Question Generation (CQG) system that generates a list of important cloze questions given an English article. Our system is divided into three modules: sentence selection, keyword selection and distractor selection. We also pr...

This paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of automatically generated cloze questions in the style of the definitions found in Collins COBUILD English language learner’s dictionary. The definitions and the cloze questions are used in an automated reading tutor to help second and third grade students learn new vocabulary. A parser provides syntactic phrase structure trees for the def...

This research sought to investigate the relationship between simultaneous interpreters’ oral cloze performance, their emotional intelligence, and gender. In other words, the study tried to predict the variability in performance on simultaneous interpreting (SI) oral cloze test based on the variability in gender, emotional quotient (EQ) and its subscales. To this end, a number of seventy partici...

According to embodied theories, the symbols used by language are meaningful because they are grounded in perception, action, and emotion. In contrast, according to abstract symbol theories, meaning arises from the syntactic combination of abstract, amodal symbols. If language is grounded in internal bodily states, then one would predict that emotion affects language. Consistent with this, advoc...