This paper describes a method for providing feedback about the degree of complexity that is present in particular texts. Both the method and the software tool called TexComp are designed for use during the assessment of student compositions (such as essays and theses). The method is based on a cautious approach to the application of readability and lexical diversity formulas for reasons that ar...

Development assistance has a chequered past, in large part because planning for development assistance is historically such a fractured enterprise internally, and so disassociated from development assistance recipients’ assets and needs. The authors of environment-shaping offer an alternative development programme planning methodology that highlights above all else the ever-important relationsh...

In this article, we compare feedback-related multimodal behaviours in two different types of interactions: first encounters between two participants who do not know each in advance, and naturally-occurring conversations between two and three participants recorded at their homes. All participants are Danish native speakers. The interactions are transcribed using the same methodology, and the mul...

In this paper we will describe Berkeley’s approach to the ImageCLEFphoto task for CLEF 2007. Once again (as in ImageCLEFphoto for CLEF 2006) we used entirely text-based methods for retrieval. For some runs this year, however, we exploited the basic similarity of the topics and database from 2006 to acquire the metadata descriptions of the “example images” in the 2007 queries, and used that meta...

Abstract. This paper presents a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to provide adaptive support in microworlds. Interaction in microworlds is complex and unstructured, making the analysis of student behaviour difficult and the provision of computer-based feedback challenging. Our approach starts with the ellicitation of expected solutions to microworld tasks (both valid and common mistakes) to ...

Experience shapes the functional organization of the brain, optimizing and customizing its properties for the individual and his or her environment. One way that experience shapes the constituent networks ofthe brain is through supervised learning. In supervised learning, information from one network of neurons acts as an instructive signal to influence the pattern of connectivity in another ne...

This work introduces amethod and tool for handling overlapping parallel corpora – i.e. corpora that are based on the same source material. The method is insensitive to minor changes in the text, different segmentation levels of the corpora and omitted material from either corpora. The aim is to detect matching sentence pairs and either produce combinations of the overlapping corpora or compare ...