A quasi-experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of frame-of-reference training on the quality of competency modeling ratings made by consultants. Human resources consultants from a large consulting firm were randomly assigned to either a training or a control condition. The discriminant validity, interrater reliability, and accuracy of the competency ratings were significantly highe...

We describe first results obtained during the development of an automatic system for the assessment of spoken English proficiency of university students. The ultimate aim of this system is to allow fast, consistent and objective assessment of oral proficiency for the purpose of placing students in courses appropriate to their language skills. Rate of speech (ROS) was chosen as an indicator of f...

The highly influential framework of conceptual spaces provides a geometric way of representing knowledge. Instances are represented by points and concepts are represented by regions in a highdimensional space. Based on our recent formalization, we present a generalpurpose implementation of the conceptual spaces framework that is not only capable of representing concepts with inter-domain correl...

This paper introduces ONYX, a sentencelevel text analyzer that implements a number of innovative ideas in syntactic and semantic analysis. ONYX is being developed as part of a project that seeks to translate spoken dental examinations directly into chartable findings. ONYX integrates syntax and semantics to a high degree. It interprets sentences using a combination of probabilistic classifiers,...

The attached note is a draft of a study I am still working on. It may be of general interest to network participants.

This paper describes the largest scale annotation project involving the Enron email corpus to date. Over 12,500 emails were classified, by humans, into the categories “Business” and “Personal”, and then subcategorised by type within these categories. The paper quantifies how well humans perform on this task (evaluated by inter-annotator agreement). It presents the problems experienced with the ...

This paper presents Universidade de Aveiro’s Voice Evaluation Protocol for European Portuguese (EP), and a preliminary inter-rater reliability study. Ten patients with vocal pathology were assessed, by two Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs). Protocol parameters such as overall severity, roughness, breathiness, change of loudness (CAPEV), grade, breathiness and strain (GRBAS), glottal attack,...

Language of cause and effect captures an essential component of the semantics of a text. However, causal language is also intertwined with other semantic relations, such as temporal precedence and correlation. This makes it difficult to determine when causation is the primary intended meaning. This paper presents BECauSE 2.0, a new version of the BECauSE corpus with exhaustively annotated expre...

An electronic communication system, especially if it is designed to accommodate open access via public terminals can allow information-disadvantaged groups (such as the homeless, and women) to exchange relevant information and engage in political action. The Public Electronic Network (PEN), a free computer-based messaging system available to Santa Monica, CA residents, allowed homeless and “hom...

Verbal inter-human exchange forms an important part of informal learning, especially for workplace learning. But informal learning of an employee within inter-human communication implies informal teaching of another employee on the other side. And in the same way we try to integrate the learning process into the surrounding work processes, we also need to integrate the teaching process into the...