Two measures of lexical cohesion were developed and applied to a corpus of human-computer tutoring dialogs. For both measures, the amount of cohesion in the tutoring dialog was found to be significantly correlated to learning for students with below-mean pretest scores, but not for those with above-mean pre-test scores, even though both groups had similar amounts of cohesion. We also find that ...

We present a domain-independent unsupervised topic segmentation approach based on hybrid document indexing. Lexical chains have been successfully employed to evaluate lexical cohesion of text segments and to predict topic boundaries. Our approach is based in the notion of semantic cohesion. It uses spectral embedding to estimate semantic association between content nouns over a span of multiple...

This paper brings a contribution to the field of discourse annotation of corpora. Using ANNODIS, a french corpus annotated with discourse relations by naive and expert annotators, we focus on two of them, Elaboration and Entity-Elaboration. These two very frequent relations are (a) often confused by naive annotators (b) difficult to detect automatically as their signalling is poorly studied. We...

We present two NLP components for the Story Cloze Task – dictionary-based sentiment analysis and lexical cohesion. While previous research found no contribution from sentiment analysis to the accuracy on this task, we demonstrate that sentiment is an important aspect. We describe a new approach, using a rule that estimates sentiment congruence in a story. Our sentiment-based system achieves str...

This paper proposes a new indicator of text structure, called the lexical cohesion pro le (LCP), which locates segment boundaries in a text. A text segment is a coherent scene; the words in a segment are linked together via lexical cohesion relations. LCP records mutual similarity of words in a sequence of text. The similarity of words, which represents their cohesiveness, is computed using a s...

This paper presents a method for the automatic detection and correction of malapropism errors found in documents using the WordNet lexical database, a search engine (Google) and a paronyms dictionary. The malapropisms detection is based on the evaluation of the cohesion of the local context using the search engine, while the correction is done using the whole text cohesion evaluated in terms of...

Our summarization approach is based on the assumption that quality of the summary is influenced by a set of factors, dependent on lexical and grammatical features of text units selected and arranged while composing the summary. The system has been developed with taking into account six factors influencing the final quality: compliance with the genre "summary", relevance, focusing, compliance wi...

To properly implement a simple Tibetan Information Retrieval (IR) system segmentation of one form or another (n-gram, POS-tagging, dictionary substring matching, etc.) must be performed (see Hackett (2000b)). To take Tibetan indexing to a more sophisticated level however, some form of topic detection must be employed. This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the application to Tibetan...

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual features were compared across the three levels using M...