Online discussion forums have become a popular medium for users to discuss with and seek information from other users having similar interests. A typical discussion thread consists of a sequence of posts posted by multiple users. All the posts in a thread are not equally useful and serve a different purpose providing different types of information (some posts contain questions, some answers, et...

this study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate efl learners’ idiom learning. the participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in zabansara language school in khorramabad based on their scores on a preliminary english test (pet) and an idiom test piloted in...

The paper describes a new conversation management approach which may apply to a class of mixed initiative information seeking applications. It employs an application-independent conversation model inspired by the conversation theory of Grosz and Sidner [1]. Based on the model, we design a multi-layer conversation manager which employs instance-based learning (IBL) to determine conversation plan...

Objectives: The spontaneous language sample analysis is an important part of the language assessment protocol. Language samples give us useful information about how children use language in the natural situations of daily life. The purpose of this study was to compare Conversation, Freeplay, and narrative speech in aspects of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Type-token ratio (TTR), and the numbe...

In this paper we present a corpus of audio and video recordings of spontaneous, face-to-face multi-party conversation in two languages. Freely available high quality recordings of mundane, non-institutional, multi-party talk are still sparse, and this corpus aims to contribute valuable data suitable for study of multiple aspects of spoken interaction. In particular, it constitutes a unique reso...

conversations contain spontaneous use of routine formulas which lets speaker sinteract with each other to express opinions. gambits, as one of these formulas, act as an opening remark and help speakers to maintain the smooth flow of an everyday conversation. the lack of mastery of using gambits in maintaining the conversation leads to breakdowns in speaking. this paper aimedat comparingthe use ...

Unlike read or laboratory speech, spontaneous speech contains high rates of disfluencies (e.g., repetitions, repairs, filled pauses). Such events reflect production problems frequently encountered in everyday conversation. Analyses of American English show that disfluency affects a variety of phonetic aspects of speech, including segment durations, intonation, voice quality, vowel quality, and ...

There is much discussion these days about quality in higher education throughout all quarters of the higher education community and outside the community, as well. Government officials, employers, accrediting agencies, university administrators, institutional researchers, faculty, and faculty development specialists all have something to share concerning this topic. At the moment, however, we a...

Unwanted noises have a negative influence over communication because it disturbs the conversation and make the communication impossible. Speech enhancement algorithms are used for improving the quality and intelligibility or to reduce listener fatigues. Assessment of speech quality can be done by using either subjective listening test or objective quality measure. Evaluation of several objectiv...