The present study investigated whether word learning and retention in a second language are contingent upon a task's involvement load, i.e., the amount of need, search, and evaluation the task imposes. Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) contend that tasks with higher degrees of these three components induce higher involvement load, and are, therefore, more effective for word learning. To test this clai...

Gap and overlap tasks are widely used to promote automatic versus controlled saccades. This study examines the hypothesis that the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is differently involved in the two tasks. Twelve healthy students participated in the experiment. We used double-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) on the right PPC, the first pulse delivered at the target onset and ...

We describe the implementation of reranking models for fine-grained opinion analysis – marking up opinion expressions and extracting opinion holders. The reranking approach makes it possible to model complex relations between multiple opinions in a sentence, allowing us to represent how opinions interact through the syntactic and semantic structure. We carried out evaluations on the MPQA corpus...

The paper reports the University of Waterloo participation in the opinion and polarity tasks of the Blog track. The proposed method uses a lexicon built from several linguistic resources. The opinion discriminating ability of each subjective lexical unit was estimated using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The KLD scores of subjective words occurring within fixed-size windows around instances o...

This paper presents two instance-level transfer learning based algorithms for cross lingual opinion analysis by transferring useful translated opinion examples from other languages as the supplementary training data for improving the opinion classifier in target language. Starting from the union of small training data in target language and large translated examples in other languages, the Tran...

This study used peripheral precueing to explore the effect of covert transient attention on performance in spatial resolution tasks. Experiments 1 (Landolt-square) and 2 ('broken-line') measured gap resolution and Experiment 3 measured vernier resolution. In all three tasks the target was presented alone in a large number of possible locations, ranging from 1.5-6 degrees of eccentricity in the ...

In aspect-based sentiment analysis, most existing methods focus on either identifying aspect/opinion terms or categorizing pre-extracted aspect terms. Each task by itself only provides partial information to end users. To generate more detailed and structured opinion analysis, we study a finer-grained problem, which we call category-specific aspect and opinion terms extraction. This problem inv...

The technology of opinion extraction allows users to retrieve and analyze people’s opinions scattered over Web documents. We define an opinion unit as a quadruple consisting of the opinion holder, the subject being evaluated, the part or the attribute in which the subject is evaluated, and the value of the evaluation that expresses a positive or negative assessment. We use this definition as th...

BACKGROUND Second opinion is a treatment ratification tool that may critically influence diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Second opinions constitute one of the largest expenditures of the supplementary health insurance programs provided by the Israeli health funds. The scarcity of data on physicians' attitudes toward second opinion motivated this study to explore those attitudes within the ...

It has been demonstrated in normal subjects that smooth pursuit latency is reduced in gap pursuit tasks. We have now measured smooth pursuit latency in a group of schizophrenic subjects in both gap and non-gap conditions. In non-gap tasks pursuit latency was longer in the schizophrenic subjects than in controls. While the addition of gaps produced reductions in pursuit latency in the schizophre...