Digital Commons Network^™

Holistic Scoring Of Esl Essays Using Linguistic Maturity Attributes, Ronald Millett

Theses and Dissertations

Automated scoring of essays has been a research topic for some time in computational linguistics studies. Only recently have the particular challenges of automatic holistic scoring of ESL essays with their high grammatical, spelling and other error rates been a topic of research. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of using statistical measures of linguistic maturity to predict holistic scores for ESL essays using several techniques. Selected linguistic attributes include parts of speech, part-of-speech patterns, vocabulary density, and sentence and essay lengths. Using customized algorithms based on multivariable regression analysis as well as memory-based machine learning, holistic scores were predicted on …

Teaching Writing Through Peer Revising And Reviewing, Kristi Lundstrom

Theses and Dissertations

Although peer review, in which students evaluate each others' papers, has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving the feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: receiving or giving peer feedback. The study was conducted at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Ninety-one students in nine writing classes at two different proficiency levels, high beginning and high intermediate, participated …

Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari

Theses and Dissertations

Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting …

An English For Specific Purposes Curriculum To Prepare English Learners To Become Nursing Assistants, Abel Javier Romo

Theses and Dissertations

This project details the designing and implementation of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum to prepare English learners to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC) in Provo, Utah. UVRMC, which is owned by Intermountain Health Care (IHC), employs a group of about 40 non-native speakers of English. They work as housekeepers and have interest in learning English and consequently acquiring new skills they could use in better jobs to improve the quality of their lives. UVRMC would like these employees to obtain additional education in order to provide them with better employment opportunities. …

Learning In Minimalism-Based Language Modeling, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

The natural language version of the Soar cognitive modeling system (Newell, 1990) has enabled a number of language modeling applications from on-line parsing behavior (Lewis, 1993) to simultaneous interpretation (Lonsdale, 1997, 1998) to robotic control (Benjamin, Lonsdale, & Lyons, 2004). The system supports an integrated approach to incremental comprehension and generation. Learning mechanisms account for processes in language performance from deliberate, explicit reasoning to automatic, recognitional expertise.

Syntactic processing in prior versions of the system followed the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax.

Validating The Rating Process Of An English As A Second Language Writing Portfolio Exam, Robb Mark Mccollum

Theses and Dissertations

A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the …

Update On Soar-Based Language Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Discourse/robotic dialogue

Running on Soar 8.5.2

Having trouble getting to 8.6.1 Fresh start with 8.6.2...

A Grammatical Description Of The Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Daniel A. Law

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the grammatical system of Classical Ch'olti', the language of the Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, as attested in inscriptions of the Early Classic (approximately AD 200-600). Around 300 Lowland Maya Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been dated to the Early Classic or before, nearly one third of these remain unpublished. Previous work on the monumental inscriptions of the Early Classic (Mathews 1985; Proskouriakoff 1950) has examined Early Classic monuments primarily as works of art. Mora-Marin (2001) examined the language of inscriptions found on early portable texts, a small subset of the corpus here examined. In …

A Computer-Based Course To Teach Speech Acts: Prototype For The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Laura Morales Dorlando

Theses and Dissertations

The following report discusses the design and formative evaluation of a prototype for a computer-based course to teach speech acts as part of the Technology Assisted Language Learning (TALL) program. The report includes a literature review on speech acts and current methods and strategies for language teaching and instructional design. Next, there is a description of the lessons and the design process, as well as a summary of the formative evaluation. Following is the prototype of the lesson on apologies. The report concludes with a discussion of the project's limitations and suggestions for future research.

Xnl-Soar, Incremental Parsing, And The Minimalist Program, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Lareina Hingson, Jamison Cooper-Leavitt, David W. Casbeer, Rebecca Madsen

Faculty Publications

Minimalist Principles (Chomsky 1995)

Hierarchy of Projections (Adger 2003)

Features play a central role

NP, VP symmetry including shells

Pronunciation Matters: English Consonant Production By Auap Students, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Most Asia University students study English for at least six and a half years by the time they come to the United States to participate in the Asian University America Program (AUAP). For many, the AUAP experience is the realization of a dream to be able to forge new friendships and communicate successfully with Americans. However, despite their enthusiasm for learning, those participating in AUAP are not immune to the struggles experienced by most Japanese students as they endeavor to master English pronunciation (Purcell and Suter, 1980; Wells, 2000, Aoyama, K. Flege, J., Guion, S., Akahane-Yamada, R., Yamada, T., 2003). …

English Adjective Comparison And Analogy, Dirk Elzinga

Faculty Publications

There are two strategies for forming the comparative degree of adjectives in English; a synthetic strategy which suffixes -er to the adjective stem, and an analytical strategy which uses more in composition with the adjective. Many analyses of the choice between analytical and synthetic comparison have been proposed, but all face difficulties. In this paper I show that analogy can not only account for the distribution of analytical and synthetic comparison as well as traditional rule-based approaches, but can also provide a psychologically plausible model for the choice which speakers make.

Modeling Russian Verbs Of Motion: An Analogical Account, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Inna Danielyan Dodge

Faculty Publications

This paper presents research into verb of motion (VOM) constructions in Russian. These constructions are difficult since they involve (i) selection of an appropriate verb (with possible prefixation); (ii) selection of an appropriate preposition; and (iii) selection of an appropriate case for marking the prepositional object. A brief sketch of relevant literature frames the problem. We then discuss how a few thousand instances of VOM usage were extracted from an online tagged corpus of Russian literature. The usage instances were then vectorized using a combination of lexical and semantic class features via automatic, semiautomatic, and hand-coded methods. The instance base …

Paradigm Uniformity And Analogy: The Capitalistic Versus Militaristic Debate, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

In American English, /t/ in capitalistic is generally flapped while in militaristic it is not due to the influence of capi[ɾ]al and mili[tʰ]ary. This is called Paradigm Uniformity or PU (Steriade, 2000). Riehl (2003) presents evidence to refute PU which when reanalyzed supports PU. PU is thought to work in tandem with a rule of allophonic distribution, the nature of which is debated. An approach is suggested that eliminates the need for the rule versus PU dichotomy; allophonic distribution is carried out by analogy to stored items in the mental lexicon. Therefore, the influence of the pronunciation of capital …

Automatic Creation Of Web Services From Extraction Ontologies, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Cui Tao, Yihong Ding

Faculty Publications

The Semantic Web promises to provide timely, targeted access to user-specified information online. Though standardized services exist for performing this work, specifying these services is too complex for most people. Annotating these services is also problematic. A similar situation exists for traditional information extraction, where ontologies are increasingly used to specify information used by various extraction methods. The approach we introduce in this paper involves converting such ontologies into executable Java code. These APIs act individually or compositionally as services for Semantic Web extraction.

Learning In Minimalism-Based Language Modeling, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

The natural language version of the Soar cognitive modeling system (Newell, 1990) has enabled a number of language modeling applications from on-line parsing behavior (Lewis, 1993) to simultaneous interpretation (Lonsdale, 1997, 1998) to robotic control (Benjamin, Lonsdale, & Lyons, 2004). The system supports an integrated approach to incremental comprehension and generation. Learning mechanisms account for processes in language performance from deliberate, explicit reasoning to automatic, recognitional expertise.

Syntactic processing in prior versions of the system followed the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax.

An Operator-Based Account Of Semantic Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, C. Anton Rytting

Faculty Publications

This paper explores issues of psychological plausibility in modeling natural language understanding within Soar, a symbolic cognitive model. It focuses on constructing syntactic and semantic representations in simulated real time, with particular emphasis on word sense disambiguation (WSD). We discuss (i) what level of WSD should be modeled and (ii) how to use resources such as WordNet to inform these models. A preliminary model of coarse-grained WSD is included to show how syntactic, semantic, and other knowledge sources interact in Soar. Finally, we explore issues of interleaving, learning, and integrating other WSD approaches with Soar's native model of learning.

Assessing Geo-Location And Gender Information In Han Chinese Personal Names, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Bruce Brown

Faculty Publications

Brigham Young University is a particularly optimal academic institution for comparative cross-cultural onomastic research. There are over 65 nations represented by five or more students at BYU, and in fall semester of 2004, 10252 of the 29729 students had lived for two years in a foreign country.

Unifying Language Modeling Capabilities For Flexible Interaction, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Rebecca Diane Madsen

Faculty Publications

Dialogue processing has taken several different forms in recent years; in this paper we address a cognitive modeling approach to the problem. We begin by sketching some of our work in this area and how it derives from prior research in cognition, modeling, natural language processing, and discourse recipe compilation. We then note that, whereas the complexities of natural language— especially spoken language—have been primarily addressed by technologies that target lower-level linguistic processing, higherlevel processing has been less well studied. We introduce our approach, which is to use an agent-based cognitive modeling architecture for dialogue processing. We mention some of …

Negative Prestige And Sound Change: A Sociolinguistic Study Of The Assibilation Of /Χ/ In Piauí Portuguese, David Eddington, Michael Taylor

Faculty Publications

In standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP), when the phoneme /χ/ appears post-vocalically in coda position it is realized with a variety of allophones [r, h, x, χ, ʁ, ʁ̥, ɣ] (Parkinson 1988). On the surface there appears to be free variation between the pronunciations although the variation is affected by regional and social factors (Netto 2001). Our study focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese of Piripiri (BPP), which is spoken in a small town in the rural state of Piauí in the northeast part of the country. Perhaps the most salient regional characteristic of BPP is that when /χ/ appears in coda …

A Computational Analysis Of Navajo Verb Stems, David Eddington, Jordan Lachler

Faculty Publications

One of the principal goals of linguistics is to find, classify, and describe relationships between words. Many formal mechanisms such as rules and constraints have been devised in order to show systematic relationships. Inflectional paradigms are a crucial component of a linguistic analysis that has applications for pedagogical grammars. For example, over the past 20 years there have been numerous Navajo textbooks produced that are aimed at beginning learners of the language. These include works such as Diné Bizaad Bóhoo'aah (Navajo Language Institute 1986), Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo (Goossen 1995), and The Navajo Verb: A Grammar for Students …