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Iowa State University

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Full-Text Articles in Education

Designing An Intelligent Discourse Evaluation Tool: Theoretical, Empirical, And Technological Considerations, Elena Cotos Jan 2009

Designing An Intelligent Discourse Evaluation Tool: Theoretical, Empirical, And Technological Considerations, Elena Cotos

Elena Cotos

Considering the promising potential of ICALL and intelligent feedback, this paper addresses this topic from the perspective of practical applications. It reviews existing intelligent language learning systems and their feedback capabilities, arguing that while ICALL is very promising and highly complex, its development should be more principled. In other words, the decisions behind the system design need to be justified theoretically, integrating technology with theory, research, and practice in instructed SLA. To support this argument, this paper provides an example of how this was achieved in the context of L2 graduate academic writing. It describes a new natural language processing-based …


Automated Diagnostic Writing Tests: Why? How?, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar Jan 2008

Automated Diagnostic Writing Tests: Why? How?, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar

Elena Cotos

Diagnostic language assessment can greatly benefit from a collaborative union of computer-assisted language testing (CALT) and natural language processing (NLP). Currently, most CALT applications mainly allow for inferences about L2 proficiency based on learners’ recognition and comprehension of linguistic input and hardly concern language production (Holland, Maisano, Alderks, & Martin, 1993). NLP is now at a stage where it can be used or adapted for diagnostic testing of learner production skills. This paper explores the viability of NLP techniques for the diagnosis of L2 writing by analyzing the state of the art in current diagnostic language testing, reviewing the existing …


Automatic Identification Of Discourse Moves In Scientific Article Introductions, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar Jan 2008

Automatic Identification Of Discourse Moves In Scientific Article Introductions, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar

Elena Cotos

This paper reports on the first stage of building an educational tool for international graduate students to improve their academic writing skills. Taking a text-categorization approach, we experimented with several models to automatically classify sentences in research article introductions into one of three rhetorical moves. The paper begins by situating the project within the larger framework of intelligent computer-assisted language learning. It then presents the details of the study with very encouraging results. The paper then concludes by commenting on how the system may be improved and how the project is intended to be pursued and evaluated.