There is a need for methods that understand and represent the meaning of text for use in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This thesis demonstrates a method to automatically extract a lexical knowledge base from dictionaries for the purpose of improving machine reading. Machine reading refers to a process by which a computer processes natural language text into a representation that supports inference or inter-connection with existing knowledge (Clark and Harrison, 2010).1 There are a number of linguistic ideas associated with representing and applying the meaning of words which are unaddressed in current knowledge representations. This work draws heavily from the linguistic theory of frame semantics (Fillmore, 1976). A word is not a strictly defined construct; instead, it evokes our knowledge and experiences, and this information is adapted to a given context by human intelligence. This can often be seen in dictionaries, as a word may have many senses, but some are only subtle variations of the same theme or core idea. Further unaddressed issue is that sentences may have multiple reasonable and valid interpretations (or readings). This thesis postulates that there must be algorithms that work with symbolic rep- resentations which can model how words evoke knowledge and then contextualize that knowledge. I attempt to answer this previously unaddressed question, “How can a sym- bolic representation support multiple interpretations, evoked knowledge, soft word senses, and adaptation of meaning?” Furthermore, I implement and evaluate the proposed so- lution. This thesis proposes the use of a knowledge representation called Multiple Interpre- tation Graphs (MIGs), and a lexical knowledge structure called auto-frames to support contextualization. MIG is used to store a single auto-frame, the representation of a sen- tence, or an entire text. MIGs and auto-frames are produced from dependency parse trees using an algorithm I call connection search. MIG supports representing multiple different interpretations of a text, while auto-frames combine multiple word senses and in- formation related to the word into one representation. Connection search contextualizes MIGs and auto-frames, and reduces the number of interpretations that are considered valid. In this thesis, as proof of concept and evaluation, I extracted auto-frames from Long- man Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). I take the point of view that a word’s meaning depends on what it is connected to in its definition. I do not use a 1The term machine reading was coined by Etzioni et al. (2006). ii  predetermined set of semantic roles; instead, auto-frames focus on the connections or mappings between a word’s context and its definitions. Once I have extracted the auto-frames, I demonstrate how they may be contextu- alized. I then apply the lexical knowledge base to reading comprehension. The results show that this approach can produce good precision on this task, although more re- search and refinement is needed. The knowledge base and source code is made available to the community at http://martin.scaiano.com/Auto-frames.html or by contacting martin@scaiano.com.

The study examined how 5 adult Korean learners of English developed self-regulated learning (SRL) skills to overcome lexical problems in their English writing. Empirical studies have consistently shown that many of the greatest problems for ESL learners in writing are lexical in nature. The goal of the present study was to help participants to address these problems, first through tutored assistance and then more independently by controlling their uses of strategies through planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes. The study involved two phases: Phase 1 was exploratory in nature, in which I attempted to identify typical lexical problems Korean learners of English encounter in writing. Phase 2 included an intervention in the form of one-on-one tutoring that followed the cyclic model of SRL proposed by Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach (1996). I worked with 5 participants through the SRL cycle individually as they wrote and revised 3 argumentative essays. The intervention lasted for 9 weeks, focusing on developing the participants’ SRL skills in writing through the use of various strategies that were devised in Phase 1 and refined throughout Phase 2. I analyzed the participants’ difficulties and uses of strategies, self-ratings on their essays, and several measures of essay quality to examine changes in their SRL skills, self-efficacy, and writing skills. The participants initially encountered various types of difficulties in their English writing and primarily relied on self-employed strategies to cope with their difficulties. Over the course of the intervention, the participants’ attention to their difficulties and uses of various linguistic resources became progressively more focused and specific. Initially, the participants largely depended on their L1 to write their L2 essays, being chiefly occupied with the grammatical encoding of their communicative intentions. Subsequently, the participants displayed unique patterns in developing their SRL skills, which exerted positive influences on building their self-efficacy beliefs as writers and on improving the quality of their essays. Based on these findings, I emphasize the growing need for L2 writing teachers to incorporate language-focused, vocabulary-centered, and corpora-based instruction into their teaching practices. In turn, students require individual support and untimed writing tasks to develop SRL skills in writing.

The study examined how 5 adult Korean learners of English developed self-regulated learning (SRL) skills to overcome lexical problems in their English writing. Empirical studies have consistently shown that many of the greatest problems for ESL learners in writing are lexical in nature. The goal of the present study was to help participants to address these problems, first through tutored assistance and then more independently by controlling their uses of strategies through planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes. The study involved two phases: Phase 1 was exploratory in nature, in which I attempted to identify typical lexical problems Korean learners of English encounter in writing. Phase 2 included an intervention in the form of one-on-one tutoring that followed the cyclic model of SRL proposed by Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach (1996). I worked with 5 participants through the SRL cycle individually as they wrote and revised 3 argumentative essays. The intervention lasted for 9 weeks, focusing on developing the participants’ SRL skills in writing through the use of various strategies that were devised in Phase 1 and refined throughout Phase 2. I analyzed the participants’ difficulties and uses of strategies, self-ratings on their essays, and several measures of essay quality to examine changes in their SRL skills, self-efficacy, and writing skills. The participants initially encountered various types of difficulties in their English writing and primarily relied on self-employed strategies to cope with their difficulties. Over the course of the intervention, the participants’ attention to their difficulties and uses of various linguistic resources became progressively more focused and specific. Initially, the participants largely depended on their L1 to write their L2 essays, being chiefly occupied with the grammatical encoding of their communicative intentions. Subsequently, the participants displayed unique patterns in developing their SRL skills, which exerted positive influences on building their self-efficacy beliefs as writers and on improving the quality of their essays. Based on these findings, I emphasize the growing need for L2 writing teachers to incorporate language-focused, vocabulary-centered, and corpora-based instruction into their teaching practices. In turn, students require individual support and untimed writing tasks to develop SRL skills in writing.

In a series of studies using semantic relatedness judgment response times, Jiang (2000, 2002, 2004a) has claimed that L2 lexical entries fossilize with their equivalent L1 content or something very close to it. In another study using a more productive test of lexical knowledge (Jiang 2004b), however, the evidence for this conclusion was less clear. The present study is a partial replication of Jiang (2004b) with Japanese learners of English. The aims of the study are to investigate the influence of the first language (L1) on second language (L2) lexical knowledge, to investigate whether lexical knowledge displays frequency-related, emergent properties, and to investigate the influence of the L1 on the acquisition of L2 word pairs that have a common L1 equivalent. Data from a sentence completion task was completed by 244 participants, who were shown sentence contexts in which they chose between L2 word pairs sharing a common equivalent in the students' first language, Japanese. The data were analyzed using the statistical analyses available in the programming environment R to quantify the participants' ability to discriminate between synonymous and non-synonymous use of these L2 word pairs. The results showed a strong bias against synonymy for all word pairs; the participants tended to make a distinction between the two synonymous items by assigning each word a distinct meaning. With the non-synonymous items, lemma frequency was closely related to the participants' success in choosing the correct word in the word pair. In addition, lemma frequency and the degree of similarity between the words in the word pair were closely related to the participants' overall knowledge of the non-synonymous meanings of the vocabulary items. The results suggest that the participants had a stronger preference for non-synonymous options than for the synonymous option. This suggests that the learners might have adopted a one-word, one-meaning learning strategy (Willis, 1998). The reasonably strong relationship between several of the usage-based statistics and the item measures from R suggest that with exposure learners are better able to use words in ways that are similar to native speakers of English, to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts and to recognize the boundary separating semantic overlap and semantic uniqueness. Lexical similarity appears to play a secondary role, in combination with frequency, in learners' ability to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts when using L2 word pairs that have a single translation in the L1. / CITE/Language Arts

Multiword units (MWUs) is a term used in the current study to broadly cover what second language acquisition (SLA) researchers refer to as collocations, conventional expressions, chunks, idioms, formulaic sequences, or other such terms, depending on their research perspective. They are ubiquitous in language and essential in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Although MWUs are typically learned implicitly while using language naturally in both of these types of acquisition, the current study is an investigation of whether they are acquired in implicit knowledge when they are learned explicitly in a process called deliberate paired association learning. In SLA research, it is widely accepted that explicit knowledge is developed consciously and implicit knowledge is developed subconsciously. It is also believed that there is little crossover from explicit learning to implicit knowledge. However, recent research has cast doubt on this assumption. In a series of priming experiments, Elgort (2007, 2011) demonstrated that the formal and semantic lexical representations of deliberately learned pseudowords were accessed fluently and integrated into the mental lexicon, convincing evidence that deliberately learned words are immediately acquired in implicit knowledge. The current study aimed to extend these findings to MWUs in a psycholinguistic experiment that tested for implicit knowledge gains resulting from deliberate learning. Participants’ response times (RTs) were measured in three ways, on two testing instruments. First, subconscious formal recognition processing was measured in a masked repetition priming lexical decision task. In the second instrument, a self-paced reading task, both formulaic sequencing and semantic association gains were measured. The experiment was a counterbalanced, within-subjects design; so all comparisons were between conditions on items. Results were analyzed in a repeated measures linear mixed-effects model with participants and items as crossed random effects. The dependent variable was RTs on target words. The primary independent variable was learning condition: half of the critical MWUs were learned and half of them were not. The secondary independent variable was MWU composition at two levels: literal and figurative. The masked priming lexical decision task results showed that priming effects increased especially for learned figurative MWUs, evidence that implicit knowledge gains were made on their formal and semantic lexical representations as a result of deliberate learning. Results of the self-paced reading task were analyzed from two perspectives, but were less conclusive with regard to the effects of deliberate learning. Regarding formulaic sequencing gains, literal MWUs showed the most evidence of acquisition, but this happened as a result of both incidental and deliberate learning. With regard to semantic associations, it was shown that deliberate learning had similar effects on both literal and figurative MWUs. However, a serendipitous finding from this aspect of the self-paced reading results showed clearly that literal MWUs reliably primed semantic associations and sentence processing more strongly than figurative MWUs did, both before and after deliberate learning. In sum, results revealed that the difficulties learners have with developing fluent processing of figurative MWUs can be lessened by deliberate learning. On the other hand, for literal MWUs incidental learning is adequate for incrementally developing representation strength. / Language Arts

This pilot project studies the differences in knowledge about Spanish language between inmigrants from Spanish speaker countries and its descendants in Växjö, a small town insouthern Sweden. It has been noticed the extended use of Swedish terms and structuresamong inmigrants. This phenomenon has been studied by other researchers as an exampleof language displacement where users of a mimority language, in our case Spanish,gradually change their vocabulary and grammar for that of a present language of morecommon use in the community, which is Swedish in Växjö. Unlike most them, we suggestthat in the case of new users of the minority language, this is, descendants of originalinmigrants, there is no displacement but actually a lack of learning of the minoritylanguage, due to a limited acces to Spanish resources, which is compensated with the useof Swedish terms. This would results in an apparent language displacement.Based on different theories, among which we should name Bloomfield´s model oflanguage learning, Sarmiento´s division of identity in three aspects: language, traditionsand appearance, and Esquivel´s findings about adjacent languages; researchers havedeveloped these questions: what effect has over Spanish language the genealogicaldistance between first inmigrants and each successive generation? What other variablescan influence language differences? And where can these differences be found? Theresults of our study show a factual tendency to the impoverishment of the Spanishlanguage for every generation after the migration, although the results are not statisticallysignificant, what makes it interesting to continue the study at a bigger scale. We have alsofound out a correlation between Spanish language knowledge and language identity andthe perception of acceptance by the Swedish community. Among the studied areas ofknowledge, the ones that present with biggest lacks are technical subjects.

Research points at the textbook as the main source for mathematics development in the early school ages. The study enhances the concept of relational and instrumental understanding as means to address the teaching environment within textbooks. To investigate a part of the linguistic structure of this literature, this study reports on the main features that characterize the word class known as verbs due to their presence throughout a series of textbooks designed for the stages 1 to 3 in Sweden. The goal was to make common claims about frequency, tense and processes due to these verbs. By creating a specialized corpus, these verbs were catalogued and marked in comparison to two larger corpora and to GERS-levels. A process analysis was then done based on a systemic-functional linguistic tool. The results show a vast difference between the low- and the high frequency verbs. Analysis showed that present tense held the highest frequency by over 50%. Results also showed presence of the formal passive voice. Furthermore, the material processes were in a large majority in contrast to others present. Other indications of the analysis showed poor conditions for development of relational understanding in contrast to emphasis made in the national curriculum. Conclusions involve statements regarding textbook teaching methods not providing sufficient environments for language development. The characters of the verb corpus might place demands on students’ lexical knowledge and language proficiency level on forehand, which might induce a language-related knowledge barrier against the mathematical communication provided through the textbook.

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