Ramon Ziai
University of Tübingen, SFB 833, Post-Doc
- I am interested in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Content Assessment (sometimes called Automated Sh... moreI am interested in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Content Assessment (sometimes called Automated Short Answer Grading) and computational approaches to Information Structure. To find out more about the latter two, I worked in the CoMiC project (http://purl.org/icall/comic) on automatic meaning evaluation of student answers to reading comprehension questions, tying in information structure with shallow semantic analysis. After completing my PhD thesis (http://hdl.handle.net/10900/81732), I started working on transferring my research on meaning evaluation into an Intelligent Language Tutoring System called FeedBook (http://purl.org/icall/feedbook).edit
... 107115. Brants, S., S. Dipper, S. Hansen, W. Lezius & G. Smith (2002). The TIGER Treebank. ... DET determiner of a noun PRED predicate GRAD accusative NP as measuring unit -PUNCT-punctuation KON non-final coordination... more
... 107115. Brants, S., S. Dipper, S. Hansen, W. Lezius & G. Smith (2002). The TIGER Treebank. ... DET determiner of a noun PRED predicate GRAD accusative NP as measuring unit -PUNCT-punctuation KON non-final coordination conjunct REL relative clause ...
... Roger Garside and Michael Bryant, 1994. CLAWS4: the tagging of the British Na-tional Corpus. In Proceedings of the 15th Inter-national Conference on Computational Linguis-tics (COLING 94). Kyoto,Japan, pp. 622628. Guido Minnen, John... more
... Roger Garside and Michael Bryant, 1994. CLAWS4: the tagging of the British Na-tional Corpus. In Proceedings of the 15th Inter-national Conference on Computational Linguis-tics (COLING 94). Kyoto,Japan, pp. 622628. Guido Minnen, John Carroll and Darren Pearce, 2001 ...
Corpora in linguistics and computational linguistics have traditionally been assembled from data sources such as newspaper texts, books and, more recently, the web. While these sources provide large quantities of language data, typically... more
Corpora in linguistics and computational linguistics have traditionally been assembled from data sources such as newspaper texts, books and, more recently, the web. While these sources provide large quantities of language data, typically very little or nothing is known about the context under which the text has been produced. The only information an analysis can refer to is the text itself, e.g., when a sentence is analyzed using the preceding sentences for disambiguation. However, language is always produced in a concrete extra-linguistic context. This contextual setting includes world knowledge and situational knowledge, i.e., the aspects of world knowledge which are relevant to interpret the given text and the concrete task and situation that the language was produced for. The notion of a task and the evaluation of language in context plays a particularly important role in foreign language teaching and learning (cf., e.g., Ellis 2003) and a representation of the learner's abi...
Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems (ILTS) typically focus on analyzing learner input to diagnose learner errors and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research (cf. Heift & Schulze, 2007), such systems are... more
Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems (ILTS) typically focus on analyzing learner input to diagnose learner errors and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research (cf. Heift & Schulze, 2007), such systems are virtu-ally absent from real-life foreign language teaching (FLT). Arguably, one reason for this state of affairs is that FLT activity design and its impact on the system architecture are rarely considered in ILTS research. In this paper, we argue that a demand-driven, annotation-based Natural Lan-guage Processing (NLP) architecture is well-suited to handle the demands posed by the heterogeneous learner input which results when supporting a wider range of FLT activity types. We illustrate how the Unstructured Information Manage-ment Architecture (UIMA) can be used in an ILTS, thereby connecting the spe-cific needs of activities in foreign language teaching to the current research and development of NLP architectures in general. Making the conceptual ...
Research Interests:
Reading comprehension activities are an authentic task including a rich, language-based context, which makes them an interesting real-life challenge for research into automatic content analysis. For textual entailment research, content... more
Reading comprehension activities are an authentic task including a rich, language-based context, which makes them an interesting real-life challenge for research into automatic content analysis. For textual entailment research, content assessment of reading comprehension exercises provides an interesting opportunity for extrinsic, real-purpose evaluation, which also supports the integration of context and task information into the analysis. In this paper, we discuss the first results for content assessment of reading comprehension activities for German and present results which are competitive with the current state of the art for English. Diving deeper into the results, we provide an analysis in terms of the different question types and the ways in which the information asked for is encoded in the text. We then turn to analyzing the role of the question and argue that the surface-based account of information that is given in the question should be replaced with a more sophisticated...
Research Interests: Engineering and Education
Intelligent language tutoring systems (ILTS) typically analyze learner input to diagnose learner language properties and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research, such systems are virtually absent from... more
Intelligent language tutoring systems (ILTS) typically analyze learner input to diagnose learner language properties and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research, such systems are virtually absent from real-life foreign language teaching ( ...
Research Interests:
Developments in the educational landscape have spurred greater interest in the problem of automatically scoring short answer questions. A recent shared task on this topic revealed a fundamental divide in the modeling approaches that have... more
Developments in the educational landscape have spurred greater interest in the problem of automatically scoring short answer questions. A recent shared task on this topic revealed a fundamental divide in the modeling approaches that have been applied to this problem, with the best-performing systems split between those that employ a knowledge engineering approach and those that almost solely leverage lexical information (as opposed to higher-level syntactic information) in assigning a score to a given response. This paper aims to introduce the NLP community to the largest corpus currently available for short-answer scoring, provide an overview of methods used in the shared task using this data, and explore the extent to which more syntactically-informed features can contribute to the short answer scoring task in a way that avoids the question-specific manual effort of the knowledge engineering approach.