Assessing Vietnamese Text Readability using Multi-Level Linguistic Features

Text readability is a measure of how easy or difficult it is to read a text.This readability factor plays a crucial role in the processes of drafting and comprehending the texts, affecting the choice of proper texts for reading.Studies on the readability of text have started since the late nineteenth century and there have been many practical applications.However, these studies are mainly performed in English and other popular languages.In Vietnamese, the study of the text readability is still relatively untapped and has only received attention in recent years in the process of improving the curriculum and teaching methods.Recent studies on the readability of text in Vietnamese language are still limited, the main reason was largely due to the lack of text resources, which are corpora graded accordingly to difficulty levels.Therefore, in this study, we focused on building a corpus for assessing the readability of Vietnamese texts in the literature domain through the process of collecting, processing and evaluating documents.The result is that we have built up a corpus of 1,825 Vietnamese texts, divided into four levels of difficulty (Very easy, Easy, Medium and Difficult).Experiments with the existing Vietnamese readability assessment methods show that the built corpus is reliable and usable for further research on the text readability.

This paper studies the beginnings, development, transformations, challenges and perspectives of History of Education (in orig. Istorija pedagogije) as a scientific discipline and a teaching subject in Montenegro. For this purpose, the paper analyses the appearance, status and representation of History of Education as a teaching subject over a 130-year period, as well as the significant role it has had in the development of educational workers in Montenegro. Although generally considered a fundamental educational discipline, the History of Education has lost its importance as a teaching subject, especially when it comes to its low representation in the education of future primary-school teachers and subject teachers in primary and secondary schools or its reduction to a semester course in the Study Programme for Science of Education (in orig. Studijski program za pedagogiju). On the other hand, the History of Education has never lost significance as a scientific educational discipline in Montenegro, i.e. its content has always aroused interest. Beside the numerous dilemmas and challenges the History of Education faces, this work considers a number of recent studies which can significantly influence its status and development perspectives as well as the status of Science of Education (in orig. Pedagogija) in Montenegro.

The article is devoted to the definition of the object, subject and research methods of legal noospherology as a scientific and educational discipline. It is pointed out that the formation of "legal noospherology" as an interdisciplinary science is a natural result of the process of human cognition of the world around us. The initial accumulation of information and further differentiation of a single system of primary knowledge about the laws of nature and society, the allocation of independent disciplines and the subsequent need to solve intersectoral problems - inevitably lead to the formation of new interdisciplinary sciences. Examples that confirm this pattern are the scientific and educational disciplines "legal anthropology" and "legal sociology". They were created to solve current intersectoral problems based on the sciences of law, anthropology and sociology. It is proved that legal noospherology is a new promising scientific and educational discipline, in which on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach it is possible to study a wide range of current intersectoral civilizational problems by complex methods - jurisprudence and noospherology. This interdisciplinary – legal-noosphere approach, developed by the authors of the article – is designed to monitor the process of legal globalization, development of noosphere law and methods of MP-forecasting – based on scientific ideas about the natural unity and continuity of civilizational events. In turn, this gives grounds to apply in legal and noosphere research scientific methods of similarity theory, general topology and game theory, etc., in accordance with the mathematical concepts of "integrity" and "continuity" of the studied global object. Carrying out research on the platform of legal noospherology using the topological information-legal Model of the noosphere developed by the authors allows to study the origin and development of a holistic legal-noosphere natural phenomenon in a single spatial continuum in real time in a scientific experiment. Such opportunities are especially important for understanding the laws of sustainable development of world civilization in their ecological and legal application and global manifestation - that is, in teleologically sound activities of MP- forecasting. This indicates the most important role of legal noospherology as a scientific and educational discipline that it is able to play – and not only in the development of noosphere law, in the development of the entire system of legal and geopolitical sciences, but also the development of various areas of research in globalism.

The article draws attention to one of the centers of university legal education in Ukraine, namely the place and importance of the history of Ukrainian law as a science and academic discipline in the university education of a lawyer in the post-genocidal, post-imperial period of reconstruction of Ukraine. digitalization. Separately, the emphasis is on the author’s vision of ways to improve the methodology of teaching the history of Ukrainian law for lawyers. It is emphasized that the transdisciplinary methodology, which was declared by UNESCO to be the leading one in the organization of the educational process in the XXI century, is a scientific guideline in favor of preserving the History of Ukrainian law with the status of a mandatory discipline in the educational process. The teaching of the History of Ukrainian Law should revolve around the idea of an organic combination of priority universal legal values created over the millennia of world history with national legal values. Thus, given the purpose of university higher education, a lawyer, if he wants to become a real specialist, should get a good basic legal education and constantly improve their knowledge in this area. In this case, without an in-depth study of the history of law and the state can not do. Deep penetration into the essence of legal phenomena in the learning process is possible only through the joint efforts of both theorists and historians of law. Historical and legal knowledge is important for solving current legal problems. The use of online tools only promotes more active communication between the student and the teacher. They complement rather than replace traditional lectures and seminars in classrooms. As a basis for developing the curriculum, it would be good to take the thesis that Ukrainian law is a social institution, with a pronounced spiritual and rational mechanism for regulating human behavior, meaningful and essentially a reflection of the existing socio-cultural reality in Ukraine. It is expedient to build a training course on the basis of problem or problem-chronological study of program material. The main emphasis in teaching should focus on research work, when the student is involved by the teacher in the field of their research and together they create space for new knowledge. Key words: Ukraine, postimperial period, reconstruction, higher legal education, university legal education, history of Ukrainian law, methodology of history of Ukrainian law, methods of teaching discipline, information society, digitalization.

Under statistical learning framework, the paper focuses on how to use traditional linguistic findings on anaphora resolution as a guide for mining and organizing contextual features for Chinese co-reference resolution. The main achievements are as follows. (1) In order to simulate "syntactic and semantic parallelism factor", we extract "bags of word form and POS" feature and "bag of semes" feature from the contexts of the entity mentions and incorporate them into the baseline feature set. (2) Because it is too coarse to use the feature of bags of word form, POS tag and seme to determine the syntactic and semantic parallelism between two entity mentions, we propose a method for contextual feature reconstruction based on semantic similarity computation, in order that the reconstructed contextual features could better approximate the anaphora resolution factor of "Syntactic and Semantic Parallelism Preferences". (3) We use an entity-mention-based contextual feature representation instead of isolated word-based contextual feature representation, and expand the size of the contextual windows in addition, in order to approximately simulate "the selectional restriction factor" for anaphora resolution. The experiments show that the multi-level contextual features are useful for co-reference resolution, and the statistical system incorporated with these features performs well on the standard ACE datasets.

This investigation emphasizes the syntactic-semantic linearity in Scent of Apples by Bienvenido N. Santos. It points out the analysis of the surface and deep structure of the five select sentences excerpted from the short story entitled Scent of Apples. It takes up structural analysis which comprises the immediate constituents and the semantic components of the sentences, and description of constituents which contains transformations of sentences according to case. It considers that the five select sentences reveal surface and deep structures in syntactic-semantic manner. This supposition is supported by the theories of linear grammar that highlights the structure of the sentence and semantic-based grammar which emphasizes meaning or semantic structure of sentences. As such, in this paper the five select sentences excerpted from the Scent of Apple by Bienvenido N. Santos are utilized as pattern or model for the linguistic analysis. In instituting the structural analytical data, four phases/stages were observed; Phase 1 for Immediate Constituent Analysis, Phase 2 for Functions/Speech Acts, Phase 3 for Notion/Ideas Expressed, and Phase 4 for Sentence Transforms. It reflects that the five sentences extracted from the short story are all simple sentences. Also, shows that the five sentences function as looking/observing, owning, acquiring, remembering, and inducing something. Likewise, the five sentences declare the following notions; in a condition of being ill, possessing ones habitual action, longing something, possessing something, and influencing something, and that the five sentences construct five sentence transforms with five nominative case, five sentence transforms with possessive case, and five sentence transforms with objective case. Consequently, it has been determined that the five select sentences excerpted from the Scent of Apples by Bienvenido N. Santos display the surface and deep structures in syntactic-semantic linearity approach. In this manner, it is commended that English language teachers must create/construct learning tool activities which are fitting to the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentences, for the learners to master the structure and be particular of the functions and the usage of words. Furthermore, language teachers should also apply the various strategies and approaches that would entice students’ interest in learning the correct usage of words and the correct structure of sentences.

BackgroundEven though the BCI field has quickly grown in the last few years, it is still mainly investigated as a research area. Increased practicality and usability are required to move BCIs to the real-world. Self-paced (SP) systems would reduce the problem but there is still the big challenge of what is known as the ‘onset detection problem’.MethodsOur previous studies showed how a new sound-imagery (SI) task, high-tone covert sound production, is very effective for onset detection scenarios and we expect there are several advantages over most common asynchronous approaches used thus far, i.e., motor-imagery (MI): 1) Intuitiveness; 2) benefits to people with motor disabilities and, especially, those with lesions on cortical motor areas; and 3) no significant overlap with other common, spontaneous cognitive states, making it easier to use in daily-life situations. The approach was compared with MI tasks in online real-life scenarios, i.e., during activities such as watching videos and reading text. In our scenario, when a new message prompt from a messenger program appeared on the screen, participants watching a video (or reading text, browsing images) were asked to open the message by executing the SI or MI tasks, respectively, for each experimental condition.ResultsThe results showed the SI task performed statistically significantly better than the MI approach: 84.04% (SI) vs 66.79 (MI) True-False positive rate for the sliding image scenario, 80.84% vs 61.07% for watching video. The classification performance difference between SI and MI was found not to be significant in the text-reading scenario. Furthermore, the onset response speed showed SI (4.08 s) being significantly faster than MI (5.46 s). In terms of basic usability, 75% of subjects found SI easier to use.ConclusionsOur novel SI task outperforms typical MI for SP onset detection BCIs, therefore it would be more easily used in daily-life situations. This could be a significant step forward for the BCI field which has so far been mainly restricted to research-oriented indoor laboratory settings.

Prediction error, both at the level of sentence meaning and at the level of the next presented word, has been shown to successfully account for N400 amplitudes. Here we address the question of whether people differ in the representational level at which they implicitly predict upcoming language. To this end, we compute a measure of prediction error at the level of sentence meaning (magnitude of change in hidden layer activation, termed semantic update, in a neural network model of sentence comprehension, the Sentence Gestalt model) and a measure of prediction error at the level of the next presented word (surprisal from a next word prediction language model). When using both measures to predict N400 amplitudes during the reading of naturalistic texts, results showed that both measures significantly accounted for N400 amplitudes even when the other measure was controlled for. Most important for current purposes, both effects were significantly negatively correlated such that people with a reversed or weak surprisal effect showed the strongest influence of semantic update on N400 amplitudes, and random-effects model comparison showed that individuals differ in whether their N400 amplitudes are driven by semantic update only, by surprisal only, or by both, and that the most common model in the population was either semantic update or the combined model but clearly not the pure surprisal model. The current approach of combining large-scale models implementing different theoretical accounts with advanced model comparison techniques enables fine-grained investigations into the computational processes underlying N400 amplitudes, including interindividual differences.

Supporting Minority Male Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Disciplines

A specially developed questionnaire was used: Types of Preferred Examinations (TOPE) to assess examination-type preferences of secondary school students in the Science disciplines according to school type affiliate and gender. Structured interviews were employed to assess both the rationale of students towards these preferences as well as teacher awareness about the preferences – in contrast to their actual “examination practice.” Our findings suggest that (a) secondary school students prefer written, unlimited time examinations which, according to their perception, stress learning with understanding rather than mechanical rote learning, and in which the use of supporting material (“open book exams”) is permitted; and (b) secondary school Science teachers are aware of student examination-type preferences, yet they continue to use the traditional written, time-limited – class examination which is definitely not preferred (disliked) by their students. In view of the special emphasis in current science education research on students' development of higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS) and the need for consonance between the new curriculum goals and examination types used, it is proposed that provisions be made to facilitate teachers' compliance with students' examination-type preferences provided the latter are congruent with learning objectives and our educational aspirations.

Multi-perspectives systematic review on the applications of sentiment analysis for vaccine hesitancy

Stefan Gries’s chapter studies the early acquisition of the constituent order alternation of English verb-particle constructions such as He gave back the bottle vs. He gave the bottle back, where the choice between these two constructions has been shown to be determined by a large number of linguistic and psycholinguistic determinants. On the basis of data from the CHILDES set of corpora, the article investigates several hundred constructions from three children, with the aim of determining to what extent previously-studied syntactic and semantic factors, as well as new phonological and frequency variables that have received little attention,may affect early particle placement. Gries also discusses lexically specific preferences for particular verb-particle constructions and examines to what degree data from different children may be conflated.

Introduction Most electronically stored endoscopic reports consist of semi-structured free text. containing a significant amount of auditable information. However, the unstandardised text requires cleaning prior to audit so that the data is standardised across patients. One major obstruction to the automated auditing of free text is phrases that mention an absence of a pathology such as ‘No hiatus hernia is seen.’ or ‘There is no malignancy.’ Methods The current study aims to determine the complexity of semi-structured free text endoscopy reports and determine the simplest function in the globally most popular data analytics language ‘R’, to remove negative phrases from endoscopic text and to validate the performance of this algorithm against manual extraction. Five hundred endoscopic reports were randomly selected for any procedure between Jan 1 2007 to Jan 1 2017. The low average text complexity (measured using the package ‘readability’ in R based on sentence structure rather than terminology) was equivalent to age 14–15 years (Readability scores: Flesch KinCaid=9.8, Gunning_Fog Index=13.3, Coleman_Liau=10.0) meaning that the text could be analysed using less processor intensive pattern recognition defined as ‘regular expressions ‘rather than using machine learning. Negative phrases were extracted from the first 100 reports as a training set, using the ‘lexicon’ package in R by cross referencing each sentence in an endoscopy report with a list of known negators to create generic regular expressions that could detect all negative phrases and incorporated into a script in R. A endoscopist blinded to the automated results was required to remove all negative phrases whether in mixed or non-mixed sentences for the same 400 endoscopy reports. Automated and manually extracted phrases were then statistically compared to generate a sensitivity, specificity and accuracy measurement of automated extraction. The difference in audit outcome was also estimated when a comparison was made between simple keyword searches to populate the audit versus the use of negative removal as implemented using our technique. Results The training set resulted in 12 regular expressions, compiled into a single runnable function, thought capable of detecting most negative phrases. This resulted in a sensitivity for the detection of negative phrases of 97.2%, specificity 74.61%, positive prediction value of 65.4% and a negative prediction value of 98.01%. When the regular expression function was run against a simple keyword search for certain phrases, certain terms demonstrated a significant difference in their detection when keyword searches were used before and after the negator removal function was used.The term CLO for example was detected 12.25% without negator removal and 7.25% with the function. Conclusions Given the simple sentence structure of the endoscopy reports across multiple endoscopists, a simple processor-nonintensive approach to the removal of negative or normal findings is feasible. Although there is room to improve the specificity further, it is preferable to have false positives in the output result which may require minimal work to remove in the final data cleaning stage. The removal of negators is likely to have more or less of an impact based on the phrase being searched for.

Self-repair is correcting a sentence's structure or meaning and rewording it to provide more specific information. Exploring the use of self-repair in learners is important as a potential indicator of language attrition in second-language learning. Self-repair can solve misunderstandings and clarify the speaker’s intention. It also allows students to repair their errors without the teacher’s involvement. Previous studies of self-repair in Japanese mostly investigate learners in formal institutions. However, research on using Japanese learners in non-formal institutions is limited. This study investigates the types and the changes in the self-repair of Indonesian Japanese learners’ speaking over a five-month training program in a Vocational Training Institution (LPK). This study used a mixed method, which combined quantitative and qualitative. Participants of this study were 10 Indonesian Japanese learners at an LPK in West Java, Indonesia. The instruments through a monologue speaking task were given at the beginning and end of the training program. The results showed that morphological change is the most frequent self-repair used by learners. However, the least used self-repair at the beginning and end of the training program was different. At the beginning of the training program, the least used self-repair was a phonological change, while at the end, there were phonological and lexical changes. This study showed a tendency for a reduced frequency of self-repair with increased proficiency. This study provided a learning strategy and contributed to developing a curriculum and teaching method that is more effective in improving learners' speaking skills, especially in preparing for work in Japan. However, this study only examines self-repair using monologue speaking tasks with familiar topics. Future studies should investigate self-repair using additional task designs to deepen insights into developmental patterns.

Even though dialectometric approaches have significantly contributed to the development of dialectology in the last few decades, no relevant analyses have ever been performed on Modern Greek dialects. This article attempts to fill this gap by using dialectometric techniques to measure the degrees of association between aggregate morphological, phonological, and syntactic differences in nineteen varieties of inner Asia Minor Greek (i.e. of Cappadocian, Pharasiot, and Silliot). Our methods include correlations (between pairs of linguistic levels and between linguistic levels and geography) as well as multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis (of the whole dataset as well as of the linguistic levels), which allow us, on the one hand, to draw conclusions about the associations of linguistic levels and the distributions of dialects and, on the other hand, to directly compare our results to those coming from previous dialectometric studies and Greek dialectology. Results show that, although the complete dataset, phonology, and morphology yield—in some instances—similar patterns (i.e. high correlations between them as well as with geography, high agreement of dialect classifications), the level of syntax deviates the most, which is interpreted as a tendency to form larger dialect areas. Our findings are consistent with patterns found in earlier large-scale studies in dialectometry, but they only partially confirm the classifications of Greek dialectology.