This paper describes a new automated disengagement tracking system (DTS) that detects learners' maladaptive behaviors, e.g. mind-wandering and impetuous responding, in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), called AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a conversation-based intelligent tutoring system designed to help adult literacy learners improve their reading…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

Despite the proliferation of video-based instruction and its benefits--such as promoting student autonomy and self-paced learning--the complexities of online teaching remain a challenge. To be effective, educators require extensive training in digital teaching methodologies. As such, there's a pressing need to examine and comprehend the…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

This study addressed the role of the reflection-informed learning and instruction (RILI) model on students' academic success by using CourseMIRROR mobile system. We hypothesized that prompting students to reflect on confusing concepts stimulates their self-monitoring activities according to which students are expected to review their…

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the entire world, while the impact and usage of online learning environments has greatly increased. This paper presents a new version of the ReaderBench framework, grounded in Cohesion Network Analysis, which can be used to evaluate the online activity of students as a plug-in feature to Moodle. A Recurrent Neural…

Online courses often include discussion forums, which provide a rich source of data to better understand and improve students' learning experiences. However, forum messages frequently contain private information that prevents researchers from analyzing these data. We present a method for discovering and redacting private information including…

This paper provides an alternative way of document representation by treating topic probabilities as a vector representation for words and representing a document as a combination of the word vectors. A comparison on summary data shows that this representation is more effective in document classification. [This paper was published in:…

In this investigation we propose new machine learning methods for automated scoring models that predict the vocabulary acquisition in science and social studies of second grade English language learners, based upon free-form spoken responses. We evaluate performance on an existing dataset and use transfer learning from a large pre-trained language…

Coding is a process of assigning meaning to a given piece of evidence. Evidence may be found in a variety of data types, including documents, research interviews, posts from social media, conversations from learning platforms, or any source of data that may provide insights for the questions under qualitative study. In this study, we focus on text…

Metacognition is a valuable tool for learning, since it is closely related to self-regulation and awareness of one's own affect. However, methods for automatically detecting and studying metacognition are scarce. Thus, in this paper we describe an algorithm for automatic detection of metacognitive language in writing. We analyzed text from the…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

This study examined how machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be leveraged to assess the interpretive behavior that is required for successful literary text comprehension. We compared the accuracy of seven different machine learning classification algorithms in predicting human ratings of student essays about…