Creation of a New Domain and Evaluation of Comparison Generation in a Natural Language Generation System

We describe the creation of a new domain for the Methodius Natural Language Generation System, and an evaluation of Methodius ’ parameterized comparison generation algorithm. The new domain was based around music and performers, and texts about the domain were generated using Methodius. Our evaluation showed that test subjects learned more from texts that contained comparisons than from those that did not. We also established that the comparison generation algorithm could generalize to the music domain.

Appendix A – A Brief Introduction to the Religious Faiths and Spiritual Beliefs Included in the Primary Religious Education Program

Religions and spiritual beliefs answer the profound questions we ask ourselves: What is the meaning and purpose of my life? Who am I? What is right and wrong behaviour? Of course, in a resource like My Place in the World and in this Teacher’s Resource Guide, we can barely scratch the surface of the beliefs, traditions, and practices of the faiths and spiritual beliefs discussed. Nevertheless, in this part of the Teacher’s Resource Guide, we provide information about each of the faiths included in the student resource. We present the information in chronological order of the appearance of each major spiritual belief or religious faith. Our hope is that we have provided enough background information to allow you to teach informatively about the faiths and spiritual beliefs included in My Place in the World

Non-binding signals: are they effective or ineffectual?

Companies often send non-binding messages to their competitors, to consumers, to channel members and to various other recipients. When such messages are in the form of price signals, they tend to make antitrust authorities uneasy since it is widely believed that price signaling can and does serve as a collusion facilitating mechanism. We conducted experimental posted-offer markets with multiple competitive equilibria, and found that contrary to expectations, markets in which sellers could engage in cheap talk had lower contract prices than markets without cheap talk opportunities.posted-offer markets

The Effect of Language of Instruction on Comprehension of Conjunctions

The purpose of this research project was to determine if a bilingual explanation of conjunctions results in better comprehension than an explanation in English only for dual language learners reading an English language text. Participants included four bilingual third grade students from the communities of Longmont and Boulder, who attended English-language classrooms. The author created a research protocol to determine the participants’ comprehension of target conjunctions before and after instruction. The author taught the use of target conjunctions to the participants, with instruction for half of the conjunctions presented in English and half in Spanish. No consistent difference was found in participants’ performance on the post-test for conjunctions taught in Spanish as compared to those taught in English. The language of instruction appeared to have no effect on student performance

Experimental Economics Research: Is there an alternative to having huge research budgets?

The need to pay subjects to participate in experiments places a major financial burden on experimental economists. In this paper, we conduct dictator games and find that there is no difference in the way student subjects split money and extra-credit points, an encouraging result that suggests that giving course points could be a viable alternative to giving out cash in economic experiments.dictator games

The Growth of the Christian Church (Chapter 2 of Expressions of Faith )

Aimed at 7th-graders in Canada, this textbook uses stories to educate about the world\u27s major religions. Chapter 2, posted here, covers the rise of Christianity

Beetle II: an adaptable tutorial dialogue system

We present BEETLE II, a tutorial dialogue system which accepts unrestricted language input and supports experimentation with different dialogue strategies. Our first system evaluation compared two dialogue policies. The resulting corpus was used to study the impact of different tutoring and error recovery strategies on user satisfaction and student interaction style. It can also be used in the future to study a wide range of research issues in dialogue systems.