Is Retrieval Practice Always Superior to Restudy?

A classic study by Roediger and Karpicke (2006a) investigated the relative benefits of restudy versus retrieval practice, or “test”, on memory retention. Repeated studying was superior to repeated testing when memory was tested immediately (all study > multiple study/single test > single study/multiple tests). Strikingly, the pattern reversed when memory was tested after a days-long delay, with best performance in a single study/multiple tests condition. As each study period was minutes-long and contained repeated reading of a to-be-remembered text passage, we were interested whether the striking benefit for repeated testing at the expense of any restudy replicates when study opportunities are brief, akin to a single mention of a fact in a lecture. Participants encountered academically relevant facts a total of three times, each time either studied (S) or self-tested (T). Final test followed immediately or after a delay (Experiment 1: two days, Experiment 2: seven days). Partially replicating prior work, immediate memory benefited from repeated study (SSS > SST > STT), but the pattern did not reverse after a delay. Instead, memory was superior for facts the were restudied in addition to self-tested (SST > STT = SSS). We further investigated whether restudy after a test (STS) provides additional benefits compared to restudy before test (SST), but found comparably high delayed recall in both conditions. The results show that under some circumstances, balancing repetition and testing can allow for more information to be learned and retained long-term.

CONTRAST AS A METHOD OF FOREGROUNDING IN THE PROSE OF M. TSVETAEVA: OPPOSITION WITH THE HELP OF QUASI-ANTONYMS

Contrast, as one of the ways of foregrounding, plays a crucial role in the organization of M. Tsvetayeva's prose texts of different genres. The article shows this by analyzing an excerpt from M. Tsvetaeva’s letter to B. Pasternak (1926). This passage is two paragraphs and by its structure and content is close to the antonymic block-composite. The contrast between the sea and the land is actualized by M. Tsvetaeva and is the main principle of the organization of the given text passage. The contrasting foregrounding of meaningful information is carried out with the help of quasi-antonyms land - sea, mountain - sea, mountain - ocean. The authors show how the end-to-end antithesis based on the semantic opposition of land and water is built in the analyzed passage, how new asymmetrical relations - contradictory (land/water; land/sea), vector (sea/mountain) and gradational (mountain/sea; mountain/ocean) - are built in it, laying one on another and gradually deepening the contrast, which help the author to convey figuratively and emotionally her negative attitude to the sea and positive one to the mountain.

Automating Design Requirement Extraction From Text With Deep Learning

Nearly every artifact of the modern engineering design process is digitally recorded and stored, resulting in an overwhelming amount of raw data detailing past designs. Analyzing this design knowledge and extracting functional information from sets of digital documents is a difficult and time-consuming task for human designers. For the case of textual documentation, poorly written superfluous descriptions filled with jargon are especially challenging for junior designers with less domain expertise to read. If the task of reading documents to extract functional requirements could be automated, designers could actually benefit from the distillation of massive digital repositories of design documentation into valuable information that can inform engineering design. This paper presents a system for automating the extraction of structured functional requirements from textual design documents by applying state of the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. A recursive method utilizing Machine Learning-based question-answering is developed to process design texts by initially identifying the highest-level functional requirement, and subsequently extracting additional requirements contained in the text passage. The efficacy of this system is evaluated by comparing the Machine Learning-based results with a study of 75 human designers performing the same design document analysis task on technical texts from the field of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). The prospect of deploying such a system on the sum of all digital engineering documents suggests a future where design failures are less likely to be repeated and past successes may be consistently used to forward innovation.

GAVIN

Annotation is an effective reading strategy people often undertake while interacting with digital text. It involves highlighting pieces of text and making notes about them. Annotating while reading in a desktop environment is considered trivial but, in a mobile setting where people read while hand-holding devices, the task of highlighting and typing notes on a mobile display is challenging. In this article, we introduce GAVIN, a gaze-assisted voice note-taking application, which enables readers to seamlessly take voice notes on digital documents by implicitly anchoring them to text passages. We first conducted a contextual enquiry focusing on participants’ note-taking practices on digital documents. Using these findings, we propose a method which leverages eye-tracking and machine learning techniques to annotate voice notes with reference text passages. To evaluate our approach, we recruited 32 participants performing voice note-taking. Following, we trained a classifier on the data collected to predict text passage where participants made voice notes. Lastly, we employed the classifier to built GAVIN and conducted a user study to demonstrate the feasibility of the system. This research demonstrates the feasibility of using gaze as a resource for implicit anchoring of voice notes, enabling the design of systems that allow users to record voice notes with minimal effort and high accuracy.

Pan and Sana (2021) Pretesting vs. posttesting: Errorful generation, prequestions, and retrieval practice

The use of practice tests to enhance learning, or test-enhanced learning, ranks among the most effective of all pedagogical techniques. We investigated the relative efficacy of pretesting (i.e., errorful generation) and posttesting (i.e., retrieval practice), two of the most prominent practice test types in the literature to date. Pretesting involves taking tests before to-be-learned information is studied, whereas posttesting involves taking tests after information is studied. In five experiments (combined n = 1,573), participants studied expository text passages, each paired with a pretest or a posttest. The tests involved multiple-choice (Experiments 1-5) or cued recall format (Experiments 2-4) and were administered with or without correct answer feedback (Experiments 3-4). On a criterial test administered 5 minutes or 48 hours later, both test types enhanced memory relative to a no-test control, but pretesting yielded higher overall scores. That advantage held across test formats, in the presence or absence of feedback, at different retention intervals, and appeared to stem from enhanced processing of text passage content (Experiment 5). Thus, although the benefits of posttesting are more well-established in the literature, pretesting is highly competitive with posttesting and can yield similar, if not greater, pedagogical benefits. These findings have important implications for the incorporation of practice tests in education and training contexts.

Aus der Editionswerkstatt: Schleiermachers Praktische Theologie – Frerichs’ Ausgabe in ihre Quellen zerlegt

In 1850, Jacob Frerichs produced the first and until now the only edition of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s important lectures on Practical Theology. It is a mix and compilation of students’ transcripts from six different semesters, redundant and at times contradictory, which doesn’t correspond to Schleiermacher’s actual lectures. Most of the transcripts used by Frerichs are still preserved and have now been evaluated for a new edition of Schleiermacher’s Practical Theology. This article disassembles Frerichs’ edition into its components giving evidence for every text passage from which source Frerichs took it.

Evaluating Richer Features and Varied Machine Learning Models for Subjectivity Classification of Book Review Sentences in Portuguese

Texts published on social media have been a valuable source of information for companies and users, as the analysis of this data helps improving/selecting products and services of interest. Due to the huge amount of data, techniques for automatically analyzing user opinions are necessary. The research field that investigates these techniques is called sentiment analysis. This paper focuses specifically on the task of subjectivity classification, which aims to predict whether a text passage conveys an opinion. We report the study and comparison of machine learning methods of different paradigms to perform subjectivity classification of book review sentences in Portuguese, which have shown to be a challenging domain in the area. Specifically, we explore richer features for the task, using several lexical, centrality-based and discourse features. We show the contributions of the different feature sets and evidence that the combination of lexical, centrality-based and discourse features produce better results than any of the feature sets individually. Additionally, by analyzing the achieved results and the acquired knowledge by some symbolic machine learning methods, we show that some discourse relations may clearly signal subjectivity. Our corpus annotation also reveals some distinctive discourse structuring patterns for sentence subjectivity.

The CITE architecture (CTS/CITE) for analysis and alignment

Documenting text-reuse (when one text includes a quotation or paraphrase of, or even allusion to another text) is one example of the problem of analysis and alignment. The most clever analytical tools will be of no avail unless their results can be cited, as scholarly evidence has been cited for centuries. This is where the CITE Architecture can help. CITE solves several problems at once. The first problem is the endless possible number of analyses (by which we mean “desirable ways of splitting up a text”): do we choose to “read” a text passage-by-passage, clause-by-clause, word-by-word, or syllable-by-syllable? The second, related to the first, is that of overlapping hierarchies: The first two words of the Iliad are “μῆνιν ἄειδε,” but the first metrical foot of the poem is “μηνιν α”; the first noun-phrase is “μῆνιν οὐλομένενην”, the first word of the first line, and the first word of the second line, and nothinginbetween. All of these issues are present when documenting text-reuse, and especially when documenting different (and perhaps contradictory) scholarly assertions of text-reuse. In our experience, over 25 years of computational textual analysis, no other technological standard can address this problem as easily.

ILLUSTRATIONS DEPICTING THE ENVIRONMENT AROUND THE MYTHICAL CITY… OF TIBETAN MEDICINE

The first chapter of the most famous treatise in Tibetan medicine called Four Treatises (Rgyud bzhi) characterises the environmental preconditions in order to practice medicine in a perfect way. One of these aspects is the description of the mythical city called Lta na sdug where a precious palace of the Buddha of medicine is situated. The origin of the text passage and, hence, the geographical location of this mythical city is discussed controversially in the current literature. This paper, however, argues that it is possible that the suggested principles are applicable at any suitable place of Tibetan medical practice if they were adapted to the local environment as long as most of the described parameters are adhered to symbolically. Different types of visual expressions depicting features of the city as described in this introductory chapter will be compared. First, plate number one of the famous seventeenth century thangka collection to the Blue Beryl commentary stored in Ulan-Ude presents a rather orthodox interpretation of these circumstances. Second, not a painting but a three-dimensional example of monastic cityplanning: the medical murals in the inner courtyard of the Medical Faculty and the architectural arrangement of the Faculty within the whole cloister indicate that the local authorities may have regarded Labrang territory as a material form of Lta na sdug. Third, yet another pair of murals in a small monastery painted by the same artist as the murals at Labrang monastery present an alternative, vivid way of depiction.