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Natural Language Processing (NLP) became a trending domain within recent years for many researches and companies due to its wide applicability and the new advances in technology. The aim of this paper is to introduce an updated version or our open-source NLP framework, ReaderBench (http://readerbench.com/), designed to support both students and tutors in multiple learning scenarios that encompass one or more of the following dimensions: Cohesion Network Analysis of discourse, textual complexity assessment, keywords' extraction using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and word2vec semantic models, as well as the analysis of online communities and discussions. The latest version of our ReaderBench framework (v4.1) includes: a) new features, Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) and visualizations (e.g., sociograms, analysis of interaction between participants inside a community), b) a new web interface written in Angular 6, and c) the integration of new technologies to increase performance (i.e., spaCy and AKKA), as well as modularity and ease of deployment (i.e., Artifactory and Maven modules). ReaderBench is a fully functional framework capable to enhance the quality of learning processes conducted in multiple languages (English, French, Romanian, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian), and covering both individual and collaborative assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A difficult but important aspect of e-learning for English language speakers is teaching the Arabic language. The major task for students in this context is analyzing Arabic poetry, which differs in several aspects from the English poetry. Natural Language Processing (NLP) for poetry analysis, and especially, being excellent in finding Arabic poetic characteristics is extremely difficult. Despite the rapid progress in this area in some international languages, the analysis of classical Arabic poetry has not received a sufficient attention due to the difficulty of the Arabic language, and the difficulties of analyzing its poetic theories. In this paper, a new way of finding the characteristics of the classical Arabic poem was introduced. One of the most important characteristics of Arabic poetry is the rhythm which is considered as the crown of this type of poem. The rhyme, which is the end of the musical tone of each verse in a poem, and the types of rhyme are also important features of any poetic art. In this article, we focused on the short vowels ("dammah", "kasra", "fatha", "tanween", and "shade"), mobile and constant letters which depend on the theory that analyzes the characteristics of the classical Arabic poetry introduced by Al-Khalil bin Ahmed Al Farahidi. An analysis program was written in a Python platform, which analyzes poems and provides the aforementioned features and some statistical measures. The program will be developed for an e-learning platform, and for use in the classification and identification of classical Arabic poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocabulary acquisition is considered one of the most important aspects of a language because it defines and constraints communication. In order to overcome this, students and teachers use various techniques meant to improve the learning process and facilitate word acquisition. Using conceptual networks that establish links to prior knowledge is an approach with proven good results. The game presented in this paper, Semantic Taboo, is a serious game that helps users enlarge their conceptual network. The game has two modes, one for teachers and one for students. In the teacher module, users have the option of adding playing cards. The theme of the card (the seed) is taken as input, while the list of taboo words is selected from the list of semantically related words provided by the ReaderBench framework. The student model has the same game principle as the traditional game, but the list of taboo words and the description of the seed help the learner acquire new words. The preliminary validation consisted of 15 users who were impressed by the game concept and its educational value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serious games based on reading strategies are an efficient alternative for improving students' capabilities of text understanding. In today's industry and academic environments, there are various games that target reading strategies, but unfortunately most keep focus only on the educational component, leaving the user experience behind. These games are not appealing to young students and thus, may not fully achieve the desired outcomes. The serious game described in this paper puts emphasis on the user experience, tightly coupled with keeping a high standard of its educational focus. Preliminary validation experiments denote a high user acceptance of the proposed educational scenario as an alternative to the traditional scenario that consists of a lecture followed by a self-explanation of the input narrative text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural language interfaces and, in general, Natural Language Processing (NLP) state of the art applications cannot handle satisfactory (if they can at all) conversational implicatures, illocutionary force, stylization, parody, inner disguised polemic, disguised dialogue and other similar phenomena. Considering the ventriloquism perspective in the context of the dialogic-polyphonic theories of Mikhael Bakhtin may provide a basis on trying to cope with such phenomena. The paper introduces some basic ideas of Bakhtin related to ventriloquism in an extended sense, discusses the approaches based on ventriloquism in other domains than NLP, then it analyzes several NLP applications from the perspective of this concept. Several ideas on how the analysis of ventriloquism might be done in NLP are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper presents the details and the history of building a corpus of instant messenger (chat) conversations with multiple participants used for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Two XML annotation schemas are presented. The first is the basic one in the corpus. It is automatically generated starting from various formats in which chats are exported. The second schema extends the first one. It is generated by an editor for manually annotating the chats. Details of the editor are included. The corpus may be used in different purposes: machine learning, analysis and statistics computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]