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Recently, the approach towards mining various opinions on weblogs, forums and websites has gained attentions and interests of numerous researchers. In this regard, feature-based opinion mining has been extensively studied in English documents in order to identify implicit and explicit product features and relevant opinions. However, in case of texts written in Persian language, this task faces serious challenges. The objective of this research is to present an unsupervised method for feature-based opinion mining in Persian; an approach which does not require a labeled training dataset. The proposed method in this paper involves extracting explicit product features. Previous studies dealing with extraction of explicit features often focus on lexical roles of words; the approach which cannot be used in distinguishing between an adjective as a part of a noun or a sentiment word. In this study, in addition to lexical roles, syntactic roles are also considered to extract more relevant explicit features. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has got higher recall and precision values compared to prior studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation is regarded as the systematic collection of information contributing to decision-making. It encompasses processes for gathering an enough deal of information about a program or curriculum aimed at being conducive to improvement. Evaluation is taken into technical account as formal interpretation and examination of the components of a workplace development initiative so as to find out how well it is meeting its goals, thereby allowing an organization to improve the current initiatives and enabling decisions about support. In English language teaching, textbook evaluation helps curriculum developers and syllabus designers choose the best possible materials for a course of study. Considering the importance of textbook evaluation in language teaching and language syllabus design, the researchers aimed at qualitatively analyzing the two general English textbooks; Four Corners 1 and Topnotch Fundamentals A. The evaluation was based on the checklist of Daoud and Celce-Murcia (1979). Three expert EFL teachers who had taught the mentioned books for about three years qualitatively analyzed the two textbooks. The analysis concluded that the two books almost did not differ based on the checklist, though they both had some strengths and weaknesses. Curriculum developers, syllabus designers, and EFL teachers may find the findings useful in their language teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private speech is defined as the self-talk which many children in particular engage in. It leads to the inner speech that more mature individuals use to control thought and behavior. The claim in private speech is that some learners who undergo silent period engage in private conversations with themselves, which prepares them for social speech later. Private speech eventually turns to inner speech with no external articulation. Accordingly, speech comes to reflect an advance on the earliest uses of language which are social and interpersonal. Cognitive development makes it necessary for the child to move from reliance on others to reliance on his inner speech, where the control over his mental functioning takes place. Since private speech is claimed to be a universal strategy for L1 learners, a scrutiny in its dimensions would probably be beneficial for second language studies. Therefore, the present paper briefly introduces and talks about different aspects of the private speech which might be found interesting in second language studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodological approach for determination of the most effective driving features for hybrid electric vehicle intelligent control, using the driving segment simulation. In this approach, driving data gathering is first performed in real traffic conditions using Advanced Vehicle Locator systems. The vehicle's speed time series are then divided into small segments. Subsequently, 19 driving features are defined for each driving segment, and the influence of the driving features on the vehicle's fuel consumption (FC) and exhaust emissions is investigated, using driving the driving segment simulation. The simulation approach is also verified by experimental test. Finally, the driving features are ranked by a new approach based on the definition of an effectiveness index and a correlation analysis. The results demonstrate that the velocity-dependent driving features such as ‘energy’, ‘mean of velocity’, ‘displacement’ and ‘maximum velocity’ are more effective on vehicle's FC and exhaust emissions. However, because of high dependency between these features, this study suggests independent driving features among the most effective driving features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]