Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd

Also published as: Alexandra Uitdenbogerd


2019

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Readability of Twitter Tweets for Second Language Learners
Patrick Jacob | Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the The 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Optimal language acquisition via reading requires the learners to read slightly above their current language skill level. Identifying material at the right level is the essential role of automatic readability measurement. Short message platforms such as Twitter offer the opportunity for language practice while reading about current topics and engaging in conversation in small doses, and can be filtered according to linguistic criteria to suit the learner. In this research, we explore how readable tweets are for English language learners and which factors contribute to their readability. With participants from six language groups, we collected 14,659 data points, each representing a tweet from a pool of 4100 tweets, and a judgement of perceived readability. Traditional readability measures and features failed on the data-set, but demographic data showed that judgements were largely genuine and reflected reported language skill, which is consistent with other recent studies. We report on the properties of the data set and implications for future research.

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Measuring English Readability for Vietnamese Speakers
Phuoc Nguyen | Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the The 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Reading is important for any language learner, but the difficulty level of the text needs to match a reader’s level to enable efficient learning of new vocabulary. Many widely used traditional readability measures are not effective for those who speak English as a second or additional language. This study examines English readability for Vietnamese native speakers (VL1). A collection of text difficulty judgements of nearly 100 English text passages was obtained from 12 VL1 participants, using a 5-point Likert scale. Using the same basic features found in traditional English readability measures we found that SVMs and Dale-Chall features were slightly better than linear models using either Flesch or Dale-Chall. VL1 participants’ text judgements were strongly correlated with their past IELTS test scores. This study introduces a first approximation to readability of English text for VL1, with suggestions for further improvements.

2018

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Cross-corpus Native Language Identification via Statistical Embedding
Francisco Rangel | Paolo Rosso | Julian Brooke | Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Stylistic Variation

In this paper, we approach the task of native language identification in a realistic cross-corpus scenario where a model is trained with available data and has to predict the native language from data of a different corpus. The motivation behind this study is to investigate native language identification in the Australian academic scenario where a majority of students come from China, Indonesia, and Arabic-speaking nations. We have proposed a statistical embedding representation reporting a significant improvement over common single-layer approaches of the state of the art, identifying Chinese, Arabic, and Indonesian in a cross-corpus scenario. The proposed approach was shown to be competitive even when the data is scarce and imbalanced.

2016

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Melbourne at SemEval 2016 Task 11: Classifying Type-level Word Complexity using Random Forests with Corpus and Word List Features
Julian Brooke | Alexandra Uitdenbogerd | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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Word Transformation Heuristics Agains Lexicons for Cognate Detection
Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2015

2012

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In Your Eyes: Identifying Clichés in Song Lyrics
Alex G. Smith | Christopher X. S. Zee | Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2012

2010

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Fun with Filtering French
Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2010

2006

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Web Readability and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2006