Ramon Ziai


2021

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Leveraging Task Information in Grammatical Error Correction for Short Answer Assessment through Context-based Reranking
Ramon Ziai | Anna Karnysheva
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning

2019

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The Impact of Spelling Correction and Task Context on Short Answer Assessment for Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Ramon Ziai | Florian Nuxoll | Kordula De Kuthy | Björn Rudzewitz | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning

2018

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Automatic Focus Annotation: Bringing Formal Pragmatics Alive in Analyzing the Information Structure of Authentic Data
Ramon Ziai | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Analyzing language in context, both from a theoretical and from a computational perspective, is receiving increased interest. Complementing the research in linguistics on discourse and information structure, in computational linguistics identifying discourse concepts was also shown to improve the performance of certain applications, for example, Short Answer Assessment systems (Ziai and Meurers, 2014). Building on the research that established detailed annotation guidelines for manual annotation of information structural concepts for written (Dipper et al., 2007; Ziai and Meurers, 2014) and spoken language data (Calhoun et al., 2010), this paper presents the first approach automating the analysis of focus in authentic written data. Our classification approach combines a range of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features to achieve an accuracy of 78.1% for identifying focus.

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Generating Feedback for English Foreign Language Exercises
Björn Rudzewitz | Ramon Ziai | Kordula De Kuthy | Verena Möller | Florian Nuxoll | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

While immediate feedback on learner language is often discussed in the Second Language Acquisition literature (e.g., Mackey 2006), few systems used in real-life educational settings provide helpful, metalinguistic feedback to learners. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging task information to generate the expected range of well-formed and ill-formed variability in learner answers along with the required diagnosis and feedback. We combine this offline generation approach with an online component that matches the actual student answers against the pre-computed hypotheses. The results obtained for a set of 33 thousand answers of 7th grade German high school students learning English show that the approach successfully covers frequent answer patterns. At the same time, paraphrases and content errors require a more flexible alignment approach, for which we are planning to complement the method with the CoMiC approach successfully used for the analysis of reading comprehension answers (Meurers et al., 2011).

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Feedback Strategies for Form and Meaning in a Real-life Language Tutoring System
Ramon Ziai | Bjoern Rudzewitz | Kordula De Kuthy | Florian Nuxoll | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the 7th workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning

2017

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Developing a web-based workbook for English supporting the interaction of students and teachers
Björn Rudzewitz | Ramon Ziai | Kordula De Kuthy | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the joint workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning and NLP for Language Acquisition

2016

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Focus Annotation of Task-based Data: Establishing the Quality of Crowd Annotation
Kordula De Kuthy | Ramon Ziai | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

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Approximating Givenness in Content Assessment through Distributional Semantics
Ramon Ziai | Kordula De Kuthy | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

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Focus Annotation of Task-based Data: A Comparison of Expert and Crowd-Sourced Annotation in a Reading Comprehension Corpus
Kordula De Kuthy | Ramon Ziai | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

While the formal pragmatic concepts in information structure, such as the focus of an utterance, are precisely defined in theoretical linguistics and potentially very useful in conceptual and practical terms, it has turned out to be difficult to reliably annotate such notions in corpus data. We present a large-scale focus annotation effort designed to overcome this problem. Our annotation study is based on the tasked-based corpus CREG, which consists of answers to explicitly given reading comprehension questions. We compare focus annotation by trained annotators with a crowd-sourcing setup making use of untrained native speakers. Given the task context and an annotation process incrementally making the question form and answer type explicit, the trained annotators reach substantial agreement for focus annotation. Interestingly, the crowd-sourcing setup also supports high-quality annotation ― for specific subtypes of data. Finally, we turn to the question whether the relevance of focus annotation can be extrinsically evaluated. We show that automatic short-answer assessment significantly improves for focus annotated data. The focus annotated CREG corpus is freely available and constitutes the largest such resource for German.

2015

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CoMiC: Adapting a Short Answer Assessment System for Answer Selection
Björn Rudzewitz | Ramon Ziai
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2014

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Focus Annotation in Reading Comprehension Data
Ramon Ziai | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2013

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CoMeT: Integrating different levels of linguistic modeling for meaning assessment
Niels Ott | Ramon Ziai | Michael Hahn | Detmar Meurers
Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Volume 2: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2013)

2012

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Short Answer Assessment: Establishing Links Between Research Strands
Ramon Ziai | Niels Ott | Detmar Meurers
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP

2011

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Evaluating Answers to Reading Comprehension Questions in Context: Results for German and the Role of Information Structure
Detmar Meurers | Ramon Ziai | Niels Ott | Janina Kopp
Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment

2010

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Enhancing Authentic Web Pages for Language Learners
Detmar Meurers | Ramon Ziai | Luiz Amaral | Adriane Boyd | Aleksandar Dimitrov | Vanessa Metcalf | Niels Ott
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Fifth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications