Thomas K. Landauer

• University of Colorado Boulder

In a new method for automatic indexing and retrieval, implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents is modeled to improve estimates of term-document association, and therefore the detection of relevant documents on the basis of terms found in queries. Singular-value decomposition is used to decompose a large term by doc...

Advances in assessment technologies are affording teachers and students new ways to efficiently assess and track achievement while also better promoting learning. WriteToLearn is one such technology, a Web-based tool that integrates practice and assessment in reading comprehension with writing about what is learned. Based on the principle of immedi...

The language-theoretical interpretation of the result of the analysis is that LSA vectors approximate the meaning of a word as its average effect on the meaning of passages in which it occurs, and reciprocally approximates the meaning of passages as the average of the meaning of their words. The derived relation between individual words should not...

Computational techniques for scoring essays have recently come into use. Their bases and development methods raise both old and new measurement issues. However, coming principally from computer and cognitive sciences, they have received little attention from the educational measurement community. We briefly survey the state of the technology, then...

The present invention is a methodology for analyzing and evaluating a sample text, such as essay(s), or document(s). This methodology compares sample text to a reference essay(s), document(s), or text segment(s) Within a reference essay or document. The methodology analyzes the amount of subject-matter information in the sample text, analyzes the r...

Manually analysing and evaluating writing can be a time consuming, difficult, subjective and sometimes error-prone task. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) provides a new technique for performing a variety of useful semantic analyses. LSA serves both as an approximate psychological theory of aspects of human word and passage meaning and as a practical...

This paper describes cross-language informationretrieval experiments carried out for TREC-6. Our retrieval method, cross-language latent semantic indexing (CL-LSI), is completely automatic and we were able to use it to create a 3-way EnglishFrench -German IR system. This study extends our previous work in terms of the large size of training and tes...

this document as a bag of freely intermingled French and English words. A set of training documents like this is analyzed using LSI, and the result is a reduced dimension semantic space in which related terms are near each other as shown in Figure 2. The space contains the training documents (TRdoc 1 through TRdoc 3 in the figure), and the terms th...

We describe a method for fully automated cross-language document retrieval in which no query translation is required. Queries in one language can retrieve documents in other lan- guages (as well as the original language). This is accom- plished by a method that automatically constructs a multi- lingual semantic space using Latent Semantic Indexing...

this document as a bag of freely intermingled French and English words.

This paper describes a new approach for dealing with the vocabulary problem in human-computer interaction. Most approaches to retrieving textual materials depend on a lexical match between words in users' requests and those in or assigned to database objects. Because of the tremendous diversity in the words people use to describe the same object, l...

A new method for automatic indexing and retrieval is described. The approach is to take advantage of implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents (“semantic structure”) in order to improve the detection of relevant documents on the basis of terms found in queries. The particular technique used is singular-value decompo...

In a new method for automatic indexing and retrieval, implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents is modeled to improve estimates of term-document association, and therefore the detection of relevant documents on the basis of terms found in queries. Singular-value decomposition is used to decompose a large term by doc...

In almost all computer applications, users must enter correct words for the desired objects or actions. For success without extensive training, or in first-tries for new targets, the system must recognize terms that will be chosen spontaneously. We studied spontaneous word choice for objects in five application-related domains, and found the variab...

When searching for information in menu-based retrieval systems, users are given a choice among a set of categories. Successful retrieval of information depends critically on the user’s understanding the system’s division of objects into categories and the system’s labels for these categories. This research compares several different ways of describ...

The successful use of menu-based information retrieval systems depends critically on users understanding the category names and partitions used by system designers. Some of the problems in this endeavor are psychological and have to do with naming large and ill-defined categories so that users can understand their contents, and effectively partitio...

The descriptors or categories assigned to entries in an information system form the basis of most retrieval mechanisms (e.g., menu or key word). These descriptors are the primary means of communication between system designers and end users. In this paper we analyze some of the factors which influence this communication link. Our goal is to uncover...