Abstract: Techniques are described for an automated grammar teaching system that displays sentences and allows a user to identify preposition errors within the sentences, if any. The sentences may be presented as single sentences or as part of a paragraph. The user may be asked to determine whether the sentences are correct or incorrect, to identify the locations of missing or incorrect prepositions, to provide a new correct preposition, and to identify a correct preposition usage category for the new preposition. To guide the user, an incorrect user response may trigger the display of remediation information, which may include identifying one or more grammar elements of the sentences that are relevant to identifying the preposition errors. New sentences in the teaching system may be selected based on historical data maintained for the user.

Abstract: Techniques are described for an automated grammar teaching system that displays sentences and allows a user to identify comma errors within the sentences, if any. The sentences may be presented as a set of sentences or a paragraph. When presented as a set, the sentences may employ similar or contrasting sentence structures to emphasize the application of the comma rules. The user may be asked to determine whether the sentences are correct or incorrect, to identify the locations of missing or extraneous commas, and in a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, to determine whether the conjunction joins two independent clauses. To guide the user, multi-level hints may be provided on request, and an incorrect user response may trigger the display of remediation information or a just-in-time hint. New sentences in the teaching system may be selected based on historical data maintained for the user.

Abstract: A method is provided for teaching students to recognize and correct incomplete sentences (also referred to herein as “sentence fragments”). A user is presented with one or more user interfaces that teach a user to determine whether a sentence is a complete sentence or an incomplete sentence. The interface may present an explanation as to why the sentence is a complete sentence or an incomplete sentence. To help a user deduce whether a sentence is a complete sentence or an incomplete sentence, one or more interfaces may present a user with one or more detailed questions about the sentence. The one or more detailed questions may ask the user to identify one or more particular features and/or words in the sentence. A user may be presented with one or more user interfaces that teach the user how to produce a complete sentence from a sentence fragment.

Abstract: A grammar teaching system provides adaptive practice to build students' grammar skills with respect to verb tense errors. The system displays a sentence to a user, and allows the user to identify the locations of verbs within the sentence and tenses of the identified verbs. The system reinforces correct designations of verbs using visual cues. If a user incorrectly identifies a term as a verb within a sentence, then the system displays information to help the user understand the nature of the incorrectly designated term. The system allows the user to determine whether the sentence includes a verb tense error and to select a particular verb in the sentence to replace in order to correct any verb tense error. The system allows the user to obtain help in correcting a verb tense error by providing optional tasks that step the user through the reasoning needed to correct the error.

Abstract: A system and method for delivering highly customized, natural-sounding/appearing audio and/or visual content to existing player devices, including but not restricted to wired and wireless voicemail, sound-enabled PCs, and portable MP3 or DVD players. Subscribers register with existing content providers to receive alerts and information on topics they care about (e.g., portfolio updates, financial news, sports). If a user selects the audio and/or visual delivery option, the content provider passes his or her registration and preference information to the system. The content providers then pass news information to the system, which converts it to audio and/or visuals in one of two ways. For short, formulaic messages, the system concatenates spoken phrases and clauses previously recorded by human talent and stored in a multimedia library database, to create natural-seeming audio and/or visual sequences. For longer messages, the system uses human abilities entirely—i.e.

Abstract: A technique for analyzing affect in which ambiguity in both emotion and natural language is explicitly represented and processed through fuzzy logic. In particular, textual information is processed to i) isolate a vocabulary of words belonging to an emotion, ii) represent the meaning of each word belonging to that emotion using multiple categories and scalar metrics, iii) compute profiles for text documents based on the categories and scores of their component words, and iv) manipulate the profiles to visualize the texts. The representation vehicle in the system is a set of fuzzy semantic categories (affect categories) followed by their respective centralities (degrees of relatedness between lexicon entries and their various categories) and intensities (representative of the strength of the affect level described by that word) called an affect set. A graphical representation of the affect set can also be used as a tool for decision making.

Abstract: A system and method for delivering highly customized, natural-sounding/appearing audio and/or visual content to existing player devices, including but not restricted to wired and wireless voicemail, sound-enabled PCs, and portable MP3 or DVD players. Subscribers register with existing content providers to receive alerts and information on topics they care about (e.g., portfolio updates, financial news, sports). If a user selects the audio and/or visual delivery option, the content provider passes his or her registration and preference information to the system. The content providers then pass news information to the system, which converts it to audio and/or visuals in one of two ways. For short, formulaic messages, the system concatenates spoken phrases and clauses previously recorded by human talent and stored in a Multimedia Library database, to create natural-seeming audio and/or visual sequences. For longer messages, the system uses human abilities entirely—i.e.