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(Research paper) PurposeTo evaluate and extend existing natural language processing techniques into the domain of informal online political discussions. Design/methodology/approachA database of postings from a U.S. political discussion site was collected, along with self-reported political orientation data for the users. A variety of sentiment analysis, text classification, and social network analysis methods were applied to the postings and evaluated against the users' self-descriptions. FindingsPurely text-based methods performed poorly, but could be improved using techniques which took into account the users' position in the online community. Research limitationsThe techniques we applied here are fairly simple, and more sophisticated learning algorithms may yield better results for text-based classification. Practical implicationsThis work suggests that social network analysis is an important tool for performing natural language processing tasks with informal web texts.

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At a time when experimental throughput in the field of molecular biology is increasing, it is necessary for biologists and people working in related fields to have access to sophisticated tools to enable them to efficiently process large amounts of information in order to stay abreast of current research.Rhetorical zone analysis is an application of natural language processing in which areas of text in scientific papers are classified in terms of argumentation and intellectual contribution in order to pinpoint and distinguish certain types of information. Such analysis can be employed to assist in information extraction, helping to assess and integrate data generated by experiments into the scientific community's store of knowledge.We present results for several experiments in automatic zone identification on the ZAISA-1 dataset, a new dataset composed of full biomedical research papers hand-annotated for rhetorical zones. We concentrate on general purpose and linguistically motivated features, and report results for a variety of sets of features. It is our intention to provide a baseline feature set for modeling, which can be extended in future work using combinations of heuristics and more sophisticated and task-specific modeling techniques.

This paper presents a new teacher interface for the Electronic Tandem Resources (ETR) site, the student interface described in Appel & Mullen (2000), and a new version of the site designed specifically for research purposes. The main features of the original site geared towards the language learner were the creation of a virtual environment for tandem language learning and the provision of tools and data intended to help foster the development of learner autonomy. The new teacher interface supports the integration of tandem language learning activities in the foreign language classroom and addresses the difficult issue of performance assessment and task evaluation. Computer-mediated communication activities between students in different countries are notoriously difficult for teachers to monitor. Nevertheless, there is evidence that in certain situations it is beneficial for the teacher to be able to monitor these activities. The teacher interface of the ETR site offers a user-friendly interface which requires only basic computer skills, and gives teachers access to data such as the date of the most recently sent messages, the number of words sent by students and the percentages of text written by each student in their respective L1 and L2, without giving teachers access to the content of the messages, thus preserving students’ privacy. Furthermore, a slightly different version has also been designed for evaluation of the learning by the researcher investigating second language learning in an electronic tandem environment. This interface has been designed for setting up experiments and some of its features allow for control over variables related to the experiment. The interface records time stamps for sent and received messages.