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ARCADE SOFTWARE PRODUCTS

This NSF-funded project resulted in the development of new statistical software intended to support research in the areas of text comprehension and educational technology for non-commercial applications and academic research purposes only.

Knowledge Digraph Contribution Analysis Software

Dr. Golden is currently developing a statistical model which allows the user to incorporate prior knowledge about the semantic and syntactic relationships among the elements in a text. This statistical model is called Knowledge Digraph Contribution (KDC) Analysis. The parameters of the model can be estimated from human recall, summarization, and question-answering data. Each parameter may be interpreted as the relative strength of a different knowledge schema. The parameters of the KDC model are uniquely determined and the large sample probability distribution of the estimates of the parameters can be derived for large sample sizes. These mathematical results are relevant for deriving customized statistical tests for testing hypotheses about the relevance of specific knowledge schema weighting parameters. Statistical tests for deciding which of several text knowledge schemata "best-fits" a given set of recall data have also been developed. More recently, methods of sampling from the KDC probability model have been derived which allow one to generate synthetic recall protocols and then compare these synthesized recall protocols with actual human recall protocols for the purpose of evaluating the validity of the user-specified "knowledge analyses" of the text. A prototype version of this software package is now available to text comprehension researchers.

Software to Support Semantic Coding of Human Free Response Data

Dr. Golden and his graduate students are also working on the AUTOCODER/ASMURF project which is a software tool which facilitates the coding of recall, summarization, talk-aloud, and question-answering protocol data.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0113669. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.