In the English accreditation exams, skills are assessed in three types of texts; expository, narrative and argumentative. Expository text seek to find hierarchical relationships between concepts and components. Narrative texts aim to identify the ability to discriminate events in time. The third type of document is argumentative that posess complex inferential relationships. These require skills of the student to relate more complex elements and thus produce answers from establishing mental models with inferential routes, which allow discarding distractors. In this proposal, the characteristics that possess argumentative texts are showed considering the cognitive relations between facts, pieces of evidence, opinions that are present in debates. Also, the construction of inference routes is defined with the representation of knowledge to generate answers. With the schemes, it is required to apply a degree confidence function to the type of element of the text considering that facts and pieces of evidence have a higher level of confidence than an opinion. With these results, an evaluation can be generated to discard distractors when there is neither evidence nor facts that support the opinion or belief of the writer.
Readers of texts in different languages than their native one have two challenges: first,the
readers have to translate to their native language, and then to map the structure from the
vocabulary that they know of the foreign language [
Reading requires the development of a complex cognitive system that supports the
processing of information at different levels, whether conscious or unconscious. A good
reader is one who can construct an integrated mental representation of the text, which
is also coherent and accurate [
For this reason, it is crucial to pose models of knowledge representation of the passages of the reading comprehension section, with their corresponding questions and answers. The purpose is to establish the meaning of the argumentive text according to the context. Although first-order logic allows us to model assertions or prCedoipcyartiegsh,t i©t 2019 for this paper by its authors. is also essential to establish a passages context model, so situation calculusAisttraibuusteiofunl4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) tool to do so. Another crucial aspect of favoring this knowledge representation is the identification of the semantic and cognitive relations present in the passages.
So, depending on the type of passage, the inferences can be produced that help establishes strategies to respond appropriately to the questions of the reading comprehension section of the TOEFL. In this work the argumentative passages will be revised.
Efforts have been made to improve understanding through tips, strategies, identification of rules, and practices. But in most cases does not take into account the context that is a fundamental element in the mental representation used by the brain to generate inferences and build an inference route of related concepts. In this work is intended to show the knowledge representation of TOEFL argumentative texts considering to model the context of situation calculus as well as identify the cognitive relations present in the these texts to facilitate the selection of answers in questions.
The content of this paper is divided as follows: section 2 shows a theoretical framework of cognitive models of reading comprehension. Section 3 the argumentation theory, the situation calculus, and their relation to the modeling of predicates considering the context are presented. In section 4, an representation knowledge is given. In section 5, an example is given of how a passage is converted to a knowledge base according to cognitive relations and situation calculus. A knowledge representation of the passage is proposed in section 6. Finally, the conclusions and future work are presented in section 7. 2
Reading comprehension is the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing
meaning. As Johnson[
This process include to decipher how letters create words, to accurately and
efficiently translate them to sounds (extract meaning from text), to formulate a
representation of the information that is being presented, which inevitably requires the elaboration
of new definitions; and to integrate the previous knowledge with the old (construction
of meaning) [
The precursors of these mental models were Van Dijk and Kintsch[
Two key concepts in this recall process were the ’macrostructure’ and the
’superstructure’, which were proposed in that investigation. This theory assumed that textual
processing is done in cycles, due to the limited capacity of short-term memory after
decoding the code and that a representation of the text (base text) in the memory was
gradually built up in this way. This base text not only consists of a connected sequence
of ’propositions’, but also establishes a hierarchical structure of ’macro propositions’,
which correspond to the most critical and least essential themes of the text deduced
(inferred) by the reader[
The base text, then, results from sequences of propositions that are made coherent by the ’repetition of arguments’. The macrostructures, on the other hand, can be defined as higher-order propositions that include underlying propositions. In other words, macropropositions are constructed with the micropropositions of a document and are a summary or different abstract structure underlying a text, so they must be inferred from it. Thus the micro and macropropositions form a ’macrostructure’, that is, a semantic structure that defines the overall meaning of a text.
However, these structures must associate with a context associated with the reader’s
experience. Thus, a situational model is formed, which is a cognitive model of the
situation reflected in the text that contains inferred material [
Also in 1995, the 3CAPS model was proposed by Goldman, Varma and Cote[
Later Kintsch [
Even though several cognitive models have been proposed, the Kinstch and Van
Dijk model [
This work proposes a knowledge representation based on the importance of the situational model, taking advantage of the benefits of cognitive relations and the situation calculus to approach the construction of inferences closer to the creation of mental representations over argumentative texts. 3
In this section, the theory that will support the argumentative passages representation is mentioned.
An argumentative text is one that aims to support an idea, refute it, or persuade the
reader to take the position of the writer of the text, through a series of structured and
coherent arguments that expose that point or points of view. In order to argue an idea,
it is necessary to present it, which means that the argumentative text combines both the
exposition and the argumentation [
Initially, the benefits of the calculation of situations to model contexts are described, which in the case of TOEFL texts are required, in addition to generating queries on predicates, which favors the modeling of inferences. Subsequently, the proposed representation is described as an inference tool that allows establishing rules to associate the correct answers to specific questions, these in the case of the argumentative texts depend mainly on the cognitive relations of these, so they are mentioned in the last subsection. 3.1
Argumentation always consists of a constellation of expressed thought contents, called
propositions, advanced in defense of the standpoint at issue. Such propositions can be
of various kinds and various degrees of complexity. The most uncomplicated
propositions make a connection between a subject (someone or something talked about) and a
predicate (a property that is assigned to the subject)[
Argumentative discourse aimed at resolving a difference of opinion in a reasonable the way has both a normative, critical dimension and a descriptive, empirical dimension, and in argumentation theory, both dimensions need to be taken into account.
Scholars of argumentation are often drawn to studying argumentation by their
practical interest in improving the quality of argumentative discourse where this is called. To
give substance to this challenging combination, they need to carry out a comprehensive
research program that ensures that argumentative discourse will not only be examined
descriptively as a specimen of verbal communication and interaction but also measured
against normative standards of reasonableness [
In this theory, there are terms such as belief, opinion, moreover, an attitude which
usually refers to related concepts that are in relevant ways Different from a standpoint.
These are concepts that suit the purposes of scholars who approach their object of study
from a different angle than argumentation theory [
Deborah Schiffrin (1990) [
On the other hand, a body of evidence is a warrant in case that evidence consists of
reports of observations which support some universally generalized condition [
The evidence has a relation with the facts, for example, this definition from a text on
legal evidence: A presumption may be defined to be an inference required by the rule of
law drawn as to the existence of one fact from the existence of some other established
basic facts [
As Secor has pointed out [
Hence an argument could o could not be required for every premise accepted.
Although some premises may be argued for in the context of a given argument, moreover,
some premises have been or may be argued for on other occasions, ultimately if a person
accepts any statements at all, this person must accept some statements without argument
[
This work proposes four elements in the TOEFL argumentative texts as cognitive relations considering the argumentation theory As the first element, the facts are proposed considering the true elements. As a second element are the opinions that may have a positive or negative direction concerning an argument, and these will require evidence in order to be sustained. Pieces of evidence are the observable elements that are going to accredit opinions with a certain degree of confidence. The last element would be the evaluation that will allow satisfying a conclusion or a correct answer in the case of the texts if the adequate inference route is found that leads to that justification.
In the case of argumentative texts, a structure of representation is proposed, as shown in Figure 1. Consider that the reader needs to analyze the facts, look for evidence of opinions; in order to evaluate the truth value of the judgments made by the author.
In the Figure 1 can be observed that in order to generate this inference route, it is required to place the reader in a specific context. This route will be done using the facts that, being elements that are previously identified with true value, the structure will be based in order to have the context in order to be able to assert in that context the elements that give evidence to find the route or to discard the incorrect routes.
The inference route is generated with this process: initially, the questions coming from the passage become predicates and are introduced in the node of the graph that corresponds to facts, the resulting output is the inference route that has the question in predicate format and the answers with the set of facts with which it is related. Then this route enter in the node of opinions and the generated output is a new route for each answer with all the opinions related to the answer are associated. Finally this new structure leaves and enters to the evidence node where according to the amount of evidence found for the opinions, the answer will have a degree of confidence, so an operator called a map would be required to establish a pair (opinion, evidence) that gives it a degree of confidence to establish which answer is the correct and in the case of discarded answers, this process establishes the elements by which they were discarded.
Three main reading skills are tested in TOEFL reading comprehension section[
In the reading passages [
– Modern dance was one of the ways some of these people sought to free their creative spirit (evidence) item She believed movement should be as natural as the swaying of the trees (opinion) – Duncan danced, ballet was the only type of dance performed in concert (evidence) – Duncan performed dance by using all her body in the freest possible way(act) – These were replaced with flowing Grecian tunics, bare feet, and unbound hair(evidence). – She believed in the natural body being allowed to move freely, and her dress displayed this ideal(opinion). – She was one of the pioneers who broke tradition so others might be able to develop the art (fact) – She discarded corset, ballet shoes. and stiff costumes(fact).
– Beethoven and Wagner, which was not the usual custom(fact). 6
Fig. 3. Example of Inference Route . 7
Although reading comprehension is a complex process, designing representation models that allow the identification of terms, semantic relationships, entailments, and contextrelated assertions will favor the generation of inferences to design query-answer systems to improve the achievement in the reading comprehension sections of TOEFL exams.
The assertions generated from the calculation of situations provide intuitive expressiveness to associate the cognitive relations to a context, so this representation will favor to identify properties and enrich inferential processes.
Kinstch and Van Dijk’s model, emphasize the situational model as an element dependent on the reader’s experience, with the description of the contexts generated from the calculation of situations, it is possible to create a representation closer to the reader’s experience. Thus strategies can be elaborated to improve the process of reading comprehension.
This work was carried is supported by the Sectoral Research Fund for Education with the CONACyT project 257357 and Thematic Network in Language Technologies(RedTTL) with its program Research stays for students.