It is widely believed that explicit verbatim memory for language is virtually nonexistent except in certain circumstances, for example if participants are warned they are to receive a memory test, if the language is 'interactive' (emotion-laden), or if the texts are exceedingly short and memory is tested immediately. The present experiments revisit the question of verbatim memory for language and demonstrate that participants do reliably recognize and recall full sentences that they are exposed to only once at above chance rates (Experiments 1 and 3). The texts are 300 words long, non-interactive, and no advanced warning of a memory test is given. Verbatim memory is demonstrated even when lexical content and memory for gist are controlled for (Experiments 2 and 4). The most striking finding is one of incidental recall: even after a six-day delay, participants reliably reproduce sentences they have heard before when asked to describe scenes, even though they are not asked to recall what they had heard (Experiment 5).

Deverbal nouns pose serious challenges for knowledgerepresentation systems. We present a method of canonicalizing deverbal noun representations, relying on a rich lexicon of verb subcategorization frames, the WordNet database, a large finite-state network for derivational morphology, and a series of heuristics for mapping deverbal arguments onto the arguments of corresponding verbs.

The ability to distinguish statistically different populations of speakers or writers can be an important asset in many NLP applications. In this paper, we describe a method of using document similarity measures to describe differences in behavior between native and non-native speakers of English in a writing task. 1

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify population differences between native and non‐native speakers of English in a writing task.

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)