Many English-as-a-second language learners have trouble using near-synonym words (e.g., small vs.little; briefly vs.shortly) correctly, and often look for example sentences to learn how two nearly synonymous terms differ. Prior work uses hand-crafted scores to recommend sentences but has difficulty in adopting such scores to all the near-synonyms as near-synonyms differ in various ways. We notice that the helpfulness of the learning material would reflect on the learners’ performance. Thus, we propose the inference-based learner-like agent to mimic learner behavior and identify good learning materials by examining the agent’s performance. To enable the agent to behave like a learner, we leverage entailment modeling’s capability of inferring answers from the provided materials. Experimental results show that the proposed agent is equipped with good learner-like behavior to achieve the best performance in both fill-in-the-blank (FITB) and good example sentence selection tasks. We further conduct a classroom user study with college ESL learners. The results of the user study show that the proposed agent can find out example sentences that help students learn more easily and efficiently. Compared to other models, the proposed agent improves the score of more than 17% of students after learning.

Language learners' limited lexical knowledge leads to imprecise wording. This is especially true when they attempt to express their emotions. Many learners rely heavily on the traditional thesaurus. Unfortunately, this fails to provide appropriate suggestions for lexical choices. To better aid English-as-a-second-language learners with word choices, we propose RESOLVE, which provides ranked synonyms of emotion words based on contextual information. RESOLVE suggests precise emotion words regarding the events in the relevant context. Patterns are learned to capture emotion events, and various factors are considered in the scoring function for ranking emotion words. We also describe an online writing system developed using RESOLVE and evaluate its effectiveness for learning assistance with a writing task. Experimental results showed that RESOLVE yielded a superior performance on NDCG@5 which significantly outperformed both PMI and SVM approaches, and offered better suggestions than Roget's Thesaurus and PIGAI (an online automated essay scoring system). Moreover, when applying it to the writing task, students' appropriateness with emotion words was 30 percent improved. Less-proficient learners benefited more from RESOLVE than highly-proficient learners. Post-tests also showed that after using RESOLVE, less-proficient learners' ability to use emotion words approached that of highly-proficient learners. RESOLVE thus enables learners to use precise emotion words.

In recent years, issues for supply chain management (SCM) have been discussed and researched for solving problems of business. The major reason in supply chain management is not only a concept of management but also a new solution and technique in increasing the competitive of business to enterprises. However, most of research issues focused on applications of information technology (IT) of SCM, only a few studies discussing how to develop a model to successfully implement a SCM to an enterprise. A quick response system (QR system) can help an enterprise to reduce the time of processes in business to business or business to customer in a supply chain, then the enterprise could also effectively, quickly to link upstream and downstream of industries, and to find and solve the problems of customers in anytime and anywhere. This study tries to provide a framework to explain the processes of implementation in an enterprise.