Search results for 'tag:Conversations tag:Grammar' matching tags 'Conversations' and 'Grammar'

Teaching English using the Chatbot Game

amichail — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:35:48 GMT

I believe that the Chatbot Game can be used to help students learn English as a second language:

http://chatbotgame.com
http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_rs
http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_s

Players of the Chatbot Game shape the chatbot's personality and expertise by adding simple chat rules. The better their chat rules, the higher they will score. Higher scoring rules are more likely to be used to generate a chatbot response.

I think such a game may be useful for learning English as a second language. After all, to score lots of points, you will do well by focusing on common sorts of conversation fragments -- exactly the sort of thing that someone learning English should focus on. Moreover, you get to see how well your rules do in actual chats in terms of a rule score and actual conversation fragments.

If the player uses poor grammar in a chat rule, then that rule may not score well assuming that most people chatting with the bot already know English pretty well. Even if someone doesn't vote down a rule with bad grammar, he/she might comment on the bad grammar in his/her response.

In essence, the chat rules can be viewed as open-ended exercises that are graded by the people chatting with the bot.

What do you think?

Re: GIVE A RIDE

CalifJim — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:12:24 GMT

New2grammar
I'd appreciate it if you could attempt to explain the difference.

I know that this repeats much of what was said above by others, but with complex topics sometimes just reading the same information with many different phrasings helps a little.

I bought it at Target.

Here Target refers to the entire company, regardless of which particular store the purchase was made at. It's nearly equivalent to (or rather, implies) I bought it at a Target store (See below.)

_____

I bought it at the Target on Elm Street.

Here Target is an adjective raised to the status of (common) noun by the absence of the word store. Meaning: I bought it at the Target store on Elm Street.

_____

I bought it at a Target.

Here again an adjective is raised to a noun. I'm guessing this one is not used as much as the version without the article. Meaning: I bought it at one of the stores operated by the company whose name is Target.

_____

I bought it at the Target.

Here, context would have established which Target store is meant. To use this one, there must be only one Target store that the listener could conclude is the store in question. Perhaps the conversation takes place in a small town with only one Target outlet. Because most of these large companies have so many stores, I would guess that this sentence would not be used much.

_____

Concerning bank, post office, and so on:

I was at the bank seems to me to mean I was at the bank that I usually go to / I was at "my" bank.

Actually I was at a bank, I suppose, in reality, but, besides not conveying the idea of my bank, that doesn't give the idea that I was doing bank-related business in the way that at the bank does.

The same oddity is present in several other expressions. I took the bus really means I took a bus, but a bus doesn't suggest a city-wide transportation system the way the bus does. (I used the local bus system.)

These are really difficult to explain! There are so many very slightly different usages!

Re: Sentence correction

elcid12345 — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:38:39 GMT

Thanks a lot Grammar Geek! Yes, you have got it right. That's what I intended to say. If I had provided the context of the conversation it would have been a lot simpler to understand what I meant. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who had (or has as he is still enrolled there, don't know which one to use) joined a coaching institute for an exam. I am also preparing for the same exam and also had had/taken the coaching for the same in 2004. So, I was telling him my view on the coaching.

By the way, is it wrong to say "what institutes teach you at their classroom sessions."? I guess 'at' should be replaced by 'in' but is there anything else wrong with this sentence and is the personification of institutes wrong?

Kindly mention if I have made any mistakes in the above paragraphs.

With Best Regards,
Rahul

Re: ain't

Joakim — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:30:06 GMT

Ain't is normally used in orally conversations and in informal texts. As grammar Geek says "Ain't" can sustitue for "am/is/are - not" and certainly "has/have - not".

Proofreading essay

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:43:24 GMT

This is a senior honors project essay about a programming job with PHP. I know it's a lot of work but I need a grammar check done.

Here it is::

In taking upon my Senior Honors Project I have thrown myself over a ledge with the intention to climb back up. Through this year my drive, enthusiasm, and patience have been tested. However, I believe I am within an armâs reach of the top and, with one final grasp, I shall report my experience.I could not have completed my project without some very important outside resources. One of these resources that greatly aided me was the PHP manual on php.net. This website holds information on all of the built in PHP functions. On each page users can post solutions to common problems arisen by the function dedicated to it or describe in more detail how to use them. Using this has cut down on development time by giving me answers to almost all of my syntax and function related questions. If I had trouble remembering the name of a function I could simply look it up on the site. Without this I would either have to use a guess-and-check type of finding the solution or type it into a search-engine and rely on third-party sites. This resource also helped me discover new functions that made my coding easier; I would not have to âreinvent the wheelâ when a built in function existed. The conversations with my project mentor, Ed Sprenger, have also yielded great knowledge. The insight he has given me on all my questions was very informative and he has taught me what I would have otherwise never learned through basic research. Our topics of discussion ranged from future jobs, programming languages, and life in the computer science field to internet security and database advice. It has been very helpful to have someone to talk to who is in the computer science field and understands what I am doing. I cannot imagine getting through this project with someone who didnât know a bit from a byte. Ed Sprenger was a valuable resource in my project and has taught me very well.One of my objectives from the start of the project was to learn how to program in the windows environment. I am now confident that I am very knowledgeable in this field. Through use of the Windows API (Application Programming Interface) in my project I have learned all about programming windows applications. Some of the main topics I delved into were message controls and message handling. Controls are the things that make up a dialog box or application window: edit boxes, drop down boxes, and radio buttons. These, along with message handling, are all it takes to create a functional and effective Windows program. Message handling is a broad subject and was therefore a difficult subject to grasp and implement. Messages are data that is sent to the main application, child dialog boxes, and controls. These messages range from telling the object it has been clicked upon to telling the object to destroy itself. There are many messages that could be potentially sent and choosing which ones to recognize and the handling of them is up to the programmer. Luckily the Windows SDK Documentation outlines all the messages and their data.The Windows SDK (Software Development Kit) Documentation and the online documentation at msdn.com both helped me in the application programming aspect of my project. Since the documentation is straight from Microsoft, I can rely on it to tell me everything about the piece of information that I am looking up. It describes itself plainly and clearly and cross references related data that has more than often helped me grasp the subject beyond a basic understanding.Every website needs a directory chain; a way of organizing the folders that hold the files. I got my idea from a web programming job I held with Chad Furman two summers back. I learned a lot from him, holding that job. This directory tree was one thing that I remember. I have one main folder that houses all of the main pages of the site. This includes the index page, the login page, and the report card page among others. From there I have a picture folder which houses all the pictures and a folder called âincludesâ. This âincludesâ folder contains all of the PHP helper files that process the HTML forms along with some helper functions. Within lies another folder labeled âclassesâ which contains the PHP classes of the project. Each class has its own file which is included by the different files in the âincludeâ folder. So an example design would be the report card page including the report card include file (in the âincludeâ folder). This included file would then include the report card class file (in the âclassesâ folder). The design is not very complex but it does a good job of organizing my files.One aspect of the site that I was very proud of is the system for logging in. What I have set up is an include file that is required by all pages that require access to user validity or other user functions. This include file holds the user class which contains functions that deal with all aspects to the user. Any page containing the file can check for user validity, log the user in, log them out, and access the userâs data. Parents, teachers, and administrators all use the same login page. However when parents login they only in need of a password and not a username. The database holds all the different types of usersâ data the same way and in the same table. I was lucky for the logging in system to turn out as good as it did.Upon logging in every user has a set of session variables. These variables are used for keeping track of the user and their credentials. They will hold their value for as long as the internet browser is open. So a user is logged in, even while surfing other pages, providing they donât log themselves out or close out of their browser. This technique trumps using browser cookies for a couple of reasons. The pro of using cookies to save data over multiple sessions does hold value in my case. No one user will be travelling the website often enough for this feature to be worth the trouble of implementing it. Session variables are fine for what I am setting out to do. There are three basic sections that the end user has access to on the website. They are all accessed through the control panel, and depending on which type of user is requesting that page depends on the control panel they see. The control panel checks the session âaccessâ variable, and depending on the value, displays the appropriate options to be linked on the control panel. The most common type of user is the parent. Their control panel consists of one item; a link to see their childâs report card. Clicking this takes them to a table showing their report card. Each entry contains the class, the teacher, and the grade. For a class description they can simply click on the class name and a pop-up window will open containing the text. The only other option the parent has is to logout, which is on all the usersâ control panels. The next type of user is the teacher. They have considerable more options than the parent, as they should. The first thing to be noted is the teacher panel. This page is where the teachers may access and edit the enrollment and grades of their class. They may add and remove students from their class and add, edit, and delete the grades of their students. This is where the teacher will be spending most of their time. The next thing a teacher may do is view report cards. They can see any childâs report card that is in their class. However the only grades that will be listed are the ones from classes that the viewing teacher teaches. So an English teacher will not be able to see the grade a student gets in a Math class. The last thing on the teacher control panel is the class stats page. This page contains a list of all the grades in the class and the class mean, class median, and class range. The last type of user is the administrator. They have access to everything. Right from the control panel they can go into the admin panel which lets them edit almost everything on the site. On this admin panel page there are the categories: Student, Parent, Teacher, Admin, Class, Enrollment, and Grade. Under each of these are the options: Add, Delete, and Edit. So under each of the categories they can add to them (e.g. adding a student), delete them (e.g. deleting a grade), and edit them (e.g. changing a classâs description). With this they can start from scratch and create a whole grading system complete with classes, teachers, students, and grades. Along with this power, the administrator can see all studentsâ report cards complete with all classes and see all classesâ stats pages. The administrator is the person who must set everything up once, and after this the teachers and parents may use the site to the max. On every one of the pages that displays personal data there is a security check on each page refresh. This is done to prevent users from seeing what they shouldnât be seeing. This feature works by taking the user id session variable and/or the student id pertaining to that user and checks them against their respective get variables. Without this security, a user could log in and then see other usersâ data. For example, a parent could log in and direct their browser to the report card page. Naturally, their childâs report card will show up. However if they change the user id âgetâ variable and refresh the page they will see another childâs grades. This is where my protection kicks in, preventing this and giving the user an error explaining that they donât have access to the page they are trying to view. With the database designed as it is, deleting data has become a little complicated. For example, when you delete a class, all the grades are still in the database despite the fact that they have no class associated with them. Also when a student is removed their grades stay behind to rot. I have fixed this by allowing the administrator (the only one doing any deleting affected by this) the option to delete all associative data relating to the entry being deleted. So now (assuming the user chooses the option) when a student is deleted their grades and their parent user are also deleted. Also when a class is deleted all the grades go along with it. This prevents old and needless data from piling up in the database and causing confusion among the users.

Upon completion of my senior honors project I am confident with my skills and am ready to go out into the world in search of a computer science career. Spending a lot of my free time in front of my computer and programming has put me through the ringer, and I liked it. Before I started, I had no experience working on an organized project with a pre-existing goal. Before, I have just worked on small projects that have not gone anywhere. Now that I am done programming, I can see the product that I have made. I can see that it has been completed with success. I have taken my ideas and integrated them efficiently and successfully. I have learned a great deal this year.

I appreciate any help with this, thank you.

Simple letter to manager. Pls help to check grammar & sentences

vincent tee — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:32:41 GMT

Hi English Guru,

Would you please give a hand to help to verify my grammar & the structure of my english sentences resides from the letter below. Thanks !

Hi Reena,

Since you told me that I could discuss anything with you, I would like to take the opportunity now. Currently I am quite concern about my future career and would like your comments. For these past 4 months, I have tried to contribute as much as I could and work around the clock to put in extra work hours even on Saturday and Sunday to learn and contribute for the team. I understand I am working on plenty of things but although I am doing job multitasking however I could prove all my multitask-jobs were done with high quality and beyond expectation.

1. 1) BW Reporting Development

2. 2) BW Support

3. 3) Training management

4. 4) MI Newsletter

5. 5) Web programming

6. 6) Graphics + Multimedia

I would like to know further about the last conversation you have discussed via teleconference and did mention about:

1) Buying me over to project team

2) Will give me plenty of BW development work to do that could exceed what Vincent has taught me

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,
Vincent

Re: tense switching

CalifJim — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:42:07 GMT

New2grammar
I need a third opinion.

Well, I'll give you a second opinion and someone else can give you the third!

I met an old high school friend ... yesterday. It had been three years since we'd talked. << This is technically correct.

I met an old high school friend ... yesterday. It has been three years since we've talked. << Acceptable to my ear, probably because yesterday is so recent that we can include it psychologically in the same broad present in which this conversation is occurring. This is nevertheless technically 'wrong'. But note that sometimes what is 'wrong' from a strict mathematical view of time relationships is quite idiomatic linguistically and psychologically.

However, my ear would not like this:

That was the year I ran into an old high school friend -- 1995 I think it was. Anyway, it has been three years since we've talked. (NO! Here my ear would want had been and we'd.)

Re: baby girl

optilang — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:29:56 GMT

Grammar Geek
We welcome your contributions to the forum, but PLEASES accept that sometimes there are other people who can provide more natural conversation based on the way we've been speaking our entire lives.

At the risk of causing offence (not my intention I can assure you) I would like to ask the following question.

I know that native speakers are best placed to give their assessment on things - but

does it mean that native speakers are never wrong - and should we therefore always accept the "ruling" of a native speaker without question?

Maybe this is not the right place to ask this - sorry

Re: Correct the grammar of the paragraphs.

Anonymous — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:28:38 GMT

Right away, it's nearly 11:00 pm. I've just got through replying to a friend , the letter is quite long, so I it took a long time to write. She's Taiwanese, quite nice and very kind. She's extremly curious about Vietnamese culture, activity, attitude with foreigner.... She also wants to travel to Vietnam and have specialities. While I was writing, Tuan buzzed me, gave me a website and asked me to him some advice about choosing which model of shoes he should buy. I gave him my advice, and he had chosen.

I kept on writing into the day. A short while later, Huynh Anh said hi to me. I told her to wait a moment. Then, I continued my business. When I finished, she went off-line for a long time, hey.... sorry for this.

I tried to find someone to chat with, but no one was online. Today, my friend went back to his hometown. He was hoping to get some speciality from his hometown after his return. hehe.

Hmmm, let me remember whether there was any conversations which happened today to relate to you. Ah, Sea Games 24. This afternoon, after finishing the class, my friends and I went to a coffee shop to watch the football match between Vietnam and Malaysia. This match, the Vietnamese team played not very well although beating the Malaysian team. I was quite disappointed; were you ?

Well, I'm getting sleepy. Tomorrow is Sunday, and i wish everybody a beautiful weekend.

Goodnight

Re: which vs of which

CalifJim — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:21:16 GMT

New2grammar
He'd only left her a note on the bedside table of which she had not understood the content.

This sentence could occur in a short story or novel. It would not likely occur in a casual conversation. Instead, it might be

He left her a note on the table beside the bed, but she didn't understand it.

Or if the past perfect is absolutely necessary in the context.

He'd left her a note on the table beside the bed, but she hadn't understood it.

Or if the "only" idea is absolutely required, a person might add only as in the original or might say

All he did was leave her a note on the table by the bed, but she didn't understand it.

The grammatical structures of ordinary everyday conversation are much simpler than those found in novels and essays.