Routledge Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis (University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science Series)

About the Author Tom Landauer is a theoretical and applied cognitive scientist, with interests on the one hand in advancing understanding of how complex knowledge, such as language, is learned and used, and on the other hand in creating instructional methods and automated aids to speed and enhance knowledge acquisition and use. He led the brilliant team of young cognitive scientists at Bell Communications Research that invented LSA and, along with Susan Dumais, pioneered LSAs interpretation and validation as a theory of verbal meaning. He is currently a Research Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Executive Vice President at Pearson Knowledge Technologies, a subsidiary of Pearson, the international educational publishing and assessment company. A 1960 Harvard Ph.D., he served on faculties of The Harvard Graduate School of education, Dartmouth College, and Stanford University, and was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. From 1969-1984, he was a researcher and research director at Bell Telephone Laboratories and its successor, Bell Communications Research. Tom is a devoted proponent of the Pasteurs Quadrant scientific method: taking problems from practical needs, finding solutions by empirical research and rigorous modeling, and testing theories and solutions by their effectiveness and completeness in solving the inspiring practical problem. (For example, LSA provides a rigorous theory of verbal meaning with wide applicability, but is unable to explain syntactic phenomena.) His research has almost always centered on some aspect of learning, from its physiology and biochemistry to the effects of practice schedules to mathematical theories, and to applications as diverse as marketing, childrens social development, human-computer interaction, and the specification of memorable telephone numbers. He regards LSA as by far the most significant accomplishment with which he has been associated. Danielle S. McNamara is a cognitive scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis. A great deal of her work involves the theoretical study of cognition as well as the application of cognition to educational practice. She examines a variety of phenomena related to reading, comprehension skill, working memory, communication, expertise, knowledge acquisition, and the generation effect. A major thrust of her research concerns how to improve comprehension and learning from text. One focus of that research is on providing training to improve metacognitive reading strategies. For example, she and her research team developed an automated reading strategy tutor called ISTART (Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking) that teaches readers to more effectively understand difficult text. A second focus of her reading research is on text cohesion and how that interacts with reader aptitudes. She and her research team have developed Coh-Metrix, an automated tool that assesses text on multiple dimensions, including text cohesion. Many of her projects, such as the iSTART and Coh-Metrix projects, involve the creation and refinement of computational algorithms to extract meaning from text and to automatically interpret and respond to text and discourse. LSA has played an important role in these endeavors. Simon Dennis is a psychologist and computer scientist with interests in human memory and language processes. His work on recognition memory has precipitated a fundamental rethink about the sources of interference in episodic memory paradigms, while his Syntagmatic Paradigmatic model has provided a solution to the question of how people abstract thematic role information from text as well as providing insight into the nature of inference in text comprehension. He completed his training at the University of Queensland before becoming a lecturer in the Australian Research Council's, Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology. He then moved to United States to take on