Cross-Lingual knowledge discovery : Chinese-to-English article linking in Wikipedia

In this paper we examine automated Chinese to English link discovery in Wikipedia and the effects of Chinese segmentation and Chinese to English translation on the hyperlink recommendation. Our experimental results show that the implemented link discovery framework can effectively recommend Chinese-to-English cross-lingual links. The techniques described here can assist bi-lingual users where a particular topic is not covered in Chinese, is not equally covered in both languages, or is biased in one language; as well as for language learning.

Characterizing multi-agent team behavior from partial team tracings : evidence from the English Premier League

Real-world AI systems have been recently deployed which can automatically analyze the plan and tactics of tennis players. As the game-state is updated regularly at short intervals (i.e. point-level), a library of successful and unsuccessful plans of a player can be learnt over time. Given the relative strengths and weaknesses of a player’s plans, a set of proven plans or tactics from the library that characterize a player can be identified. For low-scoring, continuous team sports like soccer, such analysis for multi-agent teams does not exist as the game is not segmented into “discretized” plays (i.e. plans), making it difficult to obtain a library that characterizes a team’s behavior. Additionally, as player tracking data is costly and difficult to obtain, we only have partial team tracings in the form of ball actions which makes this problem even more difficult. In this paper, we propose a method to overcome these issues by representing team behavior via play-segments, which are spatio-temporal descriptions of ball movement over fixed windows of time. Using these representations we can characterize team behavior from entropy maps, which give a measure of predictability of team behaviors across the field. We show the efficacy and applicability of our method on the 2010-2011 English Premier League soccer data.

Urban renewal, migration and memories : the affordances of place-based pedagogies for developing immigrant students’ literate repertoires

This paper reports on the new literacy demands in the middle years of schooling project in which the affordances of placed-based pedagogy are being explored through teacher inquiries and classroom-based design experiments. The school is located within a large-scale urban renewal project in which houses are being demolished and families relocated. The original school buildings have recently been demolished and replaced by a large ‘superschool’ which serves a bigger student population from a wider area. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, the teachers reported that the language literacy learning of students (including a majority of students learning English as a second language) involved in the project exceeded their expectations. The project provided the motivation for them to develop their oral language repertoires, by involving them in processes such as conducting interviews with adults for their oral histories, through questioning the project manager in regular meetings, and through reporting to their peers and the wider community at school assemblies. At the same time students’ written and multimodal documentation of changes in the neighbourhood and the school grounds extended their literate and semiotic repertoires as they produced books, reports, films, powerpoints, visual designs and models of structures.

Mentoring pre-service teachers on school students’ differentiated learning

This Australian study explores the mentoring of pre-service teachers in selecting and implementing teaching strategies to meet students‟ learning needs. Two case studies involving 28 mentor teachers in a professional development program and a mentor-mentee partnership during a four week practicum provided data about mentoring teaching strategies for differentiated learning. Findings showed that contexts for learning about differentiation occurred at the pre action, in-action, and post-action stages. Central to each stage were pedagogical knowledge practices such as planning, preparation, classroom management, assessment, and problem solving (reflection-in-action to present solutions to problems) as key to in-action strategising and the mentoring processes. Mentoring pre-service teachers on how to devise teaching strategies for differentiated learning needs to be researched with a wider range of mentors and pre-service teachers, including those at different stages of development.

Education for social responsibility: Ethics and imagination for engaging students and teachers in educational reform

In this chapter we make assumptions about the primary role of education for the life of its beneficiaries and for society. Undoubtedly, formal education plays an important role in enhancing the likelihood for participation in future social life, including enjoyment and employment, by the student as well as the development of the well being of society in general. Similarly, education is often seen as a main means for intergenerational transmission of knowledge and culture. However, as Dewey (1916) argues, in liberal societies, education has the capacity of enhancing democratic participation in society that goes beyond passive participation by its members. One can argue that the achievement of the ideals of democracy demands a free and strong education system. In other words, while education can function as an instrument to integrate students into the present society, it also has the potential to become an instrument for its transformation by means of which citizens can develop an understanding of how their society functions and a sense of agency towards its transformation. Arguably, this is what Freire (1985) meant when he talked about the role of education to “read and write” the world. A stream of progressive educators (e.g., Apple (2004), Freire, (1985), Giroux (2001) and McLaren (2002)) taught us that the reading of the world that is capable of leading into writing the world is a critical reading; i.e., a reading that poses “Why” questions and imagines “What else can be” (Carr & Kemmis, 1987).

Conceptualising teachers’ assessment literacies in an era of curriculum and assessment reform

Teacher assessment literacy is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. Yet understanding teacher assessment literacy is important in an international curriculum and assessment reform context that continues to challenge teachers’ assessment practices. In this article situated examples of classroom assessment literacies are analysed using Bernstein’s (Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique, Taylor and Francis, London, 1996; Br J Sociol Educ 20(2):157–173, 1999) theoretical tools of vertical and horizontal discourses, classification and framing. Drawing on a sociocultural view of learning, the authors define teacher assessment literacies as dynamic social practices which are context dependent and which involve teachers in articulating and negotiating classroom and cultural knowledges with one another and with learners, in the initiation, development and practice of assessment to achieve the learning goals of students. This conceptualisation of assessment literacy aims to make explicit some underpinning theoretical constructs of assessment literacy to inform dialogue and decision making for policy and practice to benefit student learning and achievement.

Link discovery for Chinese/English cross-language web information retrieval

Nowadays people heavily rely on the Internet for information and knowledge. Wikipedia is an online multilingual encyclopaedia that contains a very large number of detailed articles covering most written languages. It is often considered to be a treasury of human knowledge. It includes extensive hypertext links between documents of the same language for easy navigation. However, the pages in different languages are rarely cross-linked except for direct equivalent pages on the same subject in different languages. This could pose serious difficulties to users seeking information or knowledge from different lingual sources, or where there is no equivalent page in one language or another. In this thesis, a new information retrieval task—cross-lingual link discovery (CLLD) is proposed to tackle the problem of the lack of cross-lingual anchored links in a knowledge base such as Wikipedia. In contrast to traditional information retrieval tasks, cross language link discovery algorithms actively recommend a set of meaningful anchors in a source document and establish links to documents in an alternative language. In other words, cross-lingual link discovery is a way of automatically finding hypertext links between documents in different languages, which is particularly helpful for knowledge discovery in different language domains. This study is specifically focused on Chinese / English link discovery (C/ELD). Chinese / English link discovery is a special case of cross-lingual link discovery task. It involves tasks including natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and cross-lingual link discovery. To justify the effectiveness of CLLD, a standard evaluation framework is also proposed. The evaluation framework includes topics, document collections, a gold standard dataset, evaluation metrics, and toolkits for run pooling, link assessment and system evaluation. With the evaluation framework, performance of CLLD approaches and systems can be quantified. This thesis contributes to the research on natural language processing and cross-lingual information retrieval in CLLD: 1) a new simple, but effective Chinese segmentation method, n-gram mutual information, is presented for determining the boundaries of Chinese text; 2) a voting mechanism of name entity translation is demonstrated for achieving a high precision of English / Chinese machine translation; 3) a link mining approach that mines the existing link structure for anchor probabilities achieves encouraging results in suggesting cross-lingual Chinese / English links in Wikipedia. This approach was examined in the experiments for better, automatic generation of cross-lingual links that were carried out as part of the study. The overall major contribution of this thesis is the provision of a standard evaluation framework for cross-lingual link discovery research. It is important in CLLD evaluation to have this framework which helps in benchmarking the performance of various CLLD systems and in identifying good CLLD realisation approaches. The evaluation methods and the evaluation framework described in this thesis have been utilised to quantify the system performance in the NTCIR-9 Crosslink task which is the first information retrieval track of this kind.

Studying in Cuba, returning home to work : experiences of graduates from the English-speaking Caribbean

Cuba’s higher education scholarship program has received little attention in the literature on education and development. In this chapter, I discuss themes that emerge from my interviews with graduates from English-speaking Caribbean countries who studied in Cuba, as well as Cuban educators, on the nature of their academic programs and their subsequent careers. This facilitates exploration of a number of questions, including the following: 1. How, in the perceptions of scholarship students and graduates, have they experienced the philosophy of combing study, practical work, and research in the tertiary education curriculum in Cuban universities? 2. What impact does studying in Cuba appear to have on graduates after they return to their home countries? 3. How does the experience of the graduates throw light on the relationship between tertiary education and national development?

Adaptive teachers embracing new ways of learning with robotics in Chinese schools

In July 2010, China announced the “National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development(2010-2020)” (PRC 2010). The Plan calls for an education system that: • promotes an integrated development which harnesses everyone’s talent; • combines learning and thinking; unifies knowledge and practice; • allows teachers to teach according to individuals’ needs; and • reforms education quality evaluation and personnel evaluation systems focusing on performance including character, knowledge, ability and other factors. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a Professional Learning Program (PLP) undertaken by 432 primary, middle and high school teachers in China. The aim of this initiative was to develop adaptive expertise in using technology that facilitated innovative science and technology teaching and learning as envisaged by the Chinese Ministry of Education’s (2010-2020) education reforms. Key principles derived from literature about professional learning and scaffolding of learning informed the design of the PLP. The analysis of data revealed that the participants had made substantial progress towards the development of adaptive expertise. This was manifested not only by advances in the participants’ repertoires of Subject Matter Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge but also in changes to their levels of confidence and identities as teachers. It was found that through time the participants had coalesced into a professional learning community that readily engaged in the sharing, peer review, reuse and adaption, and collaborative design of innovative science and technology learning and assessment activities.

Are Malaysian Teachers Ready to Assume the Duties of Reporting Child Abuse and Neglect?

Mandatory child abuse and neglect reporting laws apply to teachers in many countries of the world. However, such laws have not yet been introduced for teachers in Malaysia, and there is debate about whether the laws should be extended to teachers at all. This paper aimed to investigate the level of support among teachers to assume mandatory reporting duties and to identify factors determining this support in Malaysia. A total of 668 teachers from 14 randomly selected public primary schools completed an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. Results showed that 44.4 per cent of the respondents supported legislation requiring teachers to report child abuse. Teachers of Indian ethnicity, those with a shorter duration of service in teaching (< 5 years), the availability of knowledgeable and supportive school staff and a higher level of commitment to reporting were significant factors affecting teachers' support for mandatory reporting. This study provides important insights into factors influencing teachers' support for the introduction of mandatory reporting legislation for teachers in Malaysia. Teachers do not unanimously support these laws and there is a lack of clarity about what such laws will mean for teachers. The data highlight the need for specific training programmes to raise teachers' awareness, build their confidence and enhance their willingness to report child abuse.

Principals, Teachers, and Student's Perception of the Information and Communication Technology in Kuwait Secondary Schools (Rhetoric and reality)

ICT integration has been advocated to provide opportunities to improve students’ achievement and engagement through transforming the educational setting. A valuable tool that contributes in enhancing and developing students’ cognitive skills for lifelong learning, ICT integration has introduced a new educational philosophy, shifting the role of students into a more central position in the pedagogical processes. Kuwait, as with many other countries, has recently planned ICT integration to develop its citizen’s capacities. This study sought to capture the principals’, teachers’, and students’ perceptions of ICT integration in pedagogical activities, as well as how ICT is being used for learning and teaching activities in three ICT leading Kuwaiti secondary schools. Interviews with principals, teachers, and students were conducted, along with an open-ended questionnaire for the teachers, researcher observations, and document analysis. The findings revealed that ICT integration in Kuwait needed to be reinforced to accomplish the ICT integration objectives. A call for further support for teachers, and a reconsideration of the ICT integration strategies were also recommended.

Basic cognitive experiences and definitions in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

This study applies theories of cognitive linguistics to the compilation of English learners’ dictionaries. Specifically, it employs the concepts of basic level categories and image schemas, two basic cognitive experiences, to examine the ‘definition proper’ of English dictionaries for foreign learners. In the study, the definition proper refers to the constituent part of a reference work that provides an explanation of the meanings of a word, phrase or term. This rationalization mainly consists of defining vocabulary, sense division and arrangement, as well as the means of defining (i.e. paraphrase, true definition, functional definition, and pictorial illustration). The aim of the study is to suggest ways of aligning the consultation and learning of definitions with dictionary users’ cognitive experiences. For this purpose, an analysis of the definition proper of the fourth edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE4) from the perspective of basic cognitive experiences has been undertaken. The study found that, generally, the lexicographic practices of LDOCE4 are consistent with theories of cognitive linguistics. However, there exist shortcomings that result from disregarding basic cognitive experiences.