Los métodos de enseñanza en ELE : el método comunicativo revisado

Cette étude se focalise sur la révision de l’approche communicative des manuels d’enseignement de l’espagnol comme langue étrangère (ELE) et, plus particulièrement, sur celle des manuels utilisés dans les institutions scolaires du Québec. D’un point de vue historique, les premières inquiétudes liées à l’enseignement et à l’acquisition de langues secondes sont apparues dans l’Antiquité. Pendant des siècles, l’enseignement fondé sur la répétition de structures a prédominé, mais une fois le Moyen Âge passé, d’autres avancées pédagogiques sont nées. Par exemple, au XVIIe siècle, des études sur la question, inspirées de penseurs comme Montaigne et Locke, ont révélé que l’apprentissage formel de la langue n’était pas utile et que les apprenants avaient besoin d’une motivation pour apprendre. Le XXe siècle a été caractérisé par le déploiement de propositions méthodologiques à utiliser dans l’enseignement de langues secondes, et c’est ainsi que des méthodes telles que Directe, Audio-linguistique, Apprentissage communautaire de la langue et Approche naturelle ont surgi. Au milieu du XXe siècle s’est développée en Europe une proposition basée sur les besoins communicatifs des étudiants et ce qui, au début, était connu comme l’approche notionnelle fonctionnelle a évolué et est devenu l’enseignement communicatif. Une telle approche concerne essentiellement l’usage de la langue et accorde moins d’importance aux connaissances linguistiques. Elle a pour objectif principal que l’étudiant-parlant développe des habiletés interprétatives et expressives de la langue objet. En nous appuyant sur un cadre théorique de l’enseignement des langues et en analysant les manuels Nuevo ELE, Prisma et Español en marcha (niveaux A1-B2), nous prétendons vérifier la présence de l’approche communicative dans ces manuels afin de pouvoir démontrer que dans les activités dites communicatives, il y a différentes applications possibles des méthodes traditionnelles de l’enseignement de langues secondes et que, par conséquent, l’approche communicative réunit plusieurs propositions qui proviennent d’autres méthodes. Mot-clés : Espagnol langue étrangère (ELE), approche communicative, analyse de manuels, Nuevo ELE, Prisma, Español en marcha.

Design of a Knowledge-Based Geographic Information System

A GIS has been designed with limited Functionalities; but with a novel approach in Aits design. The spatial data model adopted in the design of KBGIS is the unlinked vector model. Each map entity is encoded separately in vector fonn, without referencing any of its neighbouring entities. Spatial relations, in other words, are not encoded. This approach is adequate for routine analysis of geographic data represented on a planar map, and their display (Pages 105-106). Even though spatial relations are not encoded explicitly, they can be extracted through the specially designed queries. This work was undertaken as an experiment to study the feasibility of developing a GIS using a knowledge base in place of a relational database. The source of input spatial data was accurate sheet maps that were manually digitised. Each identifiable geographic primitive was represented as a distinct object, with its spatial properties and attributes defined. Composite spatial objects, made up of primitive objects, were formulated, based on production rules defining such compositions. The facts and rules were then organised into a production system, using OPS5

Using Analogy to Acquire Commonsense Knowledge from Human Contributors

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain of natural language processing, it will provide the world knowledge much needed for semantic processing of natural language. To acquire knowledge from contributors not trained in knowledge engineering, I take the following four steps: (i) develop a knowledge representation (KR) model for simple assertions in natural language, (ii) introduce cumulative analogy, a class of nearest-neighbor based analogical reasoning algorithms over this representation, (iii) argue that cumulative analogy is well suited for knowledge acquisition (KA) based on a theoretical analysis of effectiveness of KA with this approach, and (iv) test the KR model and the effectiveness of the cumulative analogy algorithms empirically. To investigate effectiveness of cumulative analogy for KA empirically, Learner, an open source system for KA by cumulative analogy has been implemented, deployed, and evaluated. (The site "1001 Questions," is available at http://teach-computers.org/learner.html). Learner acquires assertion-level knowledge by constructing shallow semantic analogies between a KA topic and its nearest neighbors and posing these analogies as natural language questions to human contributors. Suppose, for example, that based on the knowledge about "newspapers" already present in the knowledge base, Learner judges "newspaper" to be similar to "book" and "magazine." Further suppose that assertions "books contain information" and "magazines contain information" are also already in the knowledge base. Then Learner will use cumulative analogy from the similar topics to ask humans whether "newspapers contain information." Because similarity between topics is computed based on what is already known about them, Learner exhibits bootstrapping behavior --- the quality of its questions improves as it gathers more knowledge. By summing evidence for and against posing any given question, Learner also exhibits noise tolerance, limiting the effect of incorrect similarities. The KA power of shallow semantic analogy from nearest neighbors is one of the main findings of this thesis. I perform an analysis of commonsense knowledge collected by another research effort that did not rely on analogical reasoning and demonstrate that indeed there is sufficient amount of correlation in the knowledge base to motivate using cumulative analogy from nearest neighbors as a KA method. Empirically, evaluating the percentages of questions answered affirmatively, negatively and judged to be nonsensical in the cumulative analogy case compares favorably with the baseline, no-similarity case that relies on random objects rather than nearest neighbors. Of the questions generated by cumulative analogy, contributors answered 45% affirmatively, 28% negatively and marked 13% as nonsensical; in the control, no-similarity case 8% of questions were answered affirmatively, 60% negatively and 26% were marked as nonsensical.

A dynamic knowledge-based decision support system to handle solids separation problems in activated sludge systems: development and validation

El sistema de fangs activats és el tractament biològic més àmpliament utilitzat arreu del món per la depuració d'aigües residuals. El seu funcionament depèn de la correcta operació tant del reactor biològic com del decantador secundari. Quan la fase de sedimentació no es realitza correctament, la biomassa no decantada s'escapa amb l'efluent causant un impacte sobre el medi receptor. Els problemes de separació de sòlids, són actualment una de les principals causes d'ineficiència en l'operació dels sistemes de fangs activats arreu del món. Inclouen: bulking filamentós, bulking viscós, escumes biològiques, creixement dispers, flòcul pin-point i desnitrificació incontrolada. L'origen dels problemes de separació generalment es troba en un desequilibri entre les principals comunitats de microorganismes implicades en la sedimentació de la biomassa: els bacteris formadors de flòcul i els bacteris filamentosos. Degut a aquest origen microbiològic, la seva identificació i control no és una tasca fàcil pels caps de planta. Els Sistemes de Suport a la Presa de Decisions basats en el coneixement (KBDSS) són un grup d'eines informàtiques caracteritzades per la seva capacitat de representar coneixement heurístic i tractar grans quantitats de dades. L'objectiu de la present tesi és el desenvolupament i validació d'un KBDSS específicament dissenyat per donar suport als caps de planta en el control dels problemes de separació de sòlids d'orígen microbiològic en els sistemes de fangs activats. Per aconseguir aquest objectiu principal, el KBDSS ha de presentar les següents característiques: (1) la implementació del sistema ha de ser viable i realista per garantir el seu correcte funcionament; (2) el raonament del sistema ha de ser dinàmic i evolutiu per adaptar-se a les necessitats del domini al qual es vol aplicar i (3) el raonament del sistema ha de ser intel·ligent. En primer lloc, a fi de garantir la viabilitat del sistema, s'ha realitzat un estudi a petita escala (Catalunya) que ha permès determinar tant les variables més utilitzades per a la diagnosi i monitorització dels problemes i els mètodes de control més viables, com la detecció de les principals limitacions que el sistema hauria de resoldre. Els resultats d'anteriors aplicacions han demostrat que la principal limitació en el desenvolupament de KBDSSs és l'estructura de la base de coneixement (KB), on es representa tot el coneixement adquirit sobre el domini, juntament amb els processos de raonament a seguir. En el nostre cas, tenint en compte la dinàmica del domini, aquestes limitacions es podrien veure incrementades si aquest disseny no fos òptim. En aquest sentit, s'ha proposat el Domino Model com a eina per dissenyar conceptualment el sistema. Finalment, segons el darrer objectiu referent al seguiment d'un raonament intel·ligent, l'ús d'un Sistema Expert (basat en coneixement expert) i l'ús d'un Sistema de Raonament Basat en Casos (basat en l'experiència) han estat integrats com els principals sistemes intel·ligents encarregats de dur a terme el raonament del KBDSS. Als capítols 5 i 6 respectivament, es presenten el desenvolupament del Sistema Expert dinàmic (ES) i del Sistema de Raonament Basat en Casos temporal, anomenat Sistema de Raonament Basat en Episodis (EBRS). A continuació, al capítol 7, es presenten detalls de la implementació del sistema global (KBDSS) en l'entorn G2. Seguidament, al capítol 8, es mostren els resultats obtinguts durant els 11 mesos de validació del sistema, on aspectes com la precisió, capacitat i utilitat del sistema han estat validats tant experimentalment (prèviament a la implementació) com a partir de la seva implementació real a l'EDAR de Girona. Finalment, al capítol 9 s'enumeren les principals conclusions derivades de la present tesi.

Strategy clusters and sources of knowledge in French L2 listening comprehension

This article reports on an exploratory investigation into the listening strategies of lower-intermediate learners of French as an L2, including the sources of knowledge they employed in order to comprehend spoken French. Data from 14 learners were analysed to investigate whether employment of strategies in general and sources of knowledge in particular varied according to the underlying linguistic knowledge of the student. While low linguistic knowledge learners were less likely to deploy effectively certain strategies or strategy clusters, high linguistic knowledge levels were not always associated with effective strategy use. Similarly, while there was an association between linguistic knowledge and learners’ ability to draw on more than one source of knowledge in a facilitative manner, there was also evidence that learners tended to over-rely on linguistic knowledge where other sources, such as world knowledge, would have proved facilitative. We conclude by arguing for a fresh approach to listening pedagogy and research, including strategy instruction, bottom-up skill development and a consideration of the role of linguistic knowledge in strategy use.

Case-based analysis in user requirements modelling for knowledge construction

Context: Learning can be regarded as knowledge construction in which prior knowledge and experience serve as basis for the learners to expand their knowledge base. Such a process of knowledge construction has to take place continuously in order to enhance the learners’ competence in a competitive working environment. As the information consumers, the individual users demand personalised information provision which meets their own specific purposes, goals, and expectations. Objectives: The current methods in requirements engineering are capable of modelling the common user’s behaviour in the domain of knowledge construction. The users’ requirements can be represented as a case in the defined structure which can be reasoned to enable the requirements analysis. Such analysis needs to be enhanced so that personalised information provision can be tackled and modelled. However, there is a lack of suitable modelling methods to achieve this end. This paper presents a new ontological method for capturing individual user’s requirements and transforming the requirements onto personalised information provision specifications. Hence the right information can be provided to the right user for the right purpose. Method: An experiment was conducted based on the qualitative method. A medium size of group of users participated to validate the method and its techniques, i.e. articulates, maps, configures, and learning content. The results were used as the feedback for the improvement. Result: The research work has produced an ontology model with a set of techniques which support the functions for profiling user’s requirements, reasoning requirements patterns, generating workflow from norms, and formulating information provision specifications. Conclusion: The current requirements engineering approaches provide the methodical capability for developing solutions. Our research outcome, i.e. the ontology model with the techniques, can further enhance the RE approaches for modelling the individual user’s needs and discovering the user’s requirements.

Acquiring, managing and applying knowledge for environmental conservation

We are experiencing an explosion of knowledge with relevance to conserving biodiversity and protecting the environment necessary to sustain life on earth. Many science disciplines are involved in generating this ne, knowledge and real progress can be made when scientists collaborate across disciplines to generate both macro- and micro-environmental knowledge and then communicate and interact with specialists in sociology, economics and public policy. An important requirement is that the often complex scientific concepts and their voluminous supporting data are managed in such ways as to make them accessible across the many specializations involved. Horticultural science has much to contribute to the knowledge base for environmental conservation. While it seems that production horticulture has been slow to embrace knowledge and concepts that would reduce the heavy reliance on agricultural chemicals, the use of peat as a growing medium, and lead to more sustainable use of water and other resources, environmental horticulture is providing valuable opportunities to rescue or protect endangered species, educate the public about plants and plant science, and demonstrate environmental stewardship and sustainable production practices. Likewise, social horticulture is drawing, attention to the many contributions of horticultural foods and parks and gardens to human health and welfare. Overall, horticulture has a vital role to play in integrating, knowledge from other scientific, social, economic and political disciplines.

Ontology supported comparison in vague domains

It is problematic to use standard ontology tools when describing vague domains. Standard ontologies are designed to formally define one view of a domain, and although it is possible to define disagreeing statements, it is not advisable, as the resulting inferences could be incorrect. Two different solutions to the above problem in two different vague domains have been developed and are presented. The first domain is the knowledge base of conversational agents (chatbots). An ontological scripting language has been designed to access ontology data from within chatbot code. The solution developed is based on reifications of user statements. It enables a new layer of logics based on the different views of the users, enabling the body of knowledge to grow automatically. The second domain is competencies and competency frameworks. An ontological framework has been developed to model different competencies using the emergent standards. It enables comparison of competencies using a mix of linguistic logics and descriptive logics. The comparison results are non-binary, therefore not simple yes and no answers, highlighting the vague nature of the comparisons. The solution has been developed with small ontologies which can be added to and modified in order for the competency user to build a total picture that fits the user’s purpose. Finally these two approaches are viewed in the light of how they could aid future work in vague domains, further work in both domains is described and also in other domains such as the semantic web. This demonstrates two different approaches to achieve inferences using standard ontology tools in vague domains.

Linguistic interfaces and language acquisition in childhood: introduction to the special issue

Much contemporary L1 acquisition theory and empirical research are guided by the hypothesis that acquisition delays in children are often related to the integration of information across grammatical and other cognitive modules, such as syntax and discourse-pragmatics (see e.g., Grinstead, 2010). This special issue brings together cutting edge research from all relevant paradigms addressing interface issues in child language acquisition and provides a platform for the study of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge. In this introduction, we present the reader with the tools needed to best understand the contributions of the individual studies and what they bring to bear on larger theoretical questions as a collective.

Base Revision for Ontology Debugging

Belief Revision deals with the problem of adding new information to a knowledge base in a consistent way. Ontology Debugging, on the other hand, aims to find the axioms in a terminological knowledge base which caused the base to become inconsistent. In this article, we propose a belief revision approach in order to find and repair inconsistencies in ontologies represented in some description logic (DL). As the usual belief revision operators cannot be directly applied to DLs, we propose new operators that can be used with more general logics and show that, in particular, they can be applied to the logics underlying OWL-DL and Lite.

Homonymy in natural language processes: A representation using Pustejovsky's Qualia Structure and ontological information

This paper presents a proposal for the semantic treatment of ambiguous homographic forms in Brazilian Portuguese, and to offer linguistic strategies for its computational implementation in Systems of Natural Language Processing (SNLP). Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon was used as a theoretical model. From this model, the Qualia Structure - QS (and the Formal, Telic, Agentive and Constitutive roles) was selected as one of the linguistic and semantic expedients for the achievement of disambiguation of homonym forms. So that analyzed and treated data could be manipulated, we elaborated a Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) where lexical items are correlated and interconnected by different kinds of semantic relations in the QS and ontological information.

The Role of Consistency and Diversity in Building Knowledge in Family Preservation

Family preservation has been criticized for implementing programs that are not theoretically founded. One result of this circumstance is a lack of information regarding processes and outcomes of family preservation services. The knowledge base of family preservation is thus rather limited at present and will remain limited unless theory is consistently integrated within individual programs. A model for conceptualizing how theoretical consistency may be implemented within programs is presented and applied to family preservation. It is also necessary for programs to establish theoretical consistency before theoretical diversity, both within individual and across multiple programs, in order to advance the field in meaningful ways. A developmental cycle of knowledge generation is presented and applied to family preservation.

Combining Bottom-up and Top-down Generation of Interactive Knowledge Maps for Enterprise Search

Our research project develops an intranet search engine with concept- browsing functionality, where the user is able to navigate the conceptual level in an interactive, automatically generated knowledge map. This knowledge map visualizes tacit, implicit knowledge, extracted from the intranet, as a network of semantic concepts. Inductive and deductive methods are combined; a text ana- lytics engine extracts knowledge structures from data inductively, and the en- terprise ontology provides a backbone structure to the process deductively. In addition to performing conventional keyword search, the user can browse the semantic network of concepts and associations to find documents and data rec- ords. Also, the user can expand and edit the knowledge network directly. As a vision, we propose a knowledge-management system that provides concept- browsing, based on a knowledge warehouse layer on top of a heterogeneous knowledge base with various systems interfaces. Such a concept browser will empower knowledge workers to interact with knowledge structures.

Dynamics of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Local Use and Conservation of Native Trees and Shrubs in the Bolivian Andes

Native trees and shrubs are essential components of rural landscapes in the semi-arid inner-Andean valleys of Bolivia. They can be found as hedges and bushes in various agroecosystems such as terrace walls, slopes, field boundaries and fallow land. Their distribution and floristic composition are the result of dynamic spatial and temporal interactions between local farmers and the environment. Local uses of natural resources and biodiversity reflect the constantly evolving Andean culture, which can be generally characterised as an intertwining of the human, natural, and spiritual worlds. The aim of the present ethnobotanical study was to analyse the dynamics of traditional ecological knowledge, to ascertain local farmers’ perceptions and uses of native woody species in Andean communities and to associate the results with local conservation activities for the trees and shrubs concerned. Our case study was carried out within two communities of the Tunari National Park (Dept. Cochabamba) in Bolivia. For data collection, research methods from social science (semi-structured interviews, participative observation, participatory mapping) as well as vegetation surveys were combined. Local actors included women and men of all ages as well as families from different social categories and altitudinal levels of permanent residence. Our study indicates that, due to a multitude of socio-economic pressures (e.g. migration of young people) as well as changes in use of biodiversity (e.g. replacement of native by exotic introduced species), the traditional ecological knowledge base of native trees and shrubs and their respective uses has become diminished over time. In many cases it has led to a decline in people’s awareness of native species and as a consequence their practical, emotional and spiritual relationships with them have been lost. However, results also show that applied traditional ecological knowledge has led to local conservation strategies, which have succeeded in protecting those tree and shrub species which are most widely regarded for their multifunctional, constant and exclusive uses (e.g. Schinus molle, Prosopis laevigata, Baccharis dracunculifolia). The presentation will discuss the question if and how applied traditional ecological knowledge positively contributes to local initiatives of sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity in rural areas.

Modelling the system behaviour of wet snow avalanches using an expert system approach for risk management on high alpine traffic roads

The presented approach describes a model for a rule-based expert system calculating the temporal variability of the release of wet snow avalanches, using the assumption of avalanche triggering without the loading of new snow. The knowledge base of the model is created by using investigations on the system behaviour of wet snow avalanches in the Italian Ortles Alps, and is represented by a fuzzy logic rule-base. Input parameters of the expert system are numerical and linguistic variables, measurable meteorological and topographical factors and observable characteristics of the snow cover. Output of the inference method is the quantified release disposition for wet snow avalanches. Combining topographical parameters and the spatial interpolation of the calculated release disposition a hazard index map is dynamically generated. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal variability of damage potential on roads exposed to wet snow avalanches can be quantified, expressed by the number of persons at risk. The application of the rule base to the available data in the study area generated plausible results. The study demonstrates the potential for the application of expert systems and fuzzy logic in the field of natural hazard monitoring and risk management.