Cyber Enigmas? Passive Detection and Pedagogical Agents: Can Students Spot the fake?

This paper presents a study that was undertaken to examine human interaction with a pedagogical agent and the passive and active detection of such agents within a synchronous, online environment. A pedagogical agent is a software application which can provide a human like interaction using a natural language interface. These may be familiar from the smartphone interfaces such as ‘Siri’ or ‘Cortana’, or the virtual online assistants found on some websites, such as ‘Anna’ on the Ikea website. Pedagogical agents are characters on the computer screen with embodied life-like behaviours such as speech, emotions, locomotion, gestures, and movements of the head, the eye, or other parts of the body. The passive detection test is where participants are not primed to the potential presence of a pedagogical agent within the online environment. The active detection test is where participants are primed to the potential presence of a pedagogical agent. The purpose of the study was to examine how people passively detected pedagogical agents that were presenting themselves as humans in an online environment. In order to locate the pedagogical agent in a realistic higher education online environment, problem-based learning online was used. Problem-based learning online provides a focus for discussions and participation, without creating too much artificiality. The findings indicated that the ways in which students positioned the agent tended to influence the interaction between them. One of the key findings was that since the agent was focussed mainly on the pedagogical task this may have hampered interaction with the students, however some of its non-task dialogue did improve students' perceptions of the autonomous agents’ ability to interact with them. It is suggested that future studies explore the differences between the relationships and interactions of learner and pedagogical agent within authentic situations, in order to understand if students' interactions are different between real and virtual mentors in an online setting.

SyllabO+ : la première base de données sous-lexicale du français québécois oral

Les unités linguistiques sous-lexicales (p.ex., la syllabe, le phonème ou le phone) jouent un rôle crucial dans le traitement langagier. En particulier, le traitement langagier est profondément influencé par la distribution de ces unités. Par exemple, les syllabes les plus fréquentes sont articulées plus rapidement. Il est donc important d’avoir accès à des outils permettant de créer du matériel expérimental ou clinique pour l’étude du langage normal ou pathologique qui soit représentatif de l’utilisation des syllabes et des phones dans la langue orale. L’accès à ce type d’outil permet également de comparer des stimuli langagiers en fonction de leurs statistiques distributionnelles, ou encore d’étudier l’impact de ces statistiques sur le traitement langagier dans différentes populations. Pourtant, jusqu’à ce jour, aucun outil n’était disponible sur l’utilisation des unités linguistiques sous-lexicales du français oral québécois. Afin de combler cette lacune, un vaste corpus du français québécois oral spontané a été élaboré à partir d’enregistrements de 184 locuteurs québécois. Une base de données de syllabes et une base de données de phones ont ensuite été construites à partir de ce corpus, offrant une foule d’informations sur la structure des unités et sur leurs statistiques distributionnelles. Le fruit de ce projet, intitulé SyllabO +, sera rendu disponible en ligne en accès libre via le site web http://speechneurolab.ca/fr/syllabo dès la publication de l’article le décrivant. Cet outil incomparable sera d’une grande utilité dans plusieurs domaines, tels que les neurosciences cognitives, la psycholinguistique, la psychologie expérimentale, la phonétique, la phonologie, l’orthophonie et l’étude de l’acquisition des langues.

Distributional effects and individual differences in L2 morphology learning

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and verbal working memory. Over three sessions, 54 adults were exposed to a Russian case-marking paradigm with a balanced or skewed item distribution in the input. Whereas statistical learning ability and nonverbal intelligence predicted learning of trained items, only nonverbal intelligence also predicted generalization of case-marking inflections to new vocabulary. Neither measure of temporary storage capacity predicted learning. Balanced, less predictable input was associated with higher accuracy in generalization but only in the initial test session. These results suggest that individual differences in pattern extraction play a more sustained role in L2 acquisition than instructional manipulations that vary the predictability of lexical items in the input.

Os paradoxos de Prior e o calculo proposicional deôntico relevante E¹.

Cruz, Ângela Maria Paiva. Os paradoxos de Prior e o cálculo proposicional deôntico relevante. Princípios, Natal, v. 4, p. 05-18, 1996.

SES-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN WORD LEARNING: EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE INHIBITION AND WORD LEARNING

Socioeconomic status (SES) influences language and cognitive development, with discrepancies particularly noticeable in vocabulary development. This study examines how SES-related differences impact the development of syntactic processing, cognitive inhibition, and word learning. 38 4-5-year-olds from higher- and lower-SES backgrounds completed a word-learning task, in which novel words were embedded in active and passive sentences. Critically, unlike the active sentences, all passive sentences required a syntactic revision. Measures of cognitive inhibition were obtained through a modified Stroop task. Results indicate that lower-SES participants had more difficulty using inhibitory functions to resolve conflict compared to their higher-SES counterparts. However, SES did not impact language processing, as the language outcomes were similar across SES background. Additionally, stronger inhibitory processes were related to better language outcomes in the passive sentence condition. These results suggest that cognitive inhibition impact language processing, but this function may vary across children from different SES backgrounds

A flexible bio-inspired hierarchical model for analyzing musical timbre

A flexible and multipurpose bio-inspired hierarchical model for analyzing musical timbre is presented in this paper. Inspired by findings in the fields of neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and psychoacoustics, not only does the model extract spectral and temporal characteristics of a signal, but it also analyzes amplitude modulations on different timescales. It uses a cochlear filter bank to resolve the spectral components of a sound, lateral inhibition to enhance spectral resolution, and a modulation filter bank to extract the global temporal envelope and roughness of the sound from amplitude modulations. The model was evaluated in three applications. First, it was used to simulate subjective data from two roughness experiments. Second, it was used for musical instrument classification using the k-NN algorithm and a Bayesian network. Third, it was applied to find the features that characterize sounds whose timbres were labeled in an audiovisual experiment. The successful application of the proposed model in these diverse tasks revealed its potential in capturing timbral information.

European primary pupils show their life to African peers

Since primary school pupils lack a common language, primary school pupils from Germany and Africa show a piece of their origin and of their daily live through simple drawings to their peers in a other, distant land. The teachers accompanying the exchange of these drawings communicated in natural language, but helped to transform what their pupils wanted to show by their drawing. Five students drawings are presented in order to explain and illustrate this exchange method.

The big four skills: Teachers’ assumptions on measurement of non-native students cognition

The four-skills on tests for young native speakers commonly do not generate correlation incongruency concerning the cognitive strategies frequently reported. Considering the non-native speakers there are parse evidence to determine which tasks are important to assess properly the cognitive and academic language proficiency (Cummins, 1980; 2012). Research questions: It is of high probability that young students with origin in immigration significantly differ on their communication strategies and skills in a second language processing context (1); attached to this first assumption, it is supposed that teachers significantly differ depending on their scientific area and previous training (2). Purpose: This study intends to examine whether school teachers (K-12) as having different origin in scientific domain of teaching and training perceive differently an adapted four-skills scale, in European Portuguese. Research methods: 77 teachers of five areas scientific areas, mean of teaching year service = 32 (SD= 2,7), 57 males and 46 females (from basic and high school levels). Main findings: ANOVA (Effect size and Post-hoc Tukey tests) and linear regression analysis (stepwise method) revealed statistically significant differences among teachers of different areas, mainly between language teachers and science teachers. Language teachers perceive more accurately tasks in a multiple manner to the broad skills that require to be measured in non-native students. Conclusion: If teachers perceive differently the importance of the big-four tasks, there would be incongruence on skills measurement that teachers select for immigrant puppils. Non-balanced tasks and the teachers’ perceptions on evaluation and toward competence of students would likely determine limitations for academic and cognitive development of non-native students. Furthermore, results showed sufficient evidence to conclude that tasks are perceived differently by teachers toward importance of specific skills subareas. Reading skills are best considered compared to oral comphreension skills in non-native students.

Ruchy gałek ocznych i gesty jako korelaty przetwarzania języka w tłumaczeniu konsekutywnym i symultanicznym

Wydział Anglistyki

Context Models for Understanding Images and Videos

A computer vision system that has to interact in natural language needs to understand the visual appearance of interactions between objects along with the appearance of objects themselves. Relationships between objects are frequently mentioned in queries of tasks like semantic image retrieval, image captioning, visual question answering and natural language object detection. Hence, it is essential to model context between objects for solving these tasks. In the first part of this thesis, we present a technique for detecting an object mentioned in a natural language query. Specifically, we work with referring expressions which are sentences that identify a particular object instance in an image. In many referring expressions, an object is described in relation to another object using prepositions, comparative adjectives, action verbs etc. Our proposed technique can identify both the referred object and the context object mentioned in such expressions. Context is also useful for incrementally understanding scenes and videos. In the second part of this thesis, we propose techniques for searching for objects in an image and events in a video. Our proposed incremental algorithms use the context from previously explored regions to prioritize the regions to explore next. The advantage of incremental understanding is restricting the amount of computation time and/or resources spent for various detection tasks. Our first proposed technique shows how to learn context in indoor scenes in an implicit manner and use it for searching for objects. The second technique shows how explicitly written context rules of one-on-one basketball can be used to sequentially detect events in a game.

Koherentziazko diskurtso erlazioen detekzio automatikoa patroien bidez, XMLko erlazio-egiturak oinarri hartuta

[EU]Hizkuntzaren prozesamenduan testu koherenteetan kausa taldeko erlazioak (KAUSA, ONDORIOA eta HELBURUA) automatikoki hautematea eta bereiztea erabilgarria da galdera-erantzun automatikoko sistemak eraikitzerako orduan. Horretarako Egitura Erretorikoaren Teoria (Rhetorical Structure Theory, aurrerantzean RST) eta bere erlazioak erabiliko ditugu, corpus bezala RST Treebank -a (Iruskieta et al., 2013) hartuta, zientziako laburpen-testuz osatutako corpusa, hain zuzen ere. Corpus hori XML formatuan deskargatu eta hortik XPATH tresnaren bidez informazio garrantzitsuena eskuratzen dugu. Lan honek 3 helburu nagusi ditu: lehendabizi, kausa taldeko erlazioak elkarren artean bereiztea, bigarrenez, kausa taldeko erlazio hauek beste erlazio guztiekin bereiztea, eta azkenik, EBALUAZIOA eta INTERPRETAZIOA erlazioak bereiztea sentimendu analisian aplikatu ahal izateko. Ataza horiek egiteko, RhetDB tresnarekin eskuratu diren patroi ensaguratsuenak erabili eta bi aplikazio garatu ditugu. Alde batetik, bilatu nahi ditugun patroiak adierazi eta erlazio-egitura duen edonolako testuetan bilaketak egiten dituen bilatzailea, eta bestetik, patroi esanguratsuenak emanda erlazioak etiketatzen dituen etiketatzailea. Bi aplikazio hauek gainera, ahalik eta modu parametrizagarrienean erabiltzeko garatu ditugu, kodea aldatu gabe edonork erabili ahal izateko antzeko atazak egiteko. Etiketatzaileak ebaluatu ondoren, identifikatzeko erlaziorik errazena HELBURUA erlazioa dela ikusi dugu eta KAUSA eta ONDORIOA bereizteko arazo gehiago dauzkagula ere ondorioztatu dugu. Modu berean, EBALUAZIOA eta INTERPRETAZIOA ere elkarren artean bereiz dezakegula ikusi dugu.

A tradução de textos económico-financeiros de português para inglês: potencialidades da Plataforma ISTRION

Este Trabalho de Projeto tem como objetivo primordial analisar a tradução, de português para inglês, de textos económico-financeiros, utilizando a plataforma de Tradução Automática (TA) ISTRION. A tradução de conteúdos selecionados da Newsletter Económico-Financeira Maximus Report é efetuada com base na referida plataforma, complementada com outras ferramentas de apoio ao processamento linguístico que sejam consideradas relevantes. Visa-se igualmente com este Trabalho de Projeto analisar as potencialidades desta plataforma, bem como medir os resultados da tradução. Por último pretende-se enquadrar, testar, estudar e medir quais os critérios em que se poderá tornar mais eficiente a tradução destes textos.

A novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion summarization

The Web 2.0 has resulted in a shift as to how users consume and interact with the information, and has introduced a wide range of new textual genres, such as reviews or microblogs, through which users communicate, exchange, and share opinions. The exploitation of all this user-generated content is of great value both for users and companies, in order to assist them in their decision-making processes. Given this context, the analysis and development of automatic methods that can help manage online information in a quicker manner are needed. Therefore, this article proposes and evaluates a novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion abstractive summarization. Our approach is characterized by the integration of syntactic sentence simplification, sentence regeneration and internal concept representation into the summarization process, thus being able to generate abstractive summaries, which is one the most challenging issues for this task. In order to be able to analyze different settings for our approach, the use of the sentence regeneration module was made optional, leading to two different versions of the system (one with sentence regeneration and one without). For testing them, a corpus of 400 English texts, gathered from reviews and tweets belonging to two different domains, was used. Although both versions were shown to be reliable methods for generating this type of summaries, the results obtained indicate that the version without sentence regeneration yielded to better results, improving the results of a number of state-of-the-art systems by 9%, whereas the version with sentence regeneration proved to be more robust to noisy data.

Chebanov law and Vakar formula in mathematical models of complex systems

Ecological models written in a mathematical language L(M) or model language, with a given style or methodology can be considered as a text. It is possible to apply statistical linguistic laws and the experimental results demonstrate that the behaviour of a mathematical model is the same of any literary text of any natural language. A text has the following characteristics: (a) the variables, its transformed functions and parameters are the lexic units or LUN of ecological models; (b) the syllables are constituted by a LUN, or a chain of them, separated by operating or ordering LUNs; (c) the flow equations are words; and (d) the distribution of words (LUM and CLUN) according to their lengths is based on a Poisson distribution, the Chebanov's law. It is founded on Vakar's formula, that is calculated likewise the linguistic entropy for L(M). We will apply these ideas over practical examples using MARIOLA model. In this paper it will be studied the problem of the lengths of the simple lexic units composed lexic units and words of text models, expressing these lengths in number of the primitive symbols, and syllables. The use of these linguistic laws renders it possible to indicate the degree of information given by an ecological model.

A study on energy and environmental management techniques used in petroleum process industries

Petroleum process industries are one of the most energy and emission intensive sectors throughout the world.There are natural gas processing plant, crude oils and condensate fractionation plant, liquefied natural gas plantand liquefied petroleum gas plant etc. creates environmental pollution by processing and handling of petroleumproducts. The study critically reviewed and discussed the energy and environmental management includingpollution control of petroleum process industries of Bangladesh. They produce both gaseous (process gas, wastegas etc.) and liquid (produced water, waste oil and grease etc.) pollutants. The study found that the liquid pollutantlike waste water is more hazardous and its treatment process is highly complicated due to its higher salinity, morecorrosivity and grease contain characteristics. As part of energy management, the rational use of energy and energyflow diagram of the petroleum industry is presented. Finally, a time frame measures which can be implemented inorder to save energy is outlined. The study concluded that the rational use of energy and proper environmentalmanagement are essential for achieving energy and environmental sustainability of process industries.