Personal Storytelling : Using Natural Language Generation for Children with Complex Communication Needs, in the Wild...

Acknowledgements The authors thank the children, their parents and school staff, who participated in this research, and who so willingly gave us their time, help and support. They also thank Steven Knox and Alan Clelland for their work on programming the mobile phone application. Additional thanks to DynaVox Inc. for supplying the Vmax communication devices to run our system on and Sensory Software Ltd for supplying us with their AAC software. This research was supported by the Research Council UKs Digittal Economy Programme and EPSRC (Grant numbers EP/F067151/1, EP/F066880/1, EP/E011764/1, EP/H022376/1, and EP/H022570 /1).

Natural Language Generation and Fuzzy Sets : An Exploratory Study on Geographical Referring Expression Generation

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (grant TIN2014-56633-C3-1-R) and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER) and the Galician Ministry of Education (grants GRC2014/030 and CN2012/151). Alejandro Ramos-Soto is supported by the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (FPI Fellowship Program) under grant BES-2012-051878.

An investigation into the tension arising between natural language and mathematical language experienced by mechanical engineering students

This investigation is grounded within the concept of embodied cognition where the mind is considered to be part of a biological system. A first year undergraduate Mechanical Engineering cohort of students was tasked with explaining the behaviour of three balls of different masses being rolled down a ramp. The explanations given by the students highlighted the cognitive conflict between the everyday interpretation of the word energy and its mathematical use. The results showed that even after many years of schooling, students found it challenging to interpret the mathematics they had learned and relied upon pseudo-scientific notions to account for the behaviour of the balls.

A.G.B. ter Meulen, Representing Time in Natural Language: The Dynamic Interpretation of Tense and Aspect, The MIT Press, 1997, ISBN: 978-0262200998 [Book review]

Abstract not available

Natural Language Generation enhances human decision-making with uncertain information.

Decision-making is often dependent on uncertain data, e.g. data associated with confidence scores or probabilities. We present a comparison of different informa- tion presentations for uncertain data and, for the first time, measure their effects on human decision-making. We show that the use of Natural Language Genera- tion (NLG) improves decision-making un- der uncertainty, compared to state-of-the- art graphical-based representation meth- ods. In a task-based study with 442 adults, we found that presentations using NLG lead to 24% better decision-making on av- erage than the graphical presentations, and to 44% better decision-making when NLG is combined with graphics. We also show that women achieve significantly better re- sults when presented with NLG output (an 87% increase on average compared to graphical presentations).

OntoSPARES: da linguagem natural às ontologias. Contributos para a classificação automática de dados históricos (séc. XVI-XVIII)

O processamento de linguagem natural e as ontologias são ferramentas cuja interação permite uma melhor compreensão dos dados armazenados. Este trabalho, ao associar estas duas áreas aos elementos disponíveis numa base de dados prosopográfica, tornou possível identificar e classificar relacionamentos entre setores de ocupação na forma como eram designados na época, setores de atividade num formato mais próximo do de hoje e o estatuto social que essas incumbências tinham na sociedade coeva. Os dados utilizados são sobretudo de membros do Santo Ofício – do século XVI ao século XVIII. Para atingir este objetivo utilizaram-se algumas descrições textuais de ocorrências da época e outras pouco estruturadas, disponíveis no repositório SPARES. A aplicação de processamento de linguagem natural (remoção de stopwords e aplicação de stemming), conjugada com a construção de duas ontologias, tornou possível classificar esses dados, permitindo consultas mais eficazes. Ao contribuir para a classificação automática de dados históricos, propõem-se metodologias que podem ser aplicadas em dados de qualquer outra área do conhecimento, especialmente as que lidam com as variáveis de tempo e espaço de forma mais intensa; Abstract: OntoSPARES: from natural language to ontologies Contributions to the automatic classification of historical data (16th-18th centuries) The interaction between the natural language processing and ontologies are tools allowing a better understanding of the data stored. This work, by combining these two areas to the elements available in a prosopographic database, has made possible to identify and classify relationships between occupations of many individuals (in general Holy Office members of the 16th-18th centuries). To achieve this goal the data used was gathered in SPARES repository, including some textual descriptions of the time occurrences. They are all few structured. The application of natural language processing (stopwords removal and stemming application), combined with the construction of two ontologies, made possible to classify those data, allowing a more effective search. By contributing to the automatic classification of historical data, this thesis proposes methodologies that can be applied to data from any other field of knowledge, specially data dealing with time and space variables.

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist and extralist word association experiments. Some initial models exploring this hypothesis are discussed, and they appear to be capable of substantial agreement with pre-existing experimental data. The paper concludes with a discussion of some experiments that will be performed in order to test these models.