Evaluating New Approaches of Intervention in Reading Difficulties in Students with Dyslexia: The ilearnRW Software Application

The aim of this paper is to increase knowledge and understanding on how the implementation of language content through specialized software, such as the “Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing-iLearnRW”, can enhance learning during intervention procedures to enhance reading skills for children with dyslexia.The iLearnRW software is a newly designed tool that makes use of innovative technology and provides individualized intervention through games that incorporate learning activities, addressing those language areas that are most challenging for children with dyslexia in a highly entertaining and motivating way. Individualized intervention is provided through an underlying user profile, which incorporates these language features and is constantly updated as the child uses the software playing games, presenting language material selected based on his difficulties and recording his progress. A group of 78 students (52 male, 26 female) diagnosed with dyslexia, aged between 9 and 11 years old, was assessed for phonological, morphological and vocabulary skills. The students logged in the iLearnRW software on a mean of 14.18 days over a six-month intervention. After the 6-month intervention, the students were assessed once again on the same skills so as to establish the tool’s effectiveness.The results’ analysis revealed the following: (i) there was a strong constructional linkage between the profile entries of the sample, the language content of the tasks of the screening test as well of the games and its effectiveness in the students’ performance; (ii) the students who received specific guidance by their teachers, obtained higher success rates in most of the games than the students without any guidance, and (iii) the quantity of the language content and the time playing were not correlated with the students’ performance in the software’s games. Keywords: Digital technology, assistive computer software, dyslexia, learning environmen

Visualization of Internet Web pages based on authority and word frequency

The growth, accessibility, and integration of the World Wide Web with contemporary information utilization provides a rich domain in which to explore information retrieval systems. One approach in the evolution of retrieval systems couples successful and long-standing techniques of information retrieval with new techniques, such as visualization. The system developed and reported in this thesis takes this approach. It builds upon well-known techniques of information retrieval including stemming, keyword matching, and cosine similarity. It also incorporates the new and relatively successful hubs and authority approach, which describes Web documents by their reference by other documents. Finally, it develops a new and unique approach to document visualization that encodes these metrics in a single visual representation. This new, easily scannable representation, allows the user to interact with search results as the scope of search is expanded dynamically across the Web

Natural Arabic language text understanding

The most challenging part of natural language understanding is the representation of meaning. The current representation techniques are not sufficient to resolve the ambiguities, especially when the meaning is to be used for interrogation at a later stage. Arabic language represents a challenging field for Natural Language Processing (NLP) because of its rich eloquence and free word order, but at the same time it is a good platform to capture understanding because of its rich computational, morphological and grammar rules. Among different representation techniques, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) theory is found to be best suited for this task because of its structural approach. LFG lays down a computational approach towards NLP, especially the constituent and the functional structures, and models the completeness of relationships among the contents of each structure internally, as well as among the structures externally. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, such as knowledge representation and inferencing, enhances the capture of meaning by utilising domain specific common sense knowledge embedded in the model of domain of discourse and the linguistic rules that have been captured from the Arabic language grammar. This work has achieved the following results: (i) It is the first attempt to apply the LFG formalism on a full Arabic declarative text that consists of more than one paragraph. (ii) It extends the semantic structure of the LFG theory by incorporating a representation based on the thematic-role frames theory. (iii) It extends to the LFG theory to represent domain specific common sense knowledge. (iv) It automates the production process of the functional and semantic structures. (v) It automates the production process of domain specific common sense knowledge structure, which enhances the understanding ability of the system and resolves most ambiguities in subsequent question-answer sessions

Understanding Word Embedding Stability Across Languages and Applications

Despite the recent popularity of word embedding methods, there is only a small body of work exploring the limitations of these representations. In this thesis, we consider several aspects of embedding spaces, including their stability. First, we propose a definition of stability, and show that common English word embeddings are surprisingly unstable. We explore how properties of data, words, and algorithms relate to instability. We extend this work to approximately 100 world languages, considering how linguistic typology relates to stability. Additionally, we consider contextualized output embedding spaces. Using paraphrases, we explore properties and assumptions of BERT, a popular embedding algorithm. Second, we consider how stability and other word embedding properties affect tasks where embeddings are commonly used. We consider both word embeddings used as features in downstream applications and corpus-centered applications, where embeddings are used to study characteristics of language and individual writers. In addition to stability, we also consider other word embedding properties, specifically batching and curriculum learning, and how methodological choices made for these properties affect downstream tasks. Finally, we consider how knowledge of stability affects how we use word embeddings. Throughout this thesis, we discuss strategies to mitigate instability and provide analyses highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of word embeddings in different scenarios and languages. We show areas where more work is needed to improve embeddings, and we show where embeddings are already a strong tool.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162917/1/lburdick_1.pd

Making violence public: spatializing (counter)publicness through the 1993 Sivas Arson attack, Turkey

This article discusses the relationship between violence and public space in light of a collectively perpetrated and widely televised arson attack that took place in 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, and its recent on-site commemorations. It draws on critical theoretical perspectives developed since the 1990s to consider conventional models of public space as entangled in violence, while also aiming to contribute to contemporary scholarship on contrarian responses to this entanglement. The tendency in this scholarship is to identify these responses as bottom-up, unscripted, performative and direct, and therefore as diametrically opposed to those identified as top-down, scripted, rational, and legislation-facing. The multifarious initiatives and interventions involving contextually shifting priorities, positions and strategies that mark the case discussed in this article call this tendency into question. Unassimilable under such binary oppositions, these initiatives and interventions have not refrained from engaging conventional models of public space while also developing and mobilizing contrarian ones. This article ultimately argues that public space is not just where violence occurs but also where its semantic disambiguation is pursued; this pursuit, which involves various forms of socio-political work, in turn defines and continually redefines the very distinction between conventional and contrarian imaginaries of public space

Failure prognostic schemes and database design of a software tool for efficient management of wind turbine maintenance.

Wind Turbines require numerous and varied types of maintenance activities throughout their lifespan, the frequency of which increases with years in operation. At present the proportion of maintenance cost to the total cost for wind turbines is significant particularly for offshore wind turbines (OWT) where this ratio is ∼35%. If this ratio is to be reduced in-spite of adverse operating conditions, pre-mature component failures and absence of reliability database for wind turbine components, there is a need to design unconventional maintenance scheme preferably by including novel failure prediction methodologies. Several researchers have advocated the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Bayesian Network Theory (BNT) and other statistical methods to predict failure so as to plan efficient maintenance of wind turbines, however novelty and randomness of failures, nature and number of parameters involved in statistical calculations and absence of required amount of fundamental work required for such advanced analysis have continued to maintain the high cost of maintenance. This work builds upon the benefits of condition monitoring to design methods to predict generic failures in wind turbine components and exhibits how such prediction methods can assist in cutting the maintenance cost of wind turbines. This study proposes using a dedicated tool to assist with failure prediction and planning and execution of wind turbine maintenance. The design and development of such an all-inclusive tool will assist in performing administrative works, inventory control, financial calculations and service management apart from failure prediction in wind turbine components. Its database will contain reference to standard management practices, regulatory provisions, staff details and their skillsets, service call register, troubleshooting manuals, installation guide, service history, details of customers and clients etc. that would cater to multiple avenues of wind turbine maintenance. In order to build such a software package, a robust design of its database is crucial. This work lists prerequisites for choosing a physical database and identifies the benefits of relational database software in controlling large amounts of data of various formats that are stored in such physical databases. Such a database would be an invaluable resource for reliability studies, an area of interest for both academic researchers and the industry that are identifying avenues to economise wind turbine operations

Language structure and language acquisition: grammatical categorization using phonological and distributional information

This thesis addresses the question of how words are grouped according to their grammatical categories during language acquisition. Over the past 20. years a general consensus has developed that distributional and phonological cues are important cues that language learners utilize in the grammatical categorization process (e.g., Kelly, 1992; Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998). The combination ofthese cues was investigated with artificial language learning experiments, which combined two categories of. phonologically coherent words with co-occurring distributional cues, and corpus analysis techniques. Experiments I to 4 indicated that both phonological and distribution cues are necessary for the categorization of high and low frequency words. Additionally, these experiments indicated that distributional information alone was sufficient to categorize high frequency words, but that phonological cues were necessary for low frequency words. It was also found that succeeding bigram distribution cues induced more grammatical categorization than the preceding bigram cues. This is explained by the Rescorla-'\yagner (1972) model of associative learning; associations were stronger between the category words and succeeding cues as a single succeeding cue followed all category words. Associations were weaker with preceding cues as numerous category words followed the preceding cues. Experiments 5, 6 and 7 also found that the effectiveD~ss of the distributional cues was influenced by prior linguistic experience, resulting in higher learning with distributional cues which were phonologically consistent with distributional cues found in the participants' native language (English). This thesis also investigated the debate as to what type of distributional cue is most useful in the categorization process, with some researchers advocating trigram cues (Mintz, 2002) while others advocate bigram cues (Monaghan & Christiansen, 2004; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The results of a corpus analysis and two experiments provided evidence that trigram cues (aXb) are very effective at categorization, but preliminary evidence suggests that this categorization may simply be due to the combined influence of the beginning and ending bigrams (aX and Xb). Overall, this thesis indicates that phonological and distributional cues are key to grammatical categorization, which occurs through associative learning principles; grammatical categorization progresses .faster with succeeding cues; and bigram distribution cues may be the initial source of distributional information in the grammatical categorization process

Emanager - Cdo Made Simple

The eManager application integrates the existing enforcement systems and MS Exchange Server 2003. The application exploits the benefits of CDO, ADO, LDAP, ADSI, XML and COM technologies. The application explicates the integration and utilization of CDO using VC++ programming language. It illustrates how CDO can be implemented effectively in various circumstances while maintaining uncomplicated application design and solutions. It demonstrates how CDO and ADO complements each other and interacts with other Windows artifacts such as ADSI, LDAP and Active Directory. The application implements the COM methodology that establishes the COM events using connection points and sinks. The integration and management of process and threads using events is the prim benefit for application programmers. Keywords: CDO ADO LDAP ADSI COM Events Sink Process Thread Active Directory Connection Poin