Integrating machine translation into MOOCS

This paper presents TraMOOC (Translation for Massive Open Online Courses), a European research project developed with the intention of empowering international learners in the digital multilingual world by providing reliable machine translation (MT) specifically tailored to MOOCs from English into 11 languages (Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian). The paper describes how the project is addressing the challenges involved in developing an innovative, high-quality MT service for producing accurate translations of heterogeneous multi-genre MOOC materials, encompassing subtitles of video lectures, assignments, tutorials, and social web text posted on student blogs and fora. Based on the results of a large-scale and multi-method evaluation conducted as part of the TraMOOC project, we offer a reflection on how to best integrate state-of-the-art MT into MOOC platforms. The conclusion summarizes the key lessons learned, that can be applied by the wider community of international professionals with an interest in the multilingual aspects of innovative education and new learning technologies

Teaching practice tasks

Publikacja recenzowana / Peer-reviewed publicationTeaching Practice Tasks has been designed for students of initial teacher training courses who are about to start their teaching practice. The book contains a set of materials that provide guidance and enable trainees to keep record of their development at the beginning of their teaching career. The book may be used by institutions which organize their students’ teaching practice in cooperation with school-based mentors. The tasks offered in the book may be used by teacher trainers and mentors as a tool to check and assess trainees’ progress. The book may be particularly helpful in supervision of extra-mural and distance learning students, who because of geographical and time constraints may wish to take up their teaching practice at their local schools. Teacher training institutions may find visiting student teachers in their home places almost impossible and a written record of teaching experience can provide a reliable alternative. What does the book contain? The book contains a range of tasks that will help trainees to develop skills necessary in the teaching profession. The materials may be divided into the following: Reflection tasks, Observation tasks, Team / solo teaching tasks, Materials for Teaching Practice supervisor

Why paper mills clean up : determinants of pollution abatement in four Asian countries

The authors find strong evidence that despite weak or nonexistent formal regulation and enforcement of environmental standards, many plants in South and Southeast Asia are clean. At the same time, many plants are among the world's worst polluters. To account for the extreme variation among plants, the authors review evidence from a survey of pollution abatement by 26 pulp and paper plants in four countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. They incorporate 3 sets of factors affecting pollution intensity: plant characteristics, economic considerations, and external pressure from the government and private stakeholders. They find that the level of pollution abatement is positively associated with scale and competitiveness, negatively associated with public ownership, and unaffected by foreign links (in ownership or financing). Informal regulation, or community pressure on plants works to abate pollution, with high income being a powerful predictor of effectiveness. Privatization, to the extent that it increases plant efficiency, can significantly improve environmental performance. To prevent environmental injustice in poor or marginalized communities, the authors conclude, governments may want to consider strategies for improving their participation, and may want to target regulation to address pollution problems among them.Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Water Conservation,Pollution Management&Control,Sanitation and Sewerage,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Pollution Management&Control,Sanitation and Sewerage,TF030632-DANISH CTF - FY05 (DAC PART COUNTRIES GNP PER CAPITA BELOW USD 2,500/AL

Methods of covert communication of speech signals based on a bio-inspired principle

This work presents two speech hiding methods based on a bio-inspired concept known as the ability of adaptation of speech signals. A cryptographic model uses the adaptation to transform a secret message to a non-sensitive target speech signal, and then, the scrambled speech signal is an intelligible signal. The residual intelligibility is extremely low and it is appropriate to transmit secure speech signals. On the other hand, in a steganographic model, the adapted speech signal is hidden into a host signal by using indirect substitution or direct substitution. In the first case, the scheme is known as Efficient Wavelet Masking (EWM), and in the second case, it is known as improved-EWM (iEWM). While EWM demonstrated to be highly statistical transparent, the second one, iEWM, demonstrated to be highly robust against signal manipulations. Finally, with the purpose to transmit secure speech signals in real-time operation, a hardware-based scheme is proposedEsta tesis presenta dos métodos de comunicación encubierta de señales de voz utilizando un concepto bio-inspirado, conocido como la “habilidad de adaptación de señales de voz”. El modelo de criptografía utiliza la adaptación para transformar un mensaje secreto a una señal de voz no confidencial, obteniendo una señal de voz encriptada legible. Este método es apropiado para transmitir señales de voz seguras porque en la señal encriptada no quedan rastros del mensaje secreto original. En el caso de esteganografía, la señal de voz adaptada se oculta en una señal de voz huésped, utilizando sustitución directa o indirecta. En el primer caso el esquema se denomina EWM y en el segundo caso iEWM. EWM demostró ser altamente transparente, mientras que iEWM demostró ser altamente robusto contra manipulaciones de señal. Finalmente, con el propósito de transmitir señales de voz seguras en tiempo real, se propone un esquema para dispositivos hardware

Is ChatGPT a Good Recommender? A Preliminary Study

Recommendation systems have witnessed significant advancements and have been widely used over the past decades. However, most traditional recommendation methods are task-specific and therefore lack efficient generalization ability. Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has significantly advanced NLP tasks by enhancing the capabilities of conversational models. Nonetheless, the application of ChatGPT in the recommendation domain has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we employ ChatGPT as a general-purpose recommendation model to explore its potential for transferring extensive linguistic and world knowledge acquired from large-scale corpora to recommendation scenarios. Specifically, we design a set of prompts and evaluate ChatGPT's performance on five recommendation scenarios. Unlike traditional recommendation methods, we do not fine-tune ChatGPT during the entire evaluation process, relying only on the prompts themselves to convert recommendation tasks into natural language tasks. Further, we explore the use of few-shot prompting to inject interaction information that contains user potential interest to help ChatGPT better understand user needs and interests. Comprehensive experimental results on Amazon Beauty dataset show that ChatGPT has achieved promising results in certain tasks and is capable of reaching the baseline level in others. We conduct human evaluations on two explainability-oriented tasks to more accurately evaluate the quality of contents generated by different models. And the human evaluations show ChatGPT can truly understand the provided information and generate clearer and more reasonable results. We hope that our study can inspire researchers to further explore the potential of language models like ChatGPT to improve recommendation performance and contribute to the advancement of the recommendation systems field.Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023 GenRec Worksho

Exploration of WEB resources in the domain of metal processing technologies

The amount of information contained in the WEB grows in a galloping way, which is caused by the spread of Internet access and lowering the cost of storing and sharing data across the network. The vast amount of data, impossible to be analyzed by human, is the reason why finding and selecting valuable information has become a serious problem. Due to this situation, a highly useful and desired solution would be the development of a system that would allow continuous monitoring of the WEB and finding for the user valuable information from the selected Internet resources. This paper describes the concept of such a system, along with its initial implementation and application to search for information in the field of foundry industry

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research