iDub - The potential of intralingual dubbing in foreign language learning: How to assess the task

Research on the use of active dubbing activities in foreign language learning is gaining an increasingamount of attention. The most obvious skill to be enhanced in this context is oral production and a few authors have already mentioned the potential benefits of asking students to record their voices in a ‘semi-professional’ manner. The present project attempts to assess the potential of intralingual dubbing (English-English) to develop general oral production skills in adult university students of English B2 level in an online learning environment, and to provide general guidelines of dubbing task assessment for practitioners. To this end, a group of undergraduate pre-intermediate students worked on ten sequenced activities using short videos taken from an American sitcom over a period of two months. The research study included language assessment tests, questionnaires and observation as the basic data gathering tools to make the results as reliable and thorough as possible for this type of educational setting. The conclusions provide a good starting point for the establishment of basic guidelines that may help teachers implement dubbing tasks in the language class

Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the new generation in automatic plagiarism detection

Although paraphrasing is the linguistic mechanism underlying many plagiarism cases, little attention has been paid to its analysis in the framework of automatic plagiarism detection. Therefore, state-of-the-art plagiarism detectors find it difficult to detect cases of paraphrase plagiarism. In this article, we analyse the relationship between paraphrasing and plagiarism, paying special attention to which paraphrase phenomena underlie acts of plagiarism and which of them are detected by plagiarism detection systems. With this aim in mind, we created the P4P corpus, a new resource which uses a paraphrase typology to annotate a subset of the PAN-PC-10 corpus for automatic plagiarism detection. The results of the Second International Competition on Plagiarism Detection were analysed in the light of this annotation. The presented experiments show that (i) more complex paraphrase phenomena and a high density of paraphrase mechanisms make plagiarism detection more difficult, (ii) lexical substitutions are the paraphrase mechanisms used the most when plagiarising, and (iii) paraphrase mechanisms tend to shorten the plagiarized text. For the first time, the paraphrase mechanisms behind plagiarism have been analysed, providing critical insights for the improvement of automatic plagiarism detection systems

From Multiculturalism to Technique: Feminism, Culture and the Conflict of Laws Style

The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” This impasse is detrimental both to women’s equality and to concerns for cultural autonomy. We propose shifting gears. Our approach draws on what, at first glance, would seem to be an unpromising legal paradigm for feminism – the highly technical field of conflict of laws. Using the non-intuitive hypothetical of a dispute in California between a Japanese father and daughter over a transfer of shares, we demonstrate the contribution that conflicts can make. Whereas Western feminists are often criticized for dwelling on “exotic” cultural practices to the neglect of other important issues affecting the lives of women in those communities or states, our choice of hypothetical not only joins the correctives, but also shows how economic issues, in fact, take us back to the same impasse. Even mundane issues of corporate law prove to be dizzyingly indeterminate and complex in their feminist and cultural dimensions. What makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and do justice to the different dimensions of our hypothetical, surprisingly, is viewing conflicts as technique. More generally, conflicts can offer a new approach to the feminism/culture debate – if we treat its technicalities not as mere means to an end but as an intellectual style. Trading the big picture typical of public law for the specificity and constraints of technical form provides a promising style of capturing, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexities confronting feminists as multiculturalism is challenged here and abroad

A Dual Modal Presentation of Network Relationships in Texts

Based on Baddeley’s working memory model, this research proposed a method to convert textual information with network relationships into a “graphics + voice” representation and hypothesized that this dual-modal presentation will result in superior comprehension performance and higher satisfaction than pure textual display. A simple T-test experiment was used to test the hypothesis. The independent variable was the presentation mode: textual display vs. visual-auditory presentation. The dependent variables were user performance and satisfaction. Thirty subjects participated in this experiment. The results indicate that both user performance and satisfaction improved significantly by using the “graphic + voice” presentation

Logical dynamics meets logical pluralism?

Where is logic heading today? There is a general feeling that the discipline is broadening its scope and agenda beyond classical foundational issues, and maybe even a concern that, like Stephen Leacock’s famous horseman, it is ‘riding off madly in all directions’. So, what is the resultant vector? There seem to be two broad answers in circulation today. One is logical pluralism, locating the new scope of logic in charting a wide variety of reasoning styles, often marked by non-classical structural rules of inference. This is the new program that I subscribed to in my work on sub-structural logics around 1990, and it is a powerful movement today. But gradually, I have changed my mind about the crux of what logic should become. I would now say that the main issue is not variety of reasoning styles and notions of consequence, but the variety of informational tasks performed by intelligent interacting agents, of which inference is only one among many, involving observation, memory, questions and answers, dialogue, or general communication. And logical systems should deal with a wide variety of these, making information-carrying events first-class citizens in their set-up. The purpose of this brief paper is to contrast and compare the two approaches, drawing freely on some insights from earlier published papers. In particular, I will argue that logical dynamics sets itself the more ambitious diagnostic goal of explaining why substructural phenomena occur, by ‘deconstructing’ them into classical logic plus an explicit account of the relevant informational events