Leveraging Text-to-Scene Generation for Language Elicitation and Documentation

Text-to-scene generation systems take input in the form of a natural language text and output a 3D scene illustrating the meaning of that text. A major benefit of text-to-scene generation is that it allows users to create custom 3D scenes without requiring them to have a background in 3D graphics or knowledge of specialized software packages. This contributes to making text-to-scene useful in scenarios from creative applications to education. The primary goal of this thesis is to explore how we can use text-to-scene generation in a new way: as a tool to facilitate the elicitation and formal documentation of language. In particular, we use text-to-scene generation (a) to assist field linguists studying endangered languages; (b) to provide a cross-linguistic framework for formally modeling spatial language; and (c) to collect language data using crowdsourcing. As a side effect of these goals, we also explore the problem of multilingual text-to-scene generation, that is, systems for generating 3D scenes from languages other than English. The contributions of this thesis are the following. First, we develop a novel tool suite (the WordsEye Linguistics Tools, or WELT) that uses the WordsEye text-to-scene system to assist field linguists with eliciting and documenting endangered languages. WELT allows linguists to create custom elicitation materials and to document semantics in a formal way. We test WELT with two endangered languages, Nahuatl and Arrernte. Second, we explore the question of how to learn a syntactic parser for WELT. We show that an incremental learning method using a small number of annotated dependency structures can produce reasonably accurate results. We demonstrate that using a parser trained in this way can significantly decrease the time it takes an annotator to label a new sentence with dependency information. Third, we develop a framework that generates 3D scenes from spatial and graphical semantic primitives. We incorporate this system into the WELT tools for creating custom elicitation materials, allowing users to directly manipulate the underlying semantics of a generated scene. Fourth, we introduce a deep semantic representation of spatial relations and use this to create a new resource, SpatialNet, which formally declares the lexical semantics of spatial relations for a language. We demonstrate how SpatialNet can be used to support multilingual text-to-scene generation. Finally, we show how WordsEye and the semantic resources it provides can be used to facilitate elicitation of language using crowdsourcing

New media and education

In the last thirty years we witnessed to a number of relevant innovations and changes. Some of them belong to the information technology domain and parts of them were the reason why the IT domain became the ICT domain. In order to better understand problems and issues related to education and learning it is useful to outline some of the most relevant achievements and milestones in the technological domain. If we focus on the European approach to the spread of information technology termed in the ‘90ies “Information Society” we can find initiatives such as i2015 the EU policy framework for the information society and media for the 1 next decade and, at global level, the WSIS+10 a ten years activity aimed to draw the guidelines for an harmonious and fruitful development of the information society. It promotes the positive contribution that information and communication technologies can make to the economy, society and personal quality of life. Everyone experienced in “ICT based innovation” knows that “It is not only a matter of technology”. Of course technology advances are one of the potential actors as in the case of the diffusion of personal computing or easy access to digital networking. Anyway different parameters are actively influencing e-Services success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user’s habits, literacy, capacity, market models, interaction design or merely mind-set! Before looking in detail how all these aspects are impacting on education and learning let’s take into account some additional relevant aspects

Digital libraries: The challenge of integrating instagram with a taxonomy for content management

Interoperability and social implication are two current challenges in the digital library (DL) context. To resolve the problem of interoperability, our work aims to find a relationship between the main metadata schemas. In particular, we want to formalize knowledge through the creation of a metadata taxonomy built with the analysis and the integration of existing schemas associated with DLs. We developed a method to integrate and combine Instagram metadata and hashtags. The final result is a taxonomy, which provides innovative metadata with respect to the classification of resources, as images of Instagram and the user-generated content, that play a primary role in the context of modern DLs. The possibility of Instagram to localize the photos inserted by users allows us to interpret the most relevant and interesting informative content for a specific user type and in a specific location and to improve access, visibility and searching of library content

FOSS4G 2016 Proceedings: Academic Program - selected papers and posters

This Conference Proceedings is a collection of selected papers and posters submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G 2016), 24th to 26th August 2016 in Bonn, Germany. Like in previous FOSS4G conferences on national and international level the academic papers and posters cover an extensive wide range of topics reflecting the contribution of the academia to this field by the development of open source software components, in the design of open standards, in the proliferation of web-based solutions, in the dissemination of the open principles important in science and education, or in the collection and the hosting of freely available geo-data

Utilizing social media to build community in the residence halls

The purposes of this study are to understand how community is built and residents are educated in the residence halls on college campuses as well as to design a method for social media to aid that process. To achieve this, documents were collected from 10 different institutions from across the country. The documents were analyzed to determine how community is built, residents are educated, and the use of social media in residence life. The results showed that none of the institutions were using social media in any form. It also showed that all of the institutions build community and educate residents through similar methods which led to the seven themes: 1. Community; 2. Intentional; 3. Academic Success; 4. Relationships; 5. Programing; 6. Resources; and 7. Inclusive. After understanding the methods used to build community and educate residents, a process to implement social media to aid in both areas was designed. The final piece is an example of specific features of social media to build community and educate residents within a residence hall on a college campus