240 research outputs found

    The role of grammatical gender in Spanish-English switched DPs and copula constructions..

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    Codeswitching is a language-contact phenomenon which is characterized by the simultaneous use of the two languages of the bilingual and which has been used as a tool to investigate how these two languages interact in the mind of the bilingual. The present investigation focuses on English-Spanish codeswitching within Determiner Phrases (DP switches) and within copulative constructions with an Adjective Phrase (Adj switches). By following the minimalist premises proposed by MacSwan (1999, 2000) and by Liceras et al. (2005, 2008, 2016), two issues have been under consideration: (i) the directionality of the switch, and (ii) the gender agreement mechanisms in Spanish DP switches and in Spanish Adj switches (i.e., the analogical criterion, both [+AC] and [-AC], and the masculine as default). Experimental data have been collected via three experiments from two groups of L1 Spanish &#8211; L2 English bilingual speakers (i.e., children and adults): (i) an eyetracking during reading task, (ii) a reaction time task in Gorilla, and (iii) a visual world paradigm task. Thus, both offline and online experimental data have been elicited and analyzed, as well as compared to those in previous studies. Overall, regarding the directionality of the switch, the results indicate that English DP switches and English Adj switches are processed faster and are preferred. In the case of the gender agreement mechanisms, the results point to a hierarchy (i.e., [+AC] < masculine as default < [-AC]), which shows how strongly represented Spanish gender features are in the mind of these bilinguals for whom Spanish is their L1. However, children and adults show differences which could be attributed to (i) the complexity of the structure in terms of lexical access (i.e., Adj switches are more complex than DP switches), (ii) the type of data (i.e., different patterns are found depending on whether offline data or online data are considered), (iii) the implementation of the requirements imposed by feature strength (i.e., children&#8217;s performance is affected when experimental conditions make the task harder), and (iv) the interplay between the three.La alternancia de código es un fenómeno de contacto de lenguas que se caracteriza por el uso simultáneo de las dos lenguas del bilingüe y que se ha utilizado como herramienta para investigar cómo estas interactúan en el cerebro del bilingüe. La presente investigación se centra en la alternancia de código entre el inglés y el español en sintagmas determinante y estructuras copulativas con un sintagma adjetivo. Se parte de la premisa minimalista propuesta por MacSwan (1999, 2000) y Liceras et al. (2005, 2008, 2016) para situar el foco en dos aspectos: (i) la direccionalidad del cambio de código y (ii) la concordancia de género gramatical (el criterio analógico, tanto [+AC] como [-AC], y el masculino por defecto). Se han recogido datos experimentales de dos grupos de participantes L1 español &#8211; L2 inglés (niños y adultos) mediante tres experimentos: (i) uno de lectura con seguimiento ocular, (ii) uno de tiempos de reacción en Gorilla y (iii) uno del paradigma del mundo visual. Así, se han recogido y analizado datos experimentales offline y online y a su vez se han comparado con los de estudios previos. En general, en cuanto a la direccionalidad, los resultados indican lo mismo para ambas estructuras: mayor facilidad de procesamiento y preferencia por las estructuras donde el determinante y el adjetivo están en inglés. En cuanto a la concordancia de género, los resultados apuntan a una jerarquía ([+AC] < masculino por defecto < [-AC]) que refleja cómo de fuerte es la representación de los rasgos de género en la mente de estos bilingües para los que el español es la L1. Sin embargo, existen diferencias entre los dos grupos de participantes que se atribuyen (i) a la complejidad de la estructura en términos de acceso léxico (los sintagmas adjetivos son más complejos que los sintagmas determinantes), (ii) al tipo de datos (se han encontrado patrones diferentes dependiendo de si los datos son online u offline), (iii) a la implementación de los requisitos que impone el cotejo de rasgos (la actuación de los niños se ve afectada cuando las condiciones experimentales se endurecen) y (iv) a la interacción entre estos tres aspectos.Escuela de DoctoradoDoctorado en Estudios Ingleses Avanzados: Lenguas y Culturas en Contact

    Eyewear Computing \u2013 Augmenting the Human with Head-Mounted Wearable Assistants

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    The seminar was composed of workshops and tutorials on head-mounted eye tracking, egocentric vision, optics, and head-mounted displays. The seminar welcomed 30 academic and industry researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia with a diverse background, including wearable and ubiquitous computing, computer vision, developmental psychology, optics, and human-computer interaction. In contrast to several previous Dagstuhl seminars, we used an ignite talk format to reduce the time of talks to one half-day and to leave the rest of the week for hands-on sessions, group work, general discussions, and socialising. The key results of this seminar are 1) the identification of key research challenges and summaries of breakout groups on multimodal eyewear computing, egocentric vision, security and privacy issues, skill augmentation and task guidance, eyewear computing for gaming, as well as prototyping of VR applications, 2) a list of datasets and research tools for eyewear computing, 3) three small-scale datasets recorded during the seminar, 4) an article in ACM Interactions entitled \u201cEyewear Computers for Human-Computer Interaction\u201d, as well as 5) two follow-up workshops on \u201cEgocentric Perception, Interaction, and Computing\u201d at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) as well as \u201cEyewear Computing\u201d at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)

    Health privacy : methods for privacy-preserving data sharing of methylation, microbiome and eye tracking data

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    This thesis studies the privacy risks of biomedical data and develops mechanisms for privacy-preserving data sharing. The contribution of this work is two-fold: First, we demonstrate privacy risks of a variety of biomedical data types such as DNA methylation data, microbiome data and eye tracking data. Despite being less stable than well-studied genome data and more prone to environmental changes, well-known privacy attacks can be adopted and threaten the privacy of data donors. Nevertheless, data sharing is crucial to advance biomedical research given that collection the data of a sufficiently large population is complex and costly. Therefore, we develop as a second step privacy- preserving tools that enable researchers to share such biomedical data. and second, we equip researchers with tools to enable privacy-preserving data sharing. These tools are mostly based on differential privacy, machine learning techniques and adversarial examples and carefully tuned to the concrete use case to maintain data utility while preserving privacy.Diese Dissertation beleuchtet Risiken für die Privatsphäre von biomedizinischen Daten und entwickelt Mechanismen für privatsphäre-erthaltendes Teilen von Daten. Dies zerfällt in zwei Teile: Zunächst zeigen wir die Risiken für die Privatsphäre auf, die von biomedizinischen Daten wie DNA Methylierung, Mikrobiomdaten und bei der Aufnahme von Augenbewegungen vorkommen. Obwohl diese Daten weniger stabil sind als Genomdaten, deren Risiken der Forschung gut bekannt sind, und sich mehr unter Umwelteinflüssen ändern, können bekannte Angriffe angepasst werden und bedrohen die Privatsphäre der Datenspender. Dennoch ist das Teilen von Daten essentiell um biomedizinische Forschung voranzutreiben, denn Daten von einer ausreichend großen Studienpopulation zu sammeln ist aufwändig und teuer. Deshalb entwickeln wir als zweiten Schritt privatsphäre-erhaltende Techniken, die es Wissenschaftlern erlauben, solche biomedizinischen Daten zu teilen. Diese Techniken basieren im Wesentlichen auf differentieller Privatsphäre und feindlichen Beispielen und sind sorgfältig auf den konkreten Einsatzzweck angepasst um den Nutzen der Daten zu erhalten und gleichzeitig die Privatsphäre zu schützen

    What is the influence of genre during the perception of structured text for retrieval and search?

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    This thesis presents an investigation into the high value of structured text (or form) in the context of genre within Information Retrieval. In particular, how are these structured texts perceived and why are they not more heavily used within Information Retrieval & Search communities? The main motivation is to show the features in which people can exploit genre within Information Search & Retrieval, in particular, categorisation and search tasks. To do this, it was vital to record and analyse how and why this was done during typical tasks. The literature review highlighted two previous studies (Toms & Campbell 1999a; Watt 2009) which have reported pilot studies consisting of genre categorisation and information searching. Both studies and other findings within the literature review inspired the work contained within this thesis. Genre is notoriously hard to define, but a very useful framework of Purpose and Form, developed by Yates & Orlikowski (1992), was utilised to design two user studies for the research reported within the thesis. The two studies consisted of, first, a categorisation task (e-mails), and second, a set of six simulated situations in Wikipedia, both of which collected quantitative data from eye tracking experiments as well as qualitative user data. The results of both studies showed the extent to which the participants utilised the form features of the stimuli presented, in particular, how these were used, which ocular behaviours (skimming or scanning) and actual features were used, and which were the most important. The main contributions to research made by this thesis were, first of all, that the task-based user evaluations employing simulated search scenarios revealed how and why users make decisions while interacting with the textual features of structure and layout within a discourse community, and, secondly, an extensive evaluation of the quantitative data revealed the features that were used by the participants in the user studies and the effects of the interpretation of genre in the search and categorisation process as well as the perceptual processes used in the various communities. This will be of benefit for the re-development of information systems. As far as is known, this is the first detailed and systematic investigation into the types of features, value of form, perception of features, and layout of genre using eye tracking in online communities, such as Wikipedia

    Investigating the effect of priming on reading performance on electronic devices

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    Reading is an activity needed almost everywhere in daily life. Through reading we are not only able to extract meaning from a text, but also to extend our knowledge of the world and to foster other cognitive abilities. In the age of information technology, reading behav-iour has been subject to change. With more information made accessible through the inter-net and e-reading devices, the time spent reading increases. Further, it is reported that read-ing on computers and other electronic devices tends to be shallower and abilities like browsing over a document to get the gist of its content become more important. In this thesis we want to investigate the usage of text visualizations to facilitate the reading activities on electronic devices, with special focus on reading comprehension. We want to make use of the memory psychological "priming effect" by presenting the reader with a visualization of the text's content before the actual reading activity, and thus giving the opportunity to get familiar with the information contained in the text prior to reading. To create those visualizations we developed a first prototype, which is capable of extracting keywords of a text and visualizing them. Additionally, we present certain important design aspects of text visualizations, which were discovered through a preliminary study. The presented concepts were evaluated in a user study and are considered as a starting point for future research. With the contributions of this work we aim to support readers with reading activities. Facilitated reading could help to lower the hurdle to read more and therefore foster the gain of knowledge.Die Fähigkeit des Lesens wird fast überall in unserem Alltag benötigt. Durch Lesen erfas-sen wir nicht nur die Bedeutung eines Texts, sondern erweitern unser Wissen und andere geistige Fähigkeiten. Im IT-Zeitalter ändert sich auch unser Leseverhalten. Über das Inter-net und e-Reader sind mehr Informationen zugänglich und so nimmt auch die Zeit zu, die wir mit Lesen verbringen. Lesen auf elektronischen Geräten neigt Studien zufolge außerdem dazu oberflächlicher zu sein und es wird immer wichtiger, den groben Inhalt eines Texts durch Überfliegen zu erfassen. In dieser Arbeit soll untersucht werden ob Textvisualisierungen in der Lage sind, das Le-sen auf elektronischen Geräten zu erleichtern, insbesondere in Bezug auf das Textverständnis. Hierzu möchten wir den gedächtnispsychologischen "Priming Effekt" ausnutzen, indem wir dem Leser schon vor dem eigentlichen Lesen eine visuelle Zusammenfassung des Inhalts präsentieren. Diese soll dem Leser ermöglichen, sich schon vor dem Lesen mit den Inhalten des Texts vertraut zu machen. Um solche Visualisierungen zu erstellen, wurde ein Prototyp entwickelt, der automatisch die Schlüsselworte eines Texts extrahiert und diese visuell darstellt. Wichtige Design Eigenschaften von Textvisualisierungen werden eben-falls erläutert. Die vorgestellten Konzepte wurden durch eine Nutzerstudie evaluiert und können Ausgangspunkt für spätere Forschung in diesem Bereich bilden. Mit den Erkenntnissen dieser Arbeit möchten wir dazu beitragen das Lesen auf elektronischen Geräten zu erleichtern. Unterstütztes und einfacheres Lesen könnte Lesern helfen, mehr zu Lesen und damit schließlich auch den Gewinn neuen Wissens fördern

    The use of extended reality and machine learning to improve healthcare and promote greenhealth

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    Com a Quarta Revolução Industrial, a propagação da Internet das Coisas, o avanço nas áreas de Inteligência Artificial e de Machine Learning até à migração para a Computação em Nuvem, o termo "Ambientes Inteligentes" cada vez mais deixa de ser uma idealização para se tornar realidade. Da mesma forma as tecnologias de Realidade Extendida também elas têm aumentado a sua presença no mundo tecnológico após um "período de hibernação", desde a popularização do conceito de Metaverse assim como a entrada das grandes empresas informáticas como a Apple e a Google num mercado onde a Realidade Virtual, Realidade Aumentada e Realidade Mista eram dominadas por empresas com menos experiência no desenvolvimento de sistemas (e.g. Meta), reconhecimento a nível mundial (e.g. HTC Vive), ou suporte financeiro e confiança do mercado. Esta tese tem como foco o estudo do potencial uso das tecnologias de Realidade Estendida de forma a promover Saúde Verde assim como seu uso em Hospitais Inteligentes, uma das variantes de Ambientes Inteligentes, incorporando Machine Learning e Computer Vision, como ferramenta de suporte e de melhoria de cuidados de saúde, tanto do ponto de vista do profissional de saúde como do paciente, através duma revisão literarária e análise da atualidade. Resultando na elaboração de um modelo conceptual com a sugestão de tecnologias a poderem ser usadas para alcançar esse cenário selecionadas pelo seu potencial, sendo posteriormente descrito o desenvolvimento de protótipos de partes do modelo conceptual para Óculos de Realidade Extendida como validação de conceito.With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the spread of the Internet of Things, the advance in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning until the migration to Cloud Computing, the term "Intelligent Environments" increasingly ceases to be an idealization to become reality. Likewise, Extended Reality technologies have also increased their presence in the technological world after a "hibernation period", since the popularization of the Metaverse concept, as well as the entry of large computer companies such as Apple and Google into a market where Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality were dominated by companies with less experience in system development (e.g. Meta), worldwide recognition (e.g. HTC Vive) or financial support and trust in the market. This thesis focuses on the study of the potential use of Extended Reality technologies in order to promote GreenHealth as well as their use in Smart Hospitals, one of the variants of Smart Environments, incorporating Machine Learning and Computer Vision, as a tool to support and improve healthcare, both from the point of view of the health professional and the patient, through a literature review and analysis of the current situation. Resulting in the elaboration of a conceptual model with the suggestion of technologies that can be used to achieve this scenario selected for their potential, and then the development of prototypes of parts of the conceptual model for Extended Reality Headsets as concept validation

    A Systematic Literature Review of Digital Game-based Assessment Empirical Studies: Current Trends and Open Challenges

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    Technology has become an essential part of our everyday life, and its use in educational environments keeps growing. In addition, games are one of the most popular activities across cultures and ages, and there is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for assessment. This field is commonly known as game-based assessment (GBA), which refers to the use of games to assess learners' competencies, skills, or knowledge. This paper analyzes the current status of the GBA field by performing the first systematic literature review on empirical GBA studies, based on 66 research papers that used digital GBAs to determine: (1) the context where the study has been applied, (2) the primary purpose, (3) the knowledge domain of the game used, (4) game/tool availability, (5) the size of the data sample, (6) the data science techniques and algorithms applied, (7) the targeted stakeholders of the study, and (8) what limitations and challenges are reported by authors. Based on the categories established and our analysis, the findings suggest that GBAs are mainly used in formal education and for assessment purposes, and most GBAs focus on assessing STEM content and cognitive skills. Furthermore, the current limitations indicate that future GBA research would benefit from the use of bigger data samples and more specialized algorithms. Based on our results, we discuss the status of the field with the current trends and the open challenges (including replication and validation problems) providing recommendations for the future research agenda of the GBA field.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl

    Hierarchical representations for spatio-temporal visual attention: modeling and understanding

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    Mención Internacional en el título de doctorDentro del marco de la Inteligencia Artificial, la Visión Artificial es una disciplina científica que tiene como objetivo simular automaticamente las funciones del sistema visual humano, tratando de resolver tareas como la localización y el reconocimiento de objetos, la detección de eventos o el seguimiento de objetos....Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Luis Salgado Álvarez de Sotomayor.- Secretario: Ascensión Gallardo Antolín.- Vocal: Jenny Benois Pinea
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