Eye-tracking assistive technologies for individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in the loss of muscle control. For individuals with ALS, where mobility is limited to the movement of the eyes, the use of eye-tracking-based applications can be applied to achieve some basic tasks with certain digital interfaces. This paper presents a review of existing eye-tracking software and hardware through which eye-tracking their application is sketched as an assistive technology to cope with ALS. Eye-tracking also provides a suitable alternative as control of game elements. Furthermore, artificial intelligence has been utilized to improve eye-tracking technology with significant improvement in calibration and accuracy. Gaps in literature are highlighted in the study to offer a direction for future research

Extraction of Arabic word roots: An Approach Based on Computational Model and Multi-Backpropagation Neural Networks

Stemming is a process of extracting the root of a given word, by stripping off the affixes attached to this word. Many attempts have been made to address the stemming of Arabic words problem. The majority of the existing Arabic stemming algorithms require a complete set of morphological rules and large vocabulary lookup tables. Furthermore, many of them give more than one potential stem or root for a given Arabic word. According to Ahmad [11], the Arabic stemming process based on the language morphological rules is still a very difficult task due to the nature of the language itself. The limitations of the current Arabic stemming methods have motivated this research in which we investigate a novel approach to extract the word roots of Arabic language named here as MUAIDI-STEMMER 2. This approach attempts to exploit numerical relations between Arabic letters, avoiding having a list of the root and pattern of each word in the language, and giving one root solution. This approach is composed of two phases. Phase I depends on a basic calculations extracted from linguistic analysis of Arabic patterns and affixes. Phase II is based on artificial neural network trained by backpropagation learning rule. In this proposed phase, we formulate the root extraction problem as a classification problem and the neural network as a classifier tool. This study demonstrates that a neural network can be effectively used to ex- tract the word roots of Arabic language The stemmer developed is tested using 46,895 Arabic word types3. Error counting accuracy evaluation was employed to evaluate the performance of the stemmer. It was successful in producing the stems of 44,107 Arabic words from the given test datasets with accuracy of 94.81%. 2.Muaidi is the author father's name. 3.Types mean distinct or unique words

Eye-Tracking Assistive Technologies for Individuals with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in the loss of muscle control. For individuals with ALS, where mobility is limited to the movement of the eyes, the use of eye-tracking-based applications can be applied to achieve some basic tasks with certain digital interfaces. This paper presents a review of existing eye-tracking software and hardware through which eye-tracking their application is sketched as an assistive technology to cope with ALS. Eye-tracking also provides a suitable alternative as control of game elements. Furthermore, artificial intelligence has been utilized to improve eye-tracking technology with significant improvement in calibration and accuracy. Gaps in literature are highlighted in the study to offer a direction for future research

SPARC 2018 Internationalisation and collaboration : Salford postgraduate annual research conference book of abstracts

Welcome to the Book of Abstracts for the 2018 SPARC conference. This year we not only celebrate the work of our PGRs but also the launch of our Doctoral School, which makes this year’s conference extra special. Once again we have received a tremendous contribution from our postgraduate research community; with over 100 presenters, the conference truly showcases a vibrant PGR community at Salford. These abstracts provide a taster of the research strengths of their works, and provide delegates with a reference point for networking and initiating critical debate. With such wide-ranging topics being showcased, we encourage you to take up this great opportunity to engage with researchers working in different subject areas from your own. To meet global challenges, high impact research inevitably requires interdisciplinary collaboration. This is recognised by all major research funders. Therefore engaging with the work of others and forging collaborations across subject areas is an essential skill for the next generation of researchers

On Clustering and Evaluation of Narrow Domain Short-Test Corpora

En este trabajo de tesis doctoral se investiga el problema del agrupamiento de conjuntos especiales de documentos llamados textos cortos de dominios restringidos. Para llevar a cabo esta tarea, se han analizados diversos corpora y métodos de agrupamiento. Mas aún, se han introducido algunas medidas de evaluación de corpus, técnicas de selección de términos y medidas para la validez de agrupamiento con la finalidad de estudiar los siguientes problemas: -Determinar la relativa dificultad de un corpus para ser agrupado y estudiar algunas de sus características como longitud de los textos, amplitud del dominio, estilometría, desequilibrio de clases y estructura. -Contribuir en el estado del arte sobre el agrupamiento de corpora compuesto de textos cortos de dominios restringidos El trabajo de investigación que se ha llevado a cabo se encuentra parcialmente enfocado en el "agrupamiento de textos cortos". Este tema se considera relevante dado el modo actual y futuro en que las personas tienden a usar un "lenguaje reducido" constituidos por textos cortos (por ejemplo, blogs, snippets, noticias y generación de mensajes de textos como el correo electrónico y el chat). Adicionalmente, se estudia la amplitud del dominio de corpora. En este sentido, un corpus puede ser considerado como restringido o amplio si el grado de traslape de vocabulario es alto o bajo, respectivamente. En la tarea de categorización, es bastante complejo lidiar con corpora de dominio restringido tales como artículos científicos, reportes técnicos, patentes, etc. El objetivo principal de este trabajo consiste en estudiar las posibles estrategias para tratar con los siguientes dos problemas: a) las bajas frecuencias de los términos del vocabulario en textos cortos, y b) el alto traslape de vocabulario asociado a dominios restringidos. Si bien, cada uno de los problemas anteriores es un reto suficientemente alto, cuando se trata con textos cortos de dominios restringidos, la complejidad del problema se incrPinto Avendaño, DE. (2008). On Clustering and Evaluation of Narrow Domain Short-Test Corpora [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/2641Palanci