Exploring language contact and use among globally mobile populations: a qualitative study of English-speaking short-stay academic sojourners in the Republic of Korea

This study explores the language contact and use of English speaking sojourners in the Republic of Korea who had no prior knowledge of Korean language or culture prior to arriving in the country. The study focuses on the use of mobile technology assisted l anguage use. Study participants responded to an online survey about their experiences using the Korean language when interacting with Korean speakers, their free time activities, and the types of digital and mobile technologies they used. The survey respon ses informed questions for later discussion groups, in which participants discussed challenges and solutions when encountering new linguistic and social scenarios with Korean speakers. Semi structured interviews were employed to examine the linguistic, soc ial and technological dimensions of the study participants’ brief sojourn in Korea in more depth. The interviews revealed a link between language contact, language use and a mobile instant messaging application. In the second phase of the study, online surveys focused on the language and technology link discovered in the first phase. Throughout Phase Two , the researcher observed the study participants in a series of social contexts, such as informal English practice and university events. Phase Two concluded with semi structured interviews that demonstrated language contact and use within mobile instant messaging chat rooms on participants’ handheld smart devices. The two phases revealed three key factors influencing the language contact and use between the study participants and Korean speakers. Firstly, a mutual perspicacity for mobile technologies and digital communication supported their mediated, screen to screen and blended direct and mediated face to screen interactions. Secondly, Korea’s advanced digital environment comprised handheld smart devices, smart device applications and ubiquitous, high speed Wi Fi their Korean speaking hosts to self reliance. Thirdly, language use between the study participants and Korean speakers incorporated a range of sociolinguistic resources including the exchange of symbols, small expressive images, photographs, video and audio recordings along with or in place of typed text. Using these resources also helped the study participants learn and take part in social and cultural practices, such as gifting digitally, within mobile instant messaging chat rooms. The findings of the study are drawn together in a new conceptual model which h as been called sociolinguistic digital acuity , highlighting the optimal conditions for language contact and use during a brief sojourn in a country with an unfamiliar language and culture

Information Preserving Processing of Noisy Handwritten Document Images

Many pre-processing techniques that normalize artifacts and clean noise induce anomalies due to discretization of the document image. Important information that could be used at later stages may be lost. A proposed composite-model framework takes into account pre-printed information, user-added data, and digitization characteristics. Its benefits are demonstrated by experiments with statistically significant results. Separating pre-printed ruling lines from user-added handwriting shows how ruling lines impact people\u27s handwriting and how they can be exploited for identifying writers. Ruling line detection based on multi-line linear regression reduces the mean error of counting them from 0.10 to 0.03, 6.70 to 0.06, and 0.13 to 0.02, com- pared to an HMM-based approach on three standard test datasets, thereby reducing human correction time by 50%, 83%, and 72% on average. On 61 page images from 16 rule-form templates, the precision and recall of form cell recognition are increased by 2.7% and 3.7%, compared to a cross-matrix approach. Compensating for and exploiting ruling lines during feature extraction rather than pre-processing raises the writer identification accuracy from 61.2% to 67.7% on a 61-writer noisy Arabic dataset. Similarly, counteracting page-wise skew by subtracting it or transforming contours in a continuous coordinate system during feature extraction improves the writer identification accuracy. An implementation study of contour-hinge features reveals that utilizing the full probabilistic probability distribution function matrix improves the writer identification accuracy from 74.9% to 79.5%

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

Digital Research Cycles: How Attitudes Toward Content, Culture And Technology Affect Web Development.

It has been estimated that one third of the world\u27s population does not have access to adequate health care. Some 1.6 billion people live in countries experiencing concentrated acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemics. Many countries in Africa--and other low-income countries--are in dire need of help providing adequate health care services to their citizens. They require more hands-on care from Western health workers--and training so more African health workers can eventually care for their own citizens. But these countries also need assistance acquiring and implementing both texts--the body of medical information potentially available to them--and technology--the means by which that information can be conveyed. This dissertation looks at these issues and others from a multi-faceted approach. It combines a survey of the developers of Web sites designed for use by health workers in low-income countries and a proposal for a novel approach to communication theory, which could help improve health communication and other social marketing practices. It also includes an extensive review of literature regarding a number of topics related to these issues. To improve healthcare services in low-income countries, several things should occur. First, more health workers--and others--could visit African countries and other places to provide free, hands-on medical care, as this researcher\u27s group did in Uganda. Such trips are ideal occasions for studying the cultural differences between mzungu (white man) and the Ugandan people. A number of useful medical texts have been written for health workers in low-income countries. Others will be published as new health information becomes available. But on what medium will they be published? Computers? Personal digital assistants? During the past 10 years the Internet became an ideal venue for conveying information. Unfortunately, people in target countries such as Uganda encounter cultural differences when such new technologies are diffused. This dissertation looks at cultural and technological difficulties encountered by people in low-income countries who attempt to diffuse information and communication technologies (ICT). Once a technology has been successfully adopted, someone will look for ways to use it to help others. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet--built by Web developers in Western countries--that are designed for use by health workers in low-income countries. However, these Web developers also experience cultural and technological differences, based on their knowledge of and attitudes toward best practices in their field. This research includes a survey of Web developers which determined their attitudes toward best practices in their field and tested this researcher\u27s hypothesis that there is no significant difference among the developers\u27 attitudes toward the content on their sites, their audience\u27s cultural needs and the various technological needs their audience has. It was found that the Web developers agree with 17 of 18 perceived best practices and that there is a significant difference between Web developers\u27 attitudes toward their audience\u27s technological needs and their attitudes toward quality content and the audience\u27s cultural needs. Creation of the survey herein resulted in this researcher generating a new way of thinking about communication theory--called digital research cycles. The survey was based on a review of literature and is rooted in the belief that any successful communication of a computer-mediated message in the information age is a behavior which is influenced by the senders\u27 and receivers\u27 attitudes and knowledge about textual style, the audience, technology and the subject matter to which the message pertains

Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability