Can Automated Gesture Recognition Support the Study of Child Language Development?

Children's prelinguistic gestures play a central role in their communicative development. Early gesture use has been shown to be predictive of both concurrent and later language ability, making the identification of gestures in video data at scale a potentially valuable tool for both theoretical and clinical purposes. We describe a new dataset consisting of videos of 72 infants interacting with their caregivers at 11&12 months, annotated for the appearance of 12 different gesture types. We propose a model based on deep convolutional neural networks to classify these. The model achieves 48.32% classification accuracy overall, but with significant variation between gesture types. Critically, we found strong (0.7 or above) rank order correlations between by-child gesture counts from human and machine coding for 7 of the 12 gestures (including the critical gestures of declarative pointing, hold outs and gives). Given the challenging nature of the data - recordings of many different dyads in different environments engaged in diverse activities - we consider these results a very encouraging first attempt at the task, and evidence that automatic or machine-assisted gesture identification could make a valuable contribution to the study of cognitive development

Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Research

Sinhala is the native language of the Sinhalese people who make up the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. The language belongs to the globe-spanning language tree, Indo-European. However, due to poverty in both linguistic and economic capital, Sinhala, in the perspective of Natural Language Processing tools and research, remains a resource-poor language which has neither the economic drive its cousin English has nor the sheer push of the law of numbers a language such as Chinese has. A number of research groups from Sri Lanka have noticed this dearth and the resultant dire need for proper tools and research for Sinhala natural language processing. However, due to various reasons, these attempts seem to lack coordination and awareness of each other. The objective of this paper is to fill that gap of a comprehensive literature survey of the publicly available Sinhala natural language tools and research so that the researchers working in this field can better utilize contributions of their peers. As such, we shall be uploading this paper to arXiv and perpetually update it periodically to reflect the advances made in the field

The use of respeaking for the transcription of non-fictional genres : an exploratory study

Transcription is not only a useful tool for audiovisual translation, but also a task that is being increasingly performed by translators in different scenarios. This article presents the results of an experiment in which three transcription methods are compared: manual transcription, respeaking, and revision of a transcript generated by speech recognition. The emphasis is put on respeaking, which is expected to be a useful method to speed up the process of transcription and have a positive impact on the transcribers' experience. Both objective and subjective measures were obtained: on the one hand, the time spent on each task and the output quality based on the NER metrics and on the other, the participants' opinions before and after the task, namely the self-reported effort, boredom, confidence in the accuracy of the transcript and overall qualit

Utilizing Consumer Health Posts for Pharmacovigilance: Identifying Underlying Factors Associated with Patients’ Attitudes Towards Antidepressants

Non-adherence to antidepressants is a major obstacle to antidepressants therapeutic benefits, resulting in increased risk of relapse, emergency visits, and significant burden on individuals and the healthcare system. Several studies showed that non-adherence is weakly associated with personal and clinical variables, but strongly associated with patients’ beliefs and attitudes towards medications. The traditional methods for identifying the key dimensions of patients’ attitudes towards antidepressants are associated with some methodological limitations, such as concern about confidentiality of personal information. In this study, attempts have been made to address the limitations by utilizing patients’ self report experiences in online healthcare forums to identify underlying factors affecting patients attitudes towards antidepressants. The data source of the study was a healthcare forum called “askapatients.com”. 892 patients’ reviews were randomly collected from the forum for the four most commonly prescribed antidepressants including Sertraline (Zoloft) and Escitalopram (Lexapro) from SSRI class, and Venlafaxine (Effexor) and duloxetine (Cymbalta) from SNRI class. Methodology of this study is composed of two main phases: I) generating structured data from unstructured patients’ drug reviews and testing hypotheses concerning attitude, II) identification and normalization of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), Withdrawal Symptoms (WDs) and Drug Indications (DIs) from the posts, and mapping them to both The UMLS and SNOMED CT concepts. Phase II also includes testing the association between ADRs and attitude. The result of the first phase of this study showed that “experience of adverse drug reactions”, “perceived distress received from ADRs”, “lack of knowledge about medication’s mechanism”, “withdrawal experience”, “duration of usage”, and “drug effectiveness” are strongly associated with patients attitudes. However, demographic variables including “age” and “gender” are not associated with attitude. Analysis of the data in second phase of the study showed that from 6,534 identified entities, 73% are ADRs, 12% are WDs, and 15 % are drug indications. In addition, psychological and cognitive expressions have higher variability than physiological expressions. All three types of entities were mapped to 811 UMLS and SNOMED CT concepts. Testing the association between ADRs and attitude showed that from twenty-one physiological ADRs specified in the ASEC questionnaire, “dry mouth”, “increased appetite”, “disorientation”, “yawning”, “weight gain”, and “problem with sexual dysfunction” are associated with attitude. A set of psychological and cognitive ADRs, such as “emotional indifference” and “memory problem were also tested that showed significance association between these types of ADRs and attitude. The findings of this study have important implications for designing clinical interventions aiming to improve patients\u27 adherence towards antidepressants. In addition, the dataset generated in this study has significant implications for improving performance of text-mining algorithms aiming to identify health related information from consumer health posts. Moreover, the dataset can be used for generating and testing hypotheses related to ADRs associated with psychiatric mediations, and identifying factors associated with discontinuation of antidepressants. The dataset and guidelines of this study are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pharmacovigilanceinpsychiatry/hom

Embodied boarders: Snowboarding, status and style.

The body is a symbol of status, a system of social markings and a site of distinctions. Drawing on documentary and visual sources, combined with participant observations, this article explores the body as a signifier through an examination of numerous cultural practices used by snowboarders to distinguish themselves from non-snowboarders and each other. In examining embodied snowboarders I firstly analyse their cultural tastes and styles of dress, language and bodily deportment. Secondly, I consider how boarders earn symbolic capital through demonstrations of commitment, physical prowess and risk taking. This analysis implicitly views the body as a social phenomenon, that is, it conceptualises the body as a possessor of power, a form of status, a bearer of symbolic value and a form of physical capital. The body now plays a central role in producing and reproducing social groups and the "embodied boarder" is an important case study for understanding how contemporary youth both construct and make sense of their worlds

A diglossic multi-dialectal language in the courtroom : the challenges for English-Arabic legal interpreters

The increasing mobility around the world in recent decades has meant a rise in the need for interpreting services. Coupled with the premise that no court client should be disadvantaged due to a language barrier, that has triggered an interest in research in legal interpreting, and in particular, courtroom interpreting. While literature presents studies on the topic in many languages, little research has been published on the English-Arabic language pair. Considering that the legal setting is particularly sensitive to language use and that Arabic -- one of the key languages spoken at home in Australia -- is charecterised by diglossia and dialectal diversity, this study aims to investigate the setting where the two phenomena intersect, i.e., the challenges in legal interpreting that are related to Arabic language varieties. The study was conducted empirically and primarily qualitatively. Questionnaires and interviews were utilised, and a focus group forum was convened to collect data from interpreters and legal professionals who have participated in English-Arabic legal encounters. The study has found that Arabic varieties pose challenges in the English-Arabic legal setting and that the relevant stakeholders (other than interpreters) do not have adequate awareness of the issue. It has also found that the particular variant of Arabic referred to as Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) -- a relaxed version of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) -- is in most cases the optimal solution to the challenges associated with Arabic varieties. The study recommends making practice on the key Arabic dialects spoken in Australia part of interpreting academic and training programs. It also recommends that clear guidelines be outlined toward a common understanding and collaborative approach in dealing with the issue on the part of the relevant parties. Stakeholders and potential beneficiaries of the study include Arabic-speaking court clients, English-Arabic legal interpreters, and judicial officers. By investigating legal interpreting in a key language pair, this study will ultimately be of benefit for the administration of justice in Australia

Terrorists, fanatics, and extremists: The language of anti-Muslim prejudice

This paper examines contemporary expressions of anti-Muslim prejudice in Western society. Representations of "Islam" and "Muslim" were collected in a 9.87 billion-word corpus of web-based newspapers and magazines published between 2010 and 2020, in order to identify and analyze usage and connotation. This paper adopts a corpus linguistics approach, in which an analysis of collocation (co-occurring words) and concordance (contextual) data was performed. The results reveal how Islam and Muslim are frequently framed negatively (e.g., as "radical", "extremist", "terrorist", and "violent"), while other negative stereotypes and images of Islam and Muslim people were frequently attested in the data. This paper further explores anti-Muslim linguicism in Anglophone countries and makes an original contribution to the wider debate on the issue of prejudice against Muslim people