Integrating Immigrants in Colorado: Accomplishments, Challenges and Lessons Learned

Presents findings from an evaluation of the Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families initiative, including grantees' strategies, activities, and accomplishments; conditions and factors that affected their work; sustainability; and lessons learned

One Size Does Not Fit All: Meeting the Health Care Needs of Diverse Populations

Proposes a framework for meeting patients' cultural and linguistic needs: policies and procedures that support cultural competence, data collection, population-tailored services, and internal and external collaborations. Includes a self-assessment tool

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Cooperative learning in CLIL history lessons

Diese Doktorarbeit bezieht sich auf die kooperativen Lernmethoden im CLIL Geschichtsunterricht. Die Arbeit beinhaltet die folgenden wichtigen Aspekte. Zuerst ist theoretische und empirische Untersuchung durchgeführt worden, um herauszufinden, inwieweit kooperative Lernmethoden in CLIL (Integriertes Fremdsprachen- und Sachfachlernen) Geschichtsunterricht integriert sind. Außerdem sind die Rolle der Lehrer und deren Interventionsfrequenz im kooperativen Unterricht untersucht worden. Zweitens ist der Einfluss von kooperativen Lernmethoden auf die Motivation der Schüler im CLIL Geschichtsunterricht erforscht worden, wobei der Fokus auf der Gruppenheterogenität, Peer-Interaktion und Autonomie der Lernenden liegt. Drittens ist der Einfluss von kooperativen Lernmethoden auf die Fremdsprachenkenntnisse, Fachkenntnisse und nicht-akademische Fähigkeiten der Schüler im CLIL Geschichtsunterricht untersucht worden. Zur Ausführung dieser Forschung wurden sechs Lehrer*innen aus fünf verschiedenen Schulen in Berlin interviewt

A Multimedia Resource Manual to Facilitate English Language Instruction for Elementary Youth in Taiwan

The purpose of this project was to develop a multimedia resource manual to facilitate English language instmction for elementary youth in Taiwan. To accomplish this purpose, a review of current literature regarding multimedia technology in English language instmction for EFL/ESL learners was conducted. In addition, unit overviews, objectives oflesson plans, learning activities, teaching strategies, and instmctional materials were adapted and developed

Survey on reinforcement learning for language processing

In recent years some researchers have explored the use of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms as key components in the solution of various natural language processing tasks. For instance, some of these algorithms leveraging deep neural learning have found their way into conversational systems. This paper reviews the state of the art of RL methods for their possible use for different problems of natural language processing, focusing primarily on conversational systems, mainly due to their growing relevance. We provide detailed descriptions of the problems as well as discussions of why RL is well-suited to solve them. Also, we analyze the advantages and limitations of these methods. Finally, we elaborate on promising research directions in natural language processing that might benefit from reinforcement learning