Towards Understanding Egyptian Arabic Dialogues

Labelling of user's utterances to understanding his attends which called Dialogue Act (DA) classification, it is considered the key player for dialogue language understanding layer in automatic dialogue systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to user's utterances labeling for Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and Instant Messages using Machine Learning (ML) approach without relying on any special lexicons, cues, or rules. Due to the lack of Egyptian dialect dialogue corpus, the system evaluated by multi-genre corpus includes 4725 utterances for three domains, which are collected and annotated manually from Egyptian call-centers. The system achieves F1 scores of 70. 36% overall domains.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0308

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Technology-based rehabilitation to improve communication after acquired brain injury

The utilization of technology has allowed for several advances in aphasia rehabilitation for individuals with acquired brain injury. Thirty-one previous studies that provide technology-based language or language and cognitive rehabilitation are examined in terms of the domains addressed, the types of treatments that were provided, details about the methods and the results, including which types of outcomes are reported. From this, we address questions about how different aspects of the delivery of treatment can influence rehabilitation outcomes, such as whether the treatment was standardized or tailored, whether the participants were prescribed homework or not, and whether intensity was varied. Results differed by these aspects of treatment delivery but ultimately the studies demonstrated consistent improvement on various outcome measures. With these aspects of technology-based treatment in mind, the ultimate goal of personalized rehabilitation is discussed.This project was funded by the Coulter Foundation for Translational Research. (Coulter Foundation for Translational Research

Object Referring in Visual Scene with Spoken Language

Object referring has important applications, especially for human-machine interaction. While having received great attention, the task is mainly attacked with written language (text) as input rather than spoken language (speech), which is more natural. This paper investigates Object Referring with Spoken Language (ORSpoken) by presenting two datasets and one novel approach. Objects are annotated with their locations in images, text descriptions and speech descriptions. This makes the datasets ideal for multi-modality learning. The approach is developed by carefully taking down ORSpoken problem into three sub-problems and introducing task-specific vision-language interactions at the corresponding levels. Experiments show that our method outperforms competing methods consistently and significantly. The approach is also evaluated in the presence of audio noise, showing the efficacy of the proposed vision-language interaction methods in counteracting background noise.Comment: 10 pages, Submitted to WACV 201

Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Evidence of Cognate Effects in the Phonetic Production and Processing of a Vowel Contrast.

The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ "forest") or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position ((*)/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals

Electrophysiological and kinematic correlates of communicative intent in the planning and production of pointing gestures and speech

Acknowledgements We thank Albert Russel for assistance in setting up the experiments, and Charlotte Paulisse for help in data collection.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Navigation and interaction in a real-scale digital mock-up using natural language and user gesture

This paper tries to demonstrate a very new real-scale 3D system and sum up some firsthand and cutting edge results concerning multi-modal navigation and interaction interfaces. This work is part of the CALLISTO-SARI collaborative project. It aims at constructing an immersive room, developing a set of software tools and some navigation/interaction interfaces. Two sets of interfaces will be introduced here: 1) interaction devices, 2) natural language (speech processing) and user gesture. The survey on this system using subjective observation (Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, SSQ) and objective measurements (Center of Gravity, COG) shows that using natural languages and gesture-based interfaces induced less cyber-sickness comparing to device-based interfaces. Therefore, gesture-based is more efficient than device-based interfaces.FUI CALLISTO-SAR