Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Deriving and Exploiting Situational Information in Speech: Investigations in a Simulated Search and Rescue Scenario

The need for automatic recognition and understanding of speech is emerging in tasks involving the processing of large volumes of natural conversations. In application domains such as Search and Rescue, exploiting automated systems for extracting mission-critical information from speech communications has the potential to make a real difference. Spoken language understanding has commonly been approached by identifying units of meaning (such as sentences, named entities, and dialogue acts) for providing a basis for further discourse analysis. However, this fine-grained identification of fundamental units of meaning is sensitive to high error rates in the automatic transcription of noisy speech. This thesis demonstrates that topic segmentation and identification techniques can be employed for information extraction from spoken conversations by being robust to such errors. Two novel topic-based approaches are presented for extracting situational information within the search and rescue context. The first approach shows that identifying the changes in the context and content of first responders' report over time can provide an estimation of their location. The second approach presents a speech-based topological map estimation technique that is inspired, in part, by automatic mapping algorithms commonly used in robotics. The proposed approaches are evaluated on a goal-oriented conversational speech corpus, which has been designed and collected based on an abstract communication model between a first responder and a task leader during a search process. Results have confirmed that a highly imperfect transcription of noisy speech has limited impact on the information extraction performance compared with that obtained on the transcription of clean speech data. This thesis also shows that speech recognition accuracy can benefit from rescoring its initial transcription hypotheses based on the derived high-level location information. A new two-pass speech decoding architecture is presented. In this architecture, the location estimation from a first decoding pass is used to dynamically adapt a general language model which is used for rescoring the initial recognition hypotheses. This decoding strategy has resulted in a statistically significant gain in the recognition accuracy of the spoken conversations in high background noise. It is concluded that the techniques developed in this thesis can be extended to more application domains that deal with large volumes of natural spoken conversations

Pedagogic engagement with literature : how a pedagogic journal club became a higher education community of practice

This thesis investigates the impact of a pedagogic journal club (PJC) for teaching-focussed staff at a research-intensive UK university in light of sector-specific drivers such as the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) and the United Kingdom Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). A three-year cycle of action research was undertaken and the impact of the PJC on individuals who attended examined: with reference to teaching practice; promotion and professional recognition; confidence; identity, and pedagogic engagement with literature (PedEL). The impact on the wider university community in terms of module and course design, interdisciplinary collaboration and networking, as well as how the dissemination of new knowledge affected the perceived value of teaching-focussed activity, is discussed. Conducted within a pragmatist paradigm, data were gathered at regular intervals via memoing, mixed method questionnaires and participant unstructured interviews. Interrogation of the literature problematised ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ (SoTL) and the difficulties faced when engaging staff in it. Differences between ‘professional learning community’ and ‘community of practice’ were expounded demonstrating the paucity of research concerning theoretical understanding of communities in HEIs. Professional development was explored, focusing on its often-ineffective design, as well as highlighting issues that teaching-focussed professional development can face in a research-intensive institution. The conclusion of this thesis primarily concerns the creation of the pedagogic journal club (PJC) as a vehicle for dialogic pedagogic engagement with literature, which was found to engender an effective professional development community in an HE setting. Guidance on how to create a PJC is provided for HEIs to explore in their own settings. Conclusions are also made around the reconceptualising of SoTL with pedagogic engagement with literature (PedEL) sitting between the two established forms of SoTL: pedagogic development (PedD) and pedagogic research (PedR). Thus, creating a new definitional framework that HEIs can adapt to their own context and practices. Creation of a new context specific Higher Education Community of Practice (HECoP) is also reported on with respect to membership, leadership, organisational culture and knowledge sharing. Participants and the researcher became boundary spanners 12 within the institution and time is devoted in this publication to the reflexive nature of action research. Knowledge generated by the participants changes practice and policy and this publication contributes a required, robust record of action research methodology