An intelligent computer- based tutoring approach for the management of negative transfer

This research addresses how a prototype of a language tutoring system, the Chinese Tutor, tackles the practical problem of negative transfer (i.e. mother tongue influence) in the learning of Chinese grammar by English-speaking students. The design of the Chinese Tutor has been based on the results of empirical studies carried out as part of this research. The results of the data analysis show that negative transfer can be used to account for almost 80% of the errors observed in the linguistic output of students in their study of Chinese. If the students can be helped to overcome these errors, the standard of their Chinese will be greatly improved. In this research, an approach of Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems (ILTSs) has been adopted for handling negative transfer. This is because there are several advantages of ILTSs, including interactive learning, highly individualised instruction and student-centred instruction [Wyatt 1984 .The Chinese Tutor contains five main components: the Expert Model, which contains all the linguistic knowledge for tutoring and serves as a standard for evaluating the student's performance; the Student Model, which collects information on the student's performance; the Diagnoser, which detects different types of error made by the student; the Tutor Model, which plans student learning, makes didactic decisions and chooses an appropriate tutorial strategy based on the student’s performance; and the Interface Module, which communicates between the student and the system. A general and robust solution to the treatment of negative transfer, i.e. the technique of Mixed Grammar has been devised. The rules in this grammar can be applied to detect arbitrary transfer errors by using a general set of rules. A number of students in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Durham have used the Chinese Tutor with positive results

Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, Vol.10

Kontorslokaler nyttjas generellt cirka 2500 av årets 8760 timmar. Ett vanligt problem med kontorslokaler är det termiska klimatet, antingen är det för varmt, för kallt, eller så drar det. Höga temperaturer, över ca 26°C, bidrar till trötthet, nedsatt koncentration och gör att luften känns mindre fräsch. Stora variationen av lasten mellan dag och nattetid kan också resultera i att lokalerna överventileras under nattetid och underventileras under dagtid. Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka och jämföra Ecoclimes komforttaks lösning med andra olika värme och kylsystem i kontorslokaler. Att undersöka vilka eventuella fördelar Ecoclimes komforttak har gällande komfort, kyla, ventilation och ur energisynpunkt. Simuleringsprogrammet IDA ICE har använts för att simulera komforten och rumstemperaturer för ett kontor och ett konferensrum i en byggnad placerad i centrala Umeå. Resultaten från simuleringar indikerar att Ecoclimes komforttak, sänker den operativa temperaturen och höjer komforten med en mindre andel missnöjda i sitt rum jämfört med andra system trots samma rumstemperatur. För att bedömma andelen missnöjda i ett rum har komfortindexet PMV(Predicted mean vote) och PPD(Predicted percentage dissatisfied) använts. Den höga passiva effekten bidrar också till mindre energianvändning av ventilationsfläktar ifall ett VAV-system med rumstempertaurreglering används. Vidare har en känslighetsanalys genomförts på komforttaken där det undersöks hur kyleffekten påverkar kyltider, temperatur och komfort. Känslighetsanalysen visar att en ökning eller minskning av kyleffekten med 10% påverkar resultaten mest under en mycket varm dag jämfört med en normalvarm. Skillnaden i komfort var dock liten, endast 0,2 procentenheter från grundfallet

TectoMT – a deep-­linguistic core of the combined Chimera MT system

Chimera is a machine translation system that combines the TectoMT deep-linguistic core with phrase-based MT system Moses. For English–Czech pair it also uses the Depfix post-correction system. All the components run on Unix/Linux platform and are open source (available from Perl repository CPAN and the LINDAT/CLARIN repository). The main website is https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/tectomt. The development is currently supported by the QTLeap 7th FP project (http://qtleap.eu)

Generating Multilingual Personalized Descriptions of Museum Exhibits - The M-PIRO Project

This paper provides an overall presentation of the M-PIRO project. M-PIRO is developing technology that will allow museums to generate automatically textual or spoken descriptions of exhibits for collections available over the Web or in virtual reality environments. The descriptions are generated in several languages from information in a language-independent database and small fragments of text, and they can be tailored according to the backgrounds of the users, their ages, and their previous interaction with the system. An authoring tool allows museum curators to update the system's database and to control the language and content of the resulting descriptions. Although the project is still in progress, a Web-based demonstrator that supports English, Greek and Italian is already available, and it is used throughout the paper to highlight the capabilities of the emerging technology.Comment: 15 pages. Presented at the 29th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Gotland, Sweden, 2001. A version of the paper with higher quality images can be downloaded from: http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/~ionandr/caa_paper.pd

A call for the environment: A bilingual corpus-driven analysis of creative language in online texts by WWF and Greenpeace

Since its development as a discipline in the 1980s, environmental communication has sought to inform and warn people about the threats and issues that concern nature and wildlife by providing an accurate representation of them. There are a variety of actors and media that have contributed to spread such communication and raise awareness about environmental issues, both on a local and a global level. In order to reach even lay people and to fulfil their persuasive purpose, environment texts have undergone a process of popularisation and have exploited every linguistic resource, including the most creative ones. This dissertation aims at investigating the use of creative solutions in environment texts published by two environmental organisations, namely, WWF and Greenpeace. This investigation was carried out by designing a comparable corpus, consisting of online texts in Italian, British English and American English found in the websites of such NGOs. The study focused on the titles and subheadings of those texts, which were classified and grouped according to the type of lexical creativity they contain. The analysis showed that only a minority of cases included traditional figures of speech and idiomatic expressions that maintained their original form and meaning, as the majority contained manipulations at the semantic, structural, or phonological level. These deformations concerned collocations, idioms, and even quotes of famous books, songs, films, and other cultural or intertextual references. However, the most used device in the corpus turned out to be wordplay, followed by the exploitation of the polysemy of words that is generated in a particular context. Overall, it was observed that what affects the choice towards a creative device rather than another is not the general topic but the specific content of that text

低資源言語としてのベンガル語に対するオントロジーに基づく機械翻訳

In this research we propose ontology based Machine Translation with the help of WordNetand UNL Ontology. Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) for low resource language,like Bengali, has low-coverage issues. Due to the lack of parallel corpus, it has highprobability of handling unknown words. We have implemented an EBMT system for lowresourcelanguage pair. The EBMT architecture use chunk-string templates (CSTs) andunknown word translation mechanism. CSTs consist of a chunk in source-language, a stringin target-language, and word alignment information. CSTs are prepared automatically fromaligned parallel corpus and WordNet by using English chunker. For unknown wordtranslation, we used WordNet hypernym tree and English-Bengali dictionary. Proposedsystem first tries to find semantically related English words from WordNet for the unknownword. From these related words, we choose the semantically closest related word whoseBangla translation exists in English-Bangla dictionary. If no Bangla translation exists, thesystem uses IPA-based-transliteration. For proper nouns, the system uses Akkhortransliteration mechanism. CSTs improved the wide-coverage by 57 points and quality by48.81 points in human evaluation. Currently 64.29% of the test-set translations by the systemwere acceptable. The combined solutions of CSTs and unknown words generated 67.85%acceptable translations from the test-set. Unknown words mechanism improved translationquality by 3.56 points in human evaluation. This research also proposed the way to autogenerate the explanation of each concept using the semantic backgrounds provided by UNLOntology. These explanations are useful for improving translation quality of unknown words.Ontology Based Machine Translation for Bengali as Low-resource Language.本研究では、WordNet と UNL オントロジーを用いた、オントロジーに基づく機械翻訳を提案する。ベンガル語のような低資源言語 (low-resource language)に対しては、具体例に基づく機械翻訳 (EBMT)は、あまり有効ではない。パラレル・コーパスの欠如のために、多数の未知語を扱わなければならなくなるためである。我々は、低資源言語間の EBMT システムを実装した。実装したEBMT アーキテクチャでは、chunk-string templates (CSTs)と、未知語翻訳メカニズムを用いている。CST は、起点言語のチャンク、目的言語の文字列と、単語アラメント情報から成る。CST は、英語チャンカーを用いて、アラインメント済みのパラレル・コーパスとWordNet から、自動的に生成される。最初に、起点言語のチャンクが OpenNLP チャンカーを用いて自動生成される。そして、初期CST が、各起点言語のチャンクに対して生成され、すべての目的文に対するCSTアラインメントがパラレル・コーパスを用いて生成される。その後、システムは、単語アラインメント情報を用いて、CSTの組合せを生成する。最後に、WordNet を用いて、広い適用範囲を得るためにCST を一般化する。未知語翻訳に対しては、WordNet hypernym treeと、英語・ベンガル語辞書を用いる。提案システムは、最初に、未知語に対して、WordNet から意味的に関連した英単語を発見しようと試みる。これらの関連語から、英語・ベンガル語辞書にベンガル語の翻訳が存在する、意味的に最も近い語を選ぶ。もし、ベンガル語の翻訳が存在しなければ、システムはIPA-based翻訳を行う。固有名詞に対しては、システムは、Akkhor 翻訳メカニズムを用いる。CST は57 ポイントの広い適用範囲を持つように改善され、その際の人間による訳文の評価も 48.81 ポイントを得た。現在、システムのよって、64.29%のテストケースの翻訳が行える。未知語メカニズムは、人間に評価において 3.56 ポイント、翻訳の質を改善した。CST と未知語の組合せよる解法は、テストケースにおいて、67.85%の許容可能な翻訳を生成した。また、本研究では、UNL オントロジーが提供するsemantic background を用いて、各概念に対する説明を自動生成する方法も提案した。このシステムに対する入力は、１つのユニバーサル・ワード(UN)であり、システムの出力はその UN の英語や日本語による説明文である。与えられたUN に対して、システムは、最初に、SemanticWordMap を発見するが、それは、１つの特定のUN に対する、UNL オントロジーからのすべての直接的、間接的参照関係を含む。したがって、このステップの入力は、１つのUN であり、出力はWordMapグラフである。次のステップで、変換規則を用いて、WordMap グラフをUNL に変換する。この変換規則は、ユーザの要求に応じて、“From UWs only”や “From UNL Ontology”と指定できる。したがって、このステップの入力はWordMap グラフであり、出力はUNL表現である。最終ステップでは、UNL DeConverter を用いてUNL 表現を変換し、自然言語を用いて記述する。これらの表現は、未知語に対する翻訳の質の向上に有効であることがわかった。電気通信大学201

The nature of fixed language in the subtitling of a documentary film

This research is based on the assumption that audiovisual translation (AVT ) performs a social and cultural function over its viewers, thus still justifying studies that focus on linguistic issues. This is particularly striking for the reading literacy in countries such as Portugal, that are traditionally subtitling countries, even if dubbing and voice-over are also occasionally used, particularly in the case of documentaries. The purpose for this research is to analyze the examples of restricted lexical occurrence, i.e. set phrases or semantic phrasemes (Mel’čuk 1995), depending on the terminology chosen, within the two versions of the AVT – subtitling and voice-over – of a documentary film called “The Real Da Vinci Code”. In order to achieve this purpose, we chose to follow a case study methodology that allowed us to center our attention on and single out a specific feature of language – set phrases – used in this type of audiovisual texts – documentary films