Digital game-based learning: effects on students' perceptions and achievements in a business process management course

For the Degree of MCom by Dissertation in the Field of Information SystemsThe study aimed to investigate the impact of the introduction of digital game-based learning (DGBL) and its effect on students’ perceptions of competence, usefulness, and enjoyment, as well as their achievement. The context of the study was a third year Business Process Management (BPM) module, within an information systems course at the University of the Witwatersrand. Eight research questions were formulated and ten hypotheses were derived. The study was underpinned by Deci and Ryan (2002)’s self-determination theory (SDT) of human motivation, which included two of the sub-theories of SDT, cognitive evaluation theory (CIT) and organismic interaction theory (OIT), as well as Ryan et al. (2006)’s adaptation of the construct of presence into SDT. The study adopted a single group natural experiment pre-post design and a longitudinal relational design. The study was conducted with a sample of 24 students. Three baseline surveys were used to measure students’ levels of intrinsic motivation, perceived competence and perceived usefulness. This was done prior to the introduction of IBM’s Innov8 2.0, which was the digital learning game used in the study. The baseline surveys were administered one week apart, prior to the introduction of the game. After the game was introduced, an endline survey was used to capture students’ levels of intrinsic motivation, perceived competence, perceived usefulness and presence with the game. Learning achievement was measured through the use of three assessments conducted one week, one month and two months after the end of the BPM course. Hypothesis testing was conducted using t-tests, correlation, and PLS regression techniques. Results confirmed significant effects of the digital game to decrease perceived competence, a positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and achievement, and a positive relationship between presence and intrinsic motivation. As a result of the study, we now know that DGBL effects achievement through intrinsic motivation when in close proximity to the assessments. DGBL can appear to decrease perceived competence as it appears to be a feedback mechanism, which should be seen as a positive rather than negative effect. Certain DGBL characteristics such as presence increase intrinsic motivation perceptions.MT201

Factoid question answering for spoken documents

In this dissertation, we present a factoid question answering system, specifically tailored for Question Answering (QA) on spoken documents. This work explores, for the first time, which techniques can be robustly adapted from the usual QA on written documents to the more difficult spoken documents scenario. More specifically, we study new information retrieval (IR) techniques designed for speech, and utilize several levels of linguistic information for the speech-based QA task. These include named-entity detection with phonetic information, syntactic parsing applied to speech transcripts, and the use of coreference resolution. Our approach is largely based on supervised machine learning techniques, with special focus on the answer extraction step, and makes little use of handcrafted knowledge. Consequently, it should be easily adaptable to other domains and languages. In the work resulting of this Thesis, we have impulsed and coordinated the creation of an evaluation framework for the task of QA on spoken documents. The framework, named QAst, provides multi-lingual corpora, evaluation questions, and answers key. These corpora have been used in the QAst evaluation that was held in the CLEF workshop for the years 2007, 2008 and 2009, thus helping the developing of state-of-the-art techniques for this particular topic. The presentend QA system and all its modules are extensively evaluated on the European Parliament Plenary Sessions English corpus composed of manual transcripts and automatic transcripts obtained by three different Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems that exhibit significantly different word error rates. This data belongs to the CLEF 2009 track for QA on speech transcripts. The main results confirm that syntactic information is very useful for learning to rank question candidates, improving results on both manual and automatic transcripts unless the ASR quality is very low. Overall, the performance of our system is comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on this corpus, confirming the validity of our approach.En aquesta Tesi, presentem un sistema de Question Answering (QA) factual, especialment ajustat per treballar amb documents orals. En el desenvolupament explorem, per primera vegada, quines tècniques de les habitualment emprades en QA per documents escrit són suficientment robustes per funcionar en l'escenari més difícil de documents orals. Amb més especificitat, estudiem nous mètodes de Information Retrieval (IR) dissenyats per tractar amb la veu, i utilitzem diversos nivells d'informació linqüística. Entre aquests s'inclouen, a saber: detecció de Named Entities utilitzant informació fonètica, "parsing" sintàctic aplicat a transcripcions de veu, i també l'ús d'un sub-sistema de detecció i resolució de la correferència. La nostra aproximació al problema es recolza en gran part en tècniques supervisades de Machine Learning, estant aquestes enfocades especialment cap a la part d'extracció de la resposta, i fa servir la menor quantitat possible de coneixement creat per humans. En conseqüència, tot el procés de QA pot ser adaptat a altres dominis o altres llengües amb relativa facilitat. Un dels resultats addicionals de la feina darrere d'aquesta Tesis ha estat que hem impulsat i coordinat la creació d'un marc d'avaluació de la taska de QA en documents orals. Aquest marc de treball, anomenat QAst (Question Answering on Speech Transcripts), proporciona un corpus de documents orals multi-lingüe, uns conjunts de preguntes d'avaluació, i les respostes correctes d'aquestes. Aquestes dades han estat utilitzades en les evaluacionis QAst que han tingut lloc en el si de les conferències CLEF en els anys 2007, 2008 i 2009; d'aquesta manera s'ha promogut i ajudat a la creació d'un estat-de-l'art de tècniques adreçades a aquest problema en particular. El sistema de QA que presentem i tots els seus particulars sumbòduls, han estat avaluats extensivament utilitzant el corpus EPPS (transcripcions de les Sessions Plenaries del Parlament Europeu) en anglès, que cónté transcripcions manuals de tots els discursos i també transcripcions automàtiques obtingudes mitjançant tres reconeixedors automàtics de la parla (ASR) diferents. Els reconeixedors tenen característiques i resultats diferents que permetes una avaluació quantitativa i qualitativa de la tasca. Aquestes dades pertanyen a l'avaluació QAst del 2009. Els resultats principals de la nostra feina confirmen que la informació sintàctica és mol útil per aprendre automàticament a valorar la plausibilitat de les respostes candidates, millorant els resultats previs tan en transcripcions manuals com transcripcions automàtiques, descomptat que la qualitat de l'ASR sigui molt baixa. En general, el rendiment del nostre sistema és comparable o millor que els altres sistemes pertanyents a l'estat-del'art, confirmant així la validesa de la nostra aproximació

Combined query language (CQL): an interactive query language with procedural features

Interactive query languages provide easy to use interfaces to database systems. However, they lack the power of the host languages to perform manipulations on data. This thesis presents an interactive query language Combined Query Language (CQL) that has some features of procedural languages. CQL allows users to interactively manipulate databases and perform calculations on data. CQL is a self contained interactive query language that combines the computational power of a host language (like FORTRAN) with the convenience and flexibility of the common interactive query languages. Users of CQL would not have to use a host language for most of the database applications. CQL uses the low level data base management routines developed for another thesis.\u27 \u27 Robert Fabbio\u27s masters thesis