Translation dictation vs. post-editing with cloud-based voice recognition: a pilot experiment

In this paper, we report on a pilot mixed-methods experiment investigating the effects on productivity and on the translator experience of integrating machine translation (MT) postediting (PE) with voice recognition (VR) and translation dictation (TD). The experiment was performed with a sample of native Spanish participants. In the quantitative phase of the experiment, they performed four tasks under four different conditions, namely (1) conventional TD; (2) PE in dictation mode; (3) TD with VR; and (4) PE with VR (PEVR). In the follow-on qualitative phase, the participants filled out an online survey, providing details of their perceptions of the task and of PEVR in general. Our results suggest that PEVR may be a usable way to add MT to a translation workflow, with some caveats. When asked about their experience with the tasks, our participants preferred translation without the ‘constraint’ of MT, though the quantitative results show that PE tasks were generally more efficient. This paper provides a brief overview of past work exploring VR for from-scratch translation and PE purposes, describes our pilot experiment in detail, presents an overview and analysis of the data collected, and outlines avenues for future work

The use of focus cues in healthy ageing

It is known that general processing resources decline with age (Craik, 1983), yet language comprehension typically remains well preserved in normal aging (Wingfield & Grossman, 2006). It is well known that placing a concept within the scope of focus either with syntactic devices or prosody increases the salience of the text information (e.g., Birch & Rayner, 1997; Cutler & Fodor, 1979; Baker & Wagner, 1987; Cooreman & Sanford, 1996; Sturt, Sanford, Stewart & Dawydiak, 2004). Since information structuring cues are used over a lifetime, it is possible that it is preserved as a cue in older adults and that it may be used to offset other processing difficulties. However, focus may be considered a linguistic equivalent of devices for manipulating selective attention, and there is evidence that older people have difficulties with some selective attention tasks, and have difficulties with the inhibition of irrelevant stimuli. It is thus difficult to predict how older people might respond to focus cues during language processing. There is no evidence regarding this question, and the present thesis contains work aimed at an answer. This thesis presents a series of studies, including sentence continuation studies, self-paced reading studies, delayed probe recognition and eye-tracking studies, and one change detection study investigating the effect of focus and related cues on an older age group. The main findings are older adults showed in some cases larger effects of focus and subordination, in terms of reading times, change detection and probe recognition rates, than did their younger counterparts. However, older and younger participants have different processing patterns based on the proper name/role description contrast, unlike the findings from the information structuring cues. These findings are discussed in relation to existing research on how healthy adult ageing modulates language processing

Descriptive Strategies in U.S. Patents

While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifications making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, comparing them with more familiar instances like manuals or specialized publications. To achieve this purpose, a corpus of 343 US electro-mechanical patents has been analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with concordancing software at a macro (rhetorical) and microlevel (linguistic realizations). At this first stage of the research, the prime focus has been set on the most common boosting and hedging devices which stylistically feature the genre and may constitute a lexical and discursive technolectal repertoire useful for both professionals and engineering students. Among the devices detected, some (e.g. signaling nouns and verbs, repetition, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, inferential markers as code glosses) are signs of a pragmatic deference towards the non-expert members of the discursive community (i.e. lawyers and potential investors) and prove to be efficient means to overcome knowledge asymmetries

SPEECH TO CHART: SPEECH RECOGNITION AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR DENTAL CHARTING

Typically, when using practice management systems (PMS), dentists perform data entry by utilizing an assistant as a transcriptionist. This prevents dentists from interacting directly with the PMSs. Speech recognition interfaces can provide the solution to this problem. Existing speech interfaces of PMSs are cumbersome and poorly designed. In dentistry, there is a desire and need for a usable natural language interface for clinical data entry. Objectives. (1) evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction of the speech interfaces of four dental PMSs, (2) develop and evaluate a speech-to-chart prototype for charting naturally spoken dental exams. Methods. We evaluated the speech interfaces of four leading PMSs. We manually reviewed the capabilities of each system and then had 18 dental students chart 18 findings via speech in each of the systems. We measured time, errors, and user satisfaction. Next, we developed and evaluated a speech-to-chart prototype which contained the following components: speech recognizer; post-processor for error correction; NLP application (ONYX) and; graphical chart generator. We evaluated the accuracy of the speech recognizer and the post-processor. We then performed a summative evaluation on the entire system. Our prototype charted 12 hard tissue exams. We compared the charted exams to reference standard exams charted by two dentists. Results. Of the four systems, only two allowed both hard tissue and periodontal charting via speech. All interfaces required using specific commands directly comparable to using a mouse. The average time to chart the nine hard tissue findings was 2:48 and the nine periodontal findings was 2:06. There was an average of 7.5 errors per exam. We created a speech-to-chart prototype that supports natural dictation with no structured commands. On manually transcribed exams, the system performed with an average 80% accuracy. The average time to chart a single hard tissue finding with the prototype was 7.3 seconds. An improved discourse processor will greatly enhance the prototype's accuracy. Conclusions. The speech interfaces of existing PMSs are cumbersome, require using specific speech commands, and make several errors per exam. We successfully created a speech-to-chart prototype that charts hard tissue findings from naturally spoken dental exams

Pitt Momentum Fund 2020 Overview

In the 2019–2020 academic year, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Ann E. Cudd and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research (SVCR) Rob A. Rutenbar have collaborated to enhance and streamline internal funding opportunities for faculty research while continuing to support high-quality research, scholarship, and creative endeavors. The result is a jointly funded large-scale research development fund—the Pitt Momentum Funds—which restructures the University’s suite of internal funding programs (Central Research Development Fund, Social Science Research Initiative, and Special initiative to Promote Scholarly Activities in the Humanities) and adds a new SVCR/Provost Fund to provide allocations for research seeding, teaming, and scaling grants. The new $920,000 annual funding model provides large-scale, transformative scholarship support for interdisciplinary teams of faculty from at least three schools with two new one-year planning (or “teaming”) grants of$60,000, and two new two-year scaling grants at $400,000. This new suite of funds—which is new funding and does not reduce overall funding—will help advance Pitt’s goal to engage in research of impact. The new structure for awards includes three tiers: Seeding Grants—one-year term with an award cap of$16,000 plus (2,000 supplements are available for specific cases); awards are made in four tracks: STEM Health & Life Science Arts & Humanities Social Sciences, which includes business, policy, law, education, and social work Preventing Sexual Misconduct** (All faculty, including School of Medicine, are eligible to apply to this track) Seeding grants support significant and innovative scholarship by individual or groups of faculty at all ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on early career faculty and areas where external funding is extremely limited. Teaming Grants—one-year term with an award cap of 60,000. Teaming grants support the formation of new multi-disciplinary collaborations to successfully pursue large-scale external funding. Scaling Grants—two-year term with an award cap of $400,000. Scaling grants enable multi-disciplinary teams to competitively scale their research efforts in targeted pursuit of large-scale external funding. More information on eligibility, application processes, evaluation criteria, exclusions, and participation requirements is available through Pitt’s Office of Sponsored Programs. The application can be accessed at the Competition Space

Children with Dyslexia: Spelling as a Constraint on Writing Development

Background. Developmental dyslexia is characterised as a specific learning difficulty with written language: namely, reading and spelling. To date, little research has been conducted to examine the role of spelling when writing and, in particular, in the writing of young children with dyslexia. This is surprising when considering that spelling is an active process used when transcribing written text. Thus, this thesis aimed to investigate the impact of spelling ability in four areas: the quality of the written compositions produced, spelling error analyses, vocabulary choice when writing, and handwriting execution. Method. Thirty-one children with dyslexia (15 boys, 16 girls; 9 years) were compared to two typically developing groups: the first matched by age and the second by spelling-ability. Participants completed tasks that assessed cognitive ability, spelling, reading, working memory, narrative writing, vocabulary level, motor skill, and handwriting performance. A digital writing tablet was used to record and identify the temporal characteristics of handwriting. Results. Children with dyslexia scored significantly below their peers for written text quality, wrote less overall, and demonstrated a higher number of phonetically and orthographically inaccurate spelling errors. Limited vocabulary choices and a more disfluent handwriting profile were characteristics of the writing by children with dyslexia. These children with dyslexia did not have motor difficulties and demonstrated that handwriting execution speed was in fact similar to their peers. Rather, children with dyslexia paused more frequently before misspellings and within-words, a similar pattern to the younger spelling-ability matches. Spelling ability was found to predict a large proportion of variance in handwriting speed, written vocabulary choice, and the quality of the written text produced by children with dyslexia. Conclusions. A new model of the interacting writing processes was proposed, emphasising the importance of acquiring strong foundations in proficient spelling for writing to progress. The proposed model relates to atypical and typical development. The findings are related to theories of dyslexia and avenues for future research are discussed in relation to expanding the new writing model

The advantage for name -designated characters during reading

When two characters are mentioned in a text, one referred to by a title (e.g., professor) and one referred to by a proper name (e.g., Christopher), the character referred to by the name is more accessible in memory. Although there has been a lot of research documenting the advantages that name-designated characters have over title-designated characters, most of it has done so using very short texts. The experiments reported in this dissertation utilized longer passages of text to examine whether certain variables that are known to affect accessibility, such as order of mention, number of mentions, elaboration, and distance, will affect the advantages that name-designated characters typically have during reading. Participants read passages containing two characters, one referred to by a title and one referred to by a proper name. In all experiments except for the rating studies, reading times were measured for sentences that reinstated either the name- or the title-designated character. Experiment 1b varied which character was introduced first. In Experiment 2b, one character was mentioned more often than the other character. In Experiment 3, the type of elaboration was varied: either the episodic or semantic traits of the title-designated character were emphasized. In Experiment 4, the distance between the last mention of the title- or name-designated character and the reinstatement sentence was varied. In all of the experiments except for Experiment 2b, reading time differences demonstrated that the name-designated character was more accessible than the title-designated character, regardless of the manipulation. In Experiment 2b, when the name-designated character was mentioned the most often, it was reinstated faster than the title-designated. When the title-designated character was mentioned the most often, the advantage that existed for the name-designated character in every other experiment was eliminated. The results are discussed in terms of the memory-based text processing view and an interaction between episodic and semantic memory

Safety impacts of using smartphone voice control interfaces on driving performance

Distraction from the use of mobile phones has been identified as one of the causes of road traffic crashes. Voice control technology has been suggested as a potential solution to driver distraction by the manual use of mobile phones. However, new evidence has shown that using voice control interfaces while driving could require more from drivers in terms of cognitive load and visual attention compared to using a mobile phone manually. Further, several factors that moderate the use of voice control interfaces, for example, usability and acceptance are poorly understood. Thus, the current study aims to investigate the safety impact of using voice control interfaces on driving performance. A preliminary study, an online survey and a driving experiment were conducted to investigate how drivers interact with smartphone voice control interfaces and their effects on driving performance. First, the usage pattern of voice control interfaces while driving was explored using focus groups and interviews (preliminary study) and an online survey. Next, 55 participants completed a simulated driving task that utilises a valid and standardised method called the Lane Change Test (LCT). The purpose was to measure degradation of driving performance due to the concurrent performance of secondary tasks; either contact calling, playing music or text messaging task. These secondary tasks were identified as common tasks in the survey of the pattern of use of voice control interfaces while driving. Secondary tasks were performed in both visual-manual and voice control modes with either an Apple or a Samsung smartphone. Data on eye glance behaviour, workload and, usability and acceptance of the voice control interfaces were also collected. Findings support the view that interacting with voice control interfaces while driving reduces distraction from visual-manual interfaces but is still distracting compared to driving without using any devices. Texting was found to degrade task and driving performance regardless of control modes and phone type. Moreover, poor system performance leads to low acceptance of voice control technology. Smartphone voice control interfaces have an apparent advantage over visual-manual interfaces. However, they still can impose some elements of distraction that may have negative implications for road safety

Young People Are Always On Their Phones: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Texting

Since the invention of texting in the 1990s, it has become a vital tool of interaction used by people all over the world. Texting is a unique form of communication because it uses written language to emulate aspects of spoken language through the usage of textisms – emoticons, abbreviations, acronyms, and more. It is these textisms that have been the cause of much hysteria and concern over the future of the English language, and most of the focus has been put on the biggest proponents of texting: young people. This senior thesis reviews the history of standardization in writing and research on texting to investigate the linguistic purpose and function of textisms. I surveyed members of my community to learn patterns in usage of and attitudes toward texting with a focus on demographics and claims against texting, with the goal to assert that texting is an incredibly innovative form of language that enhances, rather than degrades, English