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

Integrating a State-of-the-Art ASR System into the Opencast Matterhorn Platform

[EN] In this paper we present the integration of a state-of-the-art ASR system into the Opencast Matterhorn platform, a free, open-source platform to support the management of educational audio and video content. The ASR system was trained on a novel large speech corpus, known as poliMedia, that was manually transcribed for the European project transLectures. This novel corpus contains more than 115 hours of transcribed speech that will be available for the research community. Initial results on the poliMedia corpus are also reported to compare the performance of different ASR systems based on the linear interpolation of language models. To this purpose, the in-domain poliMedia corpus was linearly interpolated with an external large-vocabulary dataset, the well-known Google N-Gram corpus. WER figures reported denote the notable improvement over the baseline performance as a result of incorporating the vast amount of data represented by the Google N-Gram corpus.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 287755. Also supported by the Spanish Government (MIPRCV ”Consolider Ingenio 2010” and iTrans2 TIN2009-14511) and the Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2009/014).Valor Miró, JD.; Pérez González De Martos, AM.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan Císcar, A. (2012). Integrating a State-of-the-Art ASR System into the Opencast Matterhorn Platform. Communications in Computer and Information Science. 328:237-246. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8_25S237246328UPVLC, XEROX, JSI-K4A, RWTH, EML, DDS: transLectures: Transcription and Translation of Video Lectures. In: Proc. of EAMT, p. 204 (2012)Zhan, P., Ries, K., Gavalda, M., Gates, D., Lavie, A., Waibel, A.: JANUS-II: towards spontaneous Spanish speech recognition 4, 2285–2288 (1996)Nogueiras, A., Fonollosa, J.A.R., Bonafonte, A., Mariño, J.B.: RAMSES: El sistema de reconocimiento del habla continua y gran vocabulario desarrollado por la UPC. In: VIII Jornadas de I+D en Telecomunicaciones, pp. 399–408 (1998)Huang, X., Alleva, F., Hon, H.W., Hwang, M.Y., Rosenfeld, R.: The SPHINX-II Speech Recognition System: An Overview. Computer, Speech and Language 7, 137–148 (1992)Speech and Language Technology Group. Sumat: An online service for subtitling by machine translation (May 2012), http://www.sumat-project.euBroman, S., Kurimo, M.: Methods for combining language models in speech recognition. In: Proc. of Interspeech, pp. 1317–1320 (2005)Liu, X., Gales, M., Hieronymous, J., Woodland, P.: Use of contexts in language model interpolation and adaptation. In: Proc. of Interspeech (2009)Liu, X., Gales, M., Hieronymous, J., Woodland, P.: Language model combination and adaptation using weighted finite state transducers (2010)Goodman, J.T.: Putting it all together: Language model combination. In: Proc. of ICASSP, pp. 1647–1650 (2000)Lööf, J., Gollan, C., Hahn, S., Heigold, G., Hoffmeister, B., Plahl, C., Rybach, D., Schlüter, R., Ney, H.: The rwth 2007 tc-star evaluation system for european english and spanish. In: Proc. of Interspeech, pp. 2145–2148 (2007)Rybach, D., Gollan, C., Heigold, G., Hoffmeister, B., Lööf, J., Schlüter, R., Ney, H.: The rwth aachen university open source speech recognition system. In: Proc. of Interspeech, pp. 2111–2114 (2009)Stolcke, A.: SRILM - An Extensible Language Modeling Toolkit. In: Proc. of ICSLP (2002)Michel, J.B., et al.: Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014), 176–182Turro, C., Cañero, A., Busquets, J.: Video learning objects creation with polimedia. In: 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), December 13-15, pp. 371–376 (2010)Barras, C., Geoffrois, E., Wu, Z., Liberman, M.: Transcriber: development and use of a tool for assisting speech corpora production. Speech Communication Special Issue on Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools 33(1-2) (2000)Apache. Apache felix (May 2012), http://felix.apache.org/site/index.htmlOsgi alliance. osgi r4 service platform (May 2012), http://www.osgi.org/Main/HomePageSahidullah, M., Saha, G.: Design, analysis and experimental evaluation of block based transformation in MFCC computation for speaker recognition 54(4), 543–565 (2012)Gascó, G., Rocha, M.-A., Sanchis-Trilles, G., Andrés-Ferrer, J., Casacuberta, F.: Does more data always yield better translations? In: Proc. of EACL, pp. 152–161 (2012)Sánchez-Cortina, I., Serrano, N., Sanchis, A., Juan, A.: A prototype for interactive speech transcription balancing error and supervision effort. In: Proc. of IUI, pp. 325–326 (2012

An approach to develop intelligent learning environments by means of immersive virtual worlds

Merging Immersive Virtual Environments, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence techniques provides a number of advantages to develop Intelligent Environments for multiple applications. This paper is focused on the application of these technologies to develop intelligent learning environments. Education is one of the most interesting applications of immersive virtual environments, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. We highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. Our proposal has been applied in several subjects of the Computer Science degree in the Carlos III University of Madrid. The results of the evaluation show that developed learning environment fosters engagement and collaboration and helps students to better understand complex concepts.This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).Publicad

Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing

An approach to develop intelligent learning environments by means of immersive virtual worlds

Merging Immersive Virtual Environments, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence techniques provides a number of advantages to develop Intelligent Environments for multiple applications. This paper is focused on the application of these technologies to develop intelligent learning environments. Education is one of the most interesting applications of immersive virtual environments, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. We highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. Our proposal has been applied in several subjects of the Computer Science degree in the Carlos III University of Madrid. The results of the evaluation show that developed learning environment fosters engagement and collaboration and helps students to better understand complex concepts.Spanish Government TEC2012-37832-C02-01Consejo Interinstitucional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CICYT) TEC2011-28626-C02-02Project CAM CONTEXTS S2009/TIC-148

A Proposal to Create Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds Integrating Advanced Educative Resources

Social Networking has been a global consumer phenomenon during the last few years. Online communities are changing the way people behave, share and interact within their daily lives. Most of such communities are mainly focused on sharing contents and communicating using a traditional web interface. However, social virtual worlds are computer-simulated environments that the users can "inhabit" and in which they can interact and create objects. Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. In this paper, we highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. We have implemented the proposal in a learning system for several subjects of the Computer Science degree in our university and show that it fostered engagement and collaboration and helped the students to better understand complex concepts.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN 2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC 2011-28626 C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS 2008-07029-C02-02.Enviad