Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students, in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over the past two years. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we find that students produce questions of high quality. More than three-quarters of questions fall into categories beyond simple recall, in contrast to similar studies of student-authored content in different subject domains. Similarly, the quality of student-authored explanations for questions was also high, with approximately 60% of all explanations classified as being of high or outstanding quality. Overall, 75% of questions met combined quality criteria, which we hypothesize is due in part to the in-class scaffolding activities that we provided for students ahead of requiring them to author questions.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

Human assessments of document similarity

Two studies are reported that examined the reliability of human assessments of document similarity and the association between human ratings and the results of n-gram automatic text analysis (ATA). Human interassessor reliability (IAR) was moderate to poor. However, correlations between average human ratings and n-gram solutions were strong. The average correlation between ATA and individual human solutions was greater than IAR. N-gram length influenced the strength of association, but optimum string length depended on the nature of the text (technical vs. nontechnical). We conclude that the methodology applied in previous studies may have led to overoptimistic views on human reliability, but that an optimal n-gram solution can provide a good approximation of the average human assessment of document similarity, a result that has important implications for future development of document visualization systems

Leveraging Contextual Cues for Generating Basketball Highlights

The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly use audio-visual cues derived from the video, we propose an approach that additionally leverages contextual cues derived from the environment that the game is being played in. The contextual cues provide information about the excitement levels in the game, which can be ranked and selected to automatically produce high-quality basketball highlights. We introduce a new dataset of 25 NCAA games along with their play-by-play stats and the ground-truth excitement data for each basket. We explore the informativeness of five different cues derived from the video and from the environment through user studies. Our experiments show that for our study participants, the highlights produced by our system are comparable to the ones produced by ESPN for the same games.Comment: Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 201

Psychiatric morbidity in older people with moderate and severe learning disability (mental retardation). Part I: development and reliability of the patient interview (the PAS-ADD)

This paper describes the development of the PAS-ADD, a semistructured clinical interview for use specifically with patients with learning disabilities, based on items drawn from the PSE. The PAS-ADD includes a number of novel features including: parallel interviewing of patient and informant; a three-tier structure to provide a flexible interview appropriate to the patient's intellectual level; use of a memorable 'anchor event' in the patient's life to improve time focus; and simplified wording, improved organisation and lay out. Inter-rater reliability was investigated using an experimental design in which two raters viewed and re-rated videotaped PAS-ADD interviews which had been conducted by an experienced clinician. Reliability results compared favourably with those obtained in a major study of PSE reliability with a sample drawn from non-learning disabled individuals. Mean kappa for all items was 0.72. Other indexes of reliability were also good. In the current phase of development, the PAS-ADD is to be expanded to include further diagnostic categories, including schizophrenia and autism. The new version will be updated for use with ICD-10 criteria

The advanced activities of daily living: a tool allowing the evaluation of subtle functional decline in mild cognitive impairment

Objectives: Assessment of advanced activities of daily living (a-ADL) can be of interest in establishing the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in an earlier stage, since these activities demand high cognitive functioning and are more responsive to subtle changes. In this study we tested a new a-ADL tool, developed according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). The a-ADL tool is based on the total number of activities performed (TNA) by a person and takes each subject as his own reference. It distinguishes a total Disability Index (a-ADL-DI), a Cognitive Disability Index (a-ADL-CDI), and a Physical Disability Index (a-ADL-PDI), with lower score representing more independency. We explored whether these indices allow distinction between cognitively healthy persons, patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and patients with mild AD. Methods: Participants were on average 80 years old (SD 4.6; 66-90), were community dwelling, and were diagnosed as (1) cognitively healthy subjects (n=26); (2) patients with MCI (n = 17), or (3) mild AD (n = 25), based upon extensive clinical evaluation and a set of global, cognitive, mood and functional assessments. The a-ADL-tool was not part of the clinical evaluation. Results: The a-ADL-CDI was significantly different between the three groups (p<.01). The a-ADL-DI was significantly different between MCI and AD (p<.001). The tool had good psychometrical properties (inter-rater reliability; agreement between patient and proxy; correlations with cognitive tests). Although the sample size was relatively small, ROC curves were computed for the a-ADL-DI and a-ADL-CDI with satisfactory and promising results. Conclusion: The a-ADL-CDI and a-ADL-DI might offer a useful contribution to the identification and follow up of patients with mild cognitive disorders in an older population

Continuous Estimation of Emotions in Speech by Dynamic Cooperative Speaker Models

Automatic emotion recognition from speech has been recently focused on the prediction of time-continuous dimensions (e.g., arousal and valence) of spontaneous and realistic expressions of emotion, as found in real-life interactions. However, the automatic prediction of such emotions poses several challenges, such as the subjectivity found in the definition of a gold standard from a pool of raters and the issue of data scarcity in training models. In this work, we introduce a novel emotion recognition system, based on ensemble of single-speaker-regression-models (SSRMs). The estimation of emotion is provided by combining a subset of the initial pool of SSRMs selecting those that are most concordance among them. The proposed approach allows the addition or removal of speakers from the ensemble without the necessity to re-build the entire machine learning system. The simplicity of this aggregation strategy, coupled with the flexibility assured by the modular architecture, and the promising results obtained on the RECOLA database highlight the potential implications of the proposed method in a real-life scenario and in particular in WEB-based applications

The relative contributions of facial shape and surface information to perceptions of attractiveness and dominance

Although many studies have investigated the facial characteristics that influence perceptions of others’ attractiveness and dominance, the majority of these studies have focused on either the effects of shape information or surface information alone. Consequently, the relative contributions of facial shape and surface characteristics to attractiveness and dominance perceptions are unclear. To address this issue, we investigated the relationships between ratings of original versions of faces and ratings of versions in which either surface information had been standardized (i.e., shape-only versions) or shape information had been standardized (i.e., surface-only versions). For attractiveness and dominance judgments of both male and female faces, ratings of shape-only and surface-only versions independently predicted ratings of the original versions of faces. The correlations between ratings of original and shape-only versions and between ratings of original and surface-only versions differed only in two instances. For male attractiveness, ratings of original versions were more strongly related to ratings of surface-only than shape-only versions, suggesting that surface information is particularly important for men’s facial attractiveness. The opposite was true for female physical dominance, suggesting that shape information is particularly important for women’s facial physical dominance. In summary, our results indicate that both facial shape and surface information contribute to judgments of others’ attractiveness and dominance, suggesting that it may be important to consider both sources of information in research on these topics

#cutting: non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) on Instagram

Social media presents an important means for social interaction, especially among adolescents, with Instagram being the most popular platform in this age-group. Pictures and communication about non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) can frequently be found on the internet. During 4 weeks in April 2016, n = 2826 (from n = 1154 accounts) pictures which directly depicted wounds on Instagram were investigated. Those pictures, associated comments, and user accounts were independently rated for content. Associations between characteristics of pictures and comments as well as weekly and daily trends of posting behavior were analyzed. Most commonly, pictures depicted wounds caused by cutting on arms or legs and were rated as mild or moderate injuries. Pictures with increasing wound grades and those depicting multiple methods of NSSI generated elevated amounts of comments. While most comments were neutral or empathic with some offering help, few comments were hostile. Pictures were mainly posted in the evening hours, with a small peak in the early morning. While there was a slight peak of pictures being posted on Sundays, postings were rather evenly spread across the week. Pictures of NSSI are frequently posted on Instagram. Social reinforcement might play a role in the posting of more severe NSSI pictures. Social media platforms need to take appropriate measures for preventing online social contagion