Supporting Distributed Coalition Planning with Semantic Wiki Technology

Contemporary and near-future military coalition environments present a number of challenges for military planning. Not only must military planners create plans against a backdrop of strict time constraints and uncertain information, they must also coordinate their planning efforts with other planning staff (often from different organizational, linguistic and cultural communities). This paper examines the potential for semantic wikis to support collaborative planning activities in the face of these challenges. Whilst we do not claim that semantic wikis could support all aspects of the collaborative planning process, we do suggest that semantic wikis can provide a highly configurable online editing environment which is likely to be of value in at least some coalition planning contexts. The strengths of semantic wikis include their support for distributed editing, their support for flexible forms of information presentation, and the opportunities they provide for new forms of inter-agent coordination. Their weaknesses include the absence of supportive plan editing interfaces and the limited support for the representation of highly expressive planning models. In the current paper, we discuss this profile of strengths and weaknesses, and we also discuss how a specific semantic wiki system, namely Semantic MediaWiki, could be used to support some aspects of collaborative planning

Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in European Journal of Political Economy. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union (EU). However, a large number of languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. On the other hand, the reduction of the number of languages would disenfranchise some or many EU citizens. We use the results of a survey on languages and argue that even though a linguistic reform reducing the number of languages is unlikely to gain sufficient political support today, this may change in the future since young people are more proficient at speaking foreign languages

"We Don't Do That Here": Calling Out Deficit Discourse in the Writing Center to Reframe Multilingual Graduate Support

Over the years, as writing center tutors, graduate assistants, and administrators, we have witnessed the challenges facing multilingual graduate student writers on their quest for academic writing support. We have spent our time researching campus resources only to find that holistic (and whole-istic) approaches to working with the particular needs of graduate multilingual writers (GMLWs) are lacking. One common narrative that we witness repeatedly is concerned with GMLWs: the “we don’t do grammar” frame that many writing centers endorse. In the example from narrative one, which is based on a client with whom Erica has been working, Yifan left embarrassed, as she was made to feel like she had been using the writing center fraudulently. In Erica’s next meeting with Yifan, she explained why writing centers are so resistant to changing this frame for their work. While her explanation may have mediated Yifan’s embarrassment somewhat, Yifan was still hesitant to work with anyone besides Erica. A similar sense of guilt and embarrassment is felt by Sam, the tutor in narrative three, who focuses on local concerns in longterm, high stakes projects that graduate students typically bring to the center. All three narratives echo what we identify as particular obstacles faced not only by our GMLWs when seeking out resources to improve their communication skills, but also by tutors and administrators who wish to identify best practices in serving multilingual students.University Writing Cente

Computational linguistics for word processing: opportunities and limits

In this paper the authors briefly outline editing functions which use methods from computational linguistics and take the structures of natural languages into consideration. Such functions could reduce errors and better support writers in realizing their communicative goals. However, linguistic methods have limits, and there are various aspects software developers have to take into account to avoid creating a solution looking for a problem: Language-aware functions could be powerful tools for writers, but writers must not be forced to adapt to their tools

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

UD Annotatrix: An Annotation Tool For Universal Dependencies

In this paper we introduce the UD Annotatrix annotation tool for manual annotation of Universal Dependencies. This tool has been designed with the aim that it should be tailored to the needs of the Universal Dependencies (UD) community, including that it should operate in fully-offline mode, and is freely-available under the GNU GPL licence. In this paper, we provide some background to the tool, an overview of its development, and background on how it works. We compare it with some other widely-used tools which are used for Universal Dependencies annotation, describe some features unique to UD Annotatrix, and finally outline some avenues for future work and provide a few concluding remarks

Atomic: an open-source software platform for multi-level corpus annotation

This paper presents Atomic, an open-source platform-independent desktop application for multi-level corpus annotation. Atomic aims at providing the linguistic community with a user-friendly annotation tool and sustainable platform through its focus on extensibility, a generic data model, and compatibility with existing linguistic formats. It is implemented on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, a pluggable Java-based framework for creating client applications. Atomic - as a set of plug-ins for this framework - integrates with the platform and allows other researchers to develop and integrate further extensions to the software as needed. The generic graph-based meta model Salt serves as Atomic’s domain model and allows for unlimited annotation levels and types. Salt is also used as an intermediate model in the Pepper framework for conversion of linguistic data, which is fully integrated into Atomic, making the latter compatible with a wide range of linguistic formats. Atomic provides tools for both less experienced and expert annotators: graphical, mouse-driven editors and a command-line data manipulation language for rapid annotation

What conceptual graph workbenches need for natural language processing

An important capability of the conceptual graph knowledge engineering tools now under development will be the transformation of natural language texts into graphs (conceptual parsing) and its reverse, the production of text from graphs (conceptual generation). Are the existing basic designs adequate for these tasks? Experience developing the BEELINE system's natural language capabilities suggests that good entry/editing tools, a generous but not unlimited storage capacity and efficient, bidirectional lexical access techniques are needed to support the supply of data structures at both the linguistic and conceptual knowledge levels. An active formalism capable of supporting declarative and procedural programs containing both linguistic and knowledge level terms is also important. If these requirements are satisfied, future text-readers can be included as part of a conceptual knowledge workbench without unexpected problems

Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing

This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in order to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilingual users may serve an important function in diffusing information across different language editions of the encyclopedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds multilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual users than larger-sized editions. About a quarter of multilingual users always edit the same articles in multiple languages, while just over 40% of multilingual users edit different articles in different languages. When non-English users do edit a second language edition, that edition is most frequently English. Nonetheless, several regional and linguistic cross-editing patterns are also present