META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020

In everyday communication, Europe’s citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. The agenda was prepared by META-NET, a European Network of Excellence. META-NET consists of 60 research centres in 34 countries, who cooperate with stakeholders from economy, government agencies, research organisations, non-governmental organisations, language communities and European universities. META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all European languages. “The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.” — Dr. Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime-Minister of Portugal) “It is imperative that language technologies for Slovene are developed systematically if we want Slovene to flourish also in the future digital world.” — Dr. Danilo Türk (President of the Republic of Slovenia) “For such small languages like Latvian keeping up with the ever increasing pace of time and technological development is crucial. The only way to ensure future existence of our language is to provide its users with equal opportunities as the users of larger languages enjoy. Therefore being on the forefront of modern technologies is our opportunity.” — Valdis Dombrovskis (Prime Minister of Latvia) “Europe’s inherent multilingualism and our scientific expertise are the perfect prerequisites for significantly advancing the challenge that language technology poses. META-NET opens up new opportunities for the development of ubiquitous multilingual technologies.” — Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research

Six adult university Esl students\u27 perspectives of dialogue journal writing: A multiple case study

To provide insight into adult university ESL students\u27 perspectives of dialogue journal writing and of their changing views of themselves as writers, a fifteen-week multiple case study was conducted, with student interviews and dialogue journal entries providing the primary sources of data. Grounded in social interactionism and cognitivism, and viewed from the perspectives of the students, this study attempted to add to the growing body of research about dialogue journal writing with speakers of English as a second language; Six ESL students representing five different cultures and ranging in age from 18 to 33 participated in the study. Each participant wrote and exchanged journal entries with the teacher 11 times during the semester, and interviewed with the investigator four times. These dialogue journal entries and interview transcripts yielded five salient themes inductively derived from the data: (1) Interpersonal Perspectives, (2) Intrapersonal Perspectives, (3) Developmental Perspectives, (4) Self as Thinker, and (5) Self as Competent User of English; Data revealed that the six students in this study valued writing interactively with the teacher. First, the dialogue journal writing permitted students to exchange information and feelings with the teacher in a way that enhanced their relationship with her. Second, students valued writing expressively about their own topics, using this opportunity to examine issues and problems in their lives. Third, students experienced improvement in their writing products, which increased their motivation to write. Finally, students changed their views of themselves as writers through the process of interactive writing. As a result, they saw themselves as better thinkers and users of the English language; Questions raised as a result of this study suggest the need for further research to (1) explore the perspectives of larger samples of similar populations; (2) investigate the relationship that gender, ethnicity, and learning style has to dialogue journal writing; (3) examine the role of error correction in interactive writing; and (4) discover the point in writing development that dialogue journal writing is most efficacious

The Digital World – Essence and Dualism

This text (a part of a Doctoral Thesis development in progress) is focused on the recent challenges before philosophy, based on the necessity to synchronize our contemporary concepts with the latest outcomes in the studies of the Digital World. The key perspective is grounded on what R. Descartes and G. F. Leibniz foresaw centuries ago. The standpoint is physicalist and the analysis considers: the human Binary Approach and Binary System, the ontological aspects of the computer programming languages, and the philosophy within the hardware and software correlation.Този текст (част от докторска дисертация в развитие) се фокусира върху съвременните предизвикателства пред философията, в процеса на синхронизиране на концепциите с бурно развиващите се изследвания на дигиталния свят. Отправна точка са вижданията на Р. Декарт и Г. Лайбниц, заявени преди векове, но валидни в значителна степен и днес. Коментарът е от позиция на физикалиста, а анализът включва човешкия бинарен подход, онтологичните аспекти на компютърните програмни езици, както и философията във взаимоотношенията хардуер-софтуер

Semantic Specialisation of Distributional Word Vector Spaces using Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Constraints

We present Attract-Repel, an algorithm for improving the semantic quality of word vectors by injecting constraints extracted from lexical resources. Attract-Repel facilitates the use of constraints from mono- and cross-lingual resources, yielding semantically specialised cross-lingual vector spaces. Our evaluation shows that the method can make use of existing cross-lingual lexicons to construct high-quality vector spaces for a plethora of different languages, facilitating semantic transfer from high- to lower-resource ones. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with state-of-the-art results on semantic similarity datasets in six languages. We next show that Attract-Repel-specialised vectors boost performance in the downstream task of dialogue state tracking (DST) across multiple languages. Finally, we show that cross-lingual vector spaces produced by our algorithm facilitate the training of multilingual DST models, which brings further performance improvements.Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart and Anna Korhonen are supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL (number 648909). Roi Reichart is also supported by the Intel-ICRI grant: Hybrid Models for Minimally Supervised Information Extraction from Conversations

An ontology for human-like interaction systems

This report proposes and describes the development of a Ph.D. Thesis aimed at building an ontological knowledge model supporting Human-Like Interaction systems. The main function of such knowledge model in a human-like interaction system is to unify the representation of each concept, relating it to the appropriate terms, as well as to other concepts with which it shares semantic relations. When developing human-like interactive systems, the inclusion of an ontological module can be valuable for both supporting interaction between participants and enabling accurate cooperation of the diverse components of such an interaction system. On one hand, during human communication, the relation between cognition and messages relies in formalization of concepts, linked to terms (or words) in a language that will enable its utterance (at the expressive layer). Moreover, each participant has a unique conceptualization (ontology), different from other individual’s. Through interaction, is the intersection of both part’s conceptualization what enables communication. Therefore, for human-like interaction is crucial to have a strong conceptualization, backed by a vast net of terms linked to its concepts, and the ability of mapping it with any interlocutor’s ontology to support denotation. On the other hand, the diverse knowledge models comprising a human-like interaction system (situation model, user model, dialogue model, etc.) and its interface components (natural language processor, voice recognizer, gesture processor, etc.) will be continuously exchanging information during their operation. It is also required for them to share a solid base of references to concepts, providing consistency, completeness and quality to their processing. Besides, humans usually handle a certain range of similar concepts they can use when building messages. The subject of similarity has been and continues to be widely studied in the fields and literature of computer science, psychology and sociolinguistics. Good similarity measures are necessary for several techniques from these fields such as information retrieval, clustering, data-mining, sense disambiguation, ontology translation and automatic schema matching. Furthermore, the ontological component should also be able to perform certain inferential processes, such as the calculation of semantic similarity between concepts. The principal benefit gained from this procedure is the ability to substitute one concept for another based on a calculation of the similarity of the two, given specific circumstances. From the human’s perspective, the procedure enables referring to a given concept in cases where the interlocutor either does not know the term(s) initially applied to refer that concept, or does not know the concept itself. In the first case, the use of synonyms can do, while in the second one it will be necessary to refer the concept from some other similar (semantically-related) concepts...Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología InformáticaSecretario: Inés María Galván León.- Secretario: José María Cavero Barca.- Vocal: Yolanda García Rui