Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

Web based learning on KBSM chemical formulae incorporating selected multiple intelligences

Vision 2020 aspires our nation to establish a progressive and resourceful society that is able to contribute to the scientific and technological civilisation of the future. One of the strategies to achieve this aspiration would be through the system of education whereby web based learning would be a good platform to begin with. The aim of this project is to develop a website for KBSM Chemistry Form Four for the subtopic Chemical Formulae, which is under the topic Chemical Formulae and Equations, Chapter 3. The aim of this website is to provide a web based learning platform for students to learn Chemical Formulae. The theory of Multiple Intelligences has been incorporated in the development of this website. However, only four multiple intelligences are selected in delivering the learning contents. The four intelligences selected are Verbal Linguistics, Logical Mathematical, Visual Spatial and Interpersonal. The Hannafin & Peck Model was adapted throughout the development process, which includes Needs Assessment, Design and Development/ Implementation Phase. Evaluation was carried out simultaneously during all three phases of development. The primary software used in developing this website is Microsoft Office Frontpage. Integration of multimedia elements such as graphics, video and animation are used to enhance the process of learning. It is hoped that this website would benefit students with the selected four intelligences at an optimum level in learning Chemical Formulae

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

SaferDrive: an NLG-based Behaviour Change Support System for Drivers

Despite the long history of Natural Language Generation (NLG) research, the potential for influencing real world behaviour through automatically generated texts has not received much attention. In this paper, we present SaferDrive, a behaviour change support system that uses NLG and telematic data in order to create weekly textual feedback for automobile drivers, which is delivered through a smartphone application. Usage-based car insurances use sensors to track driver behaviour. Although the data collected by such insurances could provide detailed feedback about the driving style, they are typically withheld from the driver and used only to calculate insurance premiums. SaferDrive instead provides detailed textual feedback about the driving style, with the intent to help drivers improve their driving habits. We evaluate the system with real drivers and report that the textual feedback generated by our system does have a positive influence on driving habits, especially with regard to speeding

Towards a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise