285 research outputs found

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Comparing the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence

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    This pilot study investigates the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence over proficiency levels of a spoken learner corpus. The results show that the formula in beginner production data is likely being recalled holistically from learners’ phonological memory rather than generated online, identifiable by virtue of its fluent production in absence of any other surface structure evidence of the formula’s syntactic properties. As learners’ L2 competence increases, the formula becomes sensitive to modifications which show structural conformity at each proficiency level. The transparency between the formula’s modification and learners’ corresponding L2 surface structure realisations suggest that it is the independent development of L2 competence which integrates the formula into compositional language, and ultimately drives the SLA process forward

    Stability of Homomorphisms, Coverings and Cocycles I: Equivalence

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    This paper is motivated by recent developments in group stability, high dimensional expansion, local testability of error correcting codes and topological property testing. In Part I, we formulate and motivate three stability problems: 1. Homomorphism stability: Are almost homomorphisms close to homomorphisms? 2. Covering stability: Are almost coverings of a cell complex close to genuine coverings of it? 3. Cocycle stability: Are 1-cochains whose coboundary is small close to 1-cocycles? We then prove that these three problems are equivalent.Comment: 32 page

    Procedural Constraint-based Generation for Game Development

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

    Expectations and expertise in artificial intelligence: specialist views and historical perspectives on conceptualisation, promise, and funding

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    Artificial intelligence’s (AI) distinctiveness as a technoscientific field that imitates the ability to think went through a resurgence of interest post-2010, attracting a flood of scientific and popular expectations as to its utopian or dystopian transformative consequences. This thesis offers observations about the formation and dynamics of expectations based on documentary material from the previous periods of perceived AI hype (1960-1975 and 1980-1990, including in-between periods of perceived dormancy), and 25 interviews with UK-based AI specialists, directly involved with its development, who commented on the issues during the crucial period of uncertainty (2017-2019) and intense negotiation through which AI gained momentum prior to its regulation and relatively stabilised new rounds of long-term investment (2020-2021). This examination applies and contributes to longitudinal studies in the sociology of expectations (SoE) and studies of experience and expertise (SEE) frameworks, proposing a historical sociology of expertise and expectations framework. The research questions, focusing on the interplay between hype mobilisation and governance, are: (1) What is the relationship between AI practical development and the broader expectational environment, in terms of funding and conceptualisation of AI? (2) To what extent does informal and non-developer assessment of expectations influence formal articulations of foresight? (3) What can historical examinations of AI’s conceptual and promissory settings tell about the current rebranding of AI? The following contributions are made: (1) I extend SEE by paying greater attention to the interplay between technoscientific experts and wider collective arenas of discourse amongst non-specialists and showing how AI’s contemporary research cultures are overwhelmingly influenced by the hype environment but also contribute to it. This further highlights the interaction between competing rationales focusing on exploratory, curiosity-driven scientific research against exploitation-oriented strategies at formal and informal levels. (2) I suggest benefits of examining promissory environments in AI and related technoscientific fields longitudinally, treating contemporary expectations as historical products of sociotechnical trajectories through an authoritative historical reading of AI’s shifting conceptualisation and attached expectations as a response to availability of funding and broader national imaginaries. This comes with the benefit of better perceiving technological hype as migrating from social group to social group instead of fading through reductionist cycles of disillusionment; either by rebranding of technical operations, or by the investigation of a given field by non-technical practitioners. It also sensitises to critically examine broader social expectations as factors for shifts in perception about theoretical/basic science research transforming into applied technological fields. Finally, (3) I offer a model for understanding the significance of interplay between conceptualisations, promising, and motivations across groups within competing dynamics of collective and individual expectations and diverse sources of expertise

    English Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices of Oral Skills Assessment in Norwegian Primary School

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    Denne studien retter søkelys mot engelsklæreres oppfatning av og praksis med muntlige ferdigheter og vurdering på mellomtrinnet i grunnskolen. Med fornyelsen av den nasjonale læreplanen (LK20), er lærere overlatt med høy grad av autonomi og et stort ansvar for å realisere læreplanens intensjon, nemlig å legge til rette for et læringsmiljø der alle elever kan nå sitt læringspotensial og oppnå ferdigheter og kompetanse basert på kjerneelementer og det enkelte fagets kompetansemål. Vurdering for læring skal gjennomsyre hele skolegangen på barneskolen, som betyr at lærere må ta utgangspunkt i elevenes nåværende kunnskapsnivå for å kunne veilede dem videre til økt faglig kunnskap og sosial kompetanse. Data for denne studien ble samlet inn gjennom semi-strukturerte intervju med fire engelsklærere som delte sine oppfatninger av muntlige ferdigheter og undervisnings- og vurderingspraksiser. De rapporterte om bruk av varierte typer muntlige aktiviteter for å fremme muntlig ferdigheter, men opplever at de har for lite tid og for store klasser til å sikre at alle elever får deltatt i muntlig aktivitet som kan danne et vurderingsgrunnlag. For å møte disse utfordringene, har tre av lærerne tatt i bruk taleopptak, hvor elevene leser inn tekster digitalt. Dette gir både lesetrening for elevene, innslag av egenvurdering, danner grunnlag for vurdering og sparer lærere for tid. På tross av dette er vurdering en sammensatt øvelse, og bruk av vurderingskriterier og strategier ser ut til å skje sporadisk. Funn i studien viser også at læreres erfaringer fra egen skolegang og utdanning har betydning for deres egen undervisningspraksis av muntlige ferdigheter. Ytre rammefaktorer påvirker også hvordan lærere planlegger, tilrettelegger og gjennomfører muntlige aktiviteter i klassen. I tillegg ser det ut til at lærere mangler både terminologi, kunnskap og kompetanse om vurdering og strategier for å vurdere muntlige ferdigheter. I likhet med funn fra studier om vurdering av muntlige ferdigheter fra ungdoms- og videregående skoler (se bl.a. Bøhn, 2015; Johannessen, 2018; Kaldahl, 2022), strever lærerne i denne studien med å vite hva og hvordan de skal vurdere og savner retningslinjer og felles standarder for å unngå å mislykkes i å tilrettelegge og tilpasse opplæringen. Kort oppsummert er det behov for mer forskning på barneskolelæreres vurderingspraksiser, og å jobbe systematisk for å utvikle felles terminologi og retningslinjer for vurdering for alle nivåer i opplæringen.This thesis addresses English teachers’ beliefs and practices of oral skills and assessment in Norwegian primary school (levels 5-7). The renewal of the National curriculum (LK20) leaves teachers with autonomy and great responsibility to realize it’s intentions, namely to facilitate a learning environment in which all pupils can reach their learning potential and develop skills and competences according to core elements and competence aims in the various subjects. Assessment for learning is a fundamental principal in primary school, which means that teachers must provide guidance based on pupils’ present knowledge, in order to help each student to advance both related to content knowledge and social competence. Data for this study was collected through four semi-structured interviews with English teachers, who shared their perceptions about oral skills and reported teaching and assessment practices. They reported to use a variety of activities to facilitate oral skills, however, due to both time constraints and large groups of pupils, they find it challenging to enable all pupils to take part in oral production that form a basis for assessment. To accommodate this demand, three of the teachers have practiced voice-recordings of pupils’ readings. This provides reading practice for pupils, elements of self-assessment, form a foundation for assessment and saves time for teachers. However, assessment of oral skills is complex, and assessment criteria and strategies appear to be randomly conducted. Findings also suggests that teachers’ beliefs related to teachers’ own language learning experience and language education influence their practice of oral skills teaching. Contextual factors, such as institutional and instructional parameters also impact how they plan, facilitate and carry out oral activities in class. Furthermore, teachers seem to lack both terminology and knowledge about assessment and competence and strategies of how to assess oral skills. Similar to findings from research on oral skills assessment in higher levels (see Bøhn, 2015; Johannessen, 2018; Kaldahl, 2022), teachers in this study struggle to know what and how to assess, and call for guidelines and shared standards to avoid failing to facilitate and adapt learning. In short, there is a need for further research on assessment practices in primary school, and to work systematically towards developing a shared terminology and common guidelines for assessment for all levels of education

    WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

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    Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments

    Extensive reading guided by a librarian: L2 English development in primary school

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    The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of extensive reading in English as a second language under the guidance of a trained librarian has on the language development of a class of sixth graders, with Norwegian as their first language. The study is based on Vygotsky’s (cop. 1978) theory of Proximal Development and Krashen’s (1981, and cop. 1982) theories of language acquisition. The researcher explores (i) the correlation between the number of books read and the pupils’ language development during the research period, (ii) the number of readings in context of an extensive reading project, (iii) the pupils’ choice of literature, and (iv) the impact of recommendations by a librarian. This is a mixed methods intervention study, where the pupils in the research class are given more time for self-selected reading in English than common in the English curriculum in Norwegian sixth grade. The following measures are included (i) the Cambridge Young Learners English tests (Cambridge English, cop. 2018; and Cambridge English, cop. 2014), (ii) a questionnaire for the pupils’ parents and guardians to retrieve language and social background variables, (iii) reading logs where the pupils register what they read during the research period, (iv) short stories written by the pupils, (v) observations of classroom interaction, and (vi) conversations with the pupils and their teachers. The pupils’ results in the Cambridge Young Learners Tests provides quantifiable results which will be used to measure their language development, this will be supported by the findings in the short stories written by the pupils during the research period. The pupils have recorded how many and which books they read in their reading logs. The researcher has kept lists over the books that were brought and presented to the class, and the impact of the recommendations by a librarian, that is the researcher, can be found by comparing the pupils’ reading logs with the researcher’s lists. The researcher’s predictions are that pupils who read more are more likely to improve in language proficiency. The number of books the pupils read will vary significantly and will be influenced both by their language competence and their earlier reading habits and reading experiences. The pupils will probably choose books of similar types and themes to those they would choose in Norwegian, and most will read at least some comic books. The books recommended by the librarian will probably be read by many of the pupils. In line with the findings from the reading programs described by Day and Bamford (1998), Krashen, Lee and Lao, (2018), Mason and Krashen (2004), Salameh (2017), and Axelsson (2000), the research for this master’s thesis shows an increased language proficiency among the pupils in a Norwegian sixth grade class who took part in this intervention study with increased focus on extensive reading in English as a second language. While there is a correlation between numbers of books read during the research period and increased language proficiency, the connection is neither linear nor unambiguous: The pupils who read the least during the research period, showed the least progress in language skills as measured by the pre- and post- research tests, while also one of the top scorers registered reading few books

    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum
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