Web readibility and computer-assisted language learning

Proficiency in a second language is of vital importance for many people. Today’s access to corpora of text, including the Web, allows new techniques for improving language skill. Our project’s aim is the development of techniques for presenting the user with suitable web text, to allow optimal language acquisition via reading. Some text found on the Web may be of a suitable level of difficulty but appropriate techniques need to be devised for locating it, as well as methods for rapid retrieval. Our experiments described here compare the range of difficulty of text found on the Web to that found in traditional hard-copy texts for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, using standard readability measures. The results show that the ESL text readability range fall within the range for Web text. This suggests that an on-line text retrieval engine based on readability can be of use to language learners. However, web pages pose their own difficulty, since those with scores representing high readability are often of limited use. Therefore readability measurement techniques need to be modified for the Web domain

Natural language processing for similar languages, varieties, and dialects: A survey

There has been a lot of recent interest in the natural language processing (NLP) community in the computational processing of language varieties and dialects, with the aim to improve the performance of applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, and dialogue systems. Here, we attempt to survey this growing field of research, with focus on computational methods for processing similar languages, varieties, and dialects. In particular, we discuss the most important challenges when dealing with diatopic language variation, and we present some of the available datasets, the process of data collection, and the most common data collection strategies used to compile datasets for similar languages, varieties, and dialects. We further present a number of studies on computational methods developed and/or adapted for preprocessing, normalization, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing similar languages, language varieties, and dialects. Finally, we discuss relevant applications such as language and dialect identification and machine translation for closely related languages, language varieties, and dialects.Non peer reviewe

Histories of Australian Rock Art Research

Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with pictographs and petroglyphs found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces – in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms. First Nations people have been marking these places with figurative imagery, abstract designs, stencils and prints for tens of thousands of years, often engaging with earlier rock markings. The art reflects and expresses changing experiences within landscapes over time, spirituality, history, law and lore, as well as relationships between individuals and groups of people, plants, animals, land and Ancestral Beings that are said to have created the world, including some rock art. Since the late 1700s, people arriving in Australia have been fascinated with the rock art they encountered, with detailed studies commencing in the late 1800s. Through the 1900s an impressive body of research on Australian rock art was undertaken, with dedicated academic study using archaeological methods employed since the late 1940s. Since then, Australian rock art has been researched from various perspectives, including that of Traditional Owners, custodians and other community members. Through the 1900s, there was also growing interest in Australian rock art from researchers across the globe, leading many to visit or migrate to Australia to undertake rock art research. In this volume, the varied histories of Australian rock art research from different parts of the country are explored not only in terms of key researchers, developments and changes over time, but also the crucial role of First Nations people themselves in investigations of this key component of their living heritage

The Nature of attachment:An Australian experience

Throughout the world, protected area management regimes typically separate cultural and natural heritage in legislation, policy, administrative structures, disciplinary expertise, and on-ground practice. Within settler colonial nations, including Australia, cultural heritage is itself habitually separated into indigenous heritage and 'historic' (or non-indigenous) heritage. A consequence of these multiple binaries and disconnected regimes is that they work across rather than with one another. In this chapter, I use the frame of place-attachment to consider issues arising from the separation of natural and cultural heritage in the management of protected areas. The case examples are homestead gardens within protected areas, and my concern is for the recognition of Anglo-Australian place-attachment to domestic gardens.</p

Treaty-Making in the Australian Federation

For many generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have called for treaties to be negotiated with Australian governments. In the face of Commonwealth inaction, states and territories have commenced treaty processes with Indigenous communities whose traditional lands fall within their borders. This article examines how the United States and Canada have negotiated treaties with Indigenous peoples and details the ongoing Australian processes in order to determine the most appropriate means of entering into treaties in the Australian federation. It concludes that while the state and territory processes are positive and offer the potential to realise valuable outcomes, it is preferable for treaties to be conducted with both federal and subnational governments. This should be undertaken by a Makarrata Commission comprising representatives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and federal, state, and local governments

Exploring Supervised Techniques for Automated Recognition of Intention Classes from Portuguese Free Texts on Agriculture

Technical and scientific knowledge is vast and complex, particularly in interdisciplinary fields such as sustainable agriculture, which is available in several interrelated, geographically dispersed and interdisciplinary online textual information sources. In this context, it is essential to support people with computational mechanisms that allow them to retrieve and interpret information in an appropriate way, as communication in these software systems is typically asynchronous and textual. User’s intention recognition and analysis in textual documents results in benefits for better information retrieval. However, intentions are expressed implicitly in texts in natural language and the specificities of the domain and cultural aspects of language make it difficult to process and analyze the text by computer systems. This requires the study of methods for the automatic recognition of intention classes in text. In this article, we conduct extensive experimental analyses on techniques based on language models and machine learning to detect instances of intention classes in texts about sustainable agriculture written in Portuguese. In our methodology, we perform a morphological analysis of the sentences and evaluate four Word Embeddings techniques (Word2Vec, Wang2Vec, FastText and Glove) combined with four machine learning techniques (Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network, Random Forest and Transfer Learning). The results obtained by applying the techniques proposed in a database with textual information on sustainable agriculture indicate promising possibilities in the recognition of intentions in free texts  in  Portuguese language on sustainable agriculture