El reto de una interpretación comunitaria de calidad: buceo en las necesidades formativas y análisis crítico de un corpus de interacción oral en el contexto biosanitario y de servicios sociales español

La presente tesis doctoral proporciona un análisis crítico de un corpus de interacción oral en el contexto biosanitario y de servicios sociales español en el contexto de la interpretación comunitaria. El capítulo I comienza con una descripción de la situación en la interpretación en los servicios públicos, con investigaciones actuales y un repaso por los grupos de investigación, universidades y redes profesionales que existen actualmente. Para dotar de interés a esta investigación, se analiza la situación actual española en términos de inmigración y turismo, con una descripción de cuáles son los países de procedencia de los extranjeros que visitan nuestro país y que por ende, hacen uso de los servicios públicos y de los servicios de interpretación. El capítulo II aborda la descripción de la traducción y la interpretación en este contexto, los rasgos más característicos como la terminología especializada, las modalidades de interpretación y la tipología de textos utilizados en este contexto (consentimientos informados, hojas de información para pacientes entre otros), las peculiaridades del discurso médico-paciente y una descripción detallada de la nueva modalidad de teleinterpretación, método utilizado cada vez más en los servicios públicos. A continuación, en el capítulo III analizamos la justificación de esta investigación, a saber, la necesidad de prestar una interpretación de calidad a estos visitantes y residentes extranjeros que hacen uso de nuestro servicios públicos, y las necesidades formativas de los intérpretes, seguido por los objetivos planteados. En el capítulo IV proporcionamos una descripción general de los estudios realizados en este ámbito que han utilizado la metodología que hemos adoptado, uso de encuestas y análisis de corpus de grabaciones. En nuestro estudio, la encuesta fue distribuida entre estudiantes de interpretación, intérpretes profesionales y docentes de interpretación. Las respuestas han proporcionado una valiosa información sobre los materiales de consulta, las horas dedicadas al campo biosanitario, la formación en códigos éticos y la situación real de intérpretes en el campo médico. A su vez, hemos compilado un corpus de grabaciones orales en la modalidad de interpretación cara a cara, recogidas en un hospital de referencia del sur de España, y en la modalidad de teleinterpretación, obtenidos de una empresa que proporciona estos servicios. El corpus está compuesto por 51 grabaciones (6 horas y 13 minutos) en los idiomas inglés, francés y alemán. En el estudio participaron tanto intérpretes profesionales como intérpretes voluntarios. A continuación en el capítulo VI proporcionamos los resultados del análisis de este corpus, entre los que se destacan los diferentes papeles que adopta el intérprete, los rasgos más característicos de la modalidad de teleinterpretación como el ruido o los turnos de palabra, y rasgos más específicos del discurso biosanitario como los marcadores discursivos, técnicas utilizadas por el intérprete para explicar terminología, las adiciones, omisiones y los errores en la transmisión del mensaje. Por último, en el capítulo VII se enumeran las conclusiones con las futuras líneas de investigación, centradas principalmente en la creación de propuestas didácticas, estrategias y materiales para la formación de intérpretes en este campo. Las aportaciones de este estudio se basan en dos líneas: por un lado la información proporcionada de las encuestas que nos ofrecen una visión real de lo que ocurre durante la formación de futuros intérpretes comparado con lo que después el intérprete profesional experimenta, y el uso de un corpus de grabaciones reales, en dos modalidades, tanto con intérpretes profesionales como voluntarios que nos ofrece también información sobre la actuación real de los intérpretes en este contexto y que servirá para mejorar la prestación de los servicios de interpretación en los servicios públicos de nuestro país

Third version (v4) of the integrated platform and documentation

The deliverable describes the third and final version of the PANACEA platform

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Managing sign language data from fieldwork.

Surprisingly little information is available about how linguists who are documenting sign languages are managing their data. This case study is based on my experiences of documenting Indonesian Sign Language (BISINDO) from 2010 onwards through the construction of a corpus of spontaneous data from 131 participants. This discussion of data management reflects some of the particular challenges of being based in the UK while conducting fieldwork in the ‘global South’, and includes informed consent, collecting data with the community, and making decisions about data processing. I also consider where those who are new to this field might find information about sign language data management, and future directions for managing sign language documentation data

Integrating Automatic Transcription into the Language Documentation Workflow: Experiments with Na Data and the Persephone Toolkit

Automatic speech recognition tools have potential for facilitating language documentation, but in practice these tools remain little-used by linguists for a variety of reasons, such as that the technology is still new (and evolving rapidly), user-friendly interfaces are still under development, and case studies demonstrating the practical usefulness of automatic recognition in a low-resource setting remain few. This article reports on a success story in integrating automatic transcription into the language documentation workflow, specifically for Yongning Na, a language of Southwest China. Using Persephone, an open-source toolkit, a single-speaker speech transcription tool was trained over five hours of manually transcribed speech. The experiments found that this method can achieve a remarkably low error rate (on the order of 17%), and that automatic transcriptions were useful as a canvas for the linguist. The present report is intended for linguists with little or no knowledge of speech processing. It aims to provide insights into (i) the way the tool operates and (ii) the process of collaborating with natural language processing specialists. Practical recommendations are offered on how to anticipate the requirements of this type of technology from the early stages of data collection in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

The Handbook to English as a Lingua Franca Practices for Inclusive Multilingual Classrooms

This handbook is an important companion for future users of the ENRICH CPD Course, including, but not limited to: (a) pre- or in-service English language teachers who may wish to engage with the CPD materials and activities at their own pace; (b) teacher educators who would like to employ the CPD materials and activities with their own trainees; (c ) researchers in the fields which ENRICH revolves around (e.g., English as a Lingua Franca, multilingualism, English language pedagogy) who may be interested in finding out whether, and how, information gathered through ENRICH could inform their research studies; and (d) members of educational policy- making organisations and institutions which may want to explore the relevance of ENRICH to their own professional endeavours. It is divided into five main chapters where the ENRICH project is firstly introduced, followed by an explanation of the needs analysis for the development of the CPD Course, a rationale for the target audience, a detailed description of each of the CPD Course sections, and a final reflection on the evaluation of the Course and lessons learnt.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Metacognition in Language Learning and Teaching

This volume offers an exhaustive look at the latest research on metacognition in language learning and teaching. While other works have explored certain notions of metacognition in language learning and teaching, this book, divided into theoretical and empirical chapters, looks at metacognition from a variety of perspectives, including metalinguistic and multilingual awareness and language learning and teaching in L2 and L3 settings, and explores a range of studies from around the world. This allows the volume to highlight a diverse set of methodological approaches, including blogging, screen recording software, automatic translation programs, language corpora, classroom interventions and interviews and, subsequently, to demonstrate the value of metacognition research and how insights from such findings can contribute to a greater understanding of language learning and language teaching processes more generally. This innovative collection is an essential resource for students and scholars in language teaching pedagogy and applied linguistics.publishedVersio

Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey

This paper is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. We propose a methodology based on five dimensions for our analysis: Objective - What musical content is to be generated? Examples are: melody, polyphony, accompaniment or counterpoint. - For what destination and for what use? To be performed by a human(s) (in the case of a musical score), or by a machine (in the case of an audio file). Representation - What are the concepts to be manipulated? Examples are: waveform, spectrogram, note, chord, meter and beat. - What format is to be used? Examples are: MIDI, piano roll or text. - How will the representation be encoded? Examples are: scalar, one-hot or many-hot. Architecture - What type(s) of deep neural network is (are) to be used? Examples are: feedforward network, recurrent network, autoencoder or generative adversarial networks. Challenge - What are the limitations and open challenges? Examples are: variability, interactivity and creativity. Strategy - How do we model and control the process of generation? Examples are: single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, sampling or input manipulation. For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and techniques and we propose some tentative multidimensional typology. This typology is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning based systems for music generation selected from the relevant literature. These systems are described and are used to exemplify the various choices of objective, representation, architecture, challenge and strategy. The last section includes some discussion and some prospects.Comment: 209 pages. This paper is a simplified version of the book: J.-P. Briot, G. Hadjeres and F.-D. Pachet, Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation, Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems, Springer, 201

Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch: Results by the STEVIN-programme

Computational Linguistics; Germanic Languages; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Computing Methodologie