Technologies for Learning Writing in L1 and L2 for the 21st Century: effects on writing metacognition, self-efficacy and argumentative structuring

Quality in higher education assumes the challenge of developing in all citizens of the 21st century the cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural dimensions that provide them with communication competences including the use of infor-mation and communication technologies, for the dissemination of sustainable scientific knowledge in different languages. Hence this paper evaluates a di-dactic-technological process called “Ensayo Científico Multilingüe” or ECM (“Multilingual Scientific Essay”), which guides the construction of argumenta-tive texts in a shared didactic space in the native language (L1) and in the first foreign language (L2). It can be stated that the ECM creates a shared didactic-technological space in different languages, producing similar effects in L1 and L2, both on writing metacognition and on self-efficacy and argumentative structuring. The ECM en-hances the association of writing metacognition with argumentative self-efficacy in L1 and L2. However, these dimensions are not associated with the structur-ing of argumentative essays, either in L1 or in L2. Furthermore, it is verified that the described variables are associated with the didactic-technological proce-dures integrated in the ECM in the following ways: (i) the procedure to pro-mote writing metacognition (through the Lesson tool) is associated with argu-mentative structuring in L2; (ii) the extent of writing activities is associated, only, with argumentative self-efficacy in L1; and (iii) participation in the Forums presents a very low association with all the variables measured

Domain transfer for deep natural language generation from abstract meaning representations

Stochastic natural language generation systems that are trained from labelled datasets are often domainspecific in their annotation and in their mapping from semantic input representations to lexical-syntactic outputs. As a result, learnt models fail to generalize across domains, heavily restricting their usability beyond single applications. In this article, we focus on the problem of domain adaptation for natural language generation. We show how linguistic knowledge from a source domain, for which labelled data is available, can be adapted to a target domain by reusing training data across domains. As a key to this, we propose to employ abstract meaning representations as a common semantic representation across domains. We model natural language generation as a long short-term memory recurrent neural network encoderdecoder, in which one recurrent neural network learns a latent representation of a semantic input, and a second recurrent neural network learns to decode it to a sequence of words. We show that the learnt representations can be transferred across domains and can be leveraged effectively to improve training on new unseen domains. Experiments in three different domains and with six datasets demonstrate that the lexical-syntactic constructions learnt in one domain can be transferred to new domains and achieve up to 75-100% of the performance of in-domain training. This is based on objective metrics such as BLEU and semantic error rate and a subjective human rating study. Training a policy from prior knowledge from a different domain is consistently better than pure in-domain training by up to 10%

Generating Natural Language from Linked Data:Unsupervised template extraction

We propose an architecture for generating natural language from Linked Data that automatically learns sentence templates and statistical document planning from parallel RDF datasets and text. We have built a proof-of-concept system (LOD-DEF) trained on un-annotated text from the Simple English Wikipedia and RDF triples from DBpedia, focusing exclusively on factual, non-temporal information. The goal of the system is to generate short descriptions, equivalent to Wikipedia stubs, of entities found in Linked Datasets. We have evaluated the LOD-DEF system against a simple generate-from-triples baseline and human-generated output. In evaluation by humans, LOD-DEF significantly outperforms the baseline on two of three measures: non-redundancy and structure and coherence.

GEMv2 : Multilingual NLG benchmarking in a single line of code

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.Peer reviewe

GEMv2: multilingual NLG benchmarking in a single line of code.

Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances. We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other's work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark

GEMv2 : Multilingual NLG benchmarking in a single line of code

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.Peer reviewe

A Domain-Independent Otology-based Approach to Representation of Courseware Knowledge

This paper proposes an ontology-based approach to representation of courseware knowledge in different domains. The focus is on a three-level semantic graph, modeling respectively the course as a whole, its structure, and domain contents itself. The authors plan to use this representation for flexibie e- learning and generation of different study plans for the learners