Automatic captions on video calls: a must for the older adults

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. Work co-financed by the Canary Islands Agency for Research, Innovation and Information Society of the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment and by the European Social Fund (ESF) Integrated Operational Program of the Canary Islands 2014–2020, Axis 3 Priority Topic 74 (85%). This work has been supported by the PERGAMEX ACTIVE project, Ref. RTI2018- 096986-B-C32, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Spain. Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (TESIS2020010113).In recent years, the use of video call or video conference tools has not stopped increasing, and especially due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, the use of video calls increased in the educational and work spheres, but also in the family sphere, due to the risks of contagion in face-to-face meetings. Throughout the world, many older people are affected by hearing loss. Auditory functional diversity can make it difficult to enjoy video calls. Using automatic captions might help these people, but not all video calling tools offer this functionality, and some offer it in some languages. We developed an automatic conversation captioning tool using Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech to Text, using the free software tool Coqui STT. This automatic captioning tool is independent of the video call platform used and allows older adults or anyone with auditory functional diversity to enjoy video calls in a simple way. A transparent user interface was designed for our tool that overlays the video call window, and the tool allows us to easily change the text size, color, and background settings. It is also important to remember that many older people have visual functional diversity, so they could have problems reading the texts, thus it is important that each person can adapt the text to their needs. An analysis has been carried out that includes older people to analyze the benefits of the interface, as well as some configuration preferences, and a proposal to improve the way the text is displayed on the screen. Spanish and English were tested during the investigation, but the tool allows us to easily install dozens of new languages based on models trained for Coqui STT.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer NatureCanary Islands Agency for Research, Innovation and Information Society of the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment and by the European Social Fund (ESF) Integrated Operational Program of the Canary Islands 2014–2020, Axis 3 Priority Topic 74 (85%)PERGAMEX ACTIVE project, Ref. RTI2018- 096986-B-C32, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. SpainAgencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (TESIS2020010113

The Italian Retranslations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: A Corpus-based Literary Analysis

The research goal is to clarify how and to what degree the modernist style and features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are rendered in the eleven retranslations into Italian of this novel and whether these can be characterised as modernist novels themselves. A suitable methodology has been developed, which is drawn on the existing corpus methods for descriptive translation studies. Empirical evidence of the differences between target texts have been found, which in many cases have been interpreted as due to the translators’ voice or thumb-prints. The present research uses a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study both linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences will be analysed in this thesis in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics such as lexical variety and lexical frequency. The target texts were digitised, and the resulting text files were then analysed by using a bespoke, novel computer program, which is capable of the mentioned functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. Not only did this methodology enable performing in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features, but it also allowed a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons. The obtained empirical results identify a progressive source-text orientation of the retranslations of Woolf’s style in a few aspects of a few target texts. The translators’ presence affected all the eleven target texts in register and style under the influence of the Italian translation norms usually attributed to the translation of literary classics

Development of the Attitudes Toward the Atypically Gendered Inventory (ATAG-I)

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2008There are presumably two and only two kinds of people in the world: men and women. Above all else, male and female are seen as mutually exclusive, complementing but never overlapping, categories. Like much of the world, Western society rests on the assumption that all persons exist unambiguously as either man or woman. The foundation undergirding this work posits that the discrete categories of male and female fail to adequately describe that part of human experience referred to as sex and gender, evidenced by the existence of two naturally occurring challenges to this binary: the transgendered and the intersexed. The goal of this work was to develop a reliable and valid assessment of societal attitudes toward the atypically gendered. Construction of the ATAG-I involved five steps: 1) A list of potential items was composed via the domain-sampling method of instrument development based on content analysis of the relevant literature; 2) A retranslation task was conducted on a group of three atypically gendered participants; 3) A second retranslation task was conducted on a small group of naïve adults; 4) A test-retest analysis was conducted; 5) Data was collected on a large sample for reliability analyses and to gather evidence of content and construct validity. The result was a valid instrument that yielded highly reliable scores

The Arabic (Re)dubbing of Wordplay in Disney Animated Films

Although audiovisual translation (AVT) has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the dubbing of wordplay in the Arabophone countries. This piece of research sets to identify, describe and assess the most common translation techniques adopted by translators when dubbing English-language animated films into Arabic. The focus is on the special case of dubbing Disney animated films into Egyptian Arabic (EA) and their subsequent redubbing into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), during the 1975-2015 period. The ultimate goal is to ascertain the similarities as well as the differences that set the two versions apart, particularly when it comes to the transfer of wordplay. To reach this objective, the methodological approach adopted for this study is a corpus of instances of wordplay that combines a quantitative phase, which has the advantage of identifying correlations between the types of wordplay and particular translation techniques and results and is then followed by a qualitative analysis that further probes the results and determines the different factors that contribute to the way wordplay is translated. The analysis reveals that, in their attempt to render this type of punning humour, in both Arabic dubbed versions, Arabic translators resort to a variety of translation techniques, namely, loan, direct translation, explication, paraphrase, substitution and omission. The examination of the data shows that achieving a humorous effect in the target dialogue is the top priority and driving factor influencing most of the strategies activated in the process of dubbing wordplay into EA. Dissimilarly, there is a noticeable lower amount of puns crossing over from the original films to the MSA dubbed versions, highlighting the fact that the approach generally taken by the dubbing teams seems to give priority to the denotative, informative dimension rather than the socio-pragmatic one. By shedding light on the intricacies of dubbing, it is hoped that this study would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the translation of wordplay in the Arabophone countries and, more specifically, in the field of dubbing children’s programmes

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

Integrity Control in Relational Database Systems - An Overview

This paper gives an overview of research regarding integrity control or integrity constraint handling in relational database management systems. The topic of constraint handling is discussed from two points of view. First, constraint handling is discussed by identifying a number of important research issues, and by treating each issue in detail. Second, a number of projects is described that have resulted in the realization of database management systems supporting integrity constraints; the various projects are compared with respect to a number of system characteristics. Together, both approaches give a broad overview of the state of the art in the field at this moment

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

Guidelines for the verification and validation of expert system software and conventional software: Bibliography. Volume 8

This volume contains all of the technical references found in Volumes 1-7 concerning the development of guidelines for the verification and validation of expert systems, knowledge-based systems, other AI systems, object-oriented systems, and conventional systems