Building Knowledge Management System for Researching Terrorist Groups on the Web

Nowadays, terrorist organizations have found a cost-effective resource to advance their courses by posting high-impact Web sites on the Internet. This alternate side of the Web is referred to as the “Dark Web.” While counterterrorism researchers seek to obtain and analyze information from the Dark Web, several problems prevent effective and efficient knowledge discovery: the dynamic and hidden character of terrorist Web sites, information overload, and language barrier problems. This study proposes an intelligent knowledge management system to support the discovery and analysis of multilingual terrorist-created Web data. We developed a systematic approach to identify, collect and store up-to-date multilingual terrorist Web data. We also propose to build an intelligent Web-based knowledge portal integrated with advanced text and Web mining techniques such as summarization, categorization and cross-lingual retrieval to facilitate the knowledge discovery from Dark Web resources. We believe our knowledge portal provide counterterrorism research communities with valuable datasets and tools in knowledge discovery and sharing

Teaching Intercultural competence in the English subject: Teacher’s practices and perspectives from Norwegian primary schools

Norsk sammendrag Tittel: Undervisning i interkulturell kompetanse i engelskfaget: lærerens praksis og perspektiver fra norsk grunnskole Forfatter: Mariell Vesterås År: 2022 Sider: 100 (ikke medregnet vedlegg) Da fornyelsen av læreplanen ble innført i den norske skolen høsten 2020, ble interkulturell kompetanse et vesentlig begrep og læringsmål i engelskfaget (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2020). Denne masteroppgaven definerer interkulturell kompetanse som kombinasjonen av kulturrelatert kunnskap, spesifikke ferdigheter og holdninger, og refererer til essensielle komponenter innenfor interkulturell kompetanse som elever må utvikle for å kunne møte og samhandle med mennesker med ulik bakgrunn (Byram, 2020; Deardorff, 2006). Denne oppgaven utforsker EFL-lærernes undervisningspraksis og perspektiver på interkulturell kompetanse for å gi et innblikk i hvordan lærere underviser aspekter knyttet til begrepet i engelskfaget på 5.-7. trinn i grunnskolen. Observasjoner og semi-strukturerte intervjuer er brukt for å samle inn data i denne oppgaven, og resultatene er diskutert med relevant teori (f.eks. Byram, 2020; Byram et al., 2002; Huber et al., 2014) og tidligere forskning (f.eks. Listuen, 2017; Skaugen, 2020; Bandura & Sercu, 2005). Resultatene i denne studien antyder at lærere har en felles forståelse av begrepet interkulturell kompetanse og hvordan det skal undervises. For eksempel fremhever deltakerne i denne studien mangfold som et vesentlig aspekt ved interkulturell kompetanse. De rapporterer også at det er viktig å utvikle elevenes kommunikative kompetanse. Likevel fremstår kunnskap som den komponenten av interkulturell kompetanse lærerne i denne forskningen legger mest vekt på, mens komponentene ferdigheter og holdninger ser ut til å bli undervist implisitt. Innholdet lærerne underviser i forholder seg til flere aspekter ved interkulturell kompetanse og undervises ofte gjennom bruk av autentiske engelskspråklige tekster og reflekterende aktiviteter.Abstract Title: Teaching Intercultural competence in the English subject: Teacher’s practices and perspectives from Norwegian primary schools Author: Mariell Vesterås Year: 2022 Pages: 100 (excluding appendices) When the curriculum renewal was introduced to Norwegian compulsory education in the autumn of 2020, intercultural competence became an essential term and learning objective in the English subject (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020). This MA thesis defines intercultural competence as the combination of culture-related knowledge, specific skills, and attitudes, which refers to essential components of intercultural competence learners must develop to be able to encounter and interact with people from different backgrounds (Byram, 2020; Deardorff, 2006). This thesis explores the EFL teachers’ teaching practices and perspectives on intercultural competence to provide an insight into how teachers teach aspects related to the term in the English subject in year 5-7. Observations and semi-structured interviews have been used to collect data in this thesis, and the results are discussed with relevant theory (e.g., Byram, 2020; Byram et al., 2002; Huber et al., 2014) and previous research (e.g., Listuen, 2017; Skaugen, 2020; Bandura & Sercu, 2005). The results in this study imply that teachers have a common understanding of the term intercultural competence and how it should be taught. For instance, the participants in this study emphasise diversity as an essential aspect of intercultural competence. They also report that developing the learners’ communicative competencies is essential. However, knowledge appears as the component of intercultural competence the teachers in this research most emphasise, while the components of skills and attitudes appear to be taught implicitly. The content the teachers teach relates to several aspects of intercultural competence and is commonly taught through the use of authentic English language texts and reflective activities

Machine learning with limited label availability: algorithms and applications

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Multilingual Lexicon Extraction under Resource-Poor Language Pairs

In general, bilingual and multilingual lexicons are important resources in many natural language processing fields such as information retrieval and machine translation. Such lexicons are usually extracted from bilingual (e.g., parallel or comparable) corpora with external seed dictionaries. However, few such corpora and bilingual seed dictionaries are publicly available for many language pairs such as Korean–French. It is important that such resources for these language pairs be publicly available or easily accessible when a monolingual resource is considered. This thesis presents efficient approaches for extracting bilingual single-/multi-word lexicons for resource-poor language pairs such as Korean–French and Korean–Spanish. The goal of this thesis is to present several efficient methods of extracting translated single-/multi-words from bilingual corpora based on a statistical method. Three approaches for single words and one approach for multi-words are proposed. The first approach is the pivot context-based approach (PCA). The PCA uses a pivot language to connect source and target languages. It builds context vectors from two parallel corpora sharing one pivot language and calculates their similarity scores to choose the best translation equivalents. The approach can reduce the effort required when using a seed dictionary for translation by using parallel corpora rather than comparable corpora. The second approach is the extended pivot context-based approach (EPCA). This approach gathers similar context vectors for each source word to augment its context. The approach assumes that similar vectors can enrich contexts. For example, young and youth can augment the context of baby. In the investigation described here, such similar vectors were collected by similarity measures such as cosine similarity. The third approach for single words uses a competitive neural network algorithm (i.e., self-organizing mapsSOM). The SOM-based approach (SA) uses synonym vectors rather than context vectors to train two different SOMs (i.e., source and target SOMs) in different ways. A source SOM is trained in an unsupervised way, while a target SOM is trained in a supervised way. The fourth approach is the constituent-based approach (CTA), which deals with multi-word expressions (MWEs). This approach reinforces the PCA for multi-words (PCAM). It extracts bilingual MWEs taking all constituents of the source MWEs into consideration. The PCAM 2 identifies MWE candidates by pointwise mutual information first and then adds them to input data as single units in order to use the PCA directly. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches generally perform well for resource-poor language pairs, particularly Korean and French–Spanish. The PCA and SA have demonstrated good performance for such language pairs. The EPCA would not have shown a stronger performance than expected. The CTA performs well even when word contexts are insufficient. Overall, the experimental results show that the CTA significantly outperforms the PCAM. In the future, homonyms (i.e., homographs such as lead or tear) should be considered. In particular, the domains of bilingual corpora should be identified. In addition, more parts of speech such as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs could be tested. In this thesis, only nouns are discussed for simplicity. Finally, thorough error analysis should also be conducted.Abstract List of Abbreviations List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgement Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Multilingual Lexicon Extraction 1.2 Motivations and Goals 1.3 Organization Chapter 2 Background and Literature Review 2.1 Extraction of Bilingual Translations of Single-words 2.1.1 Context-based approach 2.1.2 Extended approach 2.1.3 Pivot-based approach 2.2 Extractiong of Bilingual Translations of Multi-Word Expressions 2.2.1 MWE identification 2.2.2 MWE alignment 2.3 Self-Organizing Maps 2.4 Evaluation Measures Chapter 3 Pivot Context-Based Approach 3.1 Concept of Pivot-Based Approach 3.2 Experiments 3.2.1 Resources 3.2.2 Results 3.3 Summary Chapter 4 Extended Pivot Context-Based Approach 4.1 Concept of Extended Pivot Context-Based Approach 4.2 Experiments 4.2.1 Resources 4.2.2 Results 4.3 Summary Chapter 5 SOM-Based Approach 5.1 Concept of SOM-Based Approach 5.2 Experiments 5.2.1 Resources 5.2.2 Results 5.3 Summary Chapter 6 Constituent-Based Approach 6.1 Concept of Constituent-Based Approach 6.2 Experiments 6.2.1 Resources 6.2.2 Results 6.3 Summary Chapter 7 Conclusions and Future Work 7.1 Conclusions 7.2 Future Work Reference