10,993 research outputs found
User-centred interface design for cross-language information retrieval
This paper reports on the user-centered design methodology and
techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements and how these requirements informed the first phase of the user interface design for a Cross-Language Information Retrieval System. We describe a set of factors involved in analysis of the data collected and, finally discuss the implications for user interface design based on the findings
Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
The effects of cognate synonymy in L2 word learning are explored. Participants learned
the names of well-known concrete concepts in a new fictional language following a picture-word
association paradigm. Half of the concepts (set A) had two possible translations in the new language
(i.e., both words were synonyms): one was a cognate in participants’ L1 and the other one was
not. The other half of the concepts (set B) had only one possible translation in the new language,
a non-cognate word. After learning the new words, participants’ memory was tested in a picture-word
matching task and a translation recognition task. In line with previous findings, our results clearly
indicate that cognates are much easier to learn, as we found that the cognate translation was
remembered much better than both its non-cognate synonym and the non-cognate from set B. Our
results also seem to suggest that non-cognates without cognate synonyms (set B) are better learned
than non-cognates with cognate synonyms (set A). This suggests that, at early stages of L2 acquisition,
learning a cognate would produce a poorer acquisition of its non-cognate synonym, as compared to a
solely learned non-cognate. These results are discussed in the light of different theories and models
of bilingual mental lexicon
Enriching ontological user profiles with tagging history for multi-domain recommendations
Many advanced recommendation frameworks employ ontologies of various complexities to model individuals and items, providing a mechanism for the expression of user interests and the representation of item attributes. As a result, complex matching techniques can be applied to support individuals in the discovery of items according to explicit and implicit user preferences. Recently, the rapid adoption of Web2.0, and the proliferation of social networking sites, has resulted in more and more users providing an increasing amount of information about themselves that could be exploited for recommendation purposes. However, the unification of personal information with ontologies using the contemporary knowledge representation methods often associated with Web2.0 applications, such as community tagging, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we propose a method for the unification of tags with ontologies by grounding tags to a shared representation in the form of Wordnet and Wikipedia. We incorporate individuals' tagging history into their ontological profiles by matching tags with ontology concepts. This approach is preliminary evaluated by extending an existing news recommendation system with user tagging histories harvested from popular social networking sites
Agrammatic but numerate
A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to
which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the
case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both
lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact
calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown
that calculation is associated with activation of a network of
left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and
the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity
of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere
perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment
and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic
number words, all basic computational procedures were intact
across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems
involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for
example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our
knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable
independence of mathematical calculations from language
grammar in the mature cognitive system
Word frequency predicts translation asymmetry
Bilingualism studies report asymmetries in word processing across languages. Access to L2 words is slower and sensitive to semantic blocking. These observations inform influential models of bilingual processing, which propose autonomous lexicons with different processing routes. In a series of experiments, we explored an alternative hypothesis that the asymmetries are due to frequency of use. Using a within-language ‘translation’ task, involving high/low frequency (HF/LF) synonyms, we obtained parallel results to bilingual studies. Experiment 1 revealed that HF synonyms were accessed faster than LF ones. Experiment 2 showed that semantic blocking slowed retrieval only of LF synonyms, while form blocking produced powerful interference of both HF and LF words. Experiment 3 examined translation speed and sensitivity to blocking in two groups of Russian-English bilinguals who differed in frequency of use of their languages. Translation asymmetries were modulated by frequency of use. The results support an integrated lexicon model of bilingual processing
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