EyeSchool: an educational assistive technology for people with disabilities - Passing from single actors to multiple-actor environment

International audienceSince 2005, public policy in France has strongly been encouraging young people with disabilities inclusion within the regular school system. This has found a direct application through technical innovation, intended to help students being more independent within their learning activities. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to underline the manner in which using assistive information and communication technologies may improve the inclusive education for people with disabilities. The case study we present underlines the complexity of the social world into which the use of a precise assistive tool takes it place

Etude des marqueurs discursifs dans le dialogue finalisé

This study should be seen in the context of discourse analysis. The aim is to provide a method of analysis in order to recognise the performed dialogue acts. For this purpose, a corpus of fifteen spoken dialogues has been analysed, in which users are involved in a work situation. This study aims at determining several linguistic and contextual markers which account for the performed dialogue acts. The basic idea consists in the belief that the speaker gives in his utterance enough markers to be understood ; those discourse cues allow the listener to understand what speaker means. Three kinds of linguistic markers have been kept: markers which occur in the determination of the dialogue acts, connective markers, whose function is to indicate the structure of the dialogue and markers of cohesion which account for topic sequences. Those markers can be any item or lexical expression ; they can also be morphological or syntactical markers. The contextual information taken into account in our analysis are: the situation, the sequences of utterances, the roles held by the speakers in their task, and finally the prosodic and gestural information. A prototype has been elaborated: from observed linguistic and contextual information, it identifies the dialogue acts matching the utterances. This system has a model of utterance sequences. It takes into account the kind of dialogue act which is performed in each speech-turn, together with the role held by the speaker. Indeed, according to their role, the speakers do not ] perform the same acts in the same context. At last, the system has a set of knowledge about linguistic markers which are necessary to identify the performed acts. The task of the system consists in the recognition of the performed dialogue acts, and especially indirect dialogue acts. The problem is to determine the relevant markers which allow to understand what is performed through the utterances.Ce travail se place dans le cadre des analyses de discours. Son objectif est de proposer une méthode d'analyse pour reconnaître les actes de dialogue accomplis. Pour cela un corpus d'une quinzaine de dialogues oraux authentiques a été analysé ; ces dialogues mettent en scène deux locuteurs dans une tâche de conception de dessin. Cette étude consiste à déterminer un certain nombre de marques linguistiques et contextuelles rendant compte des actes de dialogue produits par les locuteurs. L'idée sur laquelle repose l'étude de ces marques est qu'un locuteur donne dans son énonciation suffisamment d'" indices " pour être compris, indices qui permettront à l'interlocuteur d'interpréter ce que le locuteur a voulu dire. Trois types d'indices linguistiques ont été retenus : les indices intervenant dans la détermination des actes de dialogue, les indices de connexion dont le rôle est de marquer la structure du discours et les indices de cohésion rendant compte des chaînes thématiques. Ces indices peuvent être des items ou des expressions lexicales, de nature morphologique ou syntaxique. Les informations contextuelles prises en compte dans l'analyse sont la situation d'énonciation, les enchaînements d'énoncés, les rôles occupés par les locuteurs dans leur tâche, auxquelles on ajoute des informations prosodiques et gestuelles. Un prototype a été élaboré ; il identifie à partir des informations linguistiques et contextuelles étudiées, les actes de dialogue correspondant aux énoncés. Ce système dispose d'un modèle des enchaînements d'actes de dialogue les plus fréquents, ainsi que d'un modèle de gestion des rôles occupés par les locuteurs. En effet, selon le rôle occupé, les locuteurs n'effectuent pas les mêmes interactions dans le même contexte. Enfin, on a donné au système un ensemble de connaissances sur les marques linguistiques nécessaires à l'identification des actes effectués. La tâche du système consiste ainsi à reconnaître que "tu peux déplacer le triangle à droite" est bien une requête ou que "je prends ce rond là ?" est bien une question. Le problème revient à déterminer les marques linguistiques et/ou contextuelles pertinentes, qui permettent de reconnaître ce qui est énoncé en terme d'actions de communication

Beyond Financial Support: Helping Citizens in Welfare Programs

Governments are turning to Social Media as a way to engage citizens in public policies through online debates and discussion forums. Together with the communication team of a government department, we are exploring another facet of government-citizens communication, and another opportunity for governments to exploit Social Media. In particular, we are investigating whether online communities could become a new channel to support specific groups of citizens. In this model, a government would facilitate the creation of online communities for specific cohorts of people sharing goals and needs as well as act as mediator. This model would enable governments to capitalise on the power of crowd-sourcing and the social capital that gets created through such communities to provide social and emotional peer-support. These communities would also serve to provide direct feedback on social security policies. We propose to explore the issues that arise in this context

Tailoring and the Efficiency of Information Seeking

Abstract. We present an empirical study assessing the impact of tailoring on information seeking tasks. Our aim was to evaluate whether providing tailored information would help people find the information they need more quickly and more accurately. Our results show that tailored documents have an impact on information seeking, at least when the information to be found is spread over a number of sources and needs to be synthesised.

Task-Driven Information Presentation

In the context of innovative Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) platform capabilities, we are building an environment that can support the generation of information tailored to the operator’s tasks. To this end, we propose a task-based interaction environment that delivers tailored multimedia information based on the analysis and the recognition of the operator’s activity. This aims at supporting the operators and maximising their efficiency by automatically providing them with information relevant to their tasks. The work is being conducted under a program that aims to enhance research and development capabilities in Australia that align with the Commonwealth’s areas of interest in AEW&C. 1

Hybrid Approach to Spoken Query Processing in Document Retrieval System

In the context of the THISL spoken document retrieval system, we present a hybrid approach to spoken query processing, which enables to increase recognition rates and to extract relevant information for the application. The query processing is distributed between grammar and language model, based on the assumption that a query can be decomposed in two relatively independent parts; the addressing form, which is parsed with a grammar, and the queried content, which is scored with a domain specific language model. Our aim is to retrieve the content sequence, which allows us to consult the database, but also, to keep information about the query formulations in order to develop an interaction between the user and the retrieval engine. This leads us to work closely with the speech recogniser and to carry out together the recognition and the query analysis. 1. Introduction Speech recognition technology has now reached a stage where it can reasonably provide baseline systems for spoken inter..