Lexical Complexity Prediction with Assembly Models

Tuning the complexity of one\u27s writing is essential to presenting ideas in a logical, intuitive manner to audiences. This paper describes a system submitted by team BigGreen to LCP 2021 for predicting the lexical complexity of English words in a given context. We assemble a feature engineering-based model and a deep neural network model with an underlying Transformer architecture based on BERT. While BERT itself performs competitively, our feature engineering-based model helps in extreme cases, eg. separating instances of easy and neutral difficulty. Our handcrafted features comprise a breadth of lexical, semantic, syntactic, and novel phonetic measures. Visualizations of BERT attention maps offer insight into potential features that Transformers models may implicitly learn when fine-tuned for the purposes of lexical complexity prediction. Our assembly technique performs reasonably well at predicting the complexities of single words, and we demonstrate how such techniques can be harnessed to perform well when on multi word expressions (MWEs) too

Innovative Analytical Assessment: The Relationship Between English E-assessment CBT Scores and Traditional Methods of Assessment

King Saud University’s (KSU) Preparatory Year (PY) examines around 12,000 students per year. The sole objective of the PY is to enable students to progress to the main campus of KSU and complete their degrees; and the main focus of its program is English language acquisition, through the English Language Skills Department (ELSD). Examining such a large number of students every year puts a strain on the resources of the faculty as a whole. As a consequence, maximizing the efficiency of the examination process is of paramount concern. Computer-based testing (CBT) is an extremely effective way of monitoring the knowledge acquisition of a large body of students. Alongside the CBT the PY also implements a speaking and writing examination for the ELSD. This study finds, through a quantitative analysis of statistical data collected from the results of ELSD Humanities students’ PY examinations, and multiple regression analysis, a high degree of correlation between the demonstration of proficiencies in the speaking and writing examinations and that of the CBT. This study proposes to measure students’ English proficiency through the exclusive use of CBT assessment. Schema theory is utilized to illustrate how the acquisition and organization of knowledge by students can be analyzed effectively. The study takes account of research to date in the field of Instructional Design and Technology to identify the need for learning solution through analysis. The study calls for further research to identify elements of ESL examinations that are overly tedious and inefficient in determining linguistic competencies, using a regression statistical model. It also calls for a more sophisticated statistical analysis, to explore the interrelations in language skills in more detail in order to provide the most rigorous and relevant evaluative framework. Keywords: Instructional Design, Learning Analytics, Educational Data Mining, Learner Characteristics, e-Assessment.

Suitability of a commercial software defined radio system for passive coherent location

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-99)

Effect of spending in the January transfer window

This paper will investigate how conducting business in the January transfer window changes the performance of teams in the second half of the season. We will solely be focusing on the premier league as this league has the largest influx of money, so ‘smaller’ teams are also able to spend a high enough amount of money to significantly affect the results of the findings

Revisiting Revitalization: How Municipalities Can Positively Impact Gentrification

Gentrification of neighbourhoods is a consequence of revitalization projects and is aided by municipal practices and policies. This paper asks what the municipality can do within its legislative power to minimize the harsh impacts of gentrification such as displacement, lack of affordable housing, and the silencing of voices of marginalized people in community development or urban planning. This paper comes during an opportune time as cities across Canada continue to grow in population, are aging and grapple with their role in dealing with social issues. This paper discusses the nuanced relationship between sustainability of healthy communities and management of growth, while particularly focusing on the ignored voices of marginalized people in these processes. Using an in-depth literature review and focusing on examples from the City of Toronto, this paper proposes a solution which would mitigate the negative effects of gentrification. Municipalities in Ontario have tools at their disposal to provide a voice to marginalized communities in revitalization projects, yet they tend to favour the interests of developers and condo dwellers. This paper asserts that proper community consultation and the use of community land trusts can minimize the harm caused by gentrification in a manner where the interests of all parties involved in revitalization can be properly balanced

Optimization of PSWAN in terms of cost and bandwidth

PSWAN is an internetworking project undertaken by Govt. of India at Pondicherry. It covers a vast area, under it there are various state headquarters and district headquarters. Approximately 3000 systems are using its internet services. Since the number of systems are more and the bandwidth required is less so optimization was needed. Optimization was required without hardware modifications, so we defined some of the parameters through which we can achieve the optimization of this network, these parameters are 1. Type of protocol 2. Type of Topology 3. Access policies 4. Load balancing 5. Traffic bottle neck 6. Bandwidth utilization. To make the network cost effective, some small networks were moved to broadband network so that bandwidth usage can be mitigated and consequently network will get optimized. Since this project (PSWAN) is using the CISCO devices only so it was easy to simulate the network, we used OPNET simulator as it is precise than other simulators. First the operational network was simulated and then the proposed one, proposed model showed evident positive results. The simulation tool used is Opnet. OPNET is extensive and powerful simulation software with wide variety of capabilities. It enables the possibility to simulate entire heterogeneous networks with various protocol