Sentence Completion Tests in a Virtual Laboratory

This paper describes a type of on-line test, the Sentence Completion Test (SCT), that tries to fill the gap between rigid MC tests and unreliable automatic essay grading approaches. We give a short overview of the main concepts, the implementation and show examplary use and applications. SCTs are used as one component in a fully operational virtual laboratory of Computational Linguistics in use at the University of Zurich

Evolution by Evaluation

This paper describes the process of formally evaluating an E-Learning system that has been in use for several years. Professional usability evaluation offers deeper insight into user behaviour and needs than accidental feedback collection or introspection by system developers. A first analysis of the evaluation samples shows satisfaction of users with the general design of the system but also dissatisfaction with certain aspects of navigation that would otherwise have escaped our attention. State of the art formal evaluation turned out to be instrumental in making an existing system considerably more user-friendly

New findings of Prototherium ausetanum (Mammalia, Pan-Sirenia) from paving stones in Girona (Catalonia, Spain)?

Taxonomic and morphological approaches on Eocene sirenians from Catalonia (Spain) benefit from a newly discovered specimen found in a quite unusual locality, the pedestrian zone in the city of Girona. Two fossil-bearing limestone slabs from middle Eocene (Bartonian) layers of a quarry in the wider surrounding area north-west of Barcelona, were CT-scanned in the Clínica Girona to enhance more detailed investigations. Post-processing of the scans and, as far as possible, 3D-reconstruction of the preserved elements in the slabs was performed at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Thereby, a skull of a Dugong specimen was used as a reference point. Based on the combined analysis of macroscopic and CT-data, the specimen most likely represents Prototherium ausetanum Balaguer & Alba, 2016 and complements the available information of the holotype and hitherto only known specimen of that species. The Girona specimen is an adult, but small individual that corroborates P. ausetanum as a generally small-sized species compared to other known Prototherium taxa

Metabolic profiling identifies trehalose as an abundant and diurnally fluctuating metabolite in the microalga Ostreococcus tauri

© 2017, The Author(s).Introduction: The picoeukaryotic alga Ostreococcus tauri (Chlorophyta) belongs to the widespread group of marine prasinophytes. Despite its ecological importance, little is known about the metabolism of this alga. Objectives: In this work, changes in the metabolome were quantified when O. tauri was grown under alternating cycles of 12 h light and 12 h darkness. Methods: Algal metabolism was analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, the bacteria associated with O. tauri were depleted to below 0.1% of total cells at the time of metabolic profiling. Results: Of 111 metabolites quantified over light–dark cycles, 20 (18%) showed clear diurnal variations. The strongest fluctuations were found for trehalose. With an intracellular concentration of 1.6 mM in the dark, this disaccharide was six times more abundant at night than during the day. This fluctuation pattern of trehalose may be a consequence of starch degradation or of the synchronized cell cycle. On the other hand, maltose (and also sucrose) was below the detection limit (~10 μM). Accumulation of glycine in the light is in agreement with the presence of a classical glycolate pathway of photorespiration. We also provide evidence for the presence of fatty acid methyl and ethyl esters in O. tauri. Conclusions: This study shows how the metabolism of O. tauri adapts to day and night and gives new insights into the configuration of the carbon metabolism. In addition, several less common metabolites were identified

A Target-Driven Evaluation of Morphological Components for German

In this paper we present an evaluation of rule-based morphological components for German for use in an interactive editing environment. The criteria for the evaluation are deduced from the intended use of these components, namely availability, performance, programming interfaces, and analysis quality. We evaluated systems developed and maintained since decades as well as new systems. However, we note serious general shortcomings when looking closer at recent implementations and come to the conclusion that the oldest system is the only one that satisfies our requirements

SMM: Detailed, Structured Morphological Analysis for Spanish

We present a morphological analyzer for Spanish called SMM. SMM is implemented in the grammar development framework Malaga, which is based on the formalism of Left- Associative Grammar. We briefly present the Malaga framework, describe the implementation decisions for some interesting morphological phenomena of Spanish, and report on the evaluation results from the analysis of corpora. SMM was originally only designed for analyzing word forms; in this article we outline two approaches for using SMM and the facilities provided by Malaga to also generate verbal paradigms. SMM can also be embedded into applications by making use of the Malaga progr

Noun phrase chunking and categorization for authoring aids

Effective authoring aids, whether for novice, second-language, or experienced writers, require linguistic knowledge. With respect to depth of analysis, authoring aids that aim to support revising and editing go beyond POS-tagging but cannot work on complete, mostly well-formed sentences to perform deep syntactic analysis, since a text undergoing revision is in a constant state of flux. In order to cope with incomplete and changing text, authoring aids for revising and editing thus have to use shallow analyses, which are fast and robust. In this paper, we discuss noun phrase chunking for German as resource for language-aware editing functions as developed in the LingURed project. We will identify requirements for resources with respect to availability, interactivity, performance and quality of results. From our experiments we also provide some information concerning ambiguity of German noun phrases

Sentence completion tests in a virtual laboratory

This Paper describes a type of on-line test, the Sentence Completion Test (SCT), that tries to fill the gap between rigid Multiple Choice tests and unreliable automatic essay grading approaches. We give a short overview of the main concepts, the implementation and show examplary uses and applications. SCTs are used as one component in a fully operational virtual laboratory of Computational Linguistics in use at the University of Zurich

Linguistic editing support

Unlike programmers, authors only get very little support from their writing tools, i.e., their word processors and editors. Current editors are unaware of the objects and structures of natural languages and only offer character-based operations for manipulating text. Writers thus have to execute complex sequences of low-level functions to achieve their rhetoric or stylistic goals while composing. Software requiring long and complex sequences of operations causes users to make slips. In the case of editing and revising, these slips result in typical revision errors, such as sentences without a verb, agreement errors, or incorrect word order. In the LingURed project, we are developing language-aware editing functions to prevent errors. These functions operate on linguistic elements, not characters, thus shortening the command sequences writers have to execute. This paper describes the motivation and background of the LingURed project and shows some prototypical language-aware functions

Opportunities and limits for language awareness in text editors

In this paper we argue that the concept of language awareness, as known from programmer’s editors, can be transferred to writing natural language and word processors. We propose editing functions which use methods from computational linguistics and take the structures of natural languages into consideration. Such functions could reduce errors and better support writers in realizing their communicative goals. We briefly compare characteristics of programming languages and natural languages and their processing tools with respect to their suitability for being used in language-aware functions in editors. However, linguistic methods have limits, and there are various aspects software developers have to take into account to avoid creating a solution looking for a problem: Language-aware functions could be powerful tools for writers, but writers must not be forced to adapt to their tools