Entre la cuantificación y la negación: Los minimizadores y su papel en la negación enfática en asturiano

The expression of emphatic negation in Romance languages is a phenomenon of syntactic microvariation in which the origin of postverbal negative markers (minimizers or quantifiers) constrains their syntactic behavior and the pragmatic interpretation of a sentence. The coexistence of many syntactic structures with minimizers in modern Asturian allows us to reconstruct the grammaticalization process these items have undergone in becoming quantifiers and postverbal negative markers. Although this process is similar to the one that has taken place in other languages, the results of grammaticalization are different, due to the grammatical constraints of each language. L’expressió de la negació emfàtica en les llengües romàniques és un fenomen de microvariació sintàctica en què l’origen de les unitats que actuen com a reforços negatius postverbals (minimitzadors o quantificadors) condiciona el comportament sintàctic d’aquestes marques i la interpretació pragmàtica de l’enunciat. La coexistència de diferents estructures sintàctiques amb minimitzadors en l’asturià actual ens permetrà reconstruir el procés de gramaticalització experimentat per aquestes unitats fins convertir-se en quantificadors i en marcadors negatius postverbals. Encara que el procés és semblant al que s’ha produït en altres llengües, les restriccions semàntiques i sintàctiques que presenten els mininimitzadors indiquen que els resultats de la gramaticalització, condicionats per l’estructura gramatical de cada llengua, són diferents

Methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain

A methodology for developing an advanced communications system for the Deaf in a new domain is presented in this paper. This methodology is a user-centred design approach consisting of four main steps: requirement analysis, parallel corpus generation, technology adaptation to the new domain, and finally, system evaluation. During the requirement analysis, both the user and technical requirements are evaluated and defined. For generating the parallel corpus, it is necessary to collect Spanish sentences in the new domain and translate them into LSE (Lengua de Signos Española: Spanish Sign Language). LSE is represented by glosses and using video recordings. This corpus is used for training the two main modules of the advanced communications system to the new domain: the spoken Spanish into the LSE translation module and the Spanish generation from the LSE module. The main aspects to be generated are the vocabularies for both languages (Spanish words and signs), and the knowledge for translating in both directions. Finally, the field evaluation is carried out with deaf people using the advanced communications system to interact with hearing people in several scenarios. In this evaluation, the paper proposes several objective and subjective measurements for evaluating the performance. In this paper, the new considered domain is about dialogues in a hotel reception. Using this methodology, the system was developed in several months, obtaining very good performance: good translation rates (10% Sign Error Rate) with small processing times, allowing face-to-face dialogues

Design, development and field evaluation of a Spanish into sign language translation system

This paper describes the design, development and field evaluation of a machine translation system from Spanish to Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española). The developed system focuses on helping Deaf people when they want to renew their Driver’s License. The system is made up of a speech recognizer (for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence), a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs belonging to the sign language), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). For the natural language translator, three technological approaches have been implemented and evaluated: an example-based strategy, a rule-based translation method and a statistical translator. For the final version, the implemented language translator combines all the alternatives into a hierarchical structure. This paper includes a detailed description of the field evaluation. This evaluation was carried out in the Local Traffic Office in Toledo involving real government employees and Deaf people. The evaluation includes objective measurements from the system and subjective information from questionnaires. The paper details the main problems found and a discussion on how to solve them (some of them specific for LSE)

AMIC: Affective multimedia analytics with inclusive and natural communication

Traditionally, textual content has been the main source of information extraction and indexing, and other technologies that are capable of extracting information from the audio and video of multimedia documents have joined later. Other major axis of analysis is the emotional and affective aspect intrinsic in human communication. This information of emotions, stances, preferences, figurative language, irony, sarcasm, etc. is fundamental and irreplaceable for a complete understanding of the content in conversations, speeches, debates, discussions, etc. The objective of this project is focused on advancing, developing and improving speech and language technologies as well as image and video technologies in the analysis of multimedia content adding to this analysis the extraction of affective-emotional information. As additional steps forward, we will advance in the methodologies and ways for presenting the information to the user, working on technologies for language simplification, automatic reports and summary generation, emotional speech synthesis and natural and inclusive interaction

Total Degree Formula for the Generic Offset to a Parametric Surface

We provide a resultant-based formula for the total degree w.r.t. the spatial variables of the generic offset to a parametric surface. The parametrization of the surface is not assumed to be proper.Comment: Preprint of an article to be published at the International Journal of Algebra and Computation, World Scientific Publishing, DOI:10.1142/S021819671100680

Predicting the academic underachievement in high school in Spain over the next few years: A dynamic modelling approach

[EN] In this paper we propose a dynamic model to understand the evolution of the academic underachievement in a high school in Spain. This model is based on ideas of Christakis and Fowler where individual habits may be transmitted by social contact. Thus, to build the model we suppose that a student has academic failure when she/he gets into study habits transmitted by students with bad academic habits. From the available academic results of the Spanish high school educational system during the period 1999 2008, we fit the model to the data in order to obtain the parameters of the model. Then, we predict the academic underachievement evolution over the next few years.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish M.C.Y.T. grant MTM2009-08587 and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia grant PAID06-09-2588Camacho Vidal, FJ.; Cortés, J.; Micle, RM.; Sánchez-Sánchez, A. (2013). Predicting the academic underachievement in high school in Spain over the next few years: A dynamic modelling approach. Mathematical and Computer Modelling. 57(7):1703-1708. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcm.2011.11.011S1703170857

Learning of the Object Oriented Paradigm Through Interactive Video-Games Development

The Object Orientation Paradigm (OOP) is more than Object Oriented languages. Learning the syntax of a language as C++ or Java is a relatively easy task compared with the understanding of the principles of OO Modeling and Design (OOD), which require a high ability of abstract reasoning. Moreover, it is not enough to teach the artifacts of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) if those principles are not properly understood. We wanted to engage the students in a motivating framework, so both the principles of OOD are properly acquired and put in practice with CASE and programming tools

Integration of a Spanish-to-LSE machine translation system into an e-learning platform

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21657-2_61This paper presents the first results of the integration of a Spanish-to-LSE Machine Translation (MT) system into an e-learning platform. Most e-learning platforms provide speech-based contents, which makes them inaccessible to the Deaf. To solve this issue, we have developed a MT system that translates Spanish speech-based contents into LSE. To test our MT system, we have integrated it into an e-learning tool. The e-learning tool sends the audio to our platform. The platform sends back the subtitles and a video stream with the signed translation to the e-learning tool. Preliminary results, evaluating the sign language synthesis module, show an isolated sign recognition accuracy of 97%. The sentence recognition accuracy was of 93%.Authors would like to acknowledge the FPU-UAM grant program for its financial support. Authors are grateful to the FCNSE linguistic department for sharing their knowledge in LSE and performing the evaluations. Many thanks go to María Chulvi and Benjamín Nogal for providing help during the imple-mentation of this system. This work was partially supported by the Telefónica Móviles España S.A. project number 10-047158-TE-Ed-01-1

Proposing a speech to gesture translation architecture for Spanish deaf people.

This article describes an architecture for translating speech into Spanish Sign Language (SSL). The architecture proposed is made up of four modules: speech recognizer, semantic analysis, gesture sequence generation and gesture playing. For the speech recognizer and the semantic analysis modules, we use software developed by IBM and CSLR (Center for Spoken Language Research at University of Colorado), respectively. Gesture sequence generation and gesture animation are the modules on which we have focused our main effort. Gesture sequence generation uses semantic concepts (obtained from the semantic analysis) associating them with several SSL gestures. This association is carried out based on a number of generation rules. For gesture animation, we have developed an animated agent (virtual representation of a human person) and a strategy for reducing the effort in gesture animation. This strategy consists of making the system automatically generate all agent positions necessary for the gesture animation. In this process, the system uses a few main agent positions (two or three per second) and some interpolation strategies, both issues previously generated by the service developer (the person who adapts the architecture proposed in this paper to a specific domain). Related to this module, we propose a distance between agent positions and a measure of gesture complexity. This measure can be used to analyze the gesture perception versus its complexity. With the architecture proposed, we are not trying to build a domain independent translator but a system able to translate speech utterances into gesture sequences in a restricted domain: railway, flights or weather information

An Algebraic Analysis of Conchoids to Algebraic Curves

We study the conchoid to an algebraic affine plane curve C from the perspective of algebraic geometry, analyzing their main algebraic properties. Beside C, the notion of conchoid involves a point A in the affine plane (the focus) and a nonzero field element d (the distance).We introduce the formal definition of conchoid by means of incidence diagrams.We prove that the conchoid is a 1-dimensional algebraic set having atmost two irreducible components. Moreover, with the exception of circles centered at the focus A and taking d as its radius, all components of the corresponding conchoid have dimension 1. In addition, we introduce the notions of special and simple components of a conchoid. Furthermore we state that, with the exception of lines passing through A, the conchoid always has at least one simple component and that, for almost every distance, all the components of the conchoid are simple. We state that, in the reducible case, simple conchoid components are birationally equivalent to C, and we show how special components can be used to decide whether a given algebraic curve is the conchoid of another curve