Evaluating Multilingual Gisting of Web Pages

We describe a prototype system for multilingual gisting of Web pages, and present an evaluation methodology based on the notion of gisting as decision support. This evaluation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other situations where the user is faced with decision-making on the basis of information in restricted or alternative form.Comment: 7 pages, uses psfig and aaai style

Parallel Strands: A Preliminary Investigation into Mining the Web for Bilingual Text

Parallel corpora are a valuable resource for machine translation, but at present their availability and utility is limited by genre- and domain-specificity, licensing restrictions, and the basic difficulty of locating parallel texts in all but the most dominant of the world's languages. A parallel corpus resource not yet explored is the World Wide Web, which hosts an abundance of pages in parallel translation, offering a potential solution to some of these problems and unique opportunities of its own. This paper presents the necessary first step in that exploration: a method for automatically finding parallel translated documents on the Web. The technique is conceptually simple, fully language independent, and scalable, and preliminary evaluation results indicate that the method may be accurate enough to apply without human intervention.Comment: LaTeX2e, 11 pages, 7 eps figures; uses psfig, llncs.cls, theapa.sty. An Appendix at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/amta98/amta98_appendix.html contains test dat

Enjoyment as a key to success? Links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary students’ foreign language enjoyment

This paper reports on crossing borders virtually via an e-Tandem scheme and presents the findings of a study, in which students of English from an Austrian university were paired with students of German from the UK and the USA. Drawing on data from 19 in-depth interviews, the study aims to identify links between e-Tandem language learning and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014, 2016). A category-based qualitative text analysis (Kuckartz, 2014) revealed that a majority of the interviewees felt e-Tandem language learning contributed to their FLE. Furthermore, a range of reasons underlying students’ perceived enjoyment of learning a language in Tandem emerged: having authentic conversations in the target language with L1 (first language) users (Dewaele, 2018), perceiving each other as cultural mediators and a difference from language classroom contexts on the level of power relations, which made students feel more at ease. Helping each other, receiving one-on-one feedback and perceiving improvement in their linguistic mastery were furthermore mentioned as factors they felt boosted their enjoyment and so was developing friendships with L1 users. According to the interviewees, these aspects specifically increased their interest and enjoyment in using and learning the language and their eudaimonic happiness. The findings demonstrate that e-Tandem language learning can be a resource to enhance perceived enjoyment in foreign language learners at tertiary level and they illustrate that social and private components of FLE seem to be interlinked

The Acute Effects of Hatha Yoga on Psychological and Physiological Measures Associated with Stress

The Acute Effects of Hatha Yoga on Psychological and Physiological Measures Associated with Stress LYNDSEY RESNIK, SCOTT P MCLEAN, Ph.D., JIMMY SMITH, Ph.D. Kinesiology Department; Southwestern University; Georgetown, TX Category: Undergraduate ABSTRACT Objectives: Hatha yoga practices induce relaxation and have been used to alleviate stress-induced disorders such as insomnia, anxiety, and depression. The purpose of the present study is to measure the acute effects of Hatha yoga on psychological and physiological measures associated with stress. Methods: Twenty healthy male and female volunteers (20.8±1.0 yrs, 171.8±6.9 cm, 67.2±15.9 kg) participated in this study. Each participant completed a 43-minute session of Hatha yoga and a 43-minute session of studying (which served as the control). Each session was separated by one week. The design was balanced such that half of the participants completed the yoga session first while the other half completed the control session. Heart rate and mood (assessed using an Affect Grid) were measured prior to, immediately after, and thirty minutes after each session. Changes in the dependent variables were assessed in a 2x3 (condition x time) repeated measures ANOVA. Results: Heart rate (p=0.611) did not change between the pre and post-test measurements (Table 1). Measures of mood significantly interacted (F(2,38)=8.159, p=0.001) between condition and time. Subsequently, two one-way ANOVAs were performed to assess the changes across time for each condition. Arousal was affected by yoga (F(2,38)=7.98, p=0.001). Specifically, arousal increased immediately after completing the yoga session but did not persist. However for the control group, arousal did not change (F(2,38)=0.176, p=0.839). Likewise, the state of pleasure was affected by yoga (F(2,38)=9.82, p(2,38)=7.66, p=0.002). Specifically the control group exhibited little change immediately after completing the session, but this measure significantly increased at the 30-minute post-test assessment. Conclusions: Overall, Hatha yoga did significantly improve psychological state, but not physiological state. Table 1 Control Yoga Pre Post Post 30 Pre Post Post 30 HR (beats/min) 70.0 (12.1) 64.6 (5.9) 63.7 (8.2) 68.6 (11.8) 64.2 (9.2) 64.1 (8.0) Arousal (% max scale) -2.13 (21.14) -0.39 (21.10) 1.03 (21.59) 8.06 (24.43) -10.79 (25.18) -1.09 (23.31) Pleasure (% max scale) 3.44 (24.56) 1.47 (26.32) 15.83 (21.81) -2.95 (23.75) 16.78 (16.42) 12.98 (20.32) The mean (SD) of HR (beats/min), arousal and pleasure (% max scale) across three time periods for both control and yoga conditions. Key words: Hatha yoga, stress, blood pressure, heart rate, affect gri