Exploring Prediction Uncertainty in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Machine Translation Quality Estimation is a notoriously difficult task, which lessens its usefulness in real-world translation environments. Such scenarios can be improved if quality predictions are accompanied by a measure of uncertainty. However, models in this task are traditionally evaluated only in terms of point estimate metrics, which do not take prediction uncertainty into account. We investigate probabilistic methods for Quality Estimation that can provide well-calibrated uncertainty estimates and evaluate them in terms of their full posterior predictive distributions. We also show how this posterior information can be useful in an asymmetric risk scenario, which aims to capture typical situations in translation workflows.Comment: Proceedings of CoNLL 201

Bridging the gap between folksonomies and the semantic web: an experience report

Abstract. While folksonomies allow tagging of similar resources with a variety of tags, their content retrieval mechanisms are severely hampered by being agnostic to the relations that exist between these tags. To overcome this limitation, several methods have been proposed to find groups of implicitly inter-related tags. We believe that content retrieval can be further improved by making the relations between tags explicit. In this paper we propose the semantic enrichment of folksonomy tags with explicit relations by harvesting the Semantic Web, i.e., dynamically selecting and combining relevant bits of knowledge from online ontologies. Our experimental results show that, while semantic enrichment needs to be aware of the particular characteristics of folksonomies and the Semantic Web, it is beneficial for both.

Complex Word Identification: Challenges in Data Annotation and System Performance

This paper revisits the problem of complex word identification (CWI) following up the SemEval CWI shared task. We use ensemble classifiers to investigate how well computational methods can discriminate between complex and non-complex words. Furthermore, we analyze the classification performance to understand what makes lexical complexity challenging. Our findings show that most systems performed poorly on the SemEval CWI dataset, and one of the reasons for that is the way in which human annotation was performed.Comment: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA 2017

School Teachers’ Attitudes towards Integration of Children with Speech Difficulties in Public Primary Schools: A Case of Busia District, Kenya

Since the onset of inclusion of children with disabilities in the education sector, many challenges are facing the reform effort especially as regards to improving services of the disabled children. In an inclusive school, general education does not relinquish responsibility for pupils with special needs, but instead, places them at the centre of challenges which include attitudes of teachers and peers. Their self-concept which is influenced by these attitudes determines their academic achievement. Philosophies regarding the education of children with disabilities have changed over the past two decades and several countries have led in the effort to implement policies, which foster the integration of all pupils into mainstream environments. Although the movement of integration has gained momentum in recent years, a key element in the successful implementation of the policy is the views of the personnel who have the major responsibility for implementing it, that is, teachers.  It is argued that teachers’ beliefs and attitudes are critical in ensuring the success of the integration practices since teachers’ acceptance of the policy of integration is likely to affect their commitment to implementing it. The importance of investigating attitudes towards people with disabilities has long been recognized. Thus, this paper aims at examining the attitude of teachers towards children with speech difficulties in public primary schools.  Descriptive survey design was adopted for this study with focus on a target population of eighty four Primary schools in Busia District. A sample size of twenty five (25) schools was obtained through stratified sampling, simple random sampling and purposive sampling techniques.  Data collection was done by use of questionnaires after which descriptive statistics was used in analysis. The study findings showed that teachers held positive attitudes about integration on children with speech difficulties. This boosted the self-concept of pupils with speech difficulties and made them perform averagely in school. This study recommends that integration should be made successful through training sensitization of teachers in special education and improvement in staffing. The study is aimed at helping to identify ways, create and encourage the development of favourable conditions that would boost the self-concept of children with speech difficulties and realize their potentials in life while learning in an integrated setting. Keywords: Teachers, Attitudes, Children with speech difficulties, Public Primary Schools, Busia Distric

Semantic modelling of user interests based on cross-folksonomy analysis

The continued increase in Web usage, in particular participation in folksonomies, reveals a trend towards a more dynamic and interactive Web where individuals can organise and share resources. Tagging has emerged as the de-facto standard for the organisation of such resources, providing a versatile and reactive knowledge management mechanism that users find easy to use and understand. It is common nowadays for users to have multiple profiles in various folksonomies, thus distributing their tagging activities. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic consolidation of user profiles across two popular social networking sites, and subsequent semantic modelling of their interests utilising Wikipedia as a multi-domain model. We evaluate how much can be learned from such sites, and in which domains the knowledge acquired is focussed. Results show that far richer interest profiles can be generated for users when multiple tag-clouds are combine

Vicinity-driven paragraph and sentence alignment for comparable corpora

Parallel corpora have driven great progress in the field of Text Simplification. However, most sentence alignment algorithms either offer a limited range of alignment types supported, or simply ignore valuable clues present in comparable documents. We address this problem by introducing a new set of flexible vicinity-driven paragraph and sentence alignment algorithms that 1-N, N-1, N-N and long distance null alignments without the need for hard-to-replicate supervised models

Education as a Practice of Freedom: Reflections on bell hooks

This paper critically analyses the conceptions of bell hooks on education. It focuses on the relevance of hook’s ideas to the classroom. It is a theoretical paper based on secondary data that seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge in education. The paper is a reflection of hook’s reaction to education as a practice of freedom, the feminist theory, progressive holistic education and pedagogy of hope. Hook’s ideologies also revolve around her philosophy of the classroom based on race, capitalism, gender, oppression, class domination, liberation, collaboration and praxis in teaching and learning. Freedom in education gives teaching a performative act that offers space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts and can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique element in each classroom. The transformed and transformative classrooms are a testament to hook’s vision of changing the way we think of pedagogy as liberatory for all involved in education, from the teacher to the student and institutions we teach and learn in everyday. Key words: Freedom, education, liberation, gender, race, literacy, culture