Search results for "language processing"
showing 10 items of 421 documents
Bayesian Modelling of Confusability of Phoneme-Grapheme Connections
2007
Deficiencies in the ability to map letters to sounds are currently considered to be the most likely early signs of dyslexia. This has motivated the use of Literate, a computer game for training this skill, in several Finnish schools and households as a tool in the early prevention of reading disability. In this paper, we present a Bayesian model that uses a student's performance in a game like Literate to infer which phoneme-grapheme connections student currently confuses with each other. This information can be used to adapt the game to a particular student's skills as well as to provide information about the student's learning progress to their parents and teachers. We apply our model to …
Layout attributes and recall
2003
The spatial arrangement of elements such as icons in a computer interface may influence learning the interface. However, the effects of layout organization on users' information processing is relatively little studied so far. The three experiments of this paper examined two attributes of layouts: spatial grouping by proximity and semantic coherence. Learning was assessed by tasks in which 30 participants recalled icon-like items' labels, locations, or both as a series of study-recall trials. The results show that layout organization interacts with task demands. Semantic organization improves recall of labels, and spatial grouping supports recall of locations. When both labels and locations …
Recall of common and uncommon words from pure and mixed lists
1980
Recall of high- and low-frequency words in the conventional free recall paradigm was compared with recall of the same words when subjects were required to count backward before and after the presentation of each word. The addition of this distractor task was associated with a reduction in the high-frequency advantage otherwise found with pure lists containing only high- or low-frequency words. This finding is attributed to the disruption of organizational processes. In contrast, the low-frequency advantage found with conventional presentation of mixed lists, containing high- and low-frequency words, was not reduced by distraction. These findings indicate that the frequency effects obtained …
Corpus Analysis and Register Variation: a field in need of an update
2013
Abstract This study reviews the development of research on register variation (RV) over the last century to the present, emphasizing the influence of corpus analyses on its greatest advances and also on its major weaknesses and ambiguities. In search of practical and useful methods to analyse language registers, in the second part of the paper, the authors sketch a different approach to RV which has been used over the last ten years in language teaching at university level and professional communication training.
Register Variation Across English Pharmaceutical Texts: A Corpus-driven Study of Keywords, Lexical Bundles and Phrase Frames in Patient Information L…
2013
Abstract This study constitutes an initial step towards filling a gap in corpus linguistics studies of linguistic and phraseological variation across English pharmaceutical texts, in particular in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. The study conducted from a register- perspective ( Biber & Conrad, 2009 ), which employs both quantitative and qualitative research procedures, aims to provide a corpus-driven description of vocabulary and phraseology, namely key words, lexical bundles, and phrase frames, used in patient information leaflets and summaries of product characteristics (represented by 463 and 146 texts, respectively) written originally in English and collected in two domain-spec…
First results of PACTE group's experimental research on translation competence acquisition : the acquisition of declarative knowledge of translation
2014
Autors llistats per ordre alfabètic. Investigadora principal: A. Hurtado Albir This paper presents the first results of empirical-experimental research into the Acquisition of Translation Competence (ATC): the acquisition of declarative knowledge about translation. This study is based on our previous research about Translation Competence (TC). Some of the data collection instruments have, however, been adapted for current use. Details of our research design include type of study, universe and sample population, study variables, data collection instruments, and data analysis processes. The dependent variables were knowledge of translation; translation project; identification and solution of …
Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information
2015
Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for Spanish–English bilinguals, who also produced very little translation priming in a lexical decision task, significant priming was observed for Japanese–English bilinguals. These results indicate that, although most of the priming in the same–different task has an orthographic basis, other types of pr…
A probabilistic approach to learning a visually grounded language model through human-robot interaction
2010
A Language is among the most fascinating and complex cognitive activities that develops rapidly since the early months of infants' life. The aim of the present work is to provide a humanoid robot with cognitive, perceptual and motor skills fundamental for the acquisition of a rudimentary form of language. We present a novel probabilistic model, inspired by the findings in cognitive sciences, able to associate spoken words with their perceptually grounded meanings. The main focus is set on acquiring the meaning of various perceptual categories (e. g. red, blue, circle, above, etc.), rather than specific world entities (e. g. an apple, a toy, etc.). Our probabilistic model is based on a varia…
Semi-automatic Quasi-morphological Word Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation
2018
This paper proposes the Prefix-Root-Postfix-Encoding (PRPE) algorithm, which performs close-to-morphological segmentation of words as part of text pre-processing in machine translation. PRPE is a cross-language algorithm requiring only minor tweaking to adapt it for any particular language, a property which makes it potentially useful for morphologically rich languages with no morphological analysers available. As a key part of the proposed algorithm we introduce the ‘Root alignment’ principle to extract potential sub-words from a corpus, as well as a special technique for constructing words from potential sub-words. We conducted experiments with two different neural machine translation sys…
What to Expect and What to Focus on in SQL Query Teaching
2019
In the process of learning a new computer language, writing erroneous statements is part of the learning experience. However, some errors persist throughout the query writing process and are never corrected. Structured Query Language (SQL) consists of a number of different concepts such as expressions, joins, grouping and ordering, all of which by nature invite different possible errors in the query writing process. Furthermore, some of these errors are relatively easy for a student to fix when compared to others. Using a data set from three student cohorts with the total of 744 students, we set out to explore which types of errors are persistent, i.e., more likely to be left uncorrected by…