Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Learning Vocabulary in Another Language: Appendixes

We present the results of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, which we organized as part of the fourth edition of the VarDial workshop at EACL’2017 This year, we included four shared tasks: Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL), Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI), German Dialect Identification (GDI), and Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing (CLP) A total of 19 teams submitted runs across the four tasks, and 15 of them wrote system description papers

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Findings of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2017

As information and communication technology access expands in the developing world, learning technologies have the opportunity to play a growing role to enhance and supplement strained educational systems. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) offer strong learning gains, but are a class of technology traditionally designed for most-developed countries. Recently, closer consideration has been made to ITS targeting the developing world and to culturally-adapted ITS. This paper presents findings from a systematic literature review that focused on barriers to ITS adoption in the developing world. While ITS were the primary focus of the review, the implications likely apply to a broader range of educational technology as well. The geographical and economic landscape of tutoring publications is mapped out, to determine where tutoring systems research occurs. Next, the paper discusses challenges and promising solutions for barriers to ITS within both formal and informal settings. These barriers include student basic computing skills, hardware sharing, mobile-dominant computing, data costs, electrical reliability, internet infrastructure, language, and culture. Differences and similarities between externally-developed and locally-developed tutoring system research for the developing world are then considered. Finally, this paper concludes with some potential future directions and opportunities for research on tutoring systems and other educational technologies on the global stage.

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Intelligent Tutoring Systems by and for the Developing World: A Review of Trends and Approaches for Educational Technology in a Global Context

Fill-in-the-blank questions are one of the main assessment devices in REAP.PT tutoring system. The problem of automatically generating the stems, i.e. the sentences that serve as basis to this type of question, has been studied mostly for English, and it remains a challenge for a language as morphologically rich as European Portuguese (EP), for which additional data scarcity problems arise. To address this problem, a supervised classification technique is used to model a classifier that decides whether a given sentence is suitable to be used as a stem in a cloze question. The major focus is put in the feature engineering task, describing both the development of new criteria, and the adaptation to EP of features already explored in the literature. The resulting classifier filters out inadequate stems, allowing experts to build and personalize their instruction focusing on a set of potentially good sentences.

Automatic generation of cloze question stems

Using standard methods and formats established at LADL, and adopted by several European research teams to construct largecoverage electronic dictionaries and grammars, we elaborated for Portuguese a set of lexlcal resources, that were implemented in IN'rEX We describe the main features of such linguistic data, refer to their mmntenance and extension, and gwe different examples of automatic text parsing based on those dictionaries and grammars

A Computational Lexicon of Portuguese for Automatic Text Parsing

This paper presents and discusses the methodology for the construction of an Academic Word List for Portuguese: PAWL, inspired in its English equivalent. The aim of this linguistic resource is to provide a solid base for future studies and applications on Computer Assisted Language Learning, while maintaining comparability with other comparable resources.

P-AWL: academic word list for Portuguese

This paper presents on-going research on the building of an electronic dictionary of frozen sentences of European Portuguese. It will focus on the problems arising from the description of their formal variation in view of natural language processing

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Frozen sentences of Portuguese: formal descriptions for NLP

Sharing data in the form of text is important for a wide range of activities but it also raises a concern about privacy when sharing data that could be sensitive. Automated text anonymization is a solution for removing all the sensitive information from documents. However, this is a challenging task due to the unstructured form of textual data and the ambiguity of natural language. In this work, we present our implementation of an automated anonymization system, built in a modular structure, for documents written in Portuguese. Four different methods of anonymization are evaluated and compared. Two methods replace the sensitive information by artificial labels: suppression and tagging. The other two methods replace the information by textual expressions: random substitution and generalization. Evaluation showed that the use of the tagging and the generalization methods facilitates the reading of an anonymized text while preventing some semantic drifts caused by the remotion of the original information.

Jorge Baptista

Papers

Automatic generation of cloze question stems

A Computational Lexicon of Portuguese for Automatic Text Parsing

P-AWL: academic word list for Portuguese

Frozen sentences of Portuguese: formal descriptions for NLP

Automated anonymization of text documents