Search results for: French language learners

Authors: Marinella Majorano, Rachele Ferrari, Tamara Bastianello

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The recent technological advance allows for applying innovative and multimedia screen-based assessment tools to test children's language and early literacy skills, monitor their growth over the preschool years, and test their readiness for primary school. Several are the advantages that a computer-based assessment tool offers with respect to paper-based tools. Firstly, computer-based tools which provide the use of games, videos, and audio may be more motivating and engaging for children, especially for those with language difficulties. Secondly, computer-based assessments are generally less time-consuming than traditional paper-based assessments: this makes them less demanding for children and provides clinicians and researchers, but also teachers, with the opportunity to test children multiple times over the same school year and, thus, to monitor their language growth more systematically. Finally, while paper-based tools require offline coding, computer-based tools sometimes allow obtaining automatically calculated scores, thus producing less subjective evaluations of the assessed skills and provide immediate feedback. Nonetheless, using computer-based assessment tools to test meta-phonological and language skills in children is not yet common practice in Italy. The present contribution aims to estimate the internal consistency of a computer-based assessment (i.e., the Simo-syl assessment). Sixty-three Italian pre-schoolers aged between 4;10 and 5;9 years were tested at the beginning of the last year of the preschool through paper-based standardised tools in their lexical (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), morpho-syntactical (Grammar Repetition Test for Children), meta-phonological (Meta-Phonological skills Evaluation test), and phono-articulatory skills (non-word repetition). The same children were tested through Simo-syl assessment on their phonological and meta-phonological skills (e.g., recognise syllables and vowels and read syllables and words). The internal consistency of the computer-based tool was acceptable (Cronbach's alpha = .799). Children's scores obtained in the paper-based assessment and scores obtained in each task of the computer-based assessment were correlated. Significant and positive correlations emerged between all the tasks of the computer-based assessment and the scores obtained in the CMF (r = .287 - .311, p < .05) and in the correct sentences in the RCGB (r = .360 - .481, p < .01); non-word repetition standardised test significantly correlates with the reading tasks only (r = .329 - .350, p < .05). Further tasks should be included in the current version of Simo-syl to have a comprehensive and multi-dimensional approach when assessing children. However, such a tool represents a good chance for the teachers to early identifying language-related problems even in the school environment.

Keywords: assessment, computer-based, early identification, language-related skills

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Authors: M. Omer, D. Wilson

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Creating a database scheme is essentially a manual process. From a requirement specification, the information contained within has to be analyzed and reduced into a set of tables, attributes and relationships. This is a time-consuming process that has to go through several stages before an acceptable database schema is achieved. The purpose of this paper is to implement a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based tool to produce a from a requirement specification. The Stanford CoreNLP version 3.3.1 and the Java programming were used to implement the proposed model. The outcome of this study indicates that the first draft of a relational database schema can be extracted from a requirement specification by using NLP tools and techniques with minimum user intervention. Therefore, this method is a step forward in finding a solution that requires little or no user intervention.

Keywords: information extraction, natural language processing, relation extraction

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Authors: Gizem Barreto Martins

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This paper explores the subversive potential inherent in the theatrical language employed within Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The research argues that this play intricately weaves ideological connections with its audience and the historical epoch it represents, effectively serving as a channel for ideological and cultural interaction potentially exerting subversive influences on social and political realms. Using a historical-materialist methodology that situates the play within its historical and political context, all while examining its connections with theater and literary theories, the paper raises a fundamental query: How does this dramatic work embody subversion, presenting a style unburdened by the performative conventions of daily life and prevailing codes and systems of representation? In response to this inquiry, the study asserts that theatrical language has the capacity to function as a subversive catalyst against prevailing ideologies, actively contributing to the process of social transformation. To substantiate this claim, the research conducts a detailed analysis of the selected play, employing the semiotic framework pioneered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Keywords: arthur miller, The crucible, gilles deleuze, felix guattari, theater and literary theories

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Authors: Sonia Rebai, Mohamed Naceur Azaiez, Dhafer Saidane

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In this study, we develop a performance evaluation model based on a multi-attribute utility approach aiming at reaching the sustainable banking (SB) status. This model is built accounting for various banks’ stakeholders in a win-win paradigm. In addition, it offers the opportunity for adopting a global measure of performance as an indication of a bank’s sustainability degree. This measure is referred to as banking sustainability performance index (BSPI). This index may constitute a basis for ranking banks. Moreover, it may constitute a bridge between the assessment types of financial and extra-financial rating agencies. A real application is performed on three French banks.

Keywords: multi-attribute utility theory, performance, sustainable banking, financial rating

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Authors: Chiara De Amicis, Sonia Falconieri, Mesut Tastan

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In this study, we analyze the language employed by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) during earnings conference calls from a gender perspective. We find evidences that conference calls held by female CEOs and/or CFOs exhibit a higher level of optimism compared to conference calls held by male CEOs and/or CFOs. Moreover, female managers tend to present and discuss firm performances with less vagueness as compared to their male colleagues. We then observe the market reaction around each earnings conference call: while manager optimism is perceived as a good signal by investors, manager vagueness significantly dampens the market reaction around the call. Whether the gender of the CEO and/or the CFO delivering the conference call affects investors’ perceptions about the firm performance is still an open question. Some evidences show that the language employed by female managers conveys more valuable information for market participants as compared to the language employed by their male counterparts. This study contributes to a growing literature in finance and accounting that uses textual analysis to assess the informativeness of corporate disclosure. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that aims at answering the question whether the gender of firm’s top managers does matter when it comes to assess the informativeness of corporate spoken communication. We believe that our results will be of relevance for future research in the field. Moreover, our evidence may be used in support of the debate if a larger participation by women in the management of companies should be encouraged or not.

Keywords: conference calls, even study, gender, market reaction, textual analysis

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Authors: Geetu Gahlawat

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The education system accustomed information on daily basis in term of variety i.e Multimedia channel. This can create a challenge to pedagogue to get hold on learner. Multimedia enhance the education system with its technology. Educators deliver their content effectively and beyond any limit through multimedia elements on another side it gives easy learning to learners and they are able to get their goals fast. This paper gives an overview of how multimedia reshape the Indian education system with its promises and pitfalls.

Keywords: multimedia, technology, techniques, development, pedagogy

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Authors: Haixu Yu, Wenhui Cao

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Tailoring Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform legal reasoning has been a popular trend in the study of AI and law. Researchers have mainly employed two methods to unlock the potential of LLMs, namely by finetuning the LLMs to expand their knowledge of law and by restructuring the prompts (In-Context Learning) to optimize the LLMs’ understanding of the legal questions. Although claiming the finetuning and renovated prompting can make LLMs more competent in legal reasoning, most state-of-the-art studies show quite limited improvements of practicability. In this paper, drawing on the study of the complexity and low interpretability of legal texts, we propose a prompting strategy based on the Chain of Thought (CoT) method. Instead of merely instructing the LLM to reason “step by step”, the prompting strategy requires the tested LLM to identify the ambiguity in the questions as the first step and then allows the LLM to generate corresponding answers in line with different understandings of the identified terms as the following step. The proposed prompting strategy attempts to encourage LLMs to "interpret" the given text from various aspects. Experiments that require the LLMs to answer “case analysis” questions of bar examination with general LLMs such as GPT 4 and legal LLMs such as LawGPT show that the prompting strategy can improve LLMs’ ability to better understand complex legal texts.

Keywords: ambiguity-identification, prompt, large language model, legal text understanding

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Authors: Adam L. Miller

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The aim of this paper is to look back to the very beginning of cinematic history and explore the connection between the differing technology used, and the varying styles adopted by early filmmakers. The paper will be structured chronologically, first looking at the advances that predated Thomas Edison and his Kinetograph and Kinetogram. This paper will then explore how Edison’s technology and films varied from the Lumiere brothers and their Cinematograph. Finally, the paper will go on to draw parallels and differences between French filmmakers such as Alice Guy and George Melies, and American filmmakers like Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith.

Keywords: film studies, early cinema, silent cinema, early cinematic technology, Thomas Edison, Alice Guy, George Melies, Edwin S. Porter, Lumiere brothers, D. W. Griffith

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Authors: Somayeh Sadat Hashemi Kamangar, Fatemeh Bakouie, Shahriar Gharibzadeh

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In this study, we target to exploit Maximum Spanning Trees (MST) of children's semantic networks to investigate their language development. To do so, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of word-embedding networks. The networks are made of words children learn prior to the age of 30 months as the nodes and the links which are built from the cosine vector similarity of words normatively acquired by children prior to two and a half years of age. These networks are weighted graphs and the strength of each link is determined by the numerical similarities of the two words (nodes) on the sides of the link. To avoid changing the weighted networks to the binaries by setting a threshold, constructing MSTs might present a solution. MST is a unique sub-graph that connects all the nodes in such a way that the sum of all the link weights is maximized without forming cycles. MSTs as the backbone of the semantic networks are suitable to examine developmental changes in semantic network topology in children. From these trees, several parameters were calculated to characterize the developmental change in network organization. We showed that MSTs provides an elegant method sensitive to capture subtle developmental changes in semantic network organization.

Keywords: maximum spanning trees, word-embedding, semantic networks, language development

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Authors: Sima Modirkhameneh, Mohammad Mohammadpanah

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In the process of EFL teachers’ development, self-led reflection (SLR) is thought to have an imperative role because it may help teachers analyze, evaluate, and contemplate what is happening in their classes. Such contemplations can not only enhance the quality of their instruction and provide better learning environments for learners but also improve the quality of their classroom management (CM). Accordingly, understanding the effect of teachers’ SLR practices may help us gain valuable insights into what possible modifications SLR may bring about in all aspects of EFL teachers' practitioners, especially their CM. The main purpose of this case study was, thus, to investigate the impact of SLR practices of 12 Iranian EFL teachers on their CM based on the universal classroom management checklist (UCMC). In addition, another objective of the current study was to have a clear image of EFL teachers’ perceptions of their own SLR practices and their possible outcomes. By conducting repeated reflective interviews, observations, and feedback of the participants over five teaching sessions, the researcher analyzed the outcomes qualitatively through the process of meaning categorization and data interpretation based on the principles of Grounded Theory. The results demonstrated that EFL teachers utilized SLR practices to improve different aspects of their language teaching skills and CM in different contexts. Almost all participants had positive comments and reactions about the effect of SLR on their CM procedures in different aspects (expectations and routines, behavior-specific praise, error corrections, prompts and precorrections, opportunity to respond, strengths and weaknesses of CM, teachers’ perception, CM ability, and learning process). Otherwise stated, results implied that familiarity with the UCMC criteria and reflective practices contributes to modifying teacher participants’ perceptions about their CM procedure and utilizing the reflective practices in their teaching styles. The results are thought to be valuably beneficial for teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers, who are recommended to pay special attention to the contributions as well as the complexity of reflective teaching. The study concludes with more detailed results and implications and useful directions for future research.

Keywords: classroom management, EFL teachers, reflective practices, self-led reflection

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Authors: L. Rajaonarivo, M. N. Bessagnet, C. Sallaberry, A. Le Parc Lacayrelle, L. Leveque

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TCVPYR is a European FEDER (European Regional Development Fund) project which aims to promote tourism in the French Pyrenees region by leveraging its cultural heritage. It involves scientists from various domains (geographers, historians, anthropologists, computer scientists...). This paper presents a fully automated process to publish any dataset as Wikipedia articles as well as the corresponding linked information on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. We validate this process on a sample of geo-referenced cultural heritage data collected by TCVPYR researchers in different regions of the Pyrenees. The main result concerns the technological prerequisites, which are now in place. Moreover, we demonstrated that we can automatically publish cultural heritage data on Wikimedia.

Keywords: cultural heritage dissemination, digital humanities, open data, Wikimedia automated publishing

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Authors: Md. Mahamud Hassan, Shantanu Biswas Linkon, Nur Mohammad Khan

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Over the last three decades, the primary education system in Bangladesh has experienced significant improvement, but it has failed to cope with different social and cultural aspects, which present many challenges for children, families, and the public school system. Neglecting our own contextual learning environment, it is a matter of sorrow that much attention has been paid to the more physical outcome-focused model, which is nothing but mere infrastructural development, and less subtle to the environment that suits the child's psychology and improves their social, emotional, physical, and moral competency. In South Asia, the symbol of education was never the little red house of colonial architecture but “A Guru sitting under a tree", whereas a responsive and inclusive design approach could help to create more innovative learning environments. Such an approach incorporates how the built, natural, and cultural environment shapes the learner; in turn, learners shape the learning. This research will be conducted to, i) identify the major issues and drawbacks of government policy for primary education development programs; ii) explore and evaluate the morphology of the conventional model of school, and iii) propose an alternative model in a collaborative design process with the stakeholders for maximizing the relationship between the physical learning environments and learners by treating “the built environment” as “the third teacher.” Based on observation, this research will try to find out to what extent built, and natural environments can be utilized as a teaching tool for a more optimal learning environment. It should also be evident that there is a significant gap in the state policy, predetermined educational specifications, and implementation process in response to stakeholders’ involvement. The outcome of this research will contribute to a people-place sensitive design approach through a more thoughtful and responsive architectural process.

Keywords: built environment, conventional planning, indigenous learning space, responsive design

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Authors: Zelalem Fantahun

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Part-of-speech tagging is the process of assigning a part-of-speech or other lexical class marker to each word into naturally occurring text. Part-of-speech tagging is the most fundamental and basic task almost in all natural language processing. In natural language processing, the problem of providing large amount of manually annotated data is a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Since, Amharic is one of under-resourced language, the availability of tagged corpus is the bottleneck problem for natural language processing especially for POS tagging. A promising direction to tackle this problem is to provide a system that does not require manually tagged data. In unsupervised learning, the learner is not provided with classifications. Unsupervised algorithms seek out similarity between pieces of data in order to determine whether they can be characterized as forming a group. This paper explicates the development of unsupervised part-of-speech tagger using K-Means clustering for Amharic language since large amount of data is produced in day-to-day activities. In the development of the tagger, the following procedures are followed. First, the unlabeled data (raw text) is divided into 10 folds and tokenization phase takes place; at this level, the raw text is chunked at sentence level and then into words. The second phase is feature extraction which includes word frequency, syntactic and morphological features of a word. The third phase is clustering. Among different clustering algorithms, K-means is selected and implemented in this study that brings group of similar words together. The fourth phase is mapping, which deals with looking at each cluster carefully and the most common tag is assigned to a group. This study finds out two features that are capable of distinguishing one part-of-speech from others these are morphological feature and positional information and show that it is possible to use unsupervised learning for Amharic POS tagging. In order to increase performance of the unsupervised part-of-speech tagger, there is a need to incorporate other features that are not included in this study, such as semantic related information. Finally, based on experimental result, the performance of the system achieves a maximum of 81% accuracy.

Keywords: POS tagging, Amharic, unsupervised learning, k-means

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Authors: Ana Sofia Torres Pereira

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On January 15th 2015, Peter Bart, editor in chief of Variety Magazine, published an article in the aforementioned magazine posing the following question “Are screenwriters becoming obsolete in Hollywood?” Is Hollywood loosing its interest in well plotted, well written scripts crafted by professionals? That screenwriters have been undervalued, forgotten and left behind since the begging of film, is a well-known fact, but ate they now at the brink of extinction? If fiction films are about people, stories, so, simply put, all about the script, what does it mean to say that the screenwriter is becoming obsolete? What will be the consequences of the possible death of the screenwriter for the cinema world? All of these questions lead us to an ultimate one: What is the true importance of a screenwriter? What can a screenwriter do that a director, for instance, can’t? How should a script be written and read in order not to become obsolete? And what about those countries, like Portugal, for example, in which the figure of the screenwriter is yet to be heard and known? How can screenwriters find their voice in a world driven by the tyrannical voice of the Director? In a demanding cinema world where the Director is considered the author of a film, it’s important to know where we can find the voice of the screenwriter, the true language of the screenplay and the importance this voice and specific language might have for the future of story telling and of film. In a paper that admittedly poses more questions than answers, I will try to unveil the importance a screenplay might have in Hollywood, in Portugal and in the cinema and communication world in general.

Keywords: cinema, communication, director, language, screenplay, screenwriting, story

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Authors: S. Ait Ali Yahia

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One of the main features of the Maghreb is its linguistic richness. The multilingualism is a fact which always marked the Maghreb since the beginning of the history up to know. Since the arrival of the Phoenicians, followed by the Carthaginians, Romans, and Arabs, etc, there was a social group in the Maghreb which controlled two kinds of idioms. The libyc one remained, despite everything, the local language used by the major part of the population. This language had a support of written transmission attested by many inscriptions. Among all the forms of the Maghreb writing, this alphabet, however, continues to cause a certain number of questions about the origin and the date of its appearance. The archaeological, linguistic and historical data remain insufficient to answer these questions. This did not prevent the researchers from giving an opinion. In order to answer these questions we will expose here the various assumptions adopted by various authors who are founded on more or less explicit arguments. We will also speak about the various forms taken by the libyc writing during antiquity.

Keywords: the alphabet libyc, Eastern libyc, Western libyc, multilingualism

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Authors: Helen Potkin

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This paper presents a practice-based case study of a project in which the student group designed and planned the curriculum content, classroom activities and assessment briefs in collaboration with the tutor. It focuses on the co-creation of the curriculum within a history and theory module, Researching the Contemporary, which runs for BA (Hons) Fine Art and Art History and for BA (Hons) Art Design History Practice at Kingston University, London. The paper analyses the potential of collaborative approaches to engender students’ investment in their own learning and to encourage reflective and self-conscious understandings of themselves as learners. It also addresses some of the challenges of working in this way, attending to the risks involved and feelings of uncertainty produced in experimental, fluid and open situations of learning. Alongside this, it acknowledges the tensions inherent in adopting such practices within the framework of the institution and within the wider of context of the commodification of higher education in the United Kingdom. The concept underpinning the initiative was to test out co-creation as a creative process and to explore the possibilities of altering the traditional hierarchical relationship between teacher and student in a more active, participatory environment. In other words, the project asked about: what kind of learning could be imagined if we were all in it together? It considered co-creation as producing different ways of being, or becoming, as learners, involving us reconfiguring multiple relationships: to learning, to each other, to research, to the institution and to our emotions. The project provided the opportunity for students to bring their own research and wider interests into the classroom, take ownership of sessions, collaborate with each other and to define the criteria against which they would be assessed. Drawing on students’ reflections on their experience of co-creation alongside theoretical considerations engaging with the processual nature of learning, concepts of equality and the generative qualities of the interrelationships in the classroom, the paper suggests that the dynamic nature of collaborative and participatory modes of engagement have the potential to foster relevant and significant learning experiences. The findings as a result of the project could be quantified in terms of the high level of student engagement in the project, specifically investment in the assessment, alongside the ambition and high quality of the student work produced. However, reflection on the outcomes of the experiment prompts a further set of questions about the nature of positionality in connection to learning, the ways our identities as learners are formed in and through our relationships in the classroom and the potential and productive nature of creative practice in education. Overall, the paper interrogates questions of what it means to work with students to invent and assemble the curriculum and it assesses the benefits and challenges of co-creation. Underpinning it is the argument that, particularly in the current climate of higher education, it is increasingly important to ask what it means to teach and to envisage what kinds of learning can be possible.

Keywords: co-creation, collaboration, learning, participation, risk

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Authors: Milind Patil

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Present paper is a discussion on Hindi-Marathi Morphological Analysis and generating rules for Machine Translation on the basis of Machine Readable Dictionary (MRD). This used Transformative Generative Grammar (TGG) rules to design the MRD. As per TGG rules, the suffix of a particular root word is based on its Tense, Aspect, Modality and Voice. That's why the suffix is very important for the word meanings (or root meanings). The Hindi and Marathi Language both have relation with Indo-Aryan language family. Both have been derived from Sanskrit language and their script is 'Devnagari'. But there are lots of differences in terms of semantics and grammatical level too. In Marathi, there are three genders, but in Hindi only two (Masculine and Feminine), the Natural gender is absent in Hindi. Likewise other grammatical categories also differ in their level of use. For MRD the suffixes (or Morpheme) are of particular root word for GNP (Gender, Number and Person) are based on its natural phenomena. A particular Suffix and Morphine change as per the need of person, number and gender. The design of MRD also based on this format. In first, Person, Number, Gender and Tense are key points than root words and suffix of particular Person, Number Gender (PNG). After that the inferences are drawn on the basis of rules that is (V.stem) (Pre.T/Past.T) (x) + (Aux-Pre.T) (x) → (V.Stem.) + (SP.TM) (X).

Keywords: MRD, TGG, stem, morph, morpheme, suffix, PNG, TAM&V, root

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Authors: Julieta Alos

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Following the explicitation hypothesis, it has been proposed that explicitation is a translation universal, i.e., one of those features that characterize translated texts, and cannot be traced back to interference from a particular language. The explicitation hypothesis has been enthusiastically endorsed by some scholars, and firmly rejected by others. Focusing on the translation of promotional material from English into Arabic, specifically in the luxury goods market, the aims of this study are twofold: First, to contribute to the debate regarding the notion of explicitation in order to advance our understanding of what has become a contentious concept. Second, to add to the growing body of literature on non-professional translation by shedding light on this particular aspect of it. To this end, our study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore a corpus of brochures pertaining to the luxury industry, translated into Arabic at the local marketing agencies promoting the brands in question, by bilingual employees who have no translation training. Our data reveals a preference to avoid creative language choices in favor of more direct advertising messages, suggestive of a general tendency towards explicitation in non-professional translation, beyond what is dictated by the grammatical and stylistic constraints of Arabic. We argue, further, that this translation approach is at odds with the principles of luxury advertising, which emphasize implicitness and ambiguity, and view language as an extension of the creative process involved in the production of the luxury item.

Keywords: English-Arabic translation, explicitation, non-professional translation, promotional texts

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Authors: Marilei Amadeu Sabino

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Idiomatic expressions are linguistic phraseologisms present in natural languages. Known to be metaphorical linguistic combinations, a good majority of them provide elements that reveal important cultural aspects of their linguistic community through their metaphors. With the advent of Cognitive Linguistics (more specifically of Cognitive Semantics), the metaphor ceased to be related to poetic language and rhetorical embellishment and came to be seen as part of simple everyday language, reflecting the way human beings think, act and conceive reality, i. e., a fundamental mechanism of human conceptualizations of the world. In this sense, it came to be conceived as an inevitable mechanism for representing the nature of thought and language. The speakers, in conceptualizing reality, often use metaphorically parts of the body in expressions known as somatic. Several conceptual metaphors appear to be potentially universal or near-universal, because people across the world share certain bodily experiences. In these terms, many linguistic metaphors may be identical or very similar in several languages. These similarities, according to the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor, derive from universal aspects of the human body. Thus, this research aims to investigate the nature of some metaphors underlying somatic idiomatic expressions of Portuguese, Italian and English languages, establishing a pattern of similarities and differences among them from a trilingual perspective. The analysis shows that much of the studied expressions are really structurally, semantically and metaphorically identical or similar in the three languages. These findings incite relevant discussions concerning mother and foreign language learning and aim to contribute to the teaching of phraseological Lexicon as well as to materials development in mono and multilingual perspectives.

Keywords: idiomatic expressions, materials development, metaphors, phraseological lexicon, teaching and learning

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Authors: Pushpavathi M., Kavya V., Akshatha V.

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Introduction: Cleft lip and palate (CLP) is a congenital condition which hinders effectual communication due to associated speech and language difficulties. Expressive language delay (ELD) is a feature seen in this population which is influenced by factors such as type and severity of CLP, age at surgical and linguistic intervention and also the type and intensity of speech and language therapy (SLT). Since CLP is the most common congenital abnormality seen in Indian children, early intervention is a necessity which plays a critical role in enhancing their speech and language skills. The interaction between the timing of intervention and factors which contribute to effective intervention by caregivers is an area which needs to be explored. Objectives: The present study attempts to determine the effect of timing of intervention on the contributing maternal factors for effective linguistic intervention in toddlers with repaired CLP with respect to the awareness, home training patterns, speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers. Participants: Thirty six toddlers in the age range of 1 to 4 years diagnosed as ELD secondary to repaired CLP, along with their mothers served as participants. Group I (Early Intervention Group, EIG) included 19 mother-child pairs who came to seek SLT soon after corrective surgery and group II (Delayed Intervention Group, DIG) included 16 mother-child pairs who received SLT after the age of 3 years. Further, the groups were divided into group A, and group B. Group ‘A’ received SLT for 60 sessions by Speech Language Pathologist (SLP), while Group B received SLT for 30 sessions by SLP and 30 sessions only by mother without supervision of SLP. Method: The mothers were enrolled for the Early Language Intervention Program and following this, their awareness about CLP was assessed through the Parental awareness questionnaire. The quality of home training was assessed through Mohite’s Inventory. Subsequently, the speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers were assessed using a Mother’s behavioral checklist. Detailed counseling and orientation was done to the mothers, and SLT was initiated for toddlers. After 60 sessions of intensive SLT, the questionnaire and checklists were re-administered to find out the changes in scores between the pre- and posttest measurements. Results: The scores obtained under different domains in the awareness questionnaire, Mohite’s inventory and Mothers behavior checklist were tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Since the data did not follow normal distribution (i.e. p > 0.05), Mann-Whitney U test was conducted which revealed that there was no significant difference between groups I and II as well as groups A and B. Further, Wilcoxon Signed Rank test revealed that mothers had better awareness regarding issues related to CLP and improved home-training abilities post-orientation (p ≤ 0.05). A statistically significant difference was also noted for speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers (p ≤ 0.05). Conclusions: Extensive orientation and counseling helped mothers of both EI and DI groups to improve their knowledge about CLP. Intensive SLT using focused stimulation and a parent-implemented approach enabled them to carry out the intervention in an effectual manner.

Keywords: awareness, cleft lip and palate, early language intervention program, home training, orientation, timing of intervention

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Authors: Vera Ofori Akomah

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There is no society without language. In football, language serves as a tool for communication. The football language and meaning of activities are largely revealed through the utterances of football commentators. The linguistic subfield of pragmatics is related to the study of meaning. Pragmatics shows that the interpretation of utterances not only depends on linguistic knowledge but also depends on knowledge about the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved such as the intent of the speaker, the place, and time of the utterance. Pragmatics analysis comes in several forms and one of such is Deixis. In football commentating, commentators often use deitic expressions in building utterances. The researcher intends to analyse deixis contained in three selected football commentaries through the use of Levinson’s deixis theory. This research is a qualitative study with content analysis as its method. This is because this study focuses on deitic expressions in football commentaries. The data of this study are utterances from English commentaries from 2016 El Classico match between Barcelona and Real Madrid, 2018 FIFA World Cup: Portugal vs Spain and 2022 FIFA World Cup Qualifier: Ghana v Nigeria. The result of the study reveals that there are five kinds of deixis which are person deixis (divided into three: the first person, the second person and the third person), place deixis, time deixis, discourse deixis and social deixis.

Keywords: pragmatics analysis, football commentary, deixis, types of deixis

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Authors: Samal Abzhanova, Saule Mussabekova

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Today, a new system of education is being created in Kazakhstan in order to develop the system of education and to satisfy the world class standards. For this purpose, there have been established new requirements and responsibilities to the instructors. Students should not be limited with providing only theoretical knowledge. Also, they should be encouraged to be competitive, to think creatively and critically. Moreover, students should be able to implement these skills into practice. These issues could be resolved through the permanent improvement of teaching methods. Therefore, a specialist who teaches the languages should use up-to-date methods and introduce new technologies. The result of the investigation suggests that an interactive teaching method is one of the new technologies in this field. This paper aims to provide information about implementing new technologies in the process of teaching language. The paper will discuss about necessity of introducing innovative technologies and the techniques of organizing interactive lessons. At the same time, the structure of the interactive lesson, conditions, principles, discussions, small group works and role-playing games will be considered. Interactive methods are carried out with the help of several types of activities, such as working in a team (with two or more group of people), playing situational or role-playing games, working with different sources of information, discussions, presentations, creative works and learning through solving situational tasks and etc.

Keywords: interactive education, interactive methods, system of education, teaching a language

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Authors: Isis Ribeiro Berger

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In view of recent war conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, the government of Paraná State, in Brazil, started a program to host Ukrainian scientists in state universities in 2022. The initiative aimed at integrating these scientists into the Brazilian academic community, strengthening the role of universities in producing science and innovation even in times of war, as well as fostering Higher Education internationalization. Paraná state was a pioneer in this initiative due to the fact it has been home to the largest contingent of immigrants and descendants of Ukrainians in Brazil because of migratory processes that began at the end of the 19th century. One of the universities receiving Ukrainian scientists is in Foz do Iguaçu, a city that borders Argentina and Paraguay. It is a multilingual environment, whose majority languages are Portuguese (the official language of Brazil), Spanish (the official language of both Argentina and Paraguay), as well as Guarani (the co-official indigenous language of Paraguay). It is in such a sociolinguistic environment that two Ukrainian professors began their activities within the scope of an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Program (master’s and doctorate degree). This case study, whose theme is the management of multilingualism, was developed within the scope of Language Policy. It aimed at identifying the attitudes of both Ukrainian professors and postgraduate students towards multilingualism in this context, given the plural linguistic repertoire of the academic community, as well as identifying the language management strategies for the construction of knowledge implemented by the program and in the classroom by these participants. Therefore, the study was conducted under a qualitative approach, for which surveys and interviews were adopted as part of its methodological procedures. Data revealed the presence of different languages in the classroom (Portuguese, Spanish, English and Ukrainian), which made pedagogical practices challenging for both professors and students, whose levels of knowledge in the different languages varied significantly. The results indicate that multilingualism was the norm as the means of instruction adopted in this context, in which bilingual Portuguese-English-Ukrainian instruction was used by the professors in their lectures. Although English has been privileged for the internationalization of Higher Education in various contexts, it was not used as an exclusive means of instruction in this case, mostly because it is a predominantly Portuguese-Spanish-speaking environment. In addition, the professors counted on the mediation of an interpreter hired by the program since not every student had sufficient knowledge of English as part of their repertoires. The findings also suggest Portuguese is the language that most of the participants of this study prefer, both because it is the mother tongue of majority, and because it is the official language of the host country to the professors, who have sought to integrate to the local culture and community. This research is inserted in the Axis: Multilingualism and Education, of the UNESCO Chair on Language Policies for Multilingualism to which this study is related.

Keywords: attitudes, border region, multilingualism management, Ukrainian professors

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Authors: Burak Oksuzoglu, Savas Yildirim, Ferhat Kutlu

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Opinion mining (OM) is one of the natural language processing (NLP) problems to determine the polarity of opinions, mostly represented on a positive-neutral-negative axis. The data for OM is usually collected from various social media platforms. In an era where social media has considerable control over companies’ futures, it’s worth understanding social media and taking actions accordingly. OM comes to the fore here as the scale of the discussion about companies increases, and it becomes unfeasible to gauge opinion on individual levels. Thus, the companies opt to automize this process by applying machine learning (ML) approaches to their data. For the last two decades, OM or sentiment analysis (SA) has been mainly performed by applying ML classification algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes to a bag of n-gram representations of textual data. With the advent of deep learning and its apparent success in NLP, traditional methods have become obsolete. Transfer learning paradigm that has been commonly used in computer vision (CV) problems started to shape NLP approaches and language models (LM) lately. This gave a sudden rise to the usage of the pretrained language model (PTM), which contains language representations that are obtained by training it on the large datasets using self-supervised learning objectives. The PTMs are further fine-tuned by a specialized downstream task dataset to produce efficient models for various NLP tasks such as OM, NER (Named-Entity Recognition), Question Answering (QA), and so forth. In this study, the traditional and modern NLP approaches have been evaluated for OM by using a sizable corpus belonging to a large private company containing about 76,000 comments in Turkish: SVM with a bag of n-grams, and two chosen pre-trained models, multilingual universal sentence encoder (MUSE) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The MUSE model is a multilingual model that supports 16 languages, including Turkish, and it is based on convolutional neural networks. The BERT is a monolingual model in our case and transformers-based neural networks. It uses a masked language model and next sentence prediction tasks that allow the bidirectional training of the transformers. During the training phase of the architecture, pre-processing operations such as morphological parsing, stemming, and spelling correction was not used since the experiments showed that their contribution to the model performance was found insignificant even though Turkish is a highly agglutinative and inflective language. The results show that usage of deep learning methods with pre-trained models and fine-tuning achieve about 11% improvement over SVM for OM. The BERT model achieved around 94% prediction accuracy while the MUSE model achieved around 88% and SVM did around 83%. The MUSE multilingual model shows better results than SVM, but it still performs worse than the monolingual BERT model.

Keywords: BERT, MUSE, opinion mining, pretrained language model, SVM, Turkish

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Authors: Genady Grabarnik, Serge Yaskolko

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Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly expanded its applicability with the incorporation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and become a technology with promise to automate some areas that were very difficult to automate before. The paper describes the introduction of generative Artificial Intelligence into Introductory Computer and Data Science courses and analysis of effect of such introduction. The generative Artificial Intelligence is incorporated in the educational process two-fold: For the instructors, we create templates of prompts for generation of tasks, and grading of the students work, including feedback on the submitted assignments. For the students, we introduce them to basic prompt engineering, which in turn will be used for generation of test cases based on description of the problems, generating code snippets for the single block complexity programming, and partitioning into such blocks of an average size complexity programming. The above-mentioned classes are run using Large Language Models, and feedback from instructors and students and courses’ outcomes are collected. The analysis shows statistically significant positive effect and preference of both stakeholders.

Keywords: introductory computer and data science education, generative AI, large language models, application of LLMS to computer and data science education

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Authors: Muhammad Fathurridho

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Grammar as a rule used by every language to be understood by everyone is always related to syntax and morphology. Arabic grammar is different with another languages’ grammars. It has more rules and difficulties. This paper aims to investigate and describe the English grammatical errors of machine translation systems in translating Arabic sentences, including declarative, exclamation, imperative, and interrogative sentences, specifically in year 2018 which can be supported with artificial intelligence’s role. The Arabic sample sentences which are divided into two; verbal and nominal sentence of several Arabic published texts will be examined as the source language samples. The translated sentences done by several popular online machine translation systems, including Google Translate, Microsoft Bing, Babylon, Facebook, Hellotalk, Worldlingo, Yandex Translate, and Tradukka Translate are the material objects of this research. Descriptive method that will be taken to finish this research will show the grammatical errors of English target language, and classify them. The conclusion of this paper has showed that the grammatical errors of machine translation results are varied and generally classified into morphological, syntactical, and semantic errors in all type of Arabic words (Noun, Verb, and Particle), and it will be one of the evaluations for machine translation’s providers to correct them in order to improve their understandable results.

Keywords: Arabic, Arabic-English translation, machine translation, grammatical errors

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Authors: Yanping He-Ulbricht, Marc Oliver Rieger

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Based on survey data collected from people with Chinese roots living in Germany, this paper examines the impact of assimilation degree and language priming (Chinese or German) on individuals’ perceived fairness of economic and social differences and their attitude towards these. The results show that both the language used and the length of time spent in a foreign culture have a significant impact. Subjects who had spent less than 10 years in Germany demonstrated a higher readiness to accept government intervention in markets with price limits than those who had lived there longer. Subjects who were asked and answered in German perceived the current economic situation as less fair and were also less inclined to accept inequality, even when it leads to a Pareto improvement. While the difference in fairness perception of inequality was a cultural effect, the difference in attitudes towards government intervention was rather a result of learning process. The findings imply that both learning processes of individuals and culture play an important role in perception and preferences regarding social and economic differences.

Keywords: assimilation, bilingualism, cross-cultural comparison, income inequality, language priming, price fairness

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Authors: Esther Moraleda Sepúlveda, Soraya Delgado Matute, Paula Salido Escudero, Raquel Mimoso García, M Cristina Alcón Lancho

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Although there is some consensus when it comes to establishing the lexicon as one of the strengths of language in people with Down Syndrome (DS), little is known about its evolution throughout development and changes based on age. The objective of this study was to find out if there are differences in receptive vocabulary between adolescence and adulthood. In this research, 30 people with DS between 11 and 40 years old, divided into two age ranges (11-18; 19 - 30) and matched in mental age, were evaluated through the Peabody Vocabulary Test. The results show significant differences between both groups in favor of the group with the oldest chronological age and a direct correlation between chronological age and receptive vocabulary development, regardless of mental age. These data support the natural evolution of the passive lexicon in people with DS.

Keywords: down syndrome, language, receptive vocabulary, adolescents, adults

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Authors: Edward Shizha, Edward Makwarimba

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This literature review explores current research on the educational strengths and barriers of newcomer and refugee youth in Canada. Canada’s shift in immigration policy in the past three decades, from Europe to Asian and African countries as source continents of recent immigrants to Canada, has tremendously increased the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious diversity of the population, including that of students in its education system. Over 18% of the country’s population was born in another country, of which 70% are visible minorities. There has been an increase in admitted immigrants and refugees, with a total of 226,203 between July 2020 and June 2021. Newcomer parents and their children in all major destination countries, including Canada, face tremendous challenges, including racism and discrimination, lack of English language skills, poverty, income inequality, unemployment, and underemployment. They face additional challenges, including discrimination against those who cannot speak the official languages, English or French. The severity of the challenges depends on several intersectional factors, including immigrant status (asylum seeker, refugee, or immigrant), age, gender, level of education and others. Through the lens of intersectionality as an explanatory perspective, this literature review examines the educational attainment and outcomes of newcomer and refugee youth in Canada in order to understand their educational needs, educational barriers and strengths. Newcomer youths’ experiences are shaped by numerous intersectional and interconnected sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic factors—including gender, migration status, racialized status, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexual minority status, age, race—that produce and perpetuate their disadvantage. According to research, immigrants and refugees from visible minority ethnic backgrounds experience exclusions more than newcomers from other backgrounds and groups from the mainstream population. For many immigrant parents, migration provides financial and educational opportunities for their children. Yet, when attending school, newcomer and refugee youth face unique challenges related to racism and discrimination, negative attitudes and stereotypes from teachers and other school authorities, language learning and proficiency, differing levels of acculturation, and different cultural views of the role of parents in relation to teachers and school, and unfamiliarity with the social or school context in Canada. Recognizing discrepancies in educational attainment of newcomer and refugee youth based on their race and immigrant status, the paper develops insights into existing research and data gaps related to educational strengths and challenges for visible minority newcomer youth in Canada. The paper concludes that the educational successes or failures of the newcomer and refugee youth and their settlement and integration into the school system in Canada may depend on where their families settle, the attitudes of the host community and the school officials (teachers, guidance counsellors and school administrators) after-school support programs and their own set of coping mechanisms. Conceivably a unique approach to after-school programming should provide learning supports and opportunities that consider newcomer and refugee youth’s needs, experiences, backgrounds and circumstances. This support is likely to translate into significant academic and psychological well-being of newcomer students.

Keywords: deficit discourse, discrimination, educational outcomes, newcomer and refugee youth, racism, strength-based approach, whiteness

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Authors: M. Jebali, M. Jemni

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This work is the part of vision based hand gesture recognition system for Natural Human Computer Interface. Hand tracking and segmentation are the primary steps for any hand gesture recognition system. The aim of this paper is to develop robust and efficient hand segmentation algorithm such as an input to another system which attempt to bring the HCI performance nearby the human-human interaction, by modeling an intelligent sign language recognition system based on prediction in the context of dialogue between the system (avatar) and the interlocutor. For the purpose of hand segmentation, an overcoming occlusion approach has been proposed for superior results for detection of hand from an image.

Keywords: HCI, sign language recognition, object tracking, hand segmentation

Procedia PDF Downloads 415