Digital Commons Network^™

Exploratory Study Investigating The Opinions Of Russian-Speaking Parents On Maintaining Their Children's Use Of The Russian Language, Sue Kraftsoff, Sarah Quinn

Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies

This study explored why and how Russian speaking parents in an Irish context maintained the Russian language in their school-age children. Using a self-administered unstandardised questionnaire, the opinions of 16 Russian-speaking parents, reporting on 24 children, were surveyed. Of this sample, five parents were then interviewed using focus group methodology. The main findings revealed that Russian-speaking parents living in Ireland strongly supported Russian language maintenance in their families and wanted their children to be as fluent as possible in the Russian language. The reasons for the support of Russian language were: cultural preservation, general knowledge of languages in addition to …

Object Detection And Texture Classification With Applications To The Diagnosis Of Skin Cancer, Jonathan Blackledge, D. A. Dubovitskiy

Books/Book chapters

We present an approach to object detection and recognition in a digital image using a classification method that is based on the application of a set of features that include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented and a self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory considered. The methods discussed, and the ‘system’ developed, have a range of applications in ‘machine vision’ and in this publication, we focus on the development and implementation of a skin cancer screening system that can …

Uniarab: An Universal Machine Translator System For Arabic Based On Role And Reference Grammar, Brian Nolan, Yasser Salem

Conference Papers

This paper presents a machine translation system (Hutchins 2003) called UniArab (Salem, Hensman and Nolan 2008). It is a proof-of-concept system supporting the fundamental aspects of Arabic, such as the parts of speech, agreement and tenses. UniArab is based on the linking algorithm of RRG (syntax to semantics and vice versa). UniArab takes MSA Arabic as input in the native orthography, parses the sentence(s) into a logical meta-representation based on the fully expanded RRG logical structures and, using this, generates perfectly grammatical English output with full agreement and morphological resolution. UniArab utilizes an XML-based implementation of elements of the Role …

Designing An Xml Lexicon Architecture For Arabic Machine Translation Based On Role And Reference Grammar, Brian Nolan, Yasser Salem

Conference Papers

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a functional theory of grammar. The main features of Role and Reference Grammar are the use of lexical decomposition, based upon predicate semantics, an analysis of clause structure and the use of a set of thematic roles organized into a hierarchy in which the highestranking roles are Actor (for the most active participant) and Undergoer. The theory allows a sentence in a specific language to be described in terms of its logical structure and grammatical procedures. The lexicon in RRG takes the position that lexical entries for verbs should contain unique information only, with …

Signs Of Access In A Digital World: Online Delivery Of Deaf Studies Curricula In Ireland At Third Level,, Brian Nolan, Lorraine Leeson

Conference Papers

Irish Sign Language (ISL), an indigenous language of Ireland, is recognized by the European Union as a natural language. It is a language separate from the other languages used in Ireland, including English, Irish, and, in Northern Ireland, British Sign Language. Some 5,000 Deaf people use ISL. Given the history of suppression of signed languages across the EU, the average Deaf person leaves school with a reading age of 8.5 to 9 years. Given this, it is no surprise that Deaf people are the most under-represented of all disadvantaged groups at third level. This poses two challenges: (1) getting Deaf …

The Dit Dynamic Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Yi Wang, Ciaran Mcdonnell, Marty Meinardi, Bunny Richardson

Conference papers

This presentation will outline the current development and functionalities of the DIT Dynamic Speech Corpus which is based on natural, informal dialogue and recorded at a high level of audio quality. The presenters will demonstrate how learners can find samples of native-to-native speech (in various L1 varieties) on a chosen topic and, in particular, speed-induced elisions, co-articulations and reductions, studying sequences in their full, natural, dialogic environment. At all stages users will be able to slow down sequences to study how native speakers produce them. First data on the acceptability and effectiveness of the slow-down technology will also be presented.

Supporting Value Creation By Reducing Cultural Distance As A Barrier To Exporting, Thomas Cooney, Amanda Ratcliffe, Jane Silver

Articles

Value creation at the level of the organisation involves balancing the interests of several different stakeholders, with exporting occasionally viewed as a broad-based strategy capable of achieving such equilibrium. However, while much has been written concerning the logistical and economic challenges faced by SMEs wishing to avail of market opportunities abroad, there remains a dearth of information offering solutions to overcoming cultural distance as a barrier to exporting. An EU project entitled ‘Passport to Trade’ sought to provide greater insight into business culture by collating the customs and subjective norms of all member states within the EU and making the …

Implementing Arabic-To-English Machine Translation Using The Role And Reference Grammar Linguistic Model, Yasser Salem, Arnold Hensman, Brian Nolan

Conference Papers

This paper presents work-in-progress investigating the development of a rule-based lexical framework for Arabic language processing using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) linguistic model. A system, called UniArab is introduced in this research to support the framework. The paper outlines the conceptual structure of UniArab System, which utilizes the framework and translates the Arabic language into another natural language. Also, this paper explores how the characteristics of the Arabic language will effect the development of a Machine Translation (MT) tool from Arabic to English. Several distinguishing features of Arabic pertinent to MT will be explored in detail with reference …

Supporting Children's Participation In Second Language Stories In An Irish Language Preschool, Maire Mhic Mhathuna

Articles

This paper considers how children learning a second language were supported as active participants during storytelling sessions in an Irish-language immersion preschool in Dublin. Audio-recordings and observations were made of the story sessions once a fortnight over a period of six months. The resulting transcripts were analysed from an interactionist perspective, recognising both the cognitive and social aspects of the process. The staff were also interviewed and a questionnaire was completed by the parents. The analysis showed that the practitioners provided support for the children through dynamic repeated readings of target books, scaffolded interactions, sufficient experience of storybook reading and …

Organizations Revisited: Human And Technological Agency In Networks Within Organizational Theory, Carina Rohr

Conference papers

The concern of this paper is twofold: It acknowledges the contribution of the actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986; Law, 1991; Latour, 1993; Latour, 1997; Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1999; Lee & Hassard, 1999; Latour, 1999; Law, 1999; Amin & Cohendet, 2003; Collins, 2004; Latour, 2005) in offsetting common opposites, such as humans and technology or structure and agency, which are applied in order to categorize organizational literature. ANT was adopted in organizational theory (OT) due to offering a distinctive view on boundaries of organizations in developing a network approach. While networks are constituted by acting and consisting of relations of heterogeneous …

Fs ≠ Fs (Formulaicity And Prosody), Dermot Campbell, Yi Wang, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

Research in recent years has convincingly shown the importance in informal speech of formulaic sequences (FSs), or pre-fabricated linguistic segments. Work being undertaken at the Technological University Dublin (DIT) aims to extend research into FSs by including the aspect of prosody. In this presentation we outline the construction of a novel speech corpus at DIT, based on intelligent access to natural dialogue recorded at a high audio quality. Search strings can be examined in their phonetic and dialogic context, and what Cauldwell called the ‘acoustic blur of speech’ made accessible to learner and researcher alike by means of DIT’s slow-down …

How Children Tell: Containing The Secret Of Child Sexual Abuse, Rosaleen Mcelvaney

Other resources

In recent years, research on the subject of child sexual abuse disclosures has seen an increase in the use of qualitative methods to explore individual experiences, reflecting an emphasis on understanding diversity rather than typicality. This research study builds on previous work that viewed disclosure as a process that occurs over time, influenced by both anticipated reactions and actual reactions that in turn influence future decisions about disclosing. The study has as its fundamental focus the experience of telling. Interviews were conducted with young people aged 8 to 19 years (n=22), parents (n=21) and adults who had experienced sexual abuse …

A Vowel-Stress Emotional Speech Analysis Method, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

The analysis of speech, particularly for emotional content, is an open area of current research. This paper documents the development of a vowel-stress analysis framework for emotional speech, which is intended to provide suitable assessment of the assets obtained in terms of their prosodic attributes. The consideration of different levels of vowel-stress provides means by which the salient points of a signal may be analysed in terms of their overall priority to the listener. The prosodic attributes of these events can thus be assessed in terms of their overall significance, in an effort to provide a means of categorising the …

Emotional Speech Corpus Construction, Annotation And Distribution, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, John Mcauley

Conference papers

This paper details a process of creating an emotional speech corpus by collecting natural emotional speech assets, analysisng and tagging them (for certain acoustic and linguistic features) and annotating them within an on-line database. The definition of specific metadata for use with an emotional speech corpus is crucial, in that poorly (or inaccurately) annotated assets are of little use in analysis. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardisation for speech corpora, particularly in relation to emotion content. The ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) is the only cohesive attempt at corpus metadata standardisation performed thus far. Although not a comprehensive …

Towards Arabic To English Machine Translation, Yasser Salem, Arnold Hensman, Brian Nolan

Articles

This paper explores how the characteristics of the Arabic language will effect the development of a Machine Translation (MT) tool from Arabic to English. Several distinguishing features of Arabic pertinent to MT will be explored in detail with reference to some potential difficulties that they might present. The paper will conclude with a proposed model incorporating the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) technique to achieve this end.

Discourse Analysis As An Approach To Intercultural Competence In The Advanced Efl Classroom, Sue Norton

Articles

In 1991 Michael McCarthy wrote in his Preface to Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers that discourse analysis is ‘not a method of teaching languages; it is a way of describing and understanding how language is used’. By 1994 he had reformulated his position and, with Ronald Carter, published Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching, which argued in favour of providing students with a metalanguage by which to analyse the language they were learning. These days, owing to the work of McCarthy, Carter, and others, the basics of discourse analysis can indeed comprise an appropriate subject matter for the advanced …

Strategies In Working With Children Learning English As A Second Language, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Una Hill

Conference papers

This paper describes a study carried out in four early years’ centres in Dublin in 2007 with practitioners who were working with children learning English as an additional language. The aim of the study was to investigate the views and experiences of practitioners on a number of aspects of this work. Interviews were conducted with the practitioners regarding their views on the social and linguistic factors affecting the children, their understanding of the process of second language leaning, the strategies they used to assist second language learning, their classroom organisation, their contact with parents and the challenges and issues that …

Intercultural Books In Practice, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Una Hill

Articles

This paper examines the practical use of intercultural and multicultural books in Early Years settings in the Irish context. Questionnaires were sent to seventy early years’ settings in the Dublin region, focusing on the criteria they used for selecting such books. These responses indicated that staff viewed inclusion, the story, age appropriateness, illustrations and the language of the books as being important. The practitioners’ responses are compared with the views of authors on diversity issues and similarities and differences identified. Overall there was a greater emphasis on children in the practitioners’ survey while the authors focused on issues. A list …

Discourse Analysis As An Approach To Intercultural Competence In The Advanced Efl Classroom, Sue Norton

Level 3

In 1991 Michael McCarthy wrote in his Preface to Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers that discourse analysis is ‘not a method of teaching languages; it is a way of describing and understanding how language is used’. By 1994 he had reformulated his position and, with Ronald Carter, published Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching, which argued in favour of providing students with a metalanguage by which to analyse the language they were learning. These days, owing to the work of McCarthy, Carter, and others, the basics of discourse analysis can indeed comprise an appropriate subject matter for the advanced …

Metadata Visualisation Techniques For Emotional Speech Corpora, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

Our research in emotional speech analysis has led to the construction of dedicated high quality, online corpora of natural emotional speech assets. Once obtained, the annotation and analysis of these assets was necessary in order to develop a database of both analysis data and metadata relating to each speech act. With annotation complete, the means by which this data may be presented to the user online for analysis, retrieval and organization is the current focus of our investigations. Building on an initial web interface developed in Ruby on Rails, we are now working towards a visually driven GUI built on …

A Review Of Negation In Clinical Texts, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Reports

Negation is commonly seen in clinical documents [Chapman et al., 2001a] ”In clinical reports the presence of a term does not necessarily indicate the presence of the clinical condition represented by that term. In fact, many of the most frequently described findings and diseases in discharge summaries, radiology reports, history and physical exams, and other transcribed reports are denied in the patient” [Chapman et al., 2001b, page. 301].

The Knowledge Side Of The Web, Max Kudrenko

Dissertations

The World Wide Web has become a household name long before its official sixteenth birthday last August (2007), not lastly because of its Knowledge potential encompassed in its vast Knowledge resources and its suitability for Knowledge activities. Out of the three main types of Web usage, which are Procedural, Leisure and Knowledge, this work will concentrate on the Knowledge one and try to analyse the rationale behind its growing popularity among both producers and consumers of Web content. The extensive Knowledge usage of the Web both demands and offers a specific type of Knowledge, Web Knowledge, which will be assessed …

Back To The Future:Knowledge Light Case Base Cookery, Qian Zhang, Rong Hu, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

The domain of cookery has been of interest for Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) research for many years since the CHEF case-based planning system in the mid 1980s. This paper returns to look at this domain, emphasising a knowledge-light approach. Our approach focuses on; the design of a structured case representation which encapsulates the details of a recipe, on leveraging WordNet for identifying food items and the relationships between them, and on using Active Learning to assist in labelling recipes with meal and cuisine types. Users can search for recipes by specifying the ingredients they wish to include in, or exclude from, …

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 Dit System Description, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

This section describes the two systems developed at DIT for the attribute selection track of the REG 2008 challenge. Both of theses systems use an incremental greedy search to generate descriptions, similar to the incremental algorithm described in (Dale and Reiter, 1995). The output of these incremental algorithms are, to a large extent, determined by the order in which the algorithm tests the target object’s attributes for inclusion in the description. Indeed, the major difference between the two systems described in this section is the mechanism used to order the attributes for inclusion.

Medical Language Processing For Patient Diagnosis Using Text Classification And Negation Labelling, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper describes the approach of the DIT AIGroup to the i2b2 Obesity Challenge to build a system to diagnose obesity and related co-morbidities from narrative, unstructured patient records. Based on experimental results a system was developed which used knowledge-light text classification using decision trees, and negation labelling.

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 Dit System Descriptions (Dit-Fbi, Dit-Tvas, Dit-Cbsr, Dit-Rbr, Dit-Fbi-Cbsr, Dit-Tvas-Rbr), John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

This papers desibes a set of systems developed at DIT for the Referring Expression Generation challenage at INLG 2008.In Proceedings of the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG-08)

Object Detection And Classification With Applications To Skin Cancer Screening, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitryi Dubovitskiy

Articles

This paper discusses a new approach to the processes of object detection, recognition and classification in a digital image. The classification method is based on the application of a set of features which include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. Thus, the approach used, incorporates the characterisation of an object in terms of its texture.

The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented which includes two novel fast segmentation algorithms for which C++ code is provided. The self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory is also presented and …

Linguatag: An Emotional Speech Analysis Application, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

The analysis of speech, particularly for emotional content, is an open area of current research. Ongoing work has developed an emotional speech corpus for analysis, and defined a vowel stress method by which this analysis may be performed. This paper documents the development of LinguaTag, an open source speech analysis software application which implements this vowel stress emotional speech analysis method developed as part of research into the acoustic and linguistic correlates of emotional speech. The analysis output is contained within a file format combining SMIL and SSML markup tags, to facilitate search and retrieval methods within an emotional speech …

C-Saw---Contextual Semantic Alignment Of Ontologies: Using Negative Semantic Reinforcement, Brendan Tierney, Mike Jackson

Conference papers

Understanding the meaning of each term in an ontology is essential for successfully integrating and aligning ontologies. Much ontology integration research to date is focused on syntactic, structural and semantic matching where the actual meaning of the concepts is disregarded. The C-SAW approach to ontology alignment is based on the Contextualizing the concepts by using a set of Semantic Alignment Words (C-SAW). The C-SAW approach is enhanced by Negative Semantic Reinforcement (NSR), where additional semantic meaning can be added to the set of Semantic Alignment Words, by considering words which are unrelated to the concept.

A Study On The Use Of Ontologies To Represent Collective Knowledge, John Mcauley

Masters

The development of ontologies has become an area of considerable research interest over the past number of years. Domain ontologies are often developed to represent a shared understanding that in turn indicates cooperative effort by a user community. However, the structure and form that an ontology takes is predicated both on the approach of the developer and the cooperation of the user community. A shift has taken place in recent years from the use of highly specialised and expressive ontologies to simpler knowledge models, progressively developed by community contribution. It is within this context that this thesis investigates the use …