Digital Commons Network^™

Computer Aided Drawing Software Delivered Through Emotional Learning. The Use Of Emoticons And Gifs As A Tool For Increasing Student Engagement., Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

Conference Papers

It is known that one of the key factors for many manufacturing companies, who are involved in the design and development process, is represented by the quality of the skills, capacity and experience of computer-aided design draftsman and designers. This means that effective, up-to-date and engaging training has to be performed by teachers and instructors, since the early stage lectures for novice engineering students. When learners are engaged and actively participate in the training process, then this transfers in to a high, deep level of learning, quality of the learnt topics and perceived passion. The following question arises, “how can …

Minority Language Maintenance In Bilingual Speakers: From Primary School To Higher Education, Bozena Dubiel

Papers

Bilinguals have options as to which language they can use. However, the options are not truly theirs but depend on multiple factors such as the country of residence, profession, business relations, and family circumstances. Therefore, bilinguals have to choose which language they use more and which less, and as language proficiency correlates with the frequency of its use, they often have sacrifices to make. Previous studies have shown that language acquisition in bilinguals can be uneven as the development of each system relies on the amount of language exposure and use, which in bilinguals is divided between two languages (de …

Using Regular Languages To Explore The Representational Capacity Of Recurrent Neural Architectures, Abhijit Mahalunkar, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The presence of Long Distance Dependencies (LDDs) in sequential data poses significant challenges for computational models. Various recurrent neural architectures have been designed to mitigate this issue. In order to test these state-of-the-art architectures, there is growing need for rich benchmarking datasets. However, one of the drawbacks of existing datasets is the lack of experimental control with regards to the presence and/or degree of LDDs. This lack of control limits the analysis of model performance in relation to the specific challenge posed by LDDs. One way to address this is to use synthetic data having the properties of subregular languages. …

Teachers' Roles In Online Learning: The Student Perspective, Qiang Huang

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This study examines how 153 university students perceived the roles of their teachers in online learning environments. Results of statistical analyses conducted using a 27-item and 5-likert-scale questionnaire showed that the Cronbach’s Alpha value of the entire questionnaire was .955 and those of the three sub-roles were all above .891, indicating that both the questionnaire and the three factors of sub-roles were reliable and valid. Further analyses revealed that the three sub-roles of teachers (i.e. cognitive, affective and managerial) were significantly different from each other: managerial was significantly higher than cognitive, while affective was the lowest. Results of descriptive …

Using Blended Learning To Enhance The Experience Of Students In Built Environment Related Degree Programs, Ruari Hayden, Philip Russell

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

Blended learning was introduced into the Construction Management programme in the School of Surveying and Construction Management at the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2016. The module has traditionally been delivered by face-to-face teaching but online delivery has been facilitated using the Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard) which has enabled a more blended approach to academic instruction. This innovative change to module provision has also provided an opportunity to enhance the student learning experience within the School through a more flexible teaching and learning environment.

In this paper, the design, development and implementation of blended learning into a Construction Technology module …

Exploring The Functional And Geometric Bias Of Spatial Relations Using Neural Language Models, Simon Dobnik, Mehdi Ghanimifard, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The challenge for computational models of spatial descriptions for situated dialogue systems is the integration of information from different modalities. The semantics of spatial descriptions are grounded in at least two sources of information: (i) a geometric representation of space and (ii) the functional interaction of related objects that. We train several neural language models on descriptions of scenes from a dataset of image captions and examine whether the functional or geometric bias of spatial descriptions reported in the literature is reflected in the estimated perplexity of these models. The results of these experiments have implications for the creation of …

An Application Of Natural Language Processing For Triangulation Of Cognitive Load Assessments In Third Level Education, Luis Alfredo Contreras

Dissertations

Work has been done to measure Mental Workload based on applications mainly related to ergonomics, human factors, and Machine Learning. The influence of Machine Learning is a reflection of an increased use of new technologies applied to areas conventionally dominated by theoretical approaches. However, collaboration between MWL and Natural Language Processing techniques seems to happen rarely. In this sense, the objective of this research is to make use of Natural Languages Processing techniques to contribute to the analysis of the relationship between Mental Workload subjective measures and Relative Frequency Ratios of keywords gathered during pre-tasks and post-tasks of MWL activities …

Assesing Completeness Of Solvency And Financial Condition Reports Through The Use Of Machine Learning And Text Classification, Ruairí Nugent

Dissertations

Text mining is a method for extracting useful information from unstructured data through the identification and exploration of large amounts of text. It is a valuable support tool for organisations. It enables a greater understanding and identification of relevant business insights from text. Critically it identifies connections between information within texts that would otherwise go unnoticed. Its application is prevalent in areas such as marketing and political science however, until recently it has been largely overlooked within economics. Central banks are beginning to investigate the benefits of machine learning, sentiment analysis and natural language processing in light of the large …

An Exploration Of Parliamentary Speeches In The Irish Parliament Using Topic Modeling, Fiona Leheny

Dissertations

The only resource available in the public domain which highlights parliamentary ac tivity is parliamentary questions. Up until the last ten years, manual content analysis was carried out to classify these. More recently, machine learning techniques have been used to automatically classify and analyse these data sets. This study analyses the verbal parliamentary speeches in the Irish Parliament (known as the D´ail) over a ten year period using unsupervised machine learning. It does so by applying a less utilised topic modeling technique, known as Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), to de tect the latent themes in these speeches. A two-layer dynamic …

Certain But Stable? A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland From 1970-2015, Ewan Alexander Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

Certain but stable? A diachronic analysis of taxation in Ireland from 1970-2015

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in Ireland from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically and what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about word usage. It is expected, though not taken a priori, that …

An Exploration Of How The Facilitator Perceived That Learning Within Vle Discussion Forums Is Improved By Facilitator-Enhanced Collaboration, Chris O'Toole

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

Research suggests that facilitator-enhanced collaboration within virtual learning environment (VLE) discussion forums improves learning. A question is therefore posed: “How does the facilitator perceive that learning within VLE discussion forums is improved by facilitator enhanced collaboration?” It is important to answer this question to understand and develop effective collaborative learning within VLE discussion forums supported by facilitators. This phenomenological study explores the lived experience of three facilitators of discussion forums within collaborative VLEs. Data were collected through short written reports of participants’ experiences and through an in-depth semi-structured interview. Both methods involved answering open-ended questions based on participants' experience of …

Examining A Hate Speech Corpus For Hate Speech Detection And Popularity Prediction, Filip Klubicka, Raquel Fernandez

Other resources

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other …

Is It Worth It? Budget-Related Evaluation Metrics For Model Selection, Filip Klubicka, Giancarlo Salton, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Projects that set out to create a linguistic resource often do so by using a machine learning model that pre-annotates or filters the content that goes through to a human annotator, before going into the final version of the resource. However, available budgets are often limited, and the amount of data that is available exceeds the amount of annotation that can be done. Thus, in order to optimize the benefit from the invested human work, we argue that the decision on which predictive model one should employ depends not only on generalized evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and F-score, but …

Orality In Joyce: Food, Famine, Feasts And Public Houses, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of …

Preliminary Findings Of A Phenomenological Study Of Middle Eastern Women’S Experiences Studying Engineering In Ireland, Shannon Chance, Bill Williams

Conference papers

This paper reports analysis of phenomenological interviews conducted with eight women studying engineering, all Arabic speakers and practicing Muslims, and all from the countries of Oman and Kuwait. Data were collected as part of a larger study of women’s experiences learning engineering in institutions of higher education in Poland, Portugal, and Ireland. The eight women contributing data for the analysis for this paper were all enrolled on engineering degree programs in Dublin, Ireland, where they studied together. The larger study involves conducting longitudinal data via interviews with 47 women around Europe to understand what their undergraduate experiences in STEM have …

Nurturing ‘Buds Of Development’: From Outcomes To Opportunities In Early Childhood Practice, Noirin Hayes, Katarina Filipovic

Articles

The current future-focused, outcomes driven early childhood policy climate presents a danger that early years pedagogy will lose sight of the ‘present’ child. Increasingly policy support for early childhood education is built around an emphasis on preparing children for school and positioning it as a key element in enhancing society through preparing future citizens to become productive members of society. The measurable outcomes discourse, in emphasising product, renders invisible the critical contribution of the processes of everyday practice to children’s development. To challenge and counteract the strong outcome discourse early years professionals must have confidence in their pedagogy. However, research …

Contesting Early Childhood Professional Identities: A Cross-National Discussion, Sonja Arndt, Mathias Urban, Colette Murray, Kylie Smith, Beth Swadener, Tomas Ellegaard

Articles

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, …

Taxation For Whom?:A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland And The United Kingdom From 1970-2015., Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in two countries, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically in both countries, what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses across both countries, and for whom and how are these discourses legitimised? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of Corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about the …

Towards A Conceptual Framework For The Development Of Immersive Experiences To Negotiate Meaning And Identify In Irish Language Learning, Naoise Collins, Brian Vaughan, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

The onset of virtual reality systems allows for new immersive content which provides users with a sense of presence in their virtual environment. This paper provides the conceptual framework for a larger study examining how designed virtual reality experiences can be utilised to transform Irish language meaning making and a user's personal Irish language identity.

Athraitheach: Who Do You Think You Are?, Declan Behan, Clare Bell

Books

Athraitheach: Who do you think you are?

Athraitheach: changeable; changing; fluctuating; shifting; varying.[1]

Conceptually informed by, and materially embedded in, the latest technological developments and innovation in typeface design, this project, ‘Athraitheach: Who do you think you are?’, takes the form of a ‘variable font’[2] that, via the visual representation of language, aims to capture and engage with current public discourses around linguistic diversity and national, cultural and social identities active in the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland.

It also aims to demonstrate how language and identity can, within particular contexts, become inextricably bound together, often being absorbed into, …

Recognizing Food As Part Of Ireland’S Intangible Cultural Heritage, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Drawing on evidence from across a range of disciplines (literature, folklore, history, sociology, etc.), this paper explores the lack of an iconic link between Ireland and food, explaining the reasons why Ireland and food are not immediately linked in the popular imagination. It argues for recognition of foodways as a significant element in Ireland’s intangible cultural heritage. It highlights and interrogates constructs, such as ‘national’ and ‘regional’ cuisines, charting the growing scholarship around Irish food history from the ground breaking work of A.T. Lucas and Louis Cullen to a recent emerging cluster of doctoral researchers. The paper identifies the potential …

Misogyny Detection And Classification In English Tweets: The Experience Of The Itt Team, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich

Conference Papers

The problem of online misogyny and women-based offending has become increasingly widespread, and the automatic detection of such messages is an urgent priority. In this paper, we present an approach based on an ensemble of Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Naïve Bayes models for the detection of misogyny in texts extracted from the Twitter platform. Our method has been presented in the framework of the participation in the Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) Shared Task in the EVALITA 2018 evaluation campaign.

Examining A Hate Speech Corpus For Hate Speech Detection And Popularity Prediction, Filip Klubicka, Raquel Fernandez

Conference papers

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other …

An Investigation Of The Impact Of A Social Constructivist Teaching Approach, Based On Trigger Questions, Through Measures Of Mental Workload And Efficiency, Federico Gobbo, Luca Longo, Declan O'Sullivan, Giuliano Orru

Conference papers

Social constructivism is grounded on the construction of information with a focus on collaborative learning through social interactions. However, it tends to ignore the human mental architecture, pillar of cognitivism. A characteristic of cognitivism is that instructional designs built upon it are generally explicit, contrarily to constructivism. This position paper proposes a novel learning task that is aimed at combining both the approaches through the use of trigger questions in a collaborative activity executed after a traditional delivery of instructions. To evaluate this new task, a metric of efficiency based upon a measure of mental workload and a measure of …

A Comparison Of Classical Versus Deep Learning Techniques For Abusive Content Detection On Social Media Sites, Hao Che, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

The automated detection of abusive content on social media websites faces a variety of challenges including imbalanced training sets, the identification of an appropriate feature representation and the selection of optimal classifiers. Classifiers such as support vector machines (SVM), combined with bag of words or ngram feature representation, have traditionally dominated in text classification for decades. With the recent emergence of deep learning and word embeddings, an increasing number of researchers have started to focus on deep neural networks. In this paper, our aim is to explore cutting-edge techniques in automated abusive content detection. We use two deep learning approaches: …

Validation Of Tagging Suggestion Models For A Hotel Ticketing Corpus, Bojan Bozic, Andre Rios, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper investigates methods for the prediction of tags on a textual corpus that describes hotel staff inputs in a ticketing system. The aim is to improve the tagging process and find the most suitable method for suggesting tags for a new text entry. The paper consists of two parts: (i) exploration of existing sample data, which includes statistical analysis and visualisation of the data to provide an overview, and (ii) evaluation of tag prediction approaches. We have included different approaches from different research fields in order to cover a broad spectrum of possible solutions. As a result, we have …

An Investigation Into Factors Which Explain The Scores And Voting Patterns Of The Eurovision Song Contest., Oisín Leonard

Dissertations

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual international television song competition. Participating countries send a group or individual artist to perform an original song at the competition. The winner is decided by all participating countries using a voting system that incorporates both a public televote and an expert jury vote. Countries are excluded from voting for their entry and the country with the highest score wins. A high scoring performance and the voting patterns of the ESC can be explained by a complex set of factors. These factors can be divided into three groups; performance factors, competition factors and …

Image Classification Using Bag-Of-Visual-Words Model, Kaiqiang Huang

Dissertations

Recently, with the explosive growth of digital technologies, there has been a rapid proliferation of the size of image collection. The technique of supervised image clas sification has been widely applied in many domains in order to organize, search, and retrieve images. However, the traditional feature extraction approaches yield the poor classification accuracy. Therefore, the Bag-of-visual-words model, inspired by Bag-of Words model in document classification, was used to present images with the local descriptors for image classification, and also it performs well in some fields. This research provides the empirical evidence to prove that the BoVW model outperforms the traditional …

Tomorrows Disability Officer - A Cornerstone On The Universal Design Campus ‘There Are No Strangers Here – Only Friends You Haven’T Met Yet” - W B Yeats, Mary Quirke, Patricia Mccarthy, Declan Treanor, Conor Mc Guckin

Papers

This paper will explore the evolution of one of the key roles on campus for students with a disability in the context of Universal Design for Learning - that of the Disability Officer. The role of Disability Officer, while neither a teacher or a learner – is primarily occupied with all those engaged in making learning accessible. It is a role that is very much part of the learning experience for any student with a disability. The challenge for Disability Officers on a UDL campus is that while they are part of the learning environment on campus they - similar …

Non-Violent Resistance: Counter-Discourse In Irish Culture, Agnés Maillot, Jennifer Bruen

Books

Counter-discourses express new and alternative views of the world, in contrast with more established discourses which embody mainstream values, norms, beliefs and attitudes. The essays in this volume assess the role of counter-discourses as non-violent forms of resistance to the status quo in core domains of Irish social, cultural and political life. These domains encompass the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process; law enforcement, policing and surveillance; parliamentary debate and obstructionism; identity formation, marriage, divorce and the family; and institutional abuse, authoritarianism and the Catholic Church. The discourses are drawn from a diverse range of media including political and parliamentary …