Geetha Abeysinghe

Generating discourse structures for written texts

This paper presents a system for automatically generating discourse structures from written text. The system is divided into two levels: sentence-level and text-level. The sentence-level discourse parser uses syntactic information and cue phrases to segment sentences into elementary discourse units and to generate discourse structures of sentences. At the text-level, constraints about textual adjacency and textual organization are integrated in a beam search in order to generate best discourse structures. The experiments were done with documents from the RST Discourse Treebank. It shows promising results in a reasonable search space compared to the discourse trees generated by human analysts.

RolEnact - Role Based Enactable Models of Business Processes

This paper describes RolEnact: a process-modelling notation used to provide enactable models of process instances. The paper shows how RolEnact models may be produced which are equivalent to role activity diagrams (RADs). This allows the modeller to describe processes in a notation (RADs); which can be understood both by process consultants and process users, whilst retaining the ability to generate enactable process scenarios.

Adoption of web based collaboration tools in the enterprise: Challenges and opportunities

Many organisations nowadays are constantly seeking ways to improve their competitive edge and remain profitable. Organisations use new technology as a strategic tool which help create new ways of satisfying customer needs and working practices. Developments in internet technologies have led to the growing dependence on web-based technologies and more recently, collaboration software platforms. In spite of the vast amount of literature which describes the benefits organisations may reap through the use of these technologies, there is also skepticism regarding the adoption of these tools. This paper takes a critical look at the adoption of collaboration tools, focusing on social media, in the enterprise especially looking at the reason for skepticism in adopting these tools. Through surveys carried out amongst users of social media and case studies, the research looks at the value adding capabilities of social media in business, the challenges and opportunities, and adoption issues.

A study to improve the efficiency of a discourse parsing system

This paper presents a study of the implementation of a discourse parsing system, where only significant features are considered. Rhetorical relations are recognized based on three types of cue phrases (the normal cue phrases, Noun-Phrase cues and Verb-Phrase cues), and different textual coherence devices. The parsing algorithm and its rule set are developed in order to create a system with high accuracy and low complexity. The data used in this system are taken from the RST Discourse Treebank of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC).

INCUVA: A Meta-framework for Sustaining the Value of Innovation in Multi-cultural Settings

Innovation is increasingly seen as the main vehicle for value creation in business organisations as well as in civic societies. Consequently, funding agencies and businesses continue to invest huge amounts of money and other resources on innovative projects with a view to creating and sustaining the desired value outcomes. However, creating value is not the same as sharing and sustaining value, especially when such value needs to be shared and sustained in a multicultural space. This paper analyses the interaction of three key elements, namely Innovation, Culture and Value, that could facilitate or inhibit the sharing and sustenance of value created through innovative projects. The paper also proposes a meta–framework based on work done during the EU-funded project VALO, aimed at developing and disseminating effective ways of maximising and sustaining the value created in innovative projects.

An evaluation of accessibility of e-learning for dyslexic students

Technologies have a tremendous impact on education today. As a result of the widespread, and accelerating, dissemination of digital technologies, there has been a profound effect on how people learn. In particular, the rapid spread of the Internet and infusion of reasonably priced personal computers into homes and schools have brought the learner with direct access to multi-media content and communication. Since these technologies are continually and rapidly evolving, their use has become a challenge both to the teacher and the learner. This also has brought forward a need to measure their effects in the educational process in a more systematic way. This research will focus on the use of technology on education and how technology impacts the educational process especially for students with dyslexia.

Towards relating delivery methods and examination success: lessons learned from the VALO LLP project case study

Didactic, teacher‐centred approaches and rote learning have long been discredited and gradually replaced by participative, interactive and creative learning sessions. Formal classroom sessions are being replaced or augmented by self‐directed study increasingly in distance mode. The evolution and affordability of technologies enables massive participation in studies, not only for short training for professional updating but also for longer study periods and attainment of qualifications. The rapid changes in society and technology demand that everybody continuously updates their knowledge and skills in their area of expertise and gain knowledge, skills and competencies in other areas for a successful life of careers and not necessarily a career for life as was the norm in the past. It is important to safeguard the quality of independent assessment and certification methods. In this paper, we consider the main delivery methods and their impact on assessment methods and associated results. With reference to the European Certification and Qualification Association framework and the recently completed European Union co‐funded Lifelong Learning Programme project VALO, we juxtapose the delivery methods used and the examination results at different partner institutions. We extract observed issues and trends, which could be principles to be adopted by future projects with regards to process improvement and performance enhancement. Copyright

Curriculum Design within a Semantic Information System

There is a demand for powerful curriculum design systems to support the representation, exchange, integration and sharing of curriculum data over the internet; to meet the requirement, this paper use ontology to describe the concepts and their relationships in a specific domain, with which the author annotate the data models, and make sure the data model has structural information as well as semantic information. In this way, data transformation in a semantic consistent way is supported and query formulation is facilitated in the process; an ontology-based description model is also proposed to give expression and organisation of curriculum information.

Semantics for the Specification of Asynchronous Communicating Systems (SACS)

The objective of the paper is to describe the formal definitions for the Specification of Asynchronous Communicating System (SACS). This is a process algebra which is a descendent of the synchronous variant of Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) known as Synchronous Calculus of Communicating Systems (SCCS). To this end, we present Structured Operational Semantics (SOS) for the constructs of SACS using Labelled Transition Systems (LTS) in order to describe the behaviour of the processes. Also, we discuss the semantic equivalences for SACS, especially bisimulation, which provides a method for verifying the behaviour of a specified process.

Semantics for a Distributed Programming Language Using SACS and Weakest Pre-Conditions

This paper describes the semantics for a distributed programming language called LIPS (language for implementing parallel systems). The formalism presented is used for the specification and verification of LIPS programs for the successful point-to-point intercommunication in distributed systems. The main focus of the paper is to define the semantics of the computational part of LIPS using Dijkstras weakest preconditions and demonstrate the integration of SACS(specification of asynchronous communication systems) with GCL(guarded command language) using an example. SACS is a variant of SCCS specially developed for specifying point-to-point asynchronous message passing systems.