Nives Mikelić Preradović

CROVALLEX: Croatian verb valence lexicon

The goal of this paper is to present CROVALLEX - the first Croatian Verb Valence Lexicon. It contains 1739 verbs with 5118 valence frames. It also contains 173 syntactic-semantic classes (72 classes with two further levels of subdivision). Functional Generative Description (FGD) is used as the background theory for the description of valence frames. Syntactic-semantic classes have been derived from VerbNet and modified for Croatian language. Lexicon has the robust and explicitly defined XML data structure which enables browsing through designated levels. CROVALLEX is available at http://cal.ffzg.hr/crovallex/index.html.

The School Library as a Promoter of Multimedia Literacy in Primary Education in Croatia

In this paper, we present and critically view the current state of the multimedia literacy education in Croatia’s elementary education. We also offer an approach to promote multimedia literacy in primary education in Croatia encouraging school librarians, elementary school students and teachers to use multimedia in regular classes. The project “Literacy for the 21st Century”, launched by the school library of the elementary school Dubovac, is being presented as an example of best practice to encourage exploration and critical thinking about selection and combination of media and the multimedia content.

Semi-automatic Verb Valence Frame Assignment through VerbNet Classification

An approach to cross-linguistic transfer of verb valence frames for Czech and Croatian language using VerbNet syntactic-semantic classification is presented. Confronting Czech-Croatian pairs of valence frames for each syntactic-semantic class, we extracted the semantic part of the Czech valence frames and applied the subcategorization features to Croatian with minor (mainly syntactic) modifications. The encouraging results suggest that other similar (Slavic) languages could benefit from the same approach. It is shown that even for languages that do not have sufficiently developed NLP resources that are highly relevant for verb subcategorization (such as WordNet), it is possible to obtain valence lexicon applying small number of rules for cross-linguistic syntactic transfer and using Levin’s verb classes.

The Role and Attitudes of Kindergarten Educators in ICT-Supported Early Childhood Education

In this paper we analyze the role and attitudes of kindergarten educators in the early ICT education. Our kindergarten survey among educators in Croatia showed the positive attitude towards ICT literacy in general, but it also showed that more than one third of educators has neither positive nor negative attitude towards the issue of early ICT education. The research results are compared to the most recent findings for other countries – Turkey, Hawaii, Sweden, Belgium, China, Greece, Portugal, UK, Australia, Israel, Chile, Slovakia, Singapore and Malaysia. The conclusion is that educators in countries that are still not obliged to use ICT in the preschool classroom, generally understand the necessity of their own ICT education and motivation to transfer their knowledge to the youngest learners.

USING VIDEO JOURNALS IN ACADEMIC SERVICE-LEARNING

This paper chronicles experience of one of its authors (Nives Mikelic Preradovic) with video journals in the service-learning course with year-5 students of Information Sciences at the University in Zagreb (Croatia) specialized in the following fields: Archival Science, Library Science, Museology, and Informatics Teacher Education. The first part of the paper introduces academic service-learning and outlines previous experiences with video journals in servicelearning. The second part of the paper describes service-learning at the University of Zagreb, and briefly introduces research methodology. The third part of the paper presents two case studies of using video journals in academic service-learning: TiM: Ti i Muzej (Team: You and Museum) and Readers’ Club Knjigotron. The last, fourth part of the paper, analyses case studies and describes advantages and obstacles to introduce video journaling in service-learning. The paper confirms earlier research in conclusion that the main obstacles to such implementation are technical skills related to video production. However, it also shows that widely available equipment, such as phones and computers, satisfies the needs of service-learning. Therefore, in contrast to earlier research, it seems that equipment has ceased to be an obstacle. In spite of differences in technical proficiency and quality of final videos, students in both groups have met learning outcomes and acquired appropriate critical skills. Instead of speaking of video proficiency, therefore, the paper suggests that future research should turn into the direction of video literacy.

A project of developing a knowledge management system

Knowledge is an essential element of modern business and increasing attention is given to its acquisition, distribution and exploitation in everyday business activities. Therefore, KONCAR launched the development of a knowledge management system for its own demands and initiated a collaboration with the academic community for scientific research purposes and potential broader social significance of the project. With regard to the multidisciplinary nature of knowledge management, an agreement was reached with the University of Zagreb, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. The knowledge management system will enable an effective management of all segments of intellectual capital of an organization, resulting in increase in productivity and higher market competitiveness, as well as an increased capability for generating new values for all parties to the agreement.

Information Transfer through Online Summarizing and Translation Technology

Information access – presented in proper language, in understandable way, at the right time and right place can be of considerable importance. Information and communication technology, wrapping also human language technologies, can play important role in information transfer to the specific user. Translation technology along with summarizing technology has opened new possibilities and perspectives, requiring in the same time the critical opinion in information analysis. The main purpose of this research is to present the impact of text summarization and online machine translation tools on information transfer. The research was performed on texts taken from online newspapers in five do- mains (politics, news, sport, film and gastronomy) in English, German and Russian languages. The total of N=240 evaluations were analysed, performed by the same three evaluators. In the research three types of assignments were made. The first assignment was to evaluate machine-translated sentences at the sentence level for the three language pairs (English-Croatian, German-Croatian and Russian-Croatan). In the second task, the similar evaluation was performed, but at the whole text level. In the third assignment, which was related to information transfer, the evaluators were asked to evaluate the overall quality of the texts process in the pipe- lined process (online summarization and online machine translation) for English and German. Assessment was based on the finding the answers to the following questions – who, what, when, where, and how? The results were analysed by ANOVA, t-test and binary logistic regression.

Motion Event in Croatian, English, German and Italian Concerning Path Prefixes and Prepositions

We present an approach to encode translocative meaning and explore not only the possible, but also the preferred patterns for expressing this phenomenon in four languages: Croatian, English, German and Italian. We manually developed verb subcategorization frames for translocative meaning of prefixes PRE- and PRO-, enlarged the Croatian part of the bilingual dictionaries with the appropriate subcategorization frames and created the frame transition rules for three language pairs. The analysis presented here should indicate the possibilities of using obtained results for the development of both monolingual and bilingual verb dictionaries to facilitate foreign language acquisition, but also to improve the native language proficiency.