Norton Trevisan Roman

Politeness and Bias in Dialogue Summarization: Two Exploratory Studies

In this chapter, two empirical pilot studies on the role of politeness in dialogue summarization are described. In these studies, a collection of four dialogues was used. Each dialogue was automatically generated by the NECA system and the politeness of the dialogue participants was systematically manipulated. Subjects were divided into groups who had to summarize the dialogues from a particular dialogue participant’s point of view or the point of view of an impartial observer. In the first study, there were no other constraints. In the second study, the summarizers were restricted to summaries whose length did not exceed 10% of the number of words in the dialogue that was being summarized.

Can natural language be utilized in the learning of programming fundamentals

The complexity and importance of learning programming fundamentals (i.e., sequences of sentences that express actions, conditions, and repetitions in computing) for undergraduate students has motivated the development of an intense educational research area. One frequently studied problem is the difficulty in the learning of traditional context-free grammars which are present, for example, in programming languages such as Pascal and C. This study experimentally investigates the use of natural language in the learning of programming fundamentals by two groups of undergraduate students without prior knowledge of programming and compares its use with that of a traditional grammar language. Results suggest that the use of natural language is a good alternative, despite the small differences, to the use of traditional programming languages defined by context-free grammars. This alternative is attractive and promising because the student does not need to learn a formal grammar to learn the fundamentals of programming.

From concrete to abstract?: problem domain in the learning of introductory programming

A good deal of research on learning introductory programming have been carried out along the past years based on a generalization to mature individuals of Piagets theory which states that learning among childrens progresses from concrete to abstract. In this research, we set up two problem domains -- a concrete and an abstract one -- along with specific programming languages and compilers. We experimentally investigated how these domains were used by two groups of undergraduate students without previous programming knowledge. Results suggest that the type of domain (either concrete or abstract), when taken in and on itself, does not affect the learning of introductory programming. On the other hand, the previous knowledge students have about the domain does influence learning.

Spelling error patterns in brazilian portuguese

Fifty years after Damerau set up his statistics for the distribution of errors in typed texts, his findings are still used in a range of different languages. Because these statistics were derived from texts in English, the question of whether they actually apply to other languages has been raised. We address this issue through the analysis of a set of typed texts in Brazilian Portuguese, deriving statistics tailored to this language. Results show that diacritical marks play a major role, as indicated by the frequency of mistakes involving them, thereby rendering Dameraus original findings mostly unfit for spelling correction systems, although still holding them useful, should one set aside such marks. Furthermore, a comparison between these results and those published for Spanish show no statistically significant differences between both languages—an indication that the distribution of spelling errors depends on the adopted character set rather than the language itself.

A comparative analysis of centering-based algorithms for pronoun resolution in Portuguese

Pronominal anaphora resolution consists in finding a referent for a given pronoun. Although being essential for many natural language processing systems, such as automatic translators, text generators and summarizers, there is a myriad of issues regarding this task, particularly when there ismore than one possible referent for a given pronoun. Over the years, several approaches have been proposed to deal with this challenge, usually taking only syntactic information into account. On the other hand, methods based on Centering Theory rely on concepts such as coherence, for instance, to do the job. In this work, we describe our implementation and evaluation of existing centering-based algorithms for pronominal resolution in Portuguese. As a result, we indicate both the strong and weak points of each of the tested algorithms, thereby helping other researchers to make a more informed decision about which method to use.

A multi-dimensional annotation scheme for behaviour in dialogues

In this paper we introduce a multi-dimensional annotation scheme for emotional and behavioural assessment in dialogue summaries. To test the soundness both of the annotation scheme and corresponding guidelines, reliability studies with nine independent annotators were carried out. As an illustration of the utility of our scheme, we have applied it to an already published study and verified whether the same conclusions hold. We hope that, in using our scheme, researchers will be able to save a lot of time and effort that, otherwise, would be spent in planning, developing and testing a scheme of their own.

Emotion and behaviour in automatic dialogue summarisation

This paper presents an overview of a six-year research project on automatic summarisation of emotional and behavioural features in dialogues. It starts by describing some evidence for the hypothesis that whenever a dialogue features very impolite behaviour, this behaviour will tend to be described in the dialogues summary, with a bias influenced by the summarisers viewpoint. It also describes the role some experiments played in providing useful information on when and how assessments of emotion and behaviour should be added to a dialogue summary, along with the necessary steps (such as the development of a multi-dimensional annotation scheme) to use these experimental results as a starting point for the automatic production of summaries. Finally, it introduces an automatic dialogue summariser capable of combining technical and emotional or behavioural information in its output summaries.

Analysis of Choreographed Human Movements Using Depth Cameras: A Systematic Review

The use of computer vision to analyze human movement has been growing considerably, facilitated by the increased availability of depth cameras This paper describes the results of a systematic review about the techniques used for movement tracking and recognition, focusing on metrics to compare choreographed movements using Microsoft Kinect as a sensor. Several techniques for data analysis and pattern recognition are explored for this task, particularly Dynamic Time Warping and Hidden Markov Models. Most papers we discuss used a single sensor instead of more complex setups and most took advantage of the Kinect SDK instead of alternatives. Rhythm is rarely considered in these systems due to the temporal alignment strategies used. While most systems that use the sensors for some form of interaction instead claim that this interaction is natural, very few actually perform any sort of usability or user experience analysis.

Introducing a Language for Human Stance Description

The ability to automatically determine a human body’s sequence of postures during movement has many practical applications, from the evaluation of the performance of physical activity practitioners to the evaluation and design of the user experience in certain systems. Current representations for such postures, however useful, are not capable of capturing all necessary features for a complete description of a human stance, such as the relationship between non-directly connected body parts. In this article, we introduce a mark-up language for body stance and movement description, designed to allow for the unambiguous representation of movement as well as the extraction of relationships between directly and non-directly connected body parts. Along with the language, we also present a computer program, developed to help end users in codifying stance and movement without having to know the language in detail.

Sentiment Analysis for Identification of Risk in the Electricity Sector

Social networks are characterized today by being a source of great information and very easy to access. But the information found therein are not yet widely used by companies to obtain data in order to generate knowledge about a given area. This article proposed the creation of a tool that, through opinions from the Twitter, could identify risks related to energy projects, and thus carry out the monitoring of risk trend, being aided by KRIs generated by classifying the tweets. Full Paper PDF: http://www.contecsi.fea.usp.br/envio/11contecsi-files/papers/734/submission/director/734-2455-1-DR.pdf