Tek Yong Lim

Evaluating playability on haptic user interface for mobile gaming

There have been escalating research interests on areas relating to haptic modality in recent years, especially towards mobile devices. However, there seems to be limited studies in determining the relation between haptic user interfaces and its influence on the playability of mobile games. This paper aims to measure playability of mobile games by comparing two different types of haptic interfaces, namely hard and soft keypad, for mobile gaming. The results show that the participants (N=12) scored highest in using a soft keypad (mean = 591.92, SD = 322.57) as compared to playing games using a hard keypad (mean = 471, SD = 359.29). However, this paper highlights that the majority of users prefer using the hard keypad method in virtue of greater player experience with regards to game play.

Designing the next generation of mobile tourism application based on situation awareness

Mobile tourism applications are changing the way travelers plan and experience tourism in the years to come. A large and growing body of literature has investigated the development of context awareness mobile applications for tourism industry. Various aspects of context awareness are studied and applied in tour guide companions and recommendation systems. However, these context awareness mobile applications do not improve travelers situation awareness especially in pre-visiting and during visiting phases. In other words, when using mobile applications, travelers may not perceive the situation correctly, fail to comprehend the situation or they are unable to anticipate the future development. This paper proposes a theoretical approach for designing mobile tourism applications using situation awareness. Three scenarios of traveler visiting experiences are presented and suitable designs for each scenario are discussed.

Soft Key and Hard Key Mobile Input Devices on Player Experience for Mobile Gaming

Input devices come in different interaction modalities, structure, layout and controls on a mobile platform. However, there is limited information on the types of mobile input devices that affect player experience. Most of the information about the advantages and disadvantages of input devices are reported in isolation without involvement from mobile game application. This paper aims to explore player experience by comparing two different types of mobile input methods, namely hard keypad (HK) and soft keypad (SK), for mobile gaming. Interview was conducted and the results were analysed using content analysis as a way of understanding player experience of input devices for mobile games. The content analysis highlighted positive and negative feedback comprising of two main categories, Features and Effects. Overall, both qualitative and quantitative data collected revealed that HK was better than SK for mobile gaming.

Meaning preservation in Example-based Machine Translation with structural semantics

Abstract The main tasks in Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT) comprise of source text decomposition, following with translation examples matching and selection, and finally adaptation and recombination of the target translation. As the natural language is ambiguous in nature, the preservation of source text’s meaning throughout these processes is complex and challenging. A structural semantics is introduced, as an attempt towards meaning-based approach to improve the EBMT system. The structural semantics is used to support deeper semantic similarity measurement and impose structural constraints in translation examples selection. A semantic compositional structure is derived from the structural semantics of the selected translation examples. This semantic compositional structure serves as a representation structure to preserve the consistency and integrity of the input sentence’s meaning structure throughout the recombination process. In this paper, an English to Malay EBMT system is presented to demonstrate the practical application of this structural semantics. Evaluation of the translation test results shows that the new translation framework based on the structural semantics has outperformed the previous EBMT framework.

Learning to Match Heterogeneous Structures using Partially Labeled Data

This paper addresses the problem of matching between highly heterogeneous structures. The problem is modeled as a classification task where training examples are used to learn the matching between structures. In our approach, training is performed using partially labeled data. We propose a Greedy Mapping approach to generate training examples from partially labeled data. Different types of structures may have different types of attributes that can be exploited to enhance the matching problem. We utilize three types of attributes, namely, text content, structure name and path correspondence, in the matching problem. Experiments are performed on two types of structures: semantic domain and semantic role. We evaluate the effectiveness of the Greedy Mapping as well as the performance on different types of attributes. Finally, the results are presented and discussed.

Mobile In-App Advertising for Tourism: A Case Study

A successful tourism advertisement can attract tourists to a certain country. This paper explored the effective ways of incorporating ads in mobile app for tourism industry. My Travel Malaysia was selected as a case study. A mobile advertising guideline was used for creation of mobile in-app banner ad. A mobile app prototype was developed and embedded with four different ads. A usability testing was carried out with ten participants and all were asked to find a particular hotel room rate. The results revealed that participants were able to recall images banner ad compare to text banner ad but they were also more likely to perceive large image banner ad as app content. However, all participants did not click on these banner ads because not relevant to their tasks.

Semi-automatic acquisition of two-level morphological rules for iban language

We describe in this paper a semi-automatic acquisition of morphological rules for morphological analyser in the case of under-resourced language, which is Iban language. We modify ideas from previous automatic morphological rules acquisition approaches, where the input requirements has become constraints to develop the analyser for under-resourced language. This work introduces three main steps in acquiring the rules from the under-resourced language, which are morphological data acquisition, morphological information validation and morphological rules extraction. The experiment shows that this approach gives successful results with 0.76 of precision and 0.99 of recall. Our findings also suggest that the availability of linguistic references and the selection of assorted techniques for morphology analysis could lead to the design of the workflow. We believe this workflow will assist other researchers to build morphological analyser with the validated morphological rules for the under-resourced languages.

Measuring User Engagement in Mobile Classroom Response System: A Case Study

Mobile classroom response system, formerly known as clicker, is a promising technology to engage students in a lecture hall. Previous studies reported the positive effects of clickers on student engagement. However, most studies focused on patterns of cohort transitions using clickers during peer-instruction activities. This paper describes a mixed method approach to explore the dynamic of user engagement among undergraduate students in a local Malaysian university. Both interaction log and diary study were selected to track the pattern of ninety five registered students using mobile classroom response system across seven lecture weeks. Interaction logs were used to profile user type, participation type and submission type. The analysis of interaction logs revealed that seven visitors participated during lecture, only around 18% of registered students participated actively, registered students were more likely to answer all questions at the end of lecture compared to the beginning of lecture and middle of lecture. On the other hand, the analysis of diary entries provided qualitative information about user engagement attributes such focused attention, felt involvement, endurability, perceived usability and novelty. Both interaction log and students diary indicated that two registered students had positive engagement using mobile classroom response system during lecture.

Usability and Player Experience of Input Device for Mobile Gaming

Input devices for mobile gaming consist of hard keypad HK and soft keypad SK. Different interaction for both input devices have an impact on usability and player experience. Although there are publications that evaluate on input devices and game, little is known on how HK and SK affect mobile gaming. The implication to usability aspect is not fully understood and the list of recommendation on player experience is limited. The aim of this paper is to examine usability and construct recommendation list for player experience by comparing two different types of mobile devices, namely HK and SK. For usability, an experiment was employed to measure effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. The studies conducted an interview after the experiment. From the interview, a list of recommendation was constructed to identify player experience of input devices for mobile games. Results of the experiment were significant for effectiveness and satisfaction measures where HK performed better than SK. The recommendation list revealed both devices most mentioned positive and negative comments.

Automatic acquisition of morphological resources for Melanau language

Computational morphological resources are the crucial component needed in providing morphological information to create morphological analyser. To acquire the morphological resources in a manual way, two main components are required. The components, which are preprocessing and morphology induction, have led to two issues: i) time consuming and ii) ambiguity in managing the resources from under-resourced languages perspective. We proposed an automatic acquisition of morphological resources tool, which is an extension from the manual way, to overcome the mentioned issues. In this work, three main modules in the proposed automatic tool are: i) tokenization - to tokenise a raw text and generate a wordlist, ii) conversion - to convert a softcopy of morphological resources into required formats and iii) integration of segmentation tools - to integrate two established segmentation tools, namely, Linguistica and Morfessor, in obtaining morphological information from the generated wordlist. Two testing methods have been conducted are component and integration testing. Result shows the proposed tool has been devised and the effectiveness has been demonstrated which allows the linguist to obtain their wordlist and segmented data easily. We believe the proposed tool will assist other researchers to construct computational morphological resources in automated way for under-resourced languages.