Tomáš Holan

Story manager in 'Europe 2045' uses Petri nets

Europe 2045 is an on-line multi-player strategy game aimed at education of high-school students in economics, politics, and media studies. The essential feature of the game is that players face various simulated scenarios and crises addressing contemporary key issues of the unified Europe. These scenarios are branching and can evolve in a parallel manner. In this paper, we present a technique for specifying plots of these scenarios, which underpins the story manager of Europe 2045. The technique is based on a modification of Petri Nets. We also detail one particular scenario concerning the current crisis in Darfur. On a general level this paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of implementation of Petri Nets in virtual storytelling.

Dependency and phrasal parsers of the Czech language: a comparison

In the paper, we present the results of an experiment with comparing the effectiveness of real text parsers of Czech language based on completely different approaches - stochastic parsers that provide dependency trees as their outputs and a meta-grammar parser that generates a resulting chart structure representing a packed forest of phrasal derivation trees. We describe and formulate main questions and problems accompanying such experiment, try to offer answers to these questions and finally display also factual results of the tests measured on 10 thousand Czech sentences.

An automatic evaluation of construction geometry assignments

A new method for evaluating assignments on constructions in geometry is proposed. Instead of comparing drawn objects and their parameters, a process of construction is evaluated as a procedure of getting from the given input to the required output. The method was implemented and used by approximately 10 teachers and 300 students of secondary schools with positive results.

Dependency Analyser Configurable by Measures

In this paper we present a dependency analyser able to compute syntax recognition and analysis according to dependency grammars. The analyser is able to deal with nonprojective constructions, it has means to express the level of word-order freedom and its limitations. The level of word-order freedom and the level of robustness (correctness) of sentences can be specified as parameters of the analysis. Data specification language and grammar definition language are also presented.

On Relax-ability of Word-Order by D-grammars

This paper studies the relaxation of word-order, using dependency grammars (DG’s). We study ‘relax-ability of languages (and DG’s)’ based on the notion of DR-(non)projectivity. We obtain two infinite scales of classes of languages using different degrees of relaxation. The one scale contains the class of context-free languages as its first (minimal) element, the other one starts by the class of regular languages.

GeoTest-A system for the automatic evaluation of geometry-based problems

This paper presents the design of a system for the assignment and evaluation of tasks in the area of geometry. The goal of this design is to help teachers specify and test/verify the initial level of knowledge and abilities required from students entering the relevant course. This design has been used for the implementation of GeoTest, a web based application using the GeoGebra dynamic geometry software. GeoTest has been in use by more than 100 teachers and 5,000 students at universities and secondary and elementary schools during the last 4 years. The feedback received from teachers confirms the usability of the application and its positive acceptance by teachers as well as students.

Spatial Orientation and 3D Geometry

During the last years, we focused our efforts on encouraging the development of spatial abilities. We have created several programs and games to support the ability to realize movement and position in space. Another, and an even more challenging, way of training and applying spatial abilities is trying to solve abstract spatial problems. The ability to solve spatial geometry problems is very important, for example, for engineering students. We encourage teachers to include new types of tasks in their math lessons, which is the main idea of this paper.

A Theoretical Basis of an Architecture of a Shell of a Reasonably Robust Syntactic Analyser

This paper describes the theoretical basis of a framework for syntactic analysis allowing for flexible, stepwise shifting of the separation line between two sets of ill-formed strings which, given a fixed degree of robustness, i.e. tolerable violation of grammatical constraints:

Parsing of Free-Word-Order Languages

This paper introduces a new type of grammars, suitable for parsing of free-word-order (natural) languages. It shows CYK-like algorithms based on such grammars for parsing and introduces a natural restriction on it, to achieve an essential speed-up, and a more adequad parsing for natural languages.