The next generation of language labs: Can mobiles help? A case study

One major challenge regarding the use of today's language labs relates to teachers' and students' awareness and computer skills. Most teachers and students may not have the requisite computer skills and might soon become overwhelmed by the sophisticated functionality of today's digital lab systems. Thus, they should be provided with the appropriate training and technical support to reduce the apprehension that is usually associated with new technology. Recurrent technical problems are another shortcoming. Failure to operate the lab equipment efficiently due to hardware or software problems will inevitably cause delays and frustration for both students and instructors.To overcome such problems in existing language labs, this paper presents a novel cross-platform mobile lab system for language learning, called Mlab. The target users of MLab are language teachers and students, and the system offers them the freedom to move around and use their own devices at any time and in any place. Therefore, this research paper presents Mlab development and evaluation through three approaches: a holistic test case scenario, think aloud and interview sessions. The results showed high usability rates and generally positive attitudes toward using the mobile lab system.     

基于UML的数据服务系统的建模

为了提高遥感数据分发网站的交互性和稳定性,完善其用户体验,建立了基于UML的可视化模型,该模型包括静态建模和动态建模。通过建模,为遥感数据分发网站的设计提供了可视化的面向对象技术的框架。在此基础上,设计了满足用户需求的分发网站。通过设计与实现,表明了该模型有效地解决了以往网站开发过程中的难拓展、难集成、用户体验不足等问题。     

TrendPerceptor: A property-function based technology intelligence system for identifying technology trends from patents

Technology intelligence systems are vital components for planning of technology development and formulation of technology strategies. Although such systems provide computation supports for technology analysis, much effort and intervention of experts, who may be expensive or unavailable, is required in gathering processes of information for analysis. As a remedy, this paper proposes TrendPerceptor, a system that uses a property-function based approach. The proposed system assists experts (1) to identify trends in invention concepts from patents, and (2) to perform evolution trend analysis of patents for technology forecasting. For this purpose, a module of the system uses grammatical analysis of textual information to automatically extract properties and functions, which show innovation directions in a given technology. Using the identified properties and functions, a module for invention concept analysis based on network analysis and a module for evolution trend analysis based on TRIZ (Russian acronym of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) trends are suggested. This paper describes the architecture of a system composed of these three modules, and illustrates two case studies using the system.     

Intelligent computer assisted blog writing system

In this paper, we designed and implemented an intelligent computer assisted blog writing system. The system includes concept expansion module, text generation module and content replacement module. The concept expansion is employed to expand the concept provided by the user and these expanded concepts can provide the system more semantic information. The text generation model is based on keyword generation model and text segment generation model of which the important keywords are extracted from system corpus to serve as the backbone of the template. Meanwhile, the text segments between keywords will make up the content of the template and candidate text segments are retrieved from the corpus based on statistical analysis. The content replacement module employs Google to retrieve content from the Web and ranks the content based on term and POS tagging similarities. The prototype system has shown that it could work well on blog writing application domain and the concept of this research could be extended to other domains easily.     

Syntax and semantics of universal programming languages

This paper deals with certain characterizations of the sets of positive integers which when represented as strings on a finite alphabet, form tree adjunct languages, As the context free languages constitute a subfamily of tree adjunct languages, the results carry over to the former as well.     

Language supports for journal abstract writing across disciplines

Various writing assistance tools have been developed through efforts in the areas of natural language processing with different degrees of success of curriculum integration depending on their functional rigor and pedagogical designs. In this paper, we developed a system, WriteAhead, that provides six types of suggestions when non‐native graduate students of English from different disciplines are composing journal abstracts, and assessed its effectiveness. The method involved automatically building domain‐specific corpora of abstracts from the Web via domain names and related keywords as query expansions, and automatically extracting vocabulary and n‐grams from the corpora in order to offer writing suggestions. At runtime, learners' input in the writing area of the system actively triggered a set of corresponding writing suggestions. This abstract writing assistant system facilitates interactions between learners and the system for writing abstracts in an effective and contextualized way, by providing suggestions such as collocations or transitional words. For assessment of WriteAhead, we compared the writing performance of two groups of students with or without using the system, and adopted student perception data. Findings show that the experiment group wrote better, and most students were satisfied with the system concerning most suggestion types, as they can effectively compose quality abstracts through provided language supports from WriteAhead.     

Verbal irony use in personal blogs

Blogs are a widely growing form of computer-mediated communication used to achieve various personal and professional communicative goals. In the present study, we examined previously posted entries from 71 regular bloggers. We examined the blogs for the use of five forms of verbal irony: hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical question, sarcasm and jocularity. In addition, topic and emotional valence of the ironic utterances were examined. Results showed that hyperbole and understatement were more frequently used than the other forms of ironic language. Discussion of hobbies and social outings was the most commonly occurring topic of ironic language, and bloggers used verbal irony to convey both positive and negative intent. The results of this study demonstrated that adult bloggers do use a variety of forms of verbal irony in their personal blogs, despite the potential risk of being misunderstood.     

初学者学习C语言中常见问题的探讨

C语言是编程领域中很有影响力的一种程序设计语言。它简洁、紧凑，使用方便、灵活，并且具备高级语言和低级语言的特征。由于C语言的编译系统对语法的检查不如其他语言那么严格，因此C语言对使用者的要求比较高。笔者结合实际教学中的经验，分类列举出C语言中常见的错误进行分析与探讨，以此对初学者给予借鉴。     

A protocol for machine-readable cache policies in OGC web services: Application to the EuroGeoSource information system

An efficient access to the contents provided through OGC web services, widely used in environmental information systems, is usually achieved by means of caching strategies. Service-owners may be interested in expressing the conditions required to allow for this. If these conditions are expressed in a machine-readable way, automatic harvesters can be programmed to follow them.This paper proposes a protocol to specify and follow cache policies for OGC web services expressed in a machine-readable language. A preliminary implementation of this protocol has been tested in the EuroGeoSource project, where a number of Web Feature Services providing mineral deposits and energy resources are periodically cached to improve the efficiency and availability of several applications. The protocol addresses a nowadays common case, and can possibly be extended to allow for more detailed policies. Further work will help to determine how it could be integrated into a full Digital Rights Management system.     

VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformation

Data transformation, an important part of report generation, converts the layout of source data into a new layout suitable for presentation. Many report tools have been developed for end-users to specify data transformation. However, current report tools only support a limited set of report layouts. This paper proposes a visual dataflow programming language, called VisualTPL, to resolve this problem. Data transformation is accomplished by writing graphical dataflow programs, which manipulate tables as first-class objects with a set of extendable table operations. A report tool, called VisualTPS, has been developed to offer an easy and intuitive end-user programming environment. Reports with sophisticated layouts can be created through top-down decomposition and incremental development. An evaluation has been conducted to assess end-users' performance with VisualTPL. The results indicated that end-users could learn VisualTPL in a short time and create complicated report layouts all by themselves. And, in comparison with a commercial report tool, VisualTPL offered end-users similar performances and was preferred over the commercial tool.