1,720,979 research outputs found
Topic modelling to support English text selection for translation into South Africa\u27s other official languages
No full textAppropriate training data is a prerequisite for the development of natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Vast amounts of language data are typically required to develop NLP tools that perform at state-of-the-art level. Such abundant resources are currently only available in a few languages. The remaining languages have to find alternative ways to become ``NLP-enabled\u27\u27. The aim of the study reported on here is to make more language data available to support NLP development in the official languages of South Africa. In this paper we present the idea of generating text data by means of translation. We also propose the use of topic modelling to identify text in a highly resourced source language that will yield meaningful translations in under-resourced target languages. More specifically, the paper describes how topic modelling was used to identify English Wikipedia articles that should be suitable for translation into South Africa\u27s 10 other official languages
The perception and identification of accent in spoken Black South African English
No full textCan mother tongue speakers of the Nguni and Sotho languages determine each other's first language (L1) based on their English accent? Contrasting claims have been made in this regard. While Black South African English (BSAE) can be distinguished clearly from Standard South African English (SSAE) on the levels of both production and perception, insufficient evidence exists that such a distinction can be made between Nguni-English and Sotho-English. This study investigates the question of perceivable differences in BSAE accents by means of two perceptual experiments. The first aim of the experiments is to ascertain whether participants from either the Nguni or Sotho language group can determine whether a particular speaker has an SSAE or aBSAE accent. The second aim is to determine whether L1 Nguni and Sotho listeners can identify a speaker's L1 group by listening to English words and sentences pronounced by Nguni and Sotho L1 speakers. Lastly, we investigate whether there is any correlation between listeners' judgement of speakers' accent and their ability to determine a speaker's L1. The results of both perceptual experiments contradict the notion that different mother tongues influence BSAE to such a degree that the speaker's L1 is easily perceived. However, some correlation was found between perception of accentedness and the correct identification of L1.Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(1): 91–10
A language application for Health Science students : a study on user experience
Full text linkDissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016.South Africa is home to 11 official languages and speakers of these languages communicate with one another on a daily basis. Such multilingual communication occurs throughout the country, especially at hospitals and clinics. Every so often, someone needs to visit a healthcare facility and then it is difficult for the patient to find a health professional that speaks a language he/she understands. Some universities in South Africa, including the University of Pretoria, address this matter by teaching students an additional language to enable them to communicate with their patients.
This study aimed to assist the University of Pretoria in this endeavour by providing three custom-designed, mobile-assisted Sepedi language learning applications to students from the Faculty of Health Sciences enrolled for the Sepedi language module. The students used the applications as supplementary tools for their studies over nine weeks and then completed a questionnaire on user experience. The questionnaire was used to determine whether the students perceived the mobile applications to be useful supplementary tools to their studies and whether they had a clear preference for a specific application.
The results of this user experience study report a positive response to the applications, including strong preferences made by the students who participated in the study.African LanguagesMAUnrestricte
Gauging the accuracy of automatic speech data harvesting in five under-resourced languages
Full text linkRecent research on deep-learning architectures has resulted in substantial improvements in automatic speech recognition accuracy. The leaps of progress made in well-resourced languages can be attributed to the fact that these architectures are able to effectively represent spoken language in all its diversity and complexity. However, developing advanced models of a language without appropriate corpora of speech and text data remains a challenge. For many under-resourced languages, including those spoken in South Africa, such resources simply do not exist. The aim of the work reported on in this paper is to address this situation by investigating the possibility to create diverse speech resources from unannotated broadcast data. The paper describes how existing speech and text resources were used to develop a semi-automatic data harvesting procedure for two genres of broadcast data, namely news bulletins and radio dramas. It was found that adapting acoustic models with less than 10 hours of manually annotated data from the same domain significantly reduced transcription error rates for speaking styles and acoustic conditions that are not represented in any of the existing speech corpora. Results also indicated that much more automatically transcribed adaptation data is required to achieve similar results
Investigating the feasibility of harvesting broadcast speech data to develop resources for South African languages
Full text linkSufficient target language data remains an important factor in the development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. For instance, the substantial improvement in acoustic modelling that deep architectures have recently achieved for well-resourced languages requires vast amounts of speech data. Moreover, the acoustic models in state-of-the-art ASR systems that generalise well across different domains are usually trained on various corpora, not just one or two. Diverse corpora containing hundreds of hours of speech data are not available for resource limited languages. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of creating additional speech resources for the official languages of South Africa by employing a semi-automatic data harvesting procedure. Factorised time-delay neural network models were used to generate phone-level transcriptions of speech data harvested from different domains
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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