DOCSLIB.ORG

Semi-Automated Correction Tools for Mathematics-Based Exercises in MOOC Environments

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Semi-Automated Correction Tools for Mathematics-Based Exercises in MOOC Environments International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Multimedia, Vol. 3, Nº 3 Semi-Automated Correction Tools for Mathematics-Based Exercises in MOOC Environments Alberto Corbí and Daniel Burgos Universidad Internacional de La Rioja the accuracy of the result but also in the correctness of the Abstract — Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow the resolution process, which might turn out to be as important as participation of hundreds of students who are interested in a –or sometimes even more important than– the final outcome wide range of areas. Given the huge attainable enrollment rate, it itself. Corrections performed by a human (a teacher/assistant) is almost impossible to suggest complex homework to students and have it carefully corrected and reviewed by a tutor or can also add value to the teacher’s view on how his/her assistant professor. In this paper, we present a software students learn and progress. The teacher’s feedback on a framework that aims at assisting teachers in MOOCs during correction sheet always entails a unique opportunity to correction tasks related to exercises in mathematics and topics improve the learner’s knowledge and build a more robust with some degree of mathematical content. In this spirit, our awareness on the matter they are currently working on. proposal might suit not only maths, but also physics and Exercises in physics deepen this reviewing philosophy and technical subjects. As a test experience, we apply it to 300+ physics homework bulletins from 80+ students. Results show our student-teacher interaction. Keeping an organized and solution can prove very useful in guiding assistant teachers coherent resolution flow is as relevant to the understanding of during correction shifts and is able to mitigate the time devoted the underlying physical phenomena as the final output itself. to this type of activities. Besides, in physics, results can belong to a broad spectrum of mathematical natures and entities, ranging from simple and Keyword s— assignments, semiautomated correction, maths, isolated numbers or scalars (e = 2.7182), vectors physics, framework. , signed quantities (-k) and physical units (3.3 kΩ), to name a few that might appear on a basic physics I. INTRODUCTION course. In addition, slightly different numbers, notations OOCs and online campuses nowadays represent an and/or symbols can represent exactly the same correct result M observable reality when it comes to self-education [5]. and account for the same reality. For instance, Together with OpenCourseWare platforms, they are definitively impacting our current TEL scene. Even in MOOC and can both be labeled as correct and the environments, students are usually required to carry out some student should receive a positive score/comment. If such homework. Nevertheless, these homework bulletins are hardly minor discrepancies could be detected, an automated system ever supervised by a tutor or a teacher. Quite the opposite, the might be able to send back an explicit recommendation as students themselves are required to self-correct and self-assess [26], for example, does. In the same sense, and as a last their exercises based on correction grids, templates and answer example, all of the following expressions have the exact same keys. Peer reviewing also takes place, as we will discuss in meaning: partial differentiation of function f with respect to an section II. Fully automated quizzes are also commonly independent variable x: displayed and correction is normally done by the MOOC and/or e-learning platform. Finally, students attending physics courses in online Technical documents from the STEM fields (Science, institutions and/or MOOCS come from very different Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) increase backgrounds and behavior is easily altered over time, as document richness with many sorts of structured objects: described by [1]. The human touch in the reviewing process mathematical and chemical formulae, diagrams, tables and has always proven to be the key to success, independently of relations, etc. These additions usually carry essential the academic environment: online, formal, higher education, information that complements the texts the student has to read. etc. At first sight, homework assignments related to these All this being said, in MOOC environments, the amount of disciplines are good candidates for automated correction homework bulletins to be reviewed, and the substantial processes. However, many teachers are interested not only in tutoring effort that takes place if every exercise from every -89- DOI: 10.9781/ijimai.2015.3312 Regular Issue student is manually revised, can reach disproportionate levels. detailed analysis of every learner, 1 by 1, and clustered by One of the goals of our project is concerned with assisting similarity. With A4Learning, the teacher can analyze the teachers during the correction phase. This target is achieved student current status, anticipate potential academic future, by pre-classifying student bulletins as ready to be teacher- and react in consequence. There is another early prototype, reviewed or not. In the latter case, an automated message can AppMOOC, which will retrieve basic requirements to grade be issued to the student, who can re-edit his/her own document activities, so that, when the professor gets an essay, a previous before reissuing it to the teacher, for a second time. Of course, checking mechanism guarantees that the work fulfills these this assistant tool would heavily depend on the type of subject minimum information and/or structure. These two prototypes, and content to be analyzed. In this paper, we focus on assisting A4Learning and AppMOOC, will be implemented along the teachers in online campuses and MOOCS when reviewing next academic year at a larger scale, with the clear objective of homework related to mathematical content. supporting teachers on their functions as evaluators and feedback providers, big mid-size and large-size groups of II. OVERVIEW OF THE CURRENT STATUS OF MOOCS, ONLINE learners, worldwide. The research work described in this paper EDUCATION AND STUDENT ASSIGNMENT MANAGEMENT is in intimate relation with the aforementioned projects. MOOCs face nowadays a number of challenges: accreditation management, credit recognition, monetization III. TOWARDS AN AUTOMATED HELPER SYSTEM FOR MATHS implementation and content and methodology quality AND TECHNICAL STUDENT HOMEWORK PRELIMINARY SCREENING assurance. Among them, methodology quality becomes the foundation from which the other four are built. MOOCs are We have designed a special workflow and protocol that taking over the long-tradition role of Open Educational automatically analyses student assignments and checks Resources. Some MOOCs also combine face-to-face strategies whether they contain coherent mathematical information with online learning and even merge formal and informal related to specific fields. This set of tools also takes into settings. In addition, MOOCs highlight the current need for account equivalent expressions, exemplified in section I. basic and specific competence acquisition, as a complement to In order to check for this coherence, simple –but also highly the current courses, very much focused on personal interests configurable and easily editable– content-checking rules and continuing education. They are also turning out the designed by the teacher are submitted to the correction engine. ultimate tool to fight against the lack of access to teaching Then, for every exercise in the student digital notebook, resources (disadvantaged individuals, regions and countries). mathematical expressions are semantically compared with the MOOC platforms require support for teachers and tutors, correction template submitted by the teacher. A more detailed based on their needs, skills, and teaching context. One of these review of the practical implementation is tackled below. has to do with grading essays and activities. Since MOOCs Of course, designing such a protocol is no easy task and has seeks the enrollment of hundreds or thousands of students, the required working with state-of-the-art mathematical language- evaluation becomes a real challenge. At present, some processing techniques and mathematics representation MOOCs rely on peer-assessment and counseling. Peer-to-peer standards, also reviewed below. seems significant and useful, so there is, at first sight, no need A. State-of-the-Art Language Processing in Mathematics for a replacement. However, a complementary evaluation resource would be welcome by the educational community. Despite the fact that linguistic analysis of scientific There are some approaches for automatic or semi-automatic documents is currently seen as an interesting line of research, assessment, like ontology networks [23], where the the current work in the field is still limited. Mathematical conceptualization of the domain model becomes the literature represents a rather isolated linguistic niche cornerstone to categorize and shapes the results properly. embodying its own challenges. We can identify a significant Another strategy involves the temporal hiring of additional contrast between this linguistic realm and, for instance, the teachers as graders, so they can act as complement to those domain of medical/healthcare research publications that have professors officially assigned to the course. In addition, a been studied by many scientific groups in recent years. Two of detailed comment and assessment on the submitted final the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Business Meeting of the Openmath Society 2018
    Business Meeting of the OpenMath Society 2018 Michael Kohlhase (President) Openmath Society http://openmath.org August 13. 2018, Hagenberg Kohlhase: Business Meeting of the OpenMath Society 2018 1 13. 8. 18, Hagenberg OpenMath 2018 Business Meeting (as required by Statutes) 1. Election of Chair of the meeting 2. Election of Secretary and two Minute Checkers (James is in Rio) 3. Annual Report 4. New Members? 5. Adoption of Balance Sheet and discharge of the Executive Committee 6. GDPR/Privacy issues for the Minutes 7. Election of the Executive Committee 8. Adoption of the second revision of the OM2 Standard 9. New OpenMath web site 10. OpenMath in JSON 11. OpenMath3 12. OMCD (management) Issues 13. Any Other Business (please come forward) Kohlhase: Business Meeting of the OpenMath Society 2018 2 13. 8. 18, Hagenberg Annual Report on Activities (2017-2018) I Last Open Business meeting, July 2017 in Edinburgh (internal ones in Spring to keep charter happy) I OM Repositories: Moved all digital assets to http://github.com/OpenMath I OM Web Site: deployed a new web site based on GH Pages (see below) I OM CD Submission Process: based on GitHub now, I OM Standard moved to separate repository, build process renovated, automated by travis. I OM2 Standard: thorough editing, more error fixing (OM binding) I OM3 Standard Effort: not started due to OM2e2 work Kohlhase: Business Meeting of the OpenMath Society 2018 3 13. 8. 18, Hagenberg New Members? I Anybody who has attended 3 OM Workshops or worked on OM for 6 months can become a member (will be generous) I please suggest new members (self-nominations encouraged) I New members proposed by OM Executive Committee I ???? Kohlhase: Business Meeting of the OpenMath Society 2018 4 13.
    [Show full text]
  • TUGBOAT Volume 39, Number 2 / 2018 TUG 2018 Conference
    TUGBOAT Volume 39, Number 2 / 2018 TUG 2018 Conference Proceedings TUG 2018 98 Conference sponsors, participants, program 100 Joseph Wright / TUG goes to Rio 104 Joseph Wright / TEX Users Group 2018 Annual Meeting notes Graphics 105 Susanne Raab / The tikzducks package A L TEX 107 Frank Mittelbach / A rollback concept for packages and classes 113 Will Robertson / Font loading in LATEX using the fontspec package: Recent updates 117 Joseph Wright / Supporting color and graphics in expl3 119 Joseph Wright / siunitx: Past, present and future Software & Tools 122 Paulo Cereda / Arara — TEX automation made easy 126 Will Robertson / The Canvas learning management system and LATEXML 131 Ross Moore / Implementing PDF standards for mathematical publishing Fonts 136 Jaeyoung Choi, Ammar Ul Hassan, Geunho Jeong / FreeType MF Module: A module for using METAFONT directly inside the FreeType rasterizer Methods 143 S.K. Venkatesan / WeTEX and Hegelian contradictions in classical mathematics Abstracts 147 TUG 2018 abstracts (Behrendt, Coriasco et al., Heinze, Hejda, Loretan, Mittelbach, Moore, Ochs, Veytsman, Wright) 149 MAPS: Contents of issue 48 (2018) 150 Die TEXnische Kom¨odie: Contents of issues 2–3/2018 151 Eutypon: Contents of issue 38–39 (October 2017) General Delivery 151 Bart Childs and Rick Furuta / Don Knuth awarded Trotter Prize 152 Barbara Beeton / Hyphenation exception log Book Reviews 153 Boris Veytsman / Book review: W. A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design by Bruce Kennett Hints & Tricks 155 Karl Berry / The treasure chest Cartoon 156 John Atkinson / Hyphe-nation; Clumsy Advertisements 157 TEX consulting and production services TUG Business 158 TUG institutional members 159 TUG 2019 election News 160 Calendar TEX Users Group Board of Directors † TUGboat (ISSN 0896-3207) is published by the Donald Knuth, Grand Wizard of TEX-arcana ∗ TEX Users Group.
    [Show full text]
  • Generating Openmath Content Dictionaries from Wikidata
    Generating OpenMath Content Dictionaries from Wikidata Moritz Schubotz Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Box 76, 78464 Konstanz, Germany, [email protected] Abstract OpenMath content dictionaries are collections of mathematical sym- bols. Traditionally, content dictionaries are handcrafted by experts. The OpenMath specification requires a name and a textual description in English for each symbol in a dictionary. In our recently published MathML benchmark (MathMLBen), we represent mathematical for- mulae in Content MathML referring to Wikidata as the knowledge base for the grounding of the semantics. Based on this benchmark, we present an OpenMath content dictionary, which we generated auto- matically from Wikidata. Our Wikidata content dictionary consists of 330 entries. We used the 280 entries of the benchmark MathMLBen, as well as 50 entries that correspond to already existing items in the official OpenMath content dictionary entries. To create these items, we proposed the Wikidata property P5610. With this property, everyone can link OpenMath symbols and Wikidata items. By linking Wikidata and OpenMath data, the multilingual community maintained textual descriptions, references to Wikipedia articles, external links to other knowledge bases (such as the Wolfram Functions Site) are connected to the expert crafted OpenMath content dictionaries. Ultimately, these connections form a new content dictionary base. This provides multi- lingual background information for symbols in MathML formulae. 1 Introduction and Prior Works Traditionally, mathematical formulae occur in a textual or situational context. Human readers infer the meaning of formulae from their layout and the context. An essential task in mathematical information retrieval (MathIR) is to mimic parts of this process to automate MathIR tasks.
    [Show full text]
  • The Utility of Openmath
    The Utility of OpenMath James H. Davenport? Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY England [email protected], WWW home page: http://staff.bath.ac.uk/masjhd Abstract. OpenMath [5] is a standard for representing the semantics of mathematical objects. It differs from ‘Presentation’ MathML [7] in not being directly concerned with the presentation of the object, and from ‘Content’ MathML in being extensible. How should these extensions be performed so as to maximise the utility (which includes presentation) of OpenMath? 1 What is OpenMath? “OpenMath is an emerging standard for representing mathematical objects with their semantics, allowing them to be exchanged between computer programs, stored in databases, or published on the worldwide web.”1. In particular, Open- Math is extensible, unlike MathML 2.02 [7]. It achieves this by having an exten- sible collection of Content Dictionaries. “Content Dictionaries (CDs) are used to assign informal and formal semantics to all symbols used in the OpenMath ob- jects. They define the symbols used to represent concepts arising in a particular area of mathematics” [5, section 1.3]. Notation 1 By an OpenMath CD we will mean any document conforming to the formal syntax of [5]. The status of an OpenMath content dictionary is one of the following [5, Section 4.2.1]: – official: approved by the OpenMath society according to the procedure defined in section 4.5 (of [5]); ? This paper owes much to some questions of Paul Libbrecht, when we were both at the IMA Workshop “The Evolution of Mathematical Communication in the Age of Digital Libraries” — December 8–9, 2006.
    [Show full text]
  • Transforming the Arχiv to XML
    Transforming the arχiv to XML Heinrich Stamerjohanns and Michael Kohlhase Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen fh.stamerjohanns,[email protected] Abstract. We describe an experiment of transforming large collections of LATEX documents to more machine-understandable representations. Concretely, we are translating the collection of scientific publications of the Cornell e-Print Archive (arXiv) using the LATEX to XML converter which is currently under development. The main technical task of our arXMLiv project is to supply LaTeXML bindings for the (thousands of) LATEX classes and packages used in the arXiv collection. For this we have developed a distributed build system that reiteratively runs LaTeXML over the arXiv collection and collects statistics about e.g. the most sorely missing LaTeXML bindings and clus- ters common error events. This creates valuable feedback to both the developers of the LaTeXML package and to binding implementers. We have now processed the complete arXiv collection of more than 400,000 documents from 1993 until 2006 (one run is a processor-year-size un- dertaking) and have continuously improved our success rate to more than 56% (i.e. over 56% of the documents that are LATEX have been converted by LaTeXML without noticing an error and are available as XHTML+MathML documents). 1 Introduction The last few years have seen the emergence of various XML-based, content- oriented markup languages for mathematics and natural sciences on the web, e.g. OpenMath, Content MathML, or our own OMDoc. The promise of these content-oriented approaches is that various tasks involved in \doing mathemat- ics" (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Installation Texlive 2019
    1 1 Installation TEXLive 2019 1.1 Deinstallation Als lokaler user mit sudo-Rechten sollten die folgenden Eingaben sudo apt purge texlive* sudo dpkg -r texlive-local sudo apt remove tex-common --purge die wichtigsten Programmteile des eventuell vorhandenen TEXLive-Systems loschen.¨ Anschließend werden die fur¨ alle user bzw. lokalen user gultigen¨ Eintrage¨ geloscht.¨ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/* sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/texmf sudo rm -rf /var/lib/texmf sudo rm -rf /etc/texmf sudo rm -rf /usr/share/texmf/ rm -rf ~/.texlive* Vor der Installation von TEXLive - hier 2019 - sollte sichergestellt werden, dass alle TEXLive-Pakete aus dem offiziellen Paketquellen deinstalliert sind (z.B. mit Synaptic nach texlive“ suchen). ” 1.2 Installation TEXLive 2019 Die manuelle Installation hat den Vorteil, dass die aktuelle Version von TEXLive (hier 2019) eingespielt wird und ein Update der jeweiligen Pakete problemlos moglich¨ ist. Nach Wechsel mit Hilfe von cd Downloads in den Downloadordner von Ubuntu kann durch die nacheinander ausgefuhrte¨ Befehlsfolge 1 1 1 Installation TEXLive 2019 wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/ c ,! install-tl-unx.tar.gz tar -zxvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz cd install-tl-20190503/ sudo ./install-tl -gui der Installationsprozess in die Wege geleitet werden. Zu beachten ist, dass der Wechsel in das Unterverzeichnis mit Hilfe von cd install-tl-20190503/ auch eine andere Nummer (Datumsfolge?) haben kann und dies mit Hilfe der (unvollstandigen)¨ Eingabe von cd install-tl- und anschließender Betatigung¨ der Tabulatortaste automatisch erganzt¨ wird. Die Ubernahme¨ der Voreinstellungen lasst¨ den Installationsvorgang - welcher je nach Internetverbindung von geschatzt¨ einer halben bis zu mehreren Stunden dauern kann - anlaufen.
    [Show full text]
  • Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Libraries
    Preprint from https://www.gipp.com/pub/ M. Schubotz et al. \Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Li- braries". In: Proc. CICM. Czech Republic, July 2019 Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Libraries Moritz Schubotz1;2, Olaf Teschke2, Vincent Stange1, Norman Meuschke1, and Bela Gipp1 1 University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany [email protected] 2 FIZ Karlsruhe / zbMATH, Berlin, Germany [email protected] Abstract. We report on an exploratory analysis of the forms of pla- giarism observable in mathematical publications, which we identified by investigating editorial notes from zbMATH. While most cases we encoun- tered were simple copies of earlier work, we also identified several forms of disguised plagiarism. We investigated 11 cases in detail and evaluate how current plagiarism detection systems perform in identifying these cases. Moreover, we describe the steps required to discover these and potentially undiscovered cases in the future. 1 Introduction Plagiarism is `the use of ideas, concepts, words, or structures without appro- priately acknowledging the source to benefit in a setting where originality is ex- pected' [5, 7]. Plagiarism represents severe research misconduct and has strongly negative impacts on academia and the public. Plagiarized research papers com- promise the scientific process and the mechanisms for tracing and correcting results. If researchers expand or revise earlier findings in subsequent research, papers that plagiarized the original paper remain unaffected. Wrong findings can spread and affect later research or practical applications. Furthermore, academic plagiarism causes a significant waste of resources [6]. Reviewing plagiarized research papers and grant applications causes unnecessary work. For example, Wager [29] quotes a journal editor stating that 10% of the papers submitted to the respective journal suffered from plagiarism of an unac- arXiv:1905.03322v2 [cs.DL] 9 Sep 2019 ceptable extent.
    [Show full text]
  • Augmenting Mathematical Formulae for More Effective Querying & Efficient Presentation
    Augmenting Mathematical Formulae for More Effective Querying & Efficient Presentation vorgelegt von Diplom-Physiker Moritz Schubotz geb. in Offenbach am Main von der Fakult¨atIV { Elektrotechnik und Informatik der Technischen Universit¨atBerlin zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Naturwissenschaften { Dr. rer. nat. { genehmigte Dissertation Promotionsausschuss: Vorsitzender: Prof. Dr. Odej Kao Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Volker Markl Gutachter: Prof. Abdou Youssef, PhD Gutachter: Prof. James Pitman, PhD Tag der wissenschaftlichen Aussprache: 31. M¨arz2017 Berlin 2017 ii Abstract Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR) is a research area that focuses on the Information Need (IN) of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) domain. Unlike traditional Information Retrieval (IR) research, that extracts information from textual data sources, MIR takes mathematical formulae into account as well. This thesis makes three main contributions: 1. It analyses the strengths and weaknesses of current MIR systems and establishes a new MIR task for future evaluations; 2. Based on the analysis, it augments mathematical notation as a foundation for future MIR systems to better fit the IN from the STEM domain; and 3. It presents a solution on how large web publishers can efficiently present math- ematics to satisfy the INs of each individual visitor. With regard to evaluation of MIR systems, it analyses the first international MIR task and proposes the Math Wikipedia Task (WMC). In contrast to other tasks, which evaluate the overall performance of MIR systems based on an IN, that is described by a combination of textual keywords and formulae, WMC was designed to gain insights about the math-specific aspects of MIR systems. In addition to that, this thesis investigates how different factors of similarity measures for mathematical expressions influence the effectiveness of MIR results.
    [Show full text]
  • Understanding
    Implementing UBL Mark Crawford UBL Vice Chair XML 2003 9 December 2003 Why Are We Talking About UBL • UBL fulfils the promise of XML for business by defining a standard cross-industry vocabulary • UBL is the ebXML missing link • UBL plus ebXML enables the next generation of eBusiness exchanges – Cheaper, easier, Internet-ready – Extends benefits of EDI to small businesses – Fits existing legal and trade concepts – Allows re-use of data • UBL can provide the XML payload for a wide variety of other web-based business frameworks Overview 1 What and Why of UBL 2 The Design of UBL ebXML Core Components Naming and Design Rules Document Engineering Customizing UBL 3 The Content of UBL 1.0 What is Normative What is non-Normative Availability 4 Making UBL Happen 5 UBL Phase 2 6 Summary The promise of XML for e-business • Plug ‘n’ play electronic commerce – Spontaneous trade – No custom programming • Ubiquity on the Internet – Dirt-cheap tools – Complete platform independence – Enable true global market availability • Enable universal interoperability – Abandon existing EDI systems – Handle both "publication" document types and "transactional" documents Goals for Successful eBusiness Services • Web-enable existing fax- and paper-based business practices • Allow businesses to upgrade at their own pace • Preserve the existing investment in electronic business exchanges • Integrate small and medium-size businesses into existing electronic data exchange-based supply chains The standardization of XML business documents is the easiest way to accomplish
    [Show full text]
  • Mathoid: Robust, Scalable, Fast and Accessible Math Rendering for Wikipedia
    Mathoid: Robust, Scalable, Fast and Accessible Math Rendering for Wikipedia Moritz Schubotz1, Gabriel Wicke2 1 Database Systems and Information Management Group, Technische Universit¨atBerlin, Einsteinufer 17, 10587 Berlin, Germany [email protected] 2 Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, California, U.S.A. [email protected] Abstract. Wikipedia is the first address for scientists who want to recap basic mathematical and physical laws and concepts. Today, formulae in those pages are displayed as Portable Network Graphics images. Those images do not integrate well into the text, can not be edited after copy- ing, are inaccessible to screen readers for people with special needs, do not support line breaks for small screens and do not scale for high res- olution devices. Mathoid improves this situation and converts formulae specified by Wikipedia editors in a TEX-like input format to MathML, with Scalable Vector Graphics images as a fallback solution. 1 Introduction: browsers are becoming smarter Wikipedia has supported mathematical content since 2003. Formulae are entered in a TEX-like notation and rendered by a program called texvc. One of the first versions of texvc announced the future of MathML support as follows: \As of January 2003, we have TeX markup for mathematical formulas on Wikipedia. It generates either PNG images or simple HTML markup, depending on user prefs and the complexity of the expression. In the future, as more browsers are smarter, it will be able to generate enhanced HTML or even MathML in many cases." [11] Today, more then 10 years later, less than 20% of people visiting the English arXiv:1404.6179v1 [cs.DL] 24 Apr 2014 Wikipedia, currently use browsers that support MathML (e.g., Firefox) [27].
    [Show full text]
  • Using NLG for Speech Synthesis of Mathematical Sentences
    Using NLG for speech synthesis of mathematical sentences Alessandro Mazzei Universita` degli Studi di Torino [email protected] Michele Monticone Cristian Bernareggi Universita` degli Studi di Torino Universita` degli Studi di Torino [email protected] [email protected] Abstract and so it represents both the function application of f to x, and the multiplication of the constant f People with sight impairments can access to for the constant x surrounded by parenthesis. a mathematical expression by using its LATEX source. However, this mechanisms have sev- In this paper we study the design of a natu- eral drawbacks: (1) it assumes the knowledge ral language generation (NLG) system for pro- of the LATEX, (2) it is slow, since LATEX is ver- ducing a mathematical sentence, that is a natural bose and (3) it is error-prone since LATEX is language sentence containing the semantics of a a typographical language. In this paper we mathematical expression. Indeed, humans, when study the design of a natural language genera- have to orally communicate mathematical expres- tion system for producing a mathematical sen- sions, use their most sophisticated communication tence, i.e. a natural language sentence express- ing the semantics of a mathematical expres- technology, that is natural language. However, sion. Moreover, we describe the main results with respect to other domains, the mathematical of a first human based evaluation experiment domain has a number of peculiarities for speech of the system for Italian language. that needed to be accounted for (see Section4). We have three main research goals in this pa- 1 Introduction per.
    [Show full text]
  • Workingwiki: a Mediawiki-Based Platform for Collaborative Research
    WorkingWiki: a MediaWiki-based platform for collaborative research Lee Worden McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California, United States [email protected] Abstract WorkingWiki is a software extension for the popular MediaWiki platform that makes a wiki into a powerful environment for collaborating on publication-quality manuscripts and software projects. Developed in Jonathan Dushoff’s theoretical biology lab at McMaster University and available as free software, it allows wiki users to work together on anything that can be done by using UNIX commands to transform textual “source code” into output. Researchers can use it to collaborate on programs written in R, python, C, or any other language, and there are special features to support easy work on LATEX documents. It develops the potential of the wiki medium to serve as a combination collaborative text editor, development environment, revision control system, and publishing platform. Its potential uses are open-ended — its processing is controlled by makefiles that are straightforward to customize — and its modular design is intended to allow parts of it to be adapted to other purposes. Copyright c 2011 by Lee Worden ([email protected]). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. The human readable license can be found here: http: //creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0. 1 Introduction The remarkable success of Wikipedia as a collaboratively constructed repository of human knowledge is strong testimony to the power of the wiki as a medium for online collaboration. Wikis — websites whose content can be edited by readers — have been adopted by great numbers of diverse groups around the world hoping to compile and present their shared knowledge.
    [Show full text]