Visual maps must be transcribed into (interactive) raised-line maps to be accessible for visually impaired people. However, these tactile maps suffer from several shortcomings: they are long and expensive to produce, they cannot display a large amount of information, and they are not dynamically modifiable. A number of methods have been developed to automate the production of raised-line maps, ...

Intelligent computer tutors can derive much of their power from having a student model that describes the learner’s competencies. However, constructing a student model is challenging for computer tutors that use automated speech recognition (ASR) as input. This paper reports using ASR output from a computer tutor for reading to compare two models of how students learn to read words: a model tha...

“Most people who handle money a lot (i.e. cashiers) can identify a lower-quality fake bill instantly just by touching it” [10]. Data analysts are like cashiers: a trained data analyst can detect anomalies “at a glance” when data is appropriately transformed. This is the goal of data visualization. This proposal addresses the type of audio anomalies that human data analysts hear instantly: angry...

The aim of this thesis is to develop sources of photonic entanglement to study both quantum networkingtasks and some of the foundations of quantum physics. To this end, three high-performance sourcesare developed, each of them taking extensively advantage of standard telecom fibre optics components.The first source generates polarization entanglement via deterministic pair separatio...

Unilateral friendships provide a powerful mechanism to study friendship formation, because these friendships contain interest in friendship, but have not yet become full, reciprocated friendship. This longitudinal study investigated whether the conversations of unilateral dyads identified in the fall were predictive of that dyad’s relationship status in the winter. I hypothesized that the conve...

Purpose: According to the Frames, then Content hypothesis (MacNeilage & Davis, 1990), the internal structure of CV syllables during canonical babbling is determined primarily by production system properties related to rhythmic mandibular oscillations (Motor Frames). The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of auditory input in emerging canonical syllables during the babbling period...

In a text-based discovery and analytical environment, high quality textual representation is needed to support discovery of and research on spoken content. The increased representation of human thoughts and ideas as digitally represented speech highlights the need for efficient generation of high quality text representations of spoken content. The most cost-effective method of producing textual...

Spoken Language can be used to provide insights into organisational processes, unfortunately transcription and coding stages are very time consuming and expensive. The concept of partial transcription and coding is proposed in which spoken language is indexed prior to any subsequent processing. The functional linguistic theory of texture is used to describe the effects of partial transcription ...

The use of metaphor as a tool to uncover people’s ideas, attitudes and values through analysis of discourse is demonstrated and illustrated with data collected in a social science research project. A “discourse dynamics” approach to metaphor situated within a complexity / dynamic systems perspective is developed. This approach is turned into a method of “metaphor-led discourse analysis” which i...

This article discusses four types of phonological knowledge: knowledge the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of speech sounds (perceptual knowledge), knowledge of the articulatory characteristics of speech sounds (articulatory knowledge), higher-level knowledge of the ways that words can be divided into sounds, and sounds can be combined into meaningful sequences in words (higher-level ph...