Literal Information Research Articles

The Effects of Using Adapted Science eBooks Within Shared Reading on Comprehension and Task Engagement of Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of using adapted science eBooks within shared reading on comprehension and task engagement of high school students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A grade-level science textbook was selected and converted into an eBook format, incorporating various visual and auditory features (e.g., text-to-speech, summarized sentences, highlighted keywords) and presented on an iPad. The shared reading intervention included before, during, and after reading strategies (i.e., pre-teaching target vocabulary words, sharing information, retelling), with direct instruction on locating literal information. The intervention effects on reading comprehension and task engagement were evaluated using a single-case multiple probe design. The results of this study indicated that all participants demonstrated improvements in reading comprehension. Despite the longer intervention sessions compared to the baseline, all participants exhibited similar or enhanced levels of task engagement during the intervention sessions. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence supporting the use of adapted eBooks within shared reading as a means to increase access to grade-level science texts for high school students with ASD while maintaining a high level of task engagement. This intervention holds promise for improving the learning outcomes for students with ASD in science content area.

What are the perceptions of physics teachers in Brazil about ChatGPT in school activities?

In this work, we propose to discuss the perceptions of physics teachers in Brazil about AI generative like ChatGPT. Data were collected by an online Focus Group (FG) held during three meetings of one and a half hours each, with six Brazilian physics teachers with varied experience and backgrounds. Participants’ discourse was analysed according to three different questions: (a) the players involved in using ChatGPT in physics classes, (b) the attitudes towards the introduction of ChatGPT in physics classes, and (c) the main functionalities of ChatGPT in physics classes. Our results indicate that physics teachers’ perceptions of GPT, in general, involves more the role of students than the role of the teacher, correspond to more positive than negative perception, and allows identifying four main functionalities defined as a co-pilot of lessons, as an educational bureaucracy manager, as a simple problem-solving tool, and as a literal information providing tool.

FOUR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is a linguistic field that explores the complex relationship between language, context, and meaning. It involves analyzing how speakers and writers use language to convey not only literal information, but also social, cultural, and emotional cues that shape communication. Pragmatics examines how language users interpret and infer meaning based on contextual factors such as tone, gesture, and social norms, and how they use language to achieve various goals and outcomes. By uncovering the hidden meanings and intentions behind language use, pragmatics provides valuable insights into human communication and helps us to better understand how language shapes our social interactions and relationships Furthermore, pragmatics plays a crucial role in language learning and teaching, as it helps learners develop their communicative competence and understand the nuances of language use in different contexts. It also has practical applications in fields such as advertising, politics, and law, where the use of language can have significant impacts on audience perceptions and behaviors. Overall, pragmatics is a dynamic and multifaceted field that continues to evolve and shape our understanding of language and communication in diverse contexts.

The primary characteristics of English pragmatics in Applied Linguistics

Pragmatics is a linguistic field that explores the complex relationship between language, context, and meaning. It involves analyzing how speakers and writers use language to convey not only literal information, but also social, cultural, and emotional cues that shape communication. Pragmatics examines how language users interpret and infer meaning based on contextual factors such as tone, gesture, and social norms, and how they use language to achieve various goals and outcomes. By uncovering the hidden meanings and intentions behind language use, pragmatics provides valuable insights into human communication and helps us to better understand how language shapes our social interactions and relationships Furthermore, pragmatics plays a crucial role in language learning and teaching, as it helps learners develop their communicative competence and understand the nuances of language use in different contexts. It also has practical applications in fields such as advertising, politics, and law, where the use of language can have significant impacts on audience perceptions and behaviors. Overall, pragmatics is a dynamic and multifaceted field that continues to evolve and shape our understanding of language and communication in diverse contexts.

Rhizosphere: Role of bacteria to manage plant diseases and sustainable agriculture-A review.

General plant diseases as well as soil-borne pathogens severely reduce agricultural yield. The rhizosphere (the region of the soil that includes and surrounds the roots) is an important niche for microbial diversity in particular phytobeneficial bacteria including plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) which have been used for a very long time to combat plant diseases. Pathogen control and crop productivity can both be improved through the use of PGPR several mechanisms, including iron-based nutrition, antibiotics, volatile substances, enzymes, biofilm, allelochemicals, and so on. Their modes of action and molecular mechanisms have improved our comprehension of how they are used to control crop disease. Therefore, there is a lot of literal information available regarding PGPR, but this review stands out since it starts with the fundamentals: the concept of the rhizosphere and the colonization process of the latter, particularly because it covers the most mechanisms. A broad figure is used to present the study's findings. The advantages of using PGPR as bioinoculants in sustainable agriculture are also mentioned.

Relationships between understanding and solving word problems of multiplicative structure

The objective of the study was to investigate the relationships between understanding word problems of multiplicative structure and performance when solving these problems. Third, 4th and 5th grades students were asked to solve multiplication and division problems (Problem-Solving Task) and to answer questions about the statement of the problems (Problem-Understanding Task). For the three school years it was easier to understand what needed to be found in the problem (literal information) than to understand which operation and which numbers to use in the resolution of the problem (inferential information). Although performance in the three school years was limited, relationships were identified between understanding the word the problems and the ability to solve them. Understanding what needed to be found and identifying the relevant numerical information had a positive impact on solving the problems, and it was more significant than the ability to identify the appropriate operation to be applied.

IoT malware classification based on reinterpreted function-call graphs

Various malware and cyberattacks have arisen along with the proliferation of IoT devices. The evolving malware targeting IoT devices calls forth effective and efficient solutions to protect vulnerable IoT devices from being compromised. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of a state-of-the-art graph embedding method, graph2vec, for performing family classification for IoT malware, with promising results reported. To further improve the generalization performance of the classifiers based on graph2vec-extracted features, we propose two new mechanisms to improve the quality of feature representation. First, we unify user-defined function calls by reinterpreting the opcode sequences therein to better capture the semantics of the function-call relationship in malware binaries. Then, we integrate literal information into the graph2vec embedding of the function call graph to achieve better discriminant ability. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we carried out performance comparison on a large-scale dataset containing more than 108K malware binaries collected from seven CPU architectures. The accuracy rates obtained by five widely adopted classifiers on malware family classification are improved by 2%, on average, by adopting the two proposed mechanisms. Specifically, when combined with the proposed approach, the support vector machine classifier obtained an accuracy rate of 98.88% on malware family classification, outperforming known function-call-graph (FCG)-based methods and previous work on static malware analysis.

A knowledge graph embeddings based approach for author name disambiguation using literals

Scholarly data is growing continuously containing information about the articles from a plethora of venues including conferences, journals, etc. Many initiatives have been taken to make scholarly data available in the form of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). These efforts to standardize these data and make them accessible have also led to many challenges such as exploration of scholarly articles, ambiguous authors, etc. This study more specifically targets the problem of Author Name Disambiguation (AND) on Scholarly KGs and presents a novel framework, Literally Author Name Disambiguation (LAND), which utilizes Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) using multimodal literal information generated from these KGs. This framework is based on three components: (1) multimodal KGEs, (2) a blocking procedure, and finally, (3) hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two newly created KGs: (i) KG containing information from Scientometrics Journal from 1978 onwards (OC-782K), and (ii) a KG extracted from a well-known benchmark for AND provided by AMiner (AMiner-534K). The results show that our proposed architecture outperforms our baselines of 8–14% in terms of F1 score and shows competitive performances on a challenging benchmark such as AMiner. The code and the datasets are publicly available through Github (https://github.com/sntcristian/and-kge) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6309855) respectively.

Ibiebe Alphabet and Ideograms as Motifs for Fabric Embellishment

The invented Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Ibiebe alphabet and ideogram (writing system) have not been explored maximally and redesigned as recurring motifs to embellish contemporary fabric. These are artistic codified graphical images that represent the visual translation of myths, legends, ideal concepts, and the philosophies of the Urhobo cultural heritage from Delta State. They are mostly explored in paintings and sculptural pieces for aesthetic and refinement purposes. Whereas, it is pertinent to encourage the integration of the creative potential of indigenous culture as visual concepts into contemporary works, since art is a potent medium for cultural dialogue. Therefore, this paper seeks to redesign the versatility and ingenuity embedded in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s formation as a recurring motif for fabric embellishment. It is essentially to provoke creativity, the development of knowledge, skills, in-studio experimentation/exploration, and the creation of new design possibilities with a diverse visual relationship. The Aesthetic theory propounded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) and the Modern Creativity theory by Kanematsu, H. and Barry, D. M. (2016) were adopted. The approach is exploratory and descriptive and relies on literal information. It will serve as an encyclopedia of redesigned motifs that cut across visual history.

Modeling and Simulation of English Speech Rationality Optimization Recognition Based on Improved Particle Filter Algorithm

As one of the most important communication tools for human beings, English pronunciation not only conveys literal information but also conveys emotion through the change of tone. Based on the standard particle filtering algorithm, an improved auxiliary traceless particle filtering algorithm is proposed. In importance sampling, based on the latest observation information, the unscented Kalman filter method is used to calculate each particle estimate to improve the accuracy of particle nonlinear transformation estimation; during the resampling process, auxiliary factors are introduced to modify the particle weights to enrich the diversity of particles and weaken particle degradation. The improved particle filter algorithm was used for online parameter identification and compared with the standard particle filter algorithm, extended Kalman particle filter algorithm, and traceless particle filter algorithm for parameter identification accuracy and calculation efficiency. The topic model is used to extract the semantic space vector representation of English phonetic text and to sequentially predict the emotional information of different scales at the chapter level, paragraph level, and sentence level. The system has reasonable recognition ability for general speech, and the improved particle filter algorithm evaluation method is further used to optimize the defect of the English speech rationality and high recognition error rate Related experiments have verified the effectiveness of the method.

Narrative comprehension and engagement with e-books vs. paper-books in autism spectrum condition.

Children with autism spectrum condition often have specific difficulties with narrative comprehension, a skill which has a strong association with both concurrent and longitudinal reading comprehension. A better understanding of narrative comprehension skills in autism spectrum condition has the potential to provide insight into potential later reading comprehension difficulties and inform early targeted intervention. In the current study, the main objective was to investigate how differences in the medium of story presentation (paper-book vs. e-book) and differences in story narration (adult narration vs. in-app narration) would influence narrative comprehension in general, and between groups (autism spectrum condition and a receptive language-matched control group). We were also interested in how task engagement (visual attention and communication) differed between group and conditions and whether task engagement was related to narrative comprehension. Forty-two children with autism spectrum condition and 42 typically developing children were read a story either via a paper-book or an e-book with interactive and multimedia features. The e-book was either narrated by the experimenter (adult narrated iPad condition) or narrated by an in-app voiceover (e-book narrated iPad condition). Children's behaviour during storybook reading was video recorded and coded for engagement (visual attention and communication). They then completed two measures of narrative comprehension: multiple-choice questions (measuring recall of literal information) and a picture ordering task (measuring global story structure). Contrary to predictions, we did not find any significant group or condition differences on either measure of narrative comprehension, and both groups demonstrated a similar level of narrative comprehension across the three conditions. We found differences in engagement between conditions for both groups, with greater visual attention in the e-book conditions compared to the paper-book condition. However, visual attention only significantly correlated with narrative comprehension for the typically developing group. Overall, this study suggests that children with autism spectrum condition are just as able as language-matched peers to comprehend a narrative from storybooks. Presenting a story on an iPad e-book compared to a paper-book does not influence narrative comprehension, nor does adult narration of the story compared to in-app narration. However, on-task engagement is linked to narrative comprehension in typically developing children.Implications: Taken together, our findings suggest that e-books may be more successful than paper-based mediums at encouraging visual attention towards the story, but no better at supporting narrative comprehension and eliciting communication.

Fine-grained Emotion Role Detection Based on Retweet Information

User behaviors in online social networks convey not only literal information but also one’s emotional attitudes towards the information. To compute this attitude, we define the concept of emotion role as the concentrated reflection of a user’s online emotional characteristics. Emotion role detection aims to better understand the structure and sentiments of online social networks and support further analysis, e.g., revealing public opinions, providing personalized recommendations, and detecting influential users. In this article, we first introduce the definition of a fine-grained emotion role, which consists of two dimensions: emotion orientation (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral) and emotion influence (i.e., leader and follower). We then propose a Multi-dimensional Emotion Role Mining model (MERM) to determine a user’s emotion role in online social networks. Specifically, we tend to identify emotion roles by combining a set of features that reflect a user’s online emotional status, including degree of emotional characteristics, accumulated emotion preference, structural factor, temporal factor, and emotion change factor. Experiment results on a real-life micro-blog reposting dataset show that the classification accuracy of the proposed model can achieve up to 90.1%.

Inferencing in Deaf Adolescents during Sign-Supported Speech Comprehension

ABSTRACTWe tested the capability of deaf adolescents, including a group of users of cochlear implants, to generate inferences during spoken language comprehension and whether they benefited from the use of sign-supported speech (SSS). Stimuli consisted of 24 short video-recorded texts in spoken language and in SSS. Participants responded to literal and inferential multiple-choice questions. In spoken language cochlear implant users had more difficulty in processing inferential than literal information and found predictive inferences harder than associative inferences. The level of spoken language proficiency was related to inference generation, especially for predictive inferences. Similarly, deaf native signers had more difficulties in generating predictive inferences, although SSS increased their comprehension. Lip-reading skills and working memory were positively related to accuracy in SSS. The inclusion of SSS only had a positive impact on the comprehension of native signers. Results suggest that cochlear implant users would benefit from an intervention to enhance verbal skills.

Compreensão literal e inferencial em alunos do ensino fundamental

Apoiado em fundamentos psicolinguísticos, o presente artigo trata sobre a leitura com foco na compreensão de informações literais e inferenciais. Para tanto, foi realizada uma pesquisa envolvendo alunos do 6º e 7º anos do Ensino Fundamental de uma escola pública federal da cidade de Porto Alegre. A compreensão da leitura foi avaliada por meio de um questionário contendo seis perguntas abertas, sendo três literais e três inferenciais. A tarefa foi realizada com base na leitura de um texto narrativo literário. Os resultados demonstraram que as perguntas inferenciais foram mais difíceis do que as perguntas literais tanto para os alunos do 6º quanto do 7º ano, sugerindo que realizar inferências é uma tarefa complexa para alunos nos níveis de escolaridade investigados. Os dados revelaram haver diferenças significativas entre os dois grupos de participantes com relação ao estabelecimento de inferências, indicando que esta capacidade evolui com a progressão escolar. Além disso, conforme mostram os resultados, o tipo de inferência e o modo como a informação literal é apresentada no texto também influencia na compreensão.

The Effects of Orienting Instructions on Readers’ Ability to Recall Literal Information from Expository Texts

AbstractThis study aimed to examine whether instructing readers to judge text information can impair or facilitate their ability to recall information from expository texts of different genres. Experiment One used four expository texts and examined three types of orienting instructions: To answer pre-text questions, to be prepared to answer questions after the reading the text, to be prepared to judge the knowledge introduced in the text. The results of the study indicated that the use of pre-text questions did not improve readers’ performance in a recall test; in fact, they impaired the readers’ overall recall ability. However, being forewarned that they would be asked to provide a judgment on the information contained within a passage after reading it did enhance the participants’ ability to recall information from expository texts. Experiment 2 used the same four expository texts and examined the relationship between text recall and participants’ judgement of text information with particular cognitive abilities. The results reveal variations in the patterns of correlations between recall and rating of the text and other cognitive factors across the different text genres. The outcomes and implications of this research are discussed in this paper.

Enhancing Interpersonal Communication: Positive Mood Effects

I tested the possibility that positive affect would promote the design of effective interpersonal communication. Participants were 44 male and 96 female undergraduates at a mid-sized university in the Southeastern United States, who were induced to experience positive or neutral affect and were then asked to design communications relating to 15 abstract stimuli. Results indicated that, compared with the participants who had experienced neutral affect, those in a positive mood constructed messages that contained greater detail and more literal information for another person (vs. messages intended for their own use at a later time). This suggests that those experiencing positive affect made adjustments to account for the perspective of the recipient. That effect was not observed for participants experiencing a neutral mood. My findings suggest that effective interpersonal communication depends, in part, on the affective state of the communicator.

Forgetting the literal: The role of inhibition in metaphor comprehension.

In order for a person to comprehend metaphoric expressions, do metaphor-irrelevant aspects of literal information need to be inhibited? Previous research using sentence-verification paradigms has found that literal associates take longer to process after reading metaphorical sentences; however, it is problematic to infer inhibition from this research. Moreover, previous work has not distinguished between familiar and novel metaphor processing. To test more directly for when inhibition may be required during metaphor processing, we performed 3 experiments using a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm. Participants initially learned word pairs where the cues were potential metaphoric vehicles and the targets were literal associates (e.g., SHARK–swim). Then, participants read half the vehicles as part of metaphorical sentences, which they interpreted (The lawyer for the defense is a shark). Subsequent forgetting of the literal associates was greater when vehicles had appeared in metaphorical sentences (Experiment 1) and was observed for both familiar and novel metaphors when participants were instructed to interpret the metaphors (Experiment 2) but was observed for only novel metaphors when participants were instructed to simply read the metaphors (Experiment 3). These results suggest that forgetting occurs as a result of inhibitory mechanisms that are engaged to alter activation of irrelevant literal information during metaphor processing, and that these mechanisms are most relevant for the processing demands associated with novel metaphors.

MATCHING ALTERNATIVE ADDRESSES: A SEMANTIC WEB APPROACH

Abstract. Rapid development of crowd-sourcing or volunteered geographic information (VGI) provides opportunities for authoritatives that deal with geospatial information. Heterogeneity of multiple data sources and inconsistency of data types is a key characteristics of VGI datasets. The expansion of cities resulted in the growing number of POIs in the OpenStreetMap, a well-known VGI source, which causes the datasets to outdate in short periods of time. These changes made to spatial and aspatial attributes of features such as names and addresses might cause confusion or ambiguity in the processes that require feature’s literal information like addressing and geocoding. VGI sources neither will conform specific vocabularies nor will remain in a specific schema for a long period of time. As a result, the integration of VGI sources is crucial and inevitable in order to avoid duplication and the waste of resources. Information integration can be used to match features and qualify different annotation alternatives for disambiguation. This study enhances the search capabilities of geospatial tools with applications able to understand user terminology to pursuit an efficient way for finding desired results. Semantic web is a capable tool for developing technologies that deal with lexical and numerical calculations and estimations. There are a vast amount of literal-spatial data representing the capability of linguistic information in knowledge modeling, but these resources need to be harmonized based on Semantic Web standards. The process of making addresses homogenous generates a helpful tool based on spatial data integration and lexical annotation matching and disambiguating.

La cartografía hidráulica en Mendoza, Argentina (siglos XVIII y XIX) como herramienta para historiar el espacio y espacializar la historia

En la historiografía tradicional, la documentación gráfica, como planos históricos y mapas, ha solido usarse con la idea de ilustrar, con la intención de amenizar un texto, como podía hacerse con una fotografía o un grabado antiguo. Se desperdiciaba así la posibilidad de considerar a estos documentos gráficos como una fuente de información histórica en sí misma. Estos planos de proyectos de servicios (cloacales, de aguas corrientes, pavimentos, etc.) suelen contener no sólo delimitado el espacio histórico, sino que lo complementan con la inserción de información literal, representaciones iconográficas o arquitectónicas, antiguos o nuevos cursos de agua, curvas de nivel, localización del equipamiento público, tipos de cultivos, instalaciones proto industriales, referencias literarias del equipamiento social, etc. Por ello, el objetivo de este artículo es mostrar las posibilidades que se abren en la investigación histórica mediante la utilización, de manera creativa, de una fuente tradicional como puede ser la cartografía histórica.El método elegido por nosotros para mostrar la utilidad y potencialidad de planos y mapas antiguos es tomar un plano testigo de 1754, inserto en un litigio por el cierre de una calle que pasaba por un molino en la ciudad de Mendoza a mediados del siglo XVIII y comenzar a construir información histórica, social y catastral sobre él. Procesarlo mediante programas gráficos —que no es lo mismo que hacer geo-referenciación— mostrando las diferentes etapas que implica un proceso de digitalización para, finalmente, contextualizar este plano “re trabajado” en el proceso histórico y político en el cual se inserta. El resultado obtenido de este proceso de digitalización y graficación fue la incorporación al corpus cartográfico mendocino de un plano histórico que se desconocía. Paradójicamente, este plano de 1754 resultó ser el primero de la ciudad de Mendoza real luego del plano ideal de la fundación en 1561. Una de las aportaciones más originales de este proceso de digitalización es la obtención de una imagen del parcelamiento catastral de una banda urbana pericentral al casco fundacional, ya que no existe otro catastro anterior y el próximo, y primer catastro urbano, recién aparecerá en 1885. Una primera conclusión que surge es que, lejos de lo que suele pensarse, el “damero español” no tuvo un mecánico traspaso en el territorio de las ciudades americanas fundadas durante el proceso colonizador español.

Detective Questions

One of the most frequent problems in reading comprehension is the difficulty in making inferences from the text, especially for students with mild disabilities (i.e., children with learning disabilities or with high-functioning autism). It is essential, therefore, that educators include the teaching of reading strategies to improve their students’ ability to extract inferential information from texts. This article describes one such strategy for improving inference-making called “Detective Questions.” It is a strategy that, in an explicit and scaffolded way, teaches children to discriminate between inferential and literal information and to find the information they need to answer questions on the text. The inclusion of this type of strategy improves children’s reading comprehension in a motivating way and may therefore become an essential part of the teacher’s repertoire of techniques for teaching reading.