Learnability

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human-computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studies-and practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due to the seamless embodiment of technical practices may be easily developed as fully fledged products, be them games, applications or any kind of digital media that provide the unified service of education and entertainment. In such a case the end product (a digital system) permits the user to interact with the environment in a game-like manner, which enhances learnability and contributes to knowledge acquirement as the underlying objective. The framework, although not a rigid one but rather subjected to ad hoc adjustments, consists of welldefined stages, which include modern educational theories and state-of-the-art development environments. This paper describes in details the proposed educational framework for the edutainment scenarios and presents a recent case study that validates its effectiveness. Despite the fact that the framework is still under development in a continuous feedback process with respect to the scenarios conceived by higher education students who utilise it, the results achieved so far are rather encouraging in terms of creativity, interaction design and aesthetics, thus addressing in a satisfactory manner the above mentioned deficiencies which -in our opinion-characterise a large portion of commercial edutainment scenarios

Reconsidering and reanalyzing a number of problems with first language acquisition and learnability within the framework of the Minimalist Program, the most recent linguistic theorizing on the part of generative grammar, the present paper ascertains some theoretical implications and consequences of the syntactic/learnability framework comprising Suzuki (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006) for the purposes of explicating the long-standing problems: (i) the transition from “pidgins” to “creoles”; (ii) the emergence of a Nicaraguan sign language among deaf children who had no common communication means (presumably, involving a generational stage where something like the transition from “pidgin” to “creoles” may be observed); (iii)  the emergence of what are called “home signs,” which are developed by deaf children who are not exposed to a signed language during the major part of the critical period; (iv) what the languages of specific language impairment (SLI) patients are like; (v) what the languages of wolf children such as Genie are like; and (vi) the outstanding case of Helen Keller, where a “tactile sign language” has been reported to have been involved (see Gill 1997).  (Although I believe that resources present in the framework of Suzuki 2005, 2006 in particular possess the potential enough to cope with most major problems arising in the explanation of the questions in (i-v) above, I specifically take up in the present article the fifth question of what Helen Keller’s language is like, submitting the more or less in-depth scrutiny and explanatory treatment (apart from some sporadic mentions of them during the course of theoretical developments appearing in the present paper) of the other five questions to (my) future work.)  In view of its potential for locating the possible origins of important differences between the cases of the Japanese second language learner of English, for example, and of Genie, in both of which the learner seems to be forced to start her acquisition of her target language largely after the critical/sensitive period has passed, the present paper focuses on the fascinating feat of language acquisition on the part of Helen Keller, who was deaf, blind, and mute as a result of the high fever and severe stomachache that hit her when she was one year and nine months, the most interesting point of Keller’s outstanding case being that Keller somehow appears to be located between the (normally developing) second language learner and wolf children such as Genie in terms of her linguistic abilities.  The central concept here is Chomsky’s (2000, 2001, 2004, 2006) strong minimalist thesis (SMT), possible requirements on the part of “efficient computation” and of the “evolution of language” being also considered.  More specifically, the biolinguistic idea following from Chomsky (2004) should be that the initial state of language acquisition is not fully genetically-determined, but that it is also a function of the general property of organic systems and, more generally, it reflects the properties of the physical world.  Further starting with some important similarities between the Unconscious (in the sense of Freud) and FLN/language and focusing on the term “compression” as a mental/linguistic vehicle between different dimensions (see Nakazawa 2004, Moro 2004), the present paper gives conjectures on the intriguing concept of a “dimension” and examines some empirical domains where the concept applies (see Uriagereka and Pietroski 2002, Uriagereka 1999/2002).  And, rather importantly, some efforts are made (by following Chomsky 2006 in reducing the contents of FLN/UG to the minimum) to examine in some detail what I take to be two major UG residues, Case and the EPP, so as to attain “ontological adequacy” in the sense that the major current concern is to explain why languages are the way they are.

This study explored the extent to which Makerere University Library Access (Makula) can be used by Makerere University Library (Mulib) users to achieve their teaching, research and information needs with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The research considered the impact of five usability factors , namely:  learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. A qualitative and quantitative study was conducted involving first-time and experienced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and librarians. The participants responded to a questionnaire, a think-after interview, and exploratory observation of Makula. The results revealed that Makula is effectiveness, efficient and satisfied the users’ needs. Librarians and library and information science students confirmed Jef Raskin’s conclusion

Mobile-wireless gadgets are becoming increasingly important in Kenya, not just as a means of social communication, but also as a medium of learning and instruction. This shift partly exploits the learnability principle in information technology which signifies how quickly a new user can begin efficient and error-free interaction with a system. The learnability principle was originally formulated for computer-based applications intended for adults but currently, children are increasingly becoming the end users. A gap exists in research on the effects of learnability on school-aged children in urban areas of Kenya. Against this backdrop, this study aimed at gathering information on the learnability characteristics of children of different age groups. The research further explored the degree to which the mobile-wireless information systems’ applications software learnability principles are applicable to children in Kenya.

This dissertation examines the acquisition of a phenomenon that lies at the interface of logic and grammar. Polarity-sensitive items (PSIs), including negative polarity items (NPIs) such as English 'any', are often characterized by their restricted distribution, and analyzed in terms of their licensing condition (compare 'John doesn’t have any books', where 'any' is licensed by negation, with the unlicensed *'John has any books'). 'Any' moreover oscillates between NPI uses and so-called ‘free choice’ uses ('John may choose any book'). While a small handful of previous acquisition studies on English 'any' have targeted children’s knowledge of the licensing condition, no previous study has systematically investigated children’s knowledge of the complex underlying semantics of PSIs like 'any', let alone the question of how children are to reconcile the dual nature of 'any'. The series of studies in this dissertation presents novel evidence from experiments and corpora demonstrating that children have incredibly sophisticated semantic knowledge of 'any', which includes the ability to generate subdomain alternatives, to (pre-)exhaustify these alternatives, to perform domain widening, and to compute so-called free choice inferences. Yet samples of parental spontaneous production reveal very little evidence that could inform the learner as to how to carry out the semantic operations required for adult-like interpretation of 'any'. I propose that the solution to this learning problem lies in innately constraining the hypothesis space of PSI types. Such a restricted hypothesis space is available to us in the form of a generative typology put forth in Chierchia (2013), an analysis that derives the possible classes of PSIs on the basis of free variation along two dimensions: the kind of alternatives that the target PSI activates, and the mode of exhaustification that factors the alternatives into meaning. On the assumption that these two dimensions are innately specified, only a finite set of PSI types can be generated; I discuss how the learner might use 'any'’s unique distributional properties in the input to map the string 'any' to the target PSI within the typology of restricted options.

Human computer interaction (HCI) is concerned with the practice of usability, which is a measure that evaluates the simplicity of using a system, software, or interface design for performing particular tasks. Evaluation is a process by which designers gather information about a systems usability to improve its user interfaces features. This research presents a study of a usability evaluation of EduGate, an online academic portal of King Saud University. In this research the heuristic evaluation method was chosen to evaluate the usability of the EduGate. Our results show that, the EduGate suffers from certain usability problem and some recommendations were proposed to enhance the usability of the EduGate. A questionnaire was then used to collect the feedback of real users (i.e. students) on the value of these recommendations. The participants supported 80% of the proposed recommendations to improve the usability of the EduGate.

This Ph.D. dissertation addresses possible bilingualism effects on speakers’ linguistic processing and representation through a psycholinguistic methodology. Our primary focus is the analysis of how bilingualism can influence bilinguals’ first language (L1), but we also investigate possible phenomena present in the acquisition of a second language (L2)-specific structure. More specifically, the research objectives are (i) to verify whether bilinguals exhibit reduced processing cost to read an L2-specific construction in the L1, (ii) to analyze whether these bilinguals accept this construction in their L1 and (iii) to investigate if bilinguals learn both the licensed and the unlicensed features of this construction in the L2. The participants are highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-English bilinguals immersed either in the L1 or in the L2. The target structure is the resultative construction (e.g., Samuel wiped the table clean) and our control structure is the depictive construction (e.g., Samuel ate the salmon raw). Both constructions are grammatical in English, but only the depictive is licensed in BP. Furthermore, we observe how the participants process and perceive some ungrammatical resultative sentences (e.g., Samuel twisted the toy broken) in English. In order to reach the research objectives, we conducted a series of experiments using the Maze Task (MT) and the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) paradigms in both BP and English. The results from the experiments in BP indicate that both immersed and non-immersed bilinguals process the adjective in the resultative construction significantly faster than BP monolinguals. However, bilinguals and monolinguals perceived the resultative construction as less acceptable than the depictive construction. These results suggest that bilingualism can exert influence on L1 linguistic processing, but such influence does not result in changes in bilinguals’ overall L1 grammar, at least in regards to the constructions under scrutiny. The data from the experiments in English indicates that bilinguals and monolinguals process the resultative construction as fast as they process the depictive construction. They also show an additional processing cost when reading the ungrammatical resultative sentences. Moreover, bilinguals and monolinguals do not differ significantly from each other in their acceptability judgments of the resultative sentences in English, but bilinguals give significantly higher acceptability ratings to the ungrammatical resultative sentences as compared to monolinguals. These results suggest that bilinguals can learn L2-specific constructions, but they are less sensitive to L2-specific restrictions than monolinguals are. We discuss all these findings in light of different theoretical perspectives, among which we highlight the Multi-Competence, the Multiple-Grammars and the Negative Evidence hypotheses.

This dissertation is about the synchronic analysis, typology, and formal learnability of tonal reassociation. Tonal reassociation refers to a group of phonological phenomena where a lexical tone surfaces in positions that the tone did not occupy underlyingly, without an apparent phonological trigger for doing so. Linguistic theory must answer why and how the grammar determines surface targets for reassociation. In addition, it must account for the crosslinguistic variation of such patterns.

To address this, the dissertation develops an analytical framework based on the interaction between tone and foot structure. Feet function as licensors for tone, driving and restraining tonal reassociation. Since many reassociation patterns involve ternary domains, the framework extends traditional binary feet theory by allowing layered, ternary feet. Grammar computation is modeled in Harmonic Serialism, which solves an opacity problem found for Optimality Theory.

The first half of the book motivates the framework through case studies of ternary spread-and-shift in Saghala, and quantity-sensitive ternary tone spread in Copperbelt Bemba. The framework accounts for both cases, and it is argued that layered feet are crucial to this success.

A third study investigates the typology predicted by the foot-based approach. The approach accounts for much or all of the considered variation, but also shows overgeneration. The fourth study accounts for the overgeneration by considering the learnability of foot-based analyses for reassociation patterns in Optimality Theory. Attested patterns are learnable, and more easily so than unattested ones, under the condition that learners consider production and comprehension errors in tandem.

An earlier introduced characterization of nonuniform learnability that allows the sample size to depend on the hypothesis to which the learner is compared has been redefined using the measure theoretic approach. Where nonuniform learnability is a strict relaxation of the Probably Approximately Correct framework. Introduction of a new algorithm, Generalize Measure Learnability framework, to implement this approach with the study of its sample and computational complexity bounds. Like the Minimum Description Length principle, this approach can be regarded as an explication of Occam razor. Furthermore, many situations were presented, Hypothesis Classes that are countable where we can apply the GML framework, which we can learn to use the GML scheme and can achieve statistical consistency.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate student engagement in learning software engineering subject with gamification approach. Software engineering subject is offered during the early year of three years towards earning a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science in most of local universities in Malaysia. This subject requires student pay attention to lectures, memorize terms and understand the concept. The passive session leads little engagement from the students. To overcome this problem, gameful design approach is introduced. The subject of the study comes from 59 students undertaking software engineering subject from computer science background from one public university in Malaysia. All students will be experienced gamification. At the end of the semester, the students are given a set of questionnaires. The findings revealed that Kahoot can engage and motivate students in learning particularly in subjects that involve lots of theoretical terms and need to do lots of reading. The initial study and findings can be used to add alternatives and improve the teaching and learning process for subject that involve lots of terms.

The current situation that we are faced with may be one where we seem to have one very strong, extremely important and far-reaching concept/thesis that we somehow have to keep to if we really hope to at least understand even a small portion of the true nature of the possession of our species, Homo sapiens, alone called language (or, more technically, the faculty of language in the narrow sense, FLN; Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002): i.e., the strong minimalist thesis (SMT; Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2008b), and the two extremely recalcitrant problems, one concerned with learnability (traditionally called the requirement of ‘explanatory adequacy’) and the other newly-emerged problem concerned with ontology (also dubbed as ‘evolutionary adequacy’).

This paper aims to bring theoretical linguistics and cognition-general theories of learning into closer contact. I argue that linguists' notions of rich UGs are well-founded, but that cognition-general learning approaches are viable as well and that the two can and should co-exist and support each other. Specifically, I use the observation that any theory of UG provides a learning criterion -- the total memory space used to store a grammar and its encoding of the input -- that supports learning according to the principle of Minimum Description-Length. This mapping from UGs to learners maintains a minimal ontological commitment: the learner for a particular UG uses only what is already required to account for linguistic competence in adults. I suggest that such learners should be our null hypothesis regarding the child's learning mechanism, and that furthermore, the mapping from theories of UG to learners provides a framework for comparing theories of UG.

We tested 3-to 5-year-old English-and Mandarin-speaking children on their interpretation of sentences like The elephant didn't eat both the carrot and the capsicum. These sentences are scopally ambiguous. Adult English speakers favour a weak interpretation of such sentences, with negation taking scope over conjunction (i.e. the elephant probably ate one of the vegetables, but not both). In contrast, adult Mandarin speakers favour a strong interpretation of the corresponding Mandarin sentences, with conjunction taking scope over negation (i.e. the elephant ate neither vegetable). The Semantic Subset Maxim predicts that children acquiring all human languages should initially prefer the strong (subset) reading of such sentences. Alternatively, the Question-Answer Requirement Model predicts that children should initially prefer the scope reading that constitutes a good true answer to a question under discussion in the context. We designed a task in which the weak reading of our sentences corresponded to a good true answer to the question under discussion. We found that children across languages nonetheless preferred to assign a strong interpretation to our test sentences, providing empirical support for the Semantic Subset Maxim.

We develop an evaluation metric for Optimality Theory that allows a learner to induce a lexicon and a phonological grammar from unanalyzed surface forms. We wish to model aspects of knowledge such as the English-speaking child's knowledge that the aspiration of the first segment of k h aet is predictable and the French-speaking child's knowledge that the final l of is optional and can be deleted while that of parle 'speak' cannot. We will try to show that the learner we present succeeds in obtaining this kind of knowledge and is better equipped to do so than other existing learners in the literature.

his study aims to add to the body of evidence regarding the linguistic
structures that seem to be more challenging in L2 acquisition than in L1
acquisition (DeKeyser, 2005; Ellis, 2008; Inagaki, 2001; Slabakova, 2014;
Sorace, 2011). he Negative Evidence Hypothesis (NEH) (Oliveira, 2016)
predicts that bilinguals are less sensitive than native speakers to violations
resulted from the overgeneralization of an L2-speciic rule. We tested this
hypothesis by analyzing the behavior of Brazilian Portuguese-English
bilinguals with diferent proiles towards the double-object construction
in English with unlicensed verbs in two acceptability judgment tasks. he
results corroborate the NEH by conveying that bilinguals gain sensitivity
as they become more proicient, yet, the data suggest that not even when
immersed in the L2, they become as sensitive as native speakers.

Service discoverability during the learning stage of an Application Program Interface (API) has a great affect on the productivity of developers and is of great importance to businesses. The adoption of Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) and Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services/APIs have increased in recent years, mainly because of its perceived ease of use in comparison to the industry standard for Web service: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), also known as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). But difficulty in assembly of service calls presents a usability problem. The difficulty is mainly due to lack of discovery mechanisms and poor documentation, which lead developers to resort to trail and error, that causes a decrease in productivity and increase in cost of service integration to businesses.

In this research we study discovery of REST architectural style from a usability standpoint. We also present an approach for enhancing discoverability using the OPTIONS Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) method. And demonstrate the approach as well as our findings on best practices of REST APIs through the development of a hypermedia driven API prototype. The usability problems and the approach to enhance the discovery problems were validated by case study using Usability Evaluation Method (UEM)s.

This paper draws on the simple observation that young children acquire the constraints on NPIs with relative ease and speed, and, against the backdrop of existing theoretical proposals about licensing, identifies a fundamental learning puzzle. We will begin with an overview of the methods that have been used to tap into normally-developing English-speaking children’s knowledge of NPI 'any'; such methods have revealed evidence of adult-like knowledge of the licensing condition on 'any' in children as young as 2-3 years of age. To address the question of how children get to this stage, I examine samples of caregiver input, and discuss how they reveal different kinds of evidence for 'any'’s restricted distribution and its licensers. Importantly however, I argue that the caregiver input does not provide direct evidence of the underlying semantics of 'any'. If only a subset of what must be acquired is present in the input, we are left with a puzzling learning problem about how children arrive at the target representation of NPIs such as 'any'.

For more than two decades children's use of multimedia was restricted to watching television and listening to music. Although some parents complained about children being addicted to listening to music the idea that children could be addicted to television was a real concern to most parents. Nowadays parents not only need to be concerned about how much television their kids are watching, but also many other forms of media that are emerging with the fast development in information and technology such as the internet, video games, tablets and smart phones. From this the researcher came to realize that children are increasingly becoming the consumers of application software facilitated by these information systems. Children spend at least three hours according to research on these media which includes the use of computers, tablets, smartphones and music. The researcher was concerned that system vendors use the same learnability principles to make applications for all age groups based on learnability principles that were designed with adult users in mind. Many interface design principles used for adult products cannot be applied to products meant for children and further yet children at different ages learn differently. The research looked at the existing learnability principles by trying to evaluate them and come up with new principle(s) that can be used to further improve the current principles so that they can be used effectively by information system designers to improve on the learnability of their application software meant for children of different age groups.

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studies- and practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due to the seamless embodiment of technical practices may be easily developed as fully fledged products, be them games, applications or any kind of digital media that provide the unified service of education and entertainment. In such a case the end product (a digital system) permits the user to interact with the environment in a game-like manner, which enhances learnability and contributes to knowledge acquirement as the underlying objective. The framework, although not a rigid one but rather subjected to ad hoc adjustments, consists of welldefined stages, which include modern educational theories and state of-the-art development environments. This paper describes in details the proposed educational framework for the edutainment scenarios and presents a recent case study that validates its effectiveness. Despite the fact that the framework is still under development in a continuous feedback process with respect to the scenarios conceived by higher education students who utilise it, the results achieved so far are rather encouraging in terms of creativity, interaction design and aesthetics, thus addressing in a satisfactory manner the above mentioned deficiencies which –in our opinion- characterise a large portion of commercial edutainment scenarios.

This paper develops a novel approach to learning phonological hidden structure relying on underexplored expectation driven learning strategies rooted in the machine learning literature. A novel probabilistic grammatical representation that enables estimation of expectation driven learning updates, and two learning algorithms utilizing these updates, are introduced. The algorithms are shown to surpass the performance of existing error-driven learning models on a large test system with hidden metrical structure. The paper then shows that the learning strategies are fully general and can also be successfully applied to learning of an entirely different sort of hidden structure created by unknown underlying representations.

We explore the implications of a particular approach to learning for an architectural question in phonology. The learning approach follows the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL), which has recently been used for learning in both constraint-based and rule-based phonology. The architectural question on which we focus is whether the grammar allows language-specific statements to be made at the level of the lexicon, as was assumed in early generative phonology, or whether such statements are prohibited, as is commonly assumed within more recent work. We show that under MDL, the architectural question has real empirical implications: across a range of seemingly natural representational schemes, an ability to make language-specific statements about the lexicon is needed to ensure the learnability of an important aspect of phonological knowledge.

Sentences with more than one logic operator are in principle ambiguous between different interpretations, depending on the assignment of logic scope. This aspect, largely overlooked in previous studies, could provide the right distinction that we need to capture children’s early misinterpretation of epistemic negative sentences. Grounded on the notion of semantic strength (Horn 1989), the opposition between weak (e.g. might not) and strong (e.g. cannot) meanings will be introduced, in order to motivate the empirical prediction that an asymmetry between different kinds of negative sentences should be observable in language development. This idea will be explored in two new experiments on Standard Italian, an ideal testing ground given its extremely simplified modal paradigm. The results confirm the prediction that, at age five, children do not have problems in comprehending negative epistemic sentences in general. Experiments 1 and 2 show instead that difficulties are largely confined to weak negative sentences. An additional result, found in Experiment 1, is the difference between children and adults in positive sentences. This result is accounted for in terms of focus and a related assertion of exhaustivity. In Experiment 2, a contextual manipulation is introduced to test this hypothesis.

This article investigates the learnability filter (LF) hypothesis, according to which the set of logically possible grammars predicted by linguistic theory is reduced to a proper subset of learnable grammars by external principles of language learning. Antifaithfulness constraints (Alderete, 2001a) provide a linguistic theory that predicts the existence of circular chain shifts of two segment types, including purely phonological exchanges that are unattested cross-linguistically (Anderson and Browne, 1973). Overt data representing such systems are fed into a standard OT learning model in which learners have IO-antifaithfulness constraints at their disposal. Despite this evidence and these constraints, learners always select grammars in which segmental exchanges are restricted to morphologically defined environments, consistent with typological findings. These results are shown to have implications for the nature of constraints in Optimality Theory, the correct analysis of morpho-pho...

Verhoeven, L., R. Schreuder, and R. H. Baayen
Besides phonotactic principles, orthographies entail graphotactic rules for which the reader must convert a phonological representation on the basis of spelling adaptation rules. In the present study, the learnability of such rules will be investigated with reference to Dutch. Although Dutch orthography can be considered highly regular, there are graphotactic rules that change letter sequences in plural noun formation. In a lexical decision experiment, the acquisition and use of such rules were examined. Participants were groups of 31 children from Grade 3 and 34 children from Grade 6, and 25 adults. The results showed that both children and adults are significantly less accurate and slower in recognizing plural word forms which undergo vowel change as a consequence of pluralization. It is concluded that graphotactic rules in Dutch orthography complicate Dutch word identification from an early stage of development and continue to play a complicating role in the word identification process of adult readers. In the discussion it is shown that current models fail to fully explain the processing of graphotactic rules in visual word identification.

Finding Missing Categories in Incomplete Utterances This paper introduces an efficient algorithm (O(n 4)) for finding a missing category in an incomplete utterance by using unification technique as when learning categorial grammars, and dynamic programming as in Cocke–Younger–Kasami algorithm. Using syntax/semantic interface of categorial grammar, this work can be used for deriving possible semantic readings of an incomplete utterance. The paper illustrates the problem with running examples.

Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human-computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studiesand practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due t...

A generally held assumption about human statistical learning is that learners keep track of the global statistics of the elements of interest across the entire set of stimuli they are exposed to. In naturalistic settings, this assumption is problematic because it requires that the cognitive system keep track of an exponentially growing number of relations while determining which of those relations are relevant and which are not. We investigated a more plausible assumption, namely, that statistical learning proceeds incrementally, using small windows of opportunity in which the relevant relations are assumed to hold over temporally contiguous objects or events. This local statistical learning hypothesis was tested on two learning tasks, one involving non-adjacent structures and the other -- novel word-to-world mappings. Our results suggest that human subjects make use of simple general-purpose cognitive heuristics that exploit temporal contiguity and contrast, leading to superior learning in tasks that belong on two different levels of language acquisition.

The paper demonstrates that falsifiability is fundamental to learning. We prove the following theorem for statistical learning and sequential prediction: If a theory is falsifiable then it is learnable -- i.e. admits a strategy that predicts optimally. An analogous result is shown for universal induction.

In this paper I question the Inertial Theory of language change put forward by Longobardi (2001), which claims that syntactic change does not arise unless caused and that any such change must originate as an ‘interface phenomenon’. It is shown that these two claims and the contention that ‘syntax, by itself, is diachronically completely inert’ (Longobardi 2001: 278), if construed as a substantive, falsifiable theory of diachrony, make predictions that are too strong, and that they cannot be reduced (as seems desirable) to properties of language acquisition. I also express doubt as to the utility and necessity of a methodological/heuristic principle of Inertia.

Open Government datasets have been flooding the Web recently, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are key to the development of services on top of these datasets. An issue of current APIs worldwide is that their learnability is limited. This work has explored the potential of querying APIs using natural language terms to mitigate that issue. A user study with 20 participants has demonstrated that a natural-language-based, along with an order-agnostic approach to API design can produce easily learnable APIs for both novice and experienced API users. These insights can pave the way for a paradigm change on Web-API design for open geodata retrieval and beyond.

We study the learning power of iterated belief-revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of universality: whether or not a particular belief-revision method is able to learn everything that in principle is learnable. We provide a general framework for interpreting belief-revision policies as learning methods. We focus on three popular cases: conditioning , lexicographic revision, and minimal revision. Our main result is that conditioning and lexicographic revision can drive a universal learning mechanism, provided that the observations include only and all true data, and provided that a non-standard, i.e., non-well-founded prior plausibility relation is allowed. We show that a standard, i.e., well-founded belief-revision setting is in general too narrow to guarantee universality of any learning method based on belief revision. We also show that minimal revision is not universal. Finally , we consider sit...

We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of universality: whether or not a particular belief revision method is able to learn everything that in principle is learnable. We provide a general framework for interpreting belief revision policies as learning methods. We focus on three popular cases: conditioning, lexicographic revision, and minimal revision. Our main result is that conditioning and lexicographic revision can drive a universal learning mechanism, provided that the observations include only and all true data, and provided that a non-standard, i.e., non-well-founded prior plausibility relation is allowed. We show that a standard, i.e., well-founded belief revision setting is in general too narrow to guarantee universality of any learning method based on belief revision. We also show that minimal revision is not universal. Finally, we consider situations in which observational errors (false observations) may occur. Given a fairness condition, which says that only finitely many errors occur, and that every error is eventually corrected, we show that lexicographic revision is still universal in this setting, while the other two methods are not.

Today we are living in the era of fourth industrial revolution demanding variety of skills set for delivering various jobs. The world is transforming in a contingent way. This transformation is not only in terms of technology but a complete domino effect is being witnessed in the recent past. The technology, demography and the social changes are affecting the professional as well as personal life styles. The techniques and procedures followed in the organizations are becoming obsolete very quickly resulting in the need for new techniques. New jobs are created; even the most demanded jobs in the current days are not even present few years back. Thus the job description and the job specification is changing a lot these days. It is not the survival that is threatening the employee work force but it is about the sustenance of their jobs. Learnability is the skill that is coming to the aid of employees for sustenance. Learnability is the ability to quickly grow and adopt skill set to be emploayable throughout their working life. In this regard this study is aimed to identify the need of learnability skill among the people and how it affects their career.
A survey was conducted with a sample of 120 employees working in different sectors to identify the need to unlearn the present skill set and relearn the new skills for their job upgradation. The study revealed that unlearning and relearning is needed in every sector like educational institutions, software, manufacturing, fast moving consumer goods etc,. The time span for the change process varies from one sector to the other. The employees seeking new skills are being headhunted by the corporate world and are reaching the tip of their career ladder and the others are left behind.

We address overgeneration in a factorial typology of metrical tone systems from previous work. We show that learnability in GLA explains the overgeneration: undesirable predicted patterns are harder to learn. The result rests crucially on the assumptions of bidirectional learning and exclusion of harmonically bounded candidates.

We study the learning power of iterated belief-revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of universality: whether or not a particular belief-revision method is able to learn everything that in principle is learnable. We provide a general framework for interpreting belief-revision policies as learning methods. We focus on three popular cases: conditioning , lexicographic revision, and minimal revision. Our main result is that conditioning and lexicographic revision can drive a universal learning mechanism, provided that the observations include only and all true data, and provided that a non-standard, i.e., non-well-founded prior plausibility relation is allowed. We show that a standard, i.e., well-founded belief-revision setting is in general too narrow to guarantee universality of any learning method based on belief revision. We also show that minimal revision is not universal. Finally , we consider situations in which observational errors (false observations) may occur. Given a fairness condition, which says that only finitely many errors occur, and that every error is eventually corrected, we show that lexicographic revision is still universal in this setting, while the other two methods are not.

Plural definite descriptions give rise to 'homogeneity' effects: the positive "The trucks are blue" and the negative "The trucks aren't blue" are neither true nor false when some of the trucks are blue and some are not, i.e. when the group of trucks is not homogeneous with respect to the property of being blue (Löbner 1987; Schwarzschild 1994, among others; for experimental evidence of this truth value gap, see Križ & Chemla 2015). A recent account of homogeneity posits that definite plurals have a literal existential meaning that can be strengthened to the universal meaning through a scalar implicature (Magri 2014). In this study, we investigated preschool-aged children's comprehension of plural definite descriptions of non-homogeneous contexts. We conducted two experiments with 4- and 5-year-old French-speaking children, one using a standard Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton 1998) and one using a ternary judgment task (Katsos & Bishop 2011). The experiments revealed three distinct subgroups of children who differed in how they interpreted plural definite descriptions and standard cases of scalar implicatures. One group of children both interpreted the definite plurals existentially and failed to compute scalar implicatures. Another group of children accessed homogeneous interpretations and computed implicatures. A smaller subgroup of children appeared to access homogeneous interpretations without computing implicatures. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of homogeneity, and in particular for the implicature theory of homogeneity, proposing that such a theory has a role to play in children's development of homogeneity.