Papers by UMARANI PAPPUSWAMY
Austroasiatic Linguistics In honour of Gérard Diffloth (1939-2023) , 2024
Most of the anaphoric resolution algorithms developed so far focus on anaphors with NP antecedent... more Most of the anaphoric resolution algorithms developed so far focus on anaphors with NP antecedents, be it inter-sentential or intrasentential. The main focus of this paper is to resolve various other types of anaphors such as discourse deictic anaphors found in computermediated tutorial dialogues on physics. We do this first through a corpus-based study of physics tutoring dialogues. Our approach is to examine the syntactic and semantic environments under which deictic anaphors can occur in the physics discourse and identify the relevant discourse cues, which in turn, are used to formulate a set of constraints and preferences inspired by Centering Theory (Grosz et al. 1995) and the theory of discourse structure (Grosz and Sidner 1986). We propose an algorithm to resolve discourse deictic anaphors in dialogues which is also capable of distinguishing deictic anaphors from individual and expletive anaphors.
When dealing with a natural language interaction about a formal domain, a number of phenomena occ... more When dealing with a natural language interaction about a formal domain, a number of phenomena occur. They include interspersing natural language with formulas, various degrees of formality, and conveying the logical structure of an essay. Capturing these phenomena, to some extent, is necessary for providing relevant tutoring feedback. In this paper we discuss these phenomena, the extent to which we process each of them in the Why2-Atlas tutoring system and directions for future work.
Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 27 , 2022
Unwritten Languages of India, 2017
This paper is published in the Unwritten Language Series:01 edited by Anvita Abbi and published ... more This paper is published in the Unwritten Language Series:01 edited by Anvita Abbi and published by Sahitya Akademi, Delhi. That version has some typos- hence this copy here!
Citation Details:
Umarani Pappuswamy. 2017. Issues and Challenges in search of Effective Orthography for Unwritten Languages of North-East India. In Abbi, A (Ed.) Unwritten Languages of India. 117-159. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Cienc. Cult. vol.71 no.4 São Paulo Oct./Dec. 2019, 2019
SEMINAR, 2021
This article is published in Seminar https://www.india-seminar.com/ Volume 742 June Issue. The sp... more This article is published in Seminar https://www.india-seminar.com/ Volume 742 June Issue. The special issue was devoted to Navigating Language in a Digital Age.
New Frontiers in Education, 2021
Unprecedented growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has impacted every sphere ... more Unprecedented growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has impacted every sphere of human life. Infusion of it has transformed teaching and learning. This paper investigates the role of teacher characteristics in the integration of ICT in education in higher secondary schools in Meghalaya, Northeast India. The sample consists of hundred and fifty teachers randomly selected from five urban and five rural schools. The data for the study was collected through the use of questionnaire. The data was analysed and the statistical tool used is mean and standard deviation. The findings of the study revealed that there is a relationship between the use of ICT and teacher characteristics in teaching and learning. Depending on the teachers' characteristics such as attitude, gender, background, age, teaching experience, the use of ICT in teaching-learning varies and resulting in their pedagogical impact.
New Frontiers in Education , 2021
This paper examines the benefits and barriers of the use of Information and Communications Techno... more This paper examines the benefits and barriers of the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning in higher secondary schools in Meghalaya, Northeast India. Three hundred students, hundred and fifty teachers and ten principals were randomly selected from five urban and five rural schools to be the participants in the study. The data for the study were collected through the use of questionnaires. The findings of the study reveal that the use of ICT enhances learning and that teaching becomes very effective with the use of ICT. On the other hand, the study shows that the barriers in the use of ICT in learning are medium compared to those in teaching. It is also found that the use of ICT improves the quality of higher learning and helps teachers to engage the students effectively.
Aligarh Journal of Linguistics, 2022
This study examined the gender variation in using language learning strategies (LLSs) by the fore... more This study examined the gender variation in using language learning strategies (LLSs) by the foreign postgraduate students studying at two universities in India. It explored the influence of gender on the choice of strategies while writing academic essays in English and also investigated the impact of instructing LLS on the writing proficiency based on gender. An intervention study was conducted on 100 foreign postgraduate students (49 males and 51 females) who are non-native speakers of English. An adapted version of Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and a writing activity were administered as research instruments. The results demonstrated that gender does not affect the overall use and preferences of language learning strategies when writing in English except in one category, namely, monitoring and evaluation, as females indicate employing them more often than males. In addition, it revealed that gender plays no role in the impact of LLSs instruction on the students' writing performance. The results suggest that students' LLSs might be affected by other cultural or individual factors apart from gender, which can be used to interpret the differences, if they exist, in strategies preferred by male and female learners in other studies.
PILC Journal of Dravidic Studies , 2000
SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGE REVIEW, Jan 1, 2005
Most of the anaphoric resolution algorithms developed so far focus on anaphors with NP antecedent... more Most of the anaphoric resolution algorithms developed so far focus on anaphors with NP antecedents, be it inter-sentential or intrasentential. The main focus of this paper is to resolve various other types of anaphors such as discourse deictic anaphors found in computermediated tutorial dialogues on physics. We do this first through a corpus-based study of physics tutoring dialogues. Our approach is to examine the syntactic and semantic environments under which deictic anaphors can occur in the physics discourse and identify the relevant discourse cues, which in turn, are used to formulate a set of constraints and preferences inspired by Centering Theory (Grosz et al. 1995) and the theory of discourse structure (Grosz and Sidner 1986). We propose an algorithm to resolve discourse deictic anaphors in dialogues which is also capable of distinguishing deictic anaphors from individual and expletive anaphors.
This study intends to examine the impact of Strategy-Based Instruction on the strategy use by for... more This study intends to examine the impact of Strategy-Based Instruction on the strategy use by foreign postgraduate students, studying at two universities in India while writing in English. A total of one hundred students, who are nonnative speakers of English, participated in this study. Fifty students in the experimental group received writing instruction through an online platform. The results were compared to their fifty counterparts in the control group. All the participants received an adapted version of the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SIIL) Questionnaire and a Writing Questionnaire as the pretest and posttest. Descriptive statistics and independent sample t-tests were run to analyze the data using SPSS. The findings showed that students who received language learning strategy instruction recorded higher scores than the students who did not receive any kind of instruction towards the skill of writing academic essays. The results revealed that students' use of strategies in writing increased noticeably after strategy instruction and implied that students can be trained to use language-learning strategies successfully in their writing through direct strategy instruction.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005
This paper describes a supervised three-tier clustering method for classifying students' essays o... more This paper describes a supervised three-tier clustering method for classifying students' essays of qualitative physics in the Why2-Atlas tutoring system. Our main purpose of categorizing text in our tutoring system is to map the students' essay statements into principles and misconceptions of physics. A simple `bag-of-words' representation using a naïve-bayes algorithm to categorize text was unsatisfactory for our purposes of analyses as it exhibited many misclassifications because of the relatedness of the concepts themselves and its inability to handle misconceptions. Hence, we investigate the performance of the k-nearest neighborhood algorithm coupled with clusters of physics concepts on classifying students' essays. We use a three-tier tagging schemata (cluster, sub-cluster and class) for each document and found that this kind of supervised hierarchical clustering leads to a better understanding of the student's essay.
The Why2-Atlas tutoring system (VanLehn et al. 2002) presents students with qualitative physics q... more The Why2-Atlas tutoring system (VanLehn et al. 2002) presents students with qualitative physics questions and encourages them via natural language dialogue to explain their answers. We describe changes we are making to the current version of Why2-Atlas to better utilize a proof-based representation of student essays for motivating dialogue. The abductive proof of the student's explanation for one physics problem serves as a very localized model of likely student beliefs. We will discuss how we can use such a localized student model to select dialogue topics (as the system currently does), to improve the accuracy of the model via clarification requests and to acknowledge and take advantage of the content of the student's essay during the dialogue.
Flairs, 2006
Students' natural language (NL) explanations in the domain of qualitative mechanics lie in-betwee... more Students' natural language (NL) explanations in the domain of qualitative mechanics lie in-between unrestricted NL and the constrained NL of "proper" domain statements. Analyzing such input and providing appropriate tutorial feedback requires extracting information relevant to the physics domain and diagnosing this information for possible errors and gaps in reasoning. In this paper we will describe two approaches to solving the diagnosis problem: weighted abductive reasoning and assumption-based truth maintenance system (ATMS). We also outline the features of knowledge representation (KR) designed to capture relevant semantics and to facilitate computational feasibility.
Flairs, 2006
We describe the WHY2-ATLAS intelligent tutoring system for qualitative physics that interacts wit... more We describe the WHY2-ATLAS intelligent tutoring system for qualitative physics that interacts with students via natural language dialogue. We focus on the issue of analyzing and responding to multi-sentential explanations. We explore approaches for achieving a deeper understanding of these explanations and dialogue management approaches and strategies for providing appropriate feedback on them.
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding - ScaNaLU '06, 2006
We describe the WHY2-ATLAS intelligent tutoring system for qualitative physics that interacts wit... more We describe the WHY2-ATLAS intelligent tutoring system for qualitative physics that interacts with students via natural language dialogue. We focus on the issue of analyzing and responding to multisentential explanations. We explore an approach that combines a statistical classifier, multiple semantic parsers and a formal reasoner for achieving a deeper understanding of these explanations in order to provide appropriate feedback on them.
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Papers by UMARANI PAPPUSWAMY
Citation Details:
Umarani Pappuswamy. 2017. Issues and Challenges in search of Effective Orthography for Unwritten Languages of North-East India. In Abbi, A (Ed.) Unwritten Languages of India. 117-159. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.