The Spoon Is in the Sink: Assisting Visually Impaired People in the Kitchen

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are increasingly adept at a variety of tasks, and this technology can be used to assist blind and partially sighted people. To do this, the system's responses must not only be accurate, but usable. It is also vital for assistive technologies to be designed with a focus on: (1) privacy, as the camera may capture a user's mail, medication bottles, or other sensitive information; (2) transparency, so that the system's behaviour can be explained and trusted by users; and (3) controllability, to tailor the system for a particular domain or user group. We have therefore extended a conversational VQA framework, called Aye-saac, with these objectives in mind. Specifically, we gave Aye-saac the ability to answer visual questions in the kitchen, a particularly challenging area for visually impaired people. Our system can now answer questions about quantity, positioning, and system confidence in regards to 299 kitchen objects. Questions about the spatial relations between these objects are particularly helpful to visually impaired people, and our system output more usable answers than other state of the art end-to-end VQA systems.

Naturalness Evaluation of Natural Language Generation in Task-oriented Dialogues Using BERT

This paper presents an automatic method to evaluate the naturalness of natural language generation in dialogue systems. While this task was previously rendered through expensive and time-consuming human labor, we present this novel task of automatic naturalness evaluation of generated language. By fine-tuning the BERT model, our proposed naturalness evaluation method shows robust results and outperforms the baselines: support vector machines, bi-directional LSTMs, and BLEURT. In addition, the training speed and evaluation performance of naturalness model are improved by transfer learning from quality and informativeness linguistic knowledge.

Multilingual Learning for Mild Cognitive Impairment Screening from a Clinical Speech Task

The Semantic Verbal Fluency Task (SVF) is an efficient and minimally invasive speech-based screening tool for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In the SVF, testees have to produce as many words for a given semantic category as possible within 60 seconds. State-of-the-art approaches for automatic evaluation of the SVF employ word embeddings to analyze semantic similarities in these word sequences. While these approaches have proven promising in a variety of test languages, the small amount of data available for any given language limits the performance. In this paper, we for the first time investigate multilingual learning approaches for MCI classification from the SVF in order to combat data scarcity. To allow for cross-language generalisation, these approaches either rely on translation to a shared language, or make use of several distinct word embeddings. In evaluations on a multilingual corpus of older French, Dutch, and German participants (Controls=66, MCI=66), we show that our multilingual approaches clearly improve over single-language baselines.

AIMH at SemEval-2021 Task 6: Multimodal Classification Using an Ensemble of Transformer Models

This paper describes the system used by the AIMH Team to approach the SemEval Task 6. We propose an approach that relies on an architecture based on the transformer model to process multimodal content (text and images) in memes. Our architecture, called DVTT (Double Visual Textual Transformer), approaches Subtasks 1 and 3 of Task 6 as multi-label classification problems, where the text and/or images of the meme are processed, and the probabilities of the presence of each possible persuasion technique are returned as a result. DVTT uses two complete networks of transformers that work on text and images that are mutually conditioned. One of the two modalities acts as the main one and the second one intervenes to enrich the first one, thus obtaining two distinct ways of operation. The two transformers outputs are merged by averaging the inferred probabilities for each possible label, and the overall network is trained end-to-end with a binary cross-entropy loss.

Perceptual Speed and its relationship to problem-solving

Students in most schools face the problems and challenges of diverse influence the curriculum student success in adaptation and its compatibility with the school in general, these problems are varied as predominantly some mental character, such as appropriate between capacity and preparations on the one hand, and between the requirements of the study, on the other hand, some of which arise as a result of a lack of information that the student needs it and a lot McCann doubled in the public mental capacity and the ability to focus disorder cause of the important reasons influencing academic achievement. Due to the fact that perception plays a vital role in the process of solving problems as a primary entrance and the process leading up to the thought process comes after the process of attention and access to the right solution. Solving problems requires awareness of this problem and understand the requirements to find a solution quickly. If the problem-solving process that requires a set of independent operations have these three characteristics, "the speed, precision, perseverance," the perception is responsible for briefing with data problem and the solution with the participation of other important functions, such as attention and memory types, levels, it will be logical and natural that varies individuals in the rate of time you need these operations, as well as in the period Satfawton Imkthonha in the performance of these tasks (zest and others 1990.16)Studies and research conducted on the problem-solving attention of researchers in most parts of the world, but in specific areas of specialized physical geography, math science curriculum has indicated, but there are few attempts to use problem-solving in the field of humanities skills by science researcher such as studying the effectiveness of a program to develop thinking skills associated with resolving the problems Mansour (2004), Syria and study the ability to solve problems and skills beyond the knowledge of the ordinary and talented Justice Abdul Wahab (2003) and the study of the elationship between the estimate and solving personal problems and some emotional disorders to Fayed (2001), but the relationship between the speed of cognitive problem solving did not receive the study and attention by Most specialists in the field of cognitive psychology while important studies in this small area, especially in adolescence, which is one of the important stages throughout the human throughout his life to see their ability to solve the problems they face and speed in solving stage, it is noticeable that the students have weak solution problems they face in their daily lives Kalmchklat school with regard to speed, precision and perseverance to follow or social problems. Based on the above, the current research is an attempt to study the relationship between the speed of cognitive and problem-solving among a sample of second grade general secondary students in the province of Damascus. It can identify the main problem of the research question follows: What is the relationship between the speed of cognitive and problem-solving among a sample of second grade students of secondary branches of literary and scientific in the province of Damascus?

The Reasons Behind the English Major Students' Weaknesses in Philadelphia University

This paper is intended to investigate and scrutinize the reasons behind the weaknesses of English major students in Philadelphia University. One thing I would like to make clear before hand is that my observations and conclusions are based on my personal experience gained during my work as General Education Specialist ( English) UNRWA – UNESCO through classroom visits to some community colleges and Education Science Faculties in the five fields of UNRWA operations, namely, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, West Bank and Gaza on the one hand, and as a teacher of English at both Philadelphia University and the University of Jordan on the other hand. I have discovered that the reasons behind our students' weaknesses may refer to the learner, the curriculum or the study plan with its three major components, namely, language, linguistics and literature, and methods and teaching strategies.