Flamingos and Hedgehogs in the Croquet-Ground: Teaching Evaluation of NLP Systems for Undergraduate Students

This report describes the course Evaluation of NLP Systems, taught for Computational Linguistics undergraduate students during the winter semester 20/21 at the University of Potsdam, Germany. It was a discussion-based seminar that covered different aspects of evaluation in NLP, namely paradigms, common procedures, data annotation, metrics and measurements, statistical significance testing, best practices and common approaches in specific NLP tasks and applications.

Measuring Translationese across Levels of Expertise: Are Professionals more Surprising than Students?

The present paper deals with a computational analysis of translationese in professional and student English-to-German translations belonging to different registers. Building upon an information-theoretical approach, we test translation conformity to source and target language in terms of a neural language model's perplexity over Part of Speech (PoS) sequences. Our primary focus is on register diversification vs. convergence, reflected in the use of constructions eliciting a higher vs. lower perplexity score. Our results show that, against our expectations, professional translations elicit higher perplexity scores from a target language model than students' translations. An analysis of the distribution of PoS patterns across registers shows that this apparent paradox is the effect of higher stylistic diversification and register sensitivity in professional translations. Our results contribute to the understanding of human translationese and shed light on the variation in texts generated by different translators, which is valuable for translation studies, multilingual language processing, and machine translation.

Introducing Information Retrieval for Biomedical Informatics Students

Introducing biomedical informatics (BMI) students to natural language processing (NLP) requires balancing technical depth with practical know-how to address application-focused needs. We developed a set of three activities introducing introductory BMI students to information retrieval with NLP, covering document representation strategies and language models from TF-IDF to BERT. These activities provide students with hands-on experience targeted towards common use cases, and introduce fundamental components of NLP workflows for a wide variety of applications.

The level of environmental awareness among sixth graders’ students in light of some variables Preliminary study in the basic education schools Lattakia City

The aim of the research was to investigate the level of environmental awareness among sixth graders’ students in light of the gender variables and the cultural level of the mother. In order to achieve this goal, the descriptive approach was used, and the "environmental awareness" scale was prepared. After verifying its validity, it was distributed to a sample of 140 students and students from the sixth grade school in Lattakia in 2017/2018. The results showed that the level of awareness among the sixth grade students was average. There were no statistically significant differences among the sixth grade in terms of environmental awareness due to sex, while there were statistically significant differences due to the cultural level of the mother in favor of students whose mothers have university degrees.

Level of psychological security among a sample of university students of Tishreen during the Syrian cries "A field study in Latakia city"

The current research aimed to recognize the level of psychological security among a sample of Tishreen university students. In order to achieve the objective of this research, Shkeer's psychological security scale was applied, which its factor structure was investigate by the researcher in a previous study. The scale was used for data collection, and in year 2017-2018, a sample of (233) students participated in the research. The results showed that the level of students’ psychological security is medium, and there is no difference between males and females, but there are differences according to the specialty, especially in “practice life”, where that the students of practice specialty showed higher feeling of psychological security than the students of theoretic specialty.

Prevalence of smoking habit and associated factors among students of Al- Andalus university of medical sciences

Background: smoking is the major cause of many chronic diseases and a growing public health problem in the world. - Aim: the aim of this study is to determine prevalence of smoking habit and associated factors among students of Al-Andalus university of medical science. - Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted from October academic year 2017 to March academic year 2018 on 300 students in Al- andalus Medical University. A systematic stratified sampling method was used. Data collected by self-administrated questionnaire. - Results: out of the 300 respondents, 166 students were smokers giving a prevalence rate of 55%.The prevalence of smokers were much higher in males than females (79.5% and 20.5%, respectively). 72.2% of students started smoking at the age of less than 20 years. There were a significance differences between faculties (P= 0.02) , which faculty of medicine reported high percentage. - Conclusions: This study directs the attention to the fact that problem of smoking among university students has important contributing personal and socio demographic factors. The study recommends integrating health awareness programmes about smoking hazards in the medical education curriculum.

Common Styles of thinking among class room teacher students and its relationship with some variable "A field study of students of classroom teacher"

This study aimed at investigating the styles of thinking of class room teacher students in the College of Education at Tishreen University, and to know the impact of the variables of ( gender, school year and the type of secondary school certificate) on styles of thinking of those students, and to achieve the aims of the study a Questionnaire was designed included some items , then the researcher assured its validity and reliability and its suitability to the purposes of this study , the researcher distributed it on a stratified random sample consisted of ( 287 ) students. The descriptive approach has been used.

Society and psychological dimensions for using face book site by young people – Tishreen university students as a sample

This study comes to reveal about the psychological and social effects of the use of special young university for social networking sites, and by knowing the motives of undergraduates to use these sites, and the various factors that led them to engage in, as well as to identify the psychological and social effects of the use of specifically Facebook site, through a study field on a sample of university students Tishreen users of Facebook, where we relied on the analytical descriptive approach and we used the questionnaire to collect data from a sample of the tool (150) students from the University of Tishreen.

First Grade Secondary Students' Attitudes Towards Learning French- A Field Study in Lattakia City

The research aim to realized discusses the First Grade Secondary Students' Attitudes Towards Learning French in Lattakia City, and to study the different of such attitudes according to variables (sex, branch). To achieve the object of the research a questionnaire has been included (56) methods, distributed to four areas: (the value of French language, used French language outside school, the role of parents in Learning language French, usefulness French language in study and future life). .then applied to a sample of students of (434) ones school year 2016/2017. The present research used the descriptive analytical approach. Validity of the questionnaire was established though a jury of (9) of the teaching staff of educational at Syrian Universities. Pilot sample consisted of (48) students, Reliability was established by Cronbach – Alpha Reliability (0.93( . The research ended up with the following results: - The Attitudes of the first grade secondary students Towards Learning French in Lattakia City was positive. - There were significant statistical differences in attitudes the First Grade Secondary Students toward Learning French according to variable sex in favor of the females. There were significant statistical differences in attitudes the First Grade Secondary Students toward Learning French according to variable branch in favor of the scientific and literary branches. The research introduced following proposals: Interest in learning French language, and Making training courses for French teachers, also Providing schools with supportive materials necessary for improving learning French.

Instructional Strategies and Its Relationship with Learning Orientation and Mental Focus for Students of Tishreen University A Field Study

The purpose of this study was to determine the level of Learning Orientation and Mental Focus for students of Tishreen University. This study also aimed at investigating affection of many variables on students` Learning Orientation and Mental Focussuch as instructional strategies, gender and specialization. Sample consisted of (672) students from Tishreen University in academic year (2016-2017). The Results Of This Study Showed:  The most preferred strategies by students are interactive Strategies; (57.4%) of students prefer to learn by using of interactive strategies.  Students of Tishreen University have a very good level of Learning Orientation (77.46%) and Acceptable level of Mental Focus (57.98%).  There is no a statistical difference between students` mean scores on scale of Learning Orientation contributed to gender variable, but There is a statistical difference between students` mean scores on scale of Mental Focus contributed to gender variable. This difference is in favor of males.  Learning Orientation are affected by Instructional Strategies; the students who prefer interactive strategies have mental focus more than students who prefer show strategies. The study recommended to continue in investigating for variables that increase with Learning Orientation and Mental Focus.