Nelson J. Johansen, Yuanyuan Fu, Matthew T. Schmitz
et al.
The basal ganglia (BG) are conserved brain regions essential for motor control, learning, emotion, and cognition, and are implicated in neurological and psychiatric disease. Yet a unified cross-species taxonomy of BG cell types is lacking, limiting translation of BG circuit mechanisms, interpretation of human genetic risk, and development of cell type-targeted tools. We present a multiomic consensus atlas of 1.8 million nuclei from human, macaque, and marmoset spanning eight BG structures. Integrating cross-species gene expression, open chromatin, and spatial profiling enables definition of conserved and divergent cell types. Alignment to existing mouse and human atlases identifies 61 homologous cell types conserved over 80 million years. We identify a STRd D2 StrioMat Hybrid medium spiny neuron (MSN) type with molecular, electrophysiological, and morphological features that clarify hybrid MSN identities. Comparative cis-regulatory analysis reveals conserved sequence grammars that encode cell identity and inform viral targeting strategies, providing a foundational resource for BG evolution, function, and disease.
Background: Feedback is crucial in second-language (L2) writing instruction for guiding student revisions and improvement. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), tools like grammar checkers and chatbots are increasingly providing automated feedback in ESL (English as a Second Language) writing contexts. Purpose: This study explores the pedagogical benefits and ethical challenges of integrating AI-generated feedback in ESL writing classes. It asks how AI feedback can enhance learning and what concerns arise regarding its use. Method: A thematic literature review was conducted, framing the analysis along three axes: (1) types of AI writing feedback, (2) pedagogical impacts on student learning and autonomy, and (3) ethical implications such as data privacy and fairness. Findings: AI tools (e.g. Grammarly, ChatGPT) offer immediate, detailed feedback on grammar and style, potentially accelerating writing development and personalization of instruction. However, risks include student overreliance on AI suggestions, variable feedback quality, and concerns about privacy and academic integrity. Comparative examples show AI feedback is fast and specific, while teacher feedback provides nuanced, context-aware guidance. Conclusion: AI-powered feedback presents notable opportunities for ESL pedagogy—improving feedback timeliness and supplementing teachers—yet it brings ethical dilemmas. Effective implementation requires teacher mediation, student training in feedback literacy, and institutional guidelines to harness AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks.
Sanjana Srabanti, G. Elisabeta Marai, Fabio Miranda
The visualization and analysis of street and pedestrian networks are important to various domain experts, including urban planners, climate researchers, and health experts. This has led to the development of new techniques for street and pedestrian network visualization, expanding how data can be shown and understood more effectively. Despite their increasing adoption, there is no established design framework to guide the creation of these visualizations while addressing the diverse requirements of various domains. When exploring a feature of interest, domain experts often need to transform, integrate, and visualize a combination of thematic data (e.g., demographic, socioeconomic, pollution) and physical data (e.g., zip codes, street networks), often spanning multiple spatial and temporal scales. This not only complicates the process of visual data exploration and system implementation for developers but also creates significant entry barriers for experts who lack a background in programming. With this in mind, in this paper, we reviewed 45 studies utilizing street-overlaid visualizations to understand how they are used. Through qualitative coding of these visualizations, we analyzed three key aspects of street and pedestrian network visualization usage: the analytical purpose they serve, the visualization approaches employed, and the data sources used in their creation. Building on this design space, we introduce StreetWeave, a declarative grammar for designing custom visualizations of multivariate spatial network data across multiple resolutions. We demonstrate how StreetWeave can be used to create various street-overlaid visualizations, enabling effective exploration and analysis of spatial data. StreetWeave is available at https://urbantk.org/streetweave.
Mohammad Jamshed, Abu Saleh Md Manjur Ahmed, Md Sarfaraj
et al.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown promise in enhancing English as a second language (ESL) writing skills by providing personalized feedback and targeted corrections, thereby facilitating improved grammar and composition proficiency. Despite the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT, their impact on common writing errors in ESL contexts has yet to be explored. This study employed a quasi-experimental design to compare the efficacy of ChatGPT’s mobile application feedback against traditional teacher feedback in a senior secondary public school in India. Over eight weeks, the experimental group received feedback on their writing error corrections through the ChatGPT application, while the control group received feedback from teachers. Additionally, participants’ attitudes towards using ChatGPT for language learning were assessed through a questionnaire administered post-intervention to 132 students. Data was collected using pre- and post-tests that involved writing stories based on pictures. The study results demonstrated that the experimental group significantly improved writing proficiency, showing a reduction in common errors (third-person singular present, past tense, progressive, past participle, plural, possessive, comparative, and superlative) compared to the control group. Furthermore, most students preferred AI feedback, associating it with noticeable improvements in their writing skills and grammatical accuracy. These findings support the integration of AI tools like ChatGPT into language learning curricula as effective supplements to traditional teaching methods, offering personalized and immediate corrections that enhance learning outcomes.
Abstract Despite the influx of research examining various aspects of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) applications (apps) over the past two decades, there have been no head-to-head studies that have investigated the comparative effectiveness of different mobile apps. The current study addresses this gap by directly comparing two of the most well-researched and popular MALL apps: Babbel and Duolingo. In this mixed methods study, adult learners (N = 59) engaged in studying Turkish as a foreign language using either Babbel (n = 27) or Duolingo (n = 32) for eight weeks. Participants then completed two exit assessments, including (1) a posttest gauging their development of various language skills (i.e. reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, and grammatical competence), and (2) a survey assessing their user experience (e.g. enjoyment, motivation, beliefs about effectiveness). The results of this study showed that although both the Babbel and Duolingo groups made progress, there were no statistically significant differences between their L2 learning gains. However, for the Babbel group, there was a stronger correlation between participants’ study time and their posttest scores. Finally, Babbel users also felt the app was more effective for learning grammar, speaking/pronunciation skills, and for learning about the target language culture. This study discusses the implications of these findings for researchers and MALL users more broadly.
Numerals hold a significant place in grammar and speech practice. Hence, the aim of this study was to examine the principles of systematicity and progression, along with other aspects of introducing numerals in grammar and spelling teaching. Content analysis and comparative analysis encompassed curricula and learning programs from the first grade of elementary school to the fourth grade of gymnasium, as well as grammar textbooks from the second to the fifth grade. Inconsistencies in the didactic-methodological apparatus of textbooks were observed, as well as insufficiently clear and logical connections between contents for the first and second cycles of elementary school, and between elementary and high school. This suggests the need for changes in the content of curricula and grammar textbooks to overcome these discrepancies. Then, language teaching would be further grounded in science and adapted to the students' age.
Este artigo propõe uma discussão sobre desinformação, envolvendo engrenagem e métodos que colaboram para a propagação de fake news no ambiente online e de outros fenômenos que surgem na esteira do modelo de negócios das Big Techs. Considera-se que, com o avanço da Inteligência Artificial, tais formatos passam a exercer um domínio cada vez maior sobre as experiências, as narrativas e o conhecimento humano, controle que pode ser considerado uma ameaça à liberdade de expressão e ao direito à informação. Diante desse desafio, do ponto de vista regulatório, avalia-se a revisão de normas que atribuam mais limites às plataformas digitais e do educacional, destaca-se a necessidade de ampliação do letramento digital, midiático e informacional. A metodologia envolve revisão bibliográfica e documental.
In this study, we evaluated the performance of the state-of-the-art sequence tagging grammar error detection and correction model (SeqTagger) using Japanese university students' writing samples. With an automatic annotation toolkit, ERRANT, we first evaluated SeqTagger's performance on error correction with human expert correction as the benchmark. Then a human-annotated approach was adopted to evaluate Seqtagger's performance in error detection using a subset of the writing dataset. Results indicated a precision of 63.66% and a recall of 20.19% for error correction in the full dataset. For the subset, after manual exclusion of irrelevant errors such as semantic and mechanical ones, the model shows an adjusted precision of 97.98% and an adjusted recall of 42.98% for error detection, indicating the model's high accuracy but also its conservativeness. Thematic analysis on errors undetected by the model revealed that determiners and articles, especially the latter, were predominant. Specifically, in terms of context-independent errors, the model occasionally overlooked basic ones and faced challenges with overly erroneous or complex structures. Meanwhile, context-dependent errors, notably those related to tense and noun number, as well as those possibly influenced by the students' first language (L1), remained particularly challenging.
Abstract Although there is consensus that second language grammar instruction is needed, some controversial issues remain. Whatever instructional options are selected, it is vital that they allow the development of not only explicit knowledge but also implicit or at least automatized knowledge that can be used in real-time interaction. Since this aim is difficult to achieve, students need to learn this subsystem on their own and this process can be aided by adept use of grammar learning strategies (GLS). However, research in this area is scarce, existing tools have not been validated in different contexts, and no cross-country comparisons have been made. The study addresses these gaps by examining the use of GLS by university students majoring in English in Hungary (N = 205) and Poland (N = 173). Data were collected by means of a standardized questionnaire and subjected to principal component analysis and correlational analysis. Independent- and paired-samples t-tests as well as regression analyses were also run. Some differences were found between the two contexts but overall patterns of GLS use were strikingly similar.
Natália Moura Pacheco Cortez, Sóstenes Reis Siqueira
Com a pandemia de COVID-19 e o crescimento de festas em plataformas online, diversas práticas em ambiências da ecologia midiática digital foram configuradas. O objetivo deste artigo é investigar as redes de mediações estabelecidas nas festas de música eletrônica em plataformas, destacando-se aqui a plataforma francesa Shotgun, que ambienta o trabalho do Masterplano, coletivo artístico de Belo Horizonte, em Minas Gerais. Este estudo se ampara nos conceitos de mediação radical e estudos de plataformização e destaca a festa online Masterplano em Chromakeyla Tour, na plataforma Shotgun, que aconteceu em junho de 2020 como objeto de análise.
Divani Majidullah Syarief, Ufairoh Shoofii Abiyyi, Umu Hana Amini
et al.
Penelitian ini dilaksanakan dengan maksud untuk mengetahui habitus-habitus masyarakat Krapyak Kidul terkait tradisi lopis raksasa. Tradisi ini rutin dihelat setiap tahun pada tanggal 8 Syawal atau tujuh hari setelah Idulfitri di Krapyak Kidul, Kota Pekalongan. Penelitian tergolong deskriptif kualitatif yang menggunakan pendekatan strukturalisme genetik Pierre Bourdieu. Pengambilan data dilakukan dengan cara wawancara terhadap narasumber yang direkam dengan gawai untuk nantinya data-data yang dibutuhkan dalam penelitian diambil dengan teknik simak dan catat. Data yang terkumpul akan dibedah berdasarkan konsep habitus dalam strukturalisme genetik Pierre Bourdieu. Hasil yang diperoleh dalam penelitian ini antara lain: (1) Habitus persaudaraan, tradisi lopis raksasa memiliki semangat persaudaraan untuk merekatkan masyarakat; (2) Habitus kompak, tradisi lopis raksasa merupakan media untuk mengompakkan masyarakat yang heterogen; (3) Habitus religius, tradisi lopis raksasa tidak dapat dipisahkan dari nilai keagamaan; (4) Habitus berbagi, tradisi lopis raksasa mengajarkan untuk berbagi pada sesama; (5) Habitus gotong royong, pembuatan lopis raksasa melalui proses yang panjang dan dilakukan bersama-sama; (6) Habitus kerja keras, eksistensi tradisi lopis raksasa tidak lepas dari usaha dan kerja keras masyarakat dalam melestarikan tradisi ini; dan (7) Habitus berdagang, tradisi lopis raksasa mampu menaikkan perekonomian masyarakat dengan adanya kesempatan untuk berdagang.
Kata kunci: tradisi, lopis raksasa, syawalan
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Computational linguistics. Natural language processing
Abstract Comparative law is necessary in the modern era in which legal systems absorb ideas and elements from other legal systems and customary legal classifications are altered. Comparative law is closely intertwined with language because the research of different legal systems presupposes the study of legal texts written in different languages. Even if translation exists, a totally crucial issue arises: can the legal essence of the case law of a country be interpreted appropriately in any language but the original? The link between law and language constitutes an absolutely essential relation, since language – through translation – is often the only way of accessing foreign law of foreign countries with different languages. So, the aforementioned relationship as well as its results in case law will be the main topic of this article. First of all, the use of language is of outmost importance to any legal system, as it serves as the means of enforcing written legal rules and contributes to their dissemination, codification and evolution. Both law and language are cultural phenomena and this is why they must be studied taking into account the temporal and social circumstances. Living in the era of multicultural societies and immigration, the need of not just translating but rather transferring the legal essence of the jurisprudence among the different countries with different cultures give prominence to the essential link between comparative law and language systems. Studying case law is regarded as a possibility to redirect judges and lawyers’ attention to the fact that the interpretation of the legal judgement is the cornerstone of a whole legal system of another country. The dynamic relationship of law and language dictates the result of the translation and interpretation of the case law of a specific country in relation to the case law of another country. Thus, comparative law comes out to serve as the guardian of the legal essence in order to transfer the legal point of the judge among different societies with different languages.
Early childhood is the first foundation for development, one of the children development such as language skill, especially in English. With the aim that children can compete in the global world when they grow up. However, the problem that occurs in the field, the English language is rarely taught as an introduction to their language skill, due to the lack of knowledge of English learning methods in the ability to speak right for children. However, there is one kindergarten that uses song and motion method to introduce English vocabulary. This study aims to explore the description of Song and motion as a method in introducing vocabulary (number and colour) in English at one of the kindergartens in central Banjarmasin. The researcher applied a descriptive qualitative design to explore Song and motion method to introduce vocabulary in English (number and colour). This study involved 15 children in Group B. The finding from this study revealed that the song and motion method is very beneficial for children English vocabulary, children can remember the vocabulary about number and colour in English and also children happily singing while moving. This study might be used as an input for a teacher to create learning English in the classroom.
Special aspects of education, Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar
No atual cenário educativo, em que os processos de ensino e aprendizagem de línguas estão inseridos, as práticas de linguagem se complexificam e neste sentido se materializam cada vez mais em contextos fluidos e integrados, hibridizando-se práticas presenciais e a distância. Assim, o uso das tecnologias bem como as diversas possibilidades comunicativas, por sua vez, fomentam a necessidade de práticas de ensino que favoreçam a autonomia e a interação entre os sujeitos envolvidos nestes processos. Levando em consideração a complexidade desse cenário na sociedade contemporânea, é relevante compreender os efeitos da concepção de língua que orienta essas práticas. Neste sentido, acreditamos que aprender uma língua, desde uma perspectiva holística, pressupõe proporcionar um arcabouço de conhecimentos que poderão contribuir para a formação social do indivíduo, como um ser atuante na sociedade, consciente dos seus direitos e deveres enquanto cidadão; daí a importância de uma concepção de língua que oriente o ensino e aprendizagem tendo em vista esses aspectos. Dessa forma, é preciso entender de que maneira ditas concepções influenciam a prática educativa, no contexto de EaD, nosso locus investigativo, quanto ao ensino e à aprendizagem de línguas. Portanto, configura-se como objetivo deste escrito refletir acerca das concepções de língua na EaD a partir de narrativas multissemióticas produzidas por coordenadores e professores formadores de língua estrangeira.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Literature (General)
Actualmente, la posedición de traducción automática (TA) se considera una práctica habitual en el flujo de trabajo de traducción, sobre todo por la buena calidad que se obtiene con la traducción automática neuronal (TAN). Este hecho está asociado a los esfuerzos que han hecho los proveedores de servicios lingüísticos y los clientes para reducir los costos debido a la reciente crisis mundial y a la creciente globalización, que ha tenido un impacto negativo en los ingresos de los traductores y en sus prácticas profesionales. En este contexto, los traductores suelen percibir la posedición con un sesgo negativo. En este artículo se presenta uno de los primeros estudios estudio sobre las actitudes de los traductores ante la posedición y se relacionan con sus tasas de productividad. También cotejamos los resultados con una encuesta contestada por poseditores profesionales que evalúan su percepción de la tarea en el mercado actual.
We study the computational complexity of universality and inclusion problems for unambiguous finite automata and context-free grammars. We observe that several such problems can be reduced to the universality problem for unambiguous context-free grammars. The latter problem has long been known to be decidable and we propose a PSPACE algorithm that works by reduction to the zeroness problem of recurrence equations with convolution. We are not aware of any non-trivial complexity lower bounds. However, we show that computing the coin-flip measure of an unambiguous context-free language, a quantitative generalisation of universality, is hard for the long-standing open problem SQRTSUM.
We present GraPPa, an effective pre-training approach for table semantic parsing that learns a compositional inductive bias in the joint representations of textual and tabular data. We construct synthetic question-SQL pairs over high-quality tables via a synchronous context-free grammar (SCFG) induced from existing text-to-SQL datasets. We pre-train our model on the synthetic data using a novel text-schema linking objective that predicts the syntactic role of a table field in the SQL for each question-SQL pair. To maintain the model's ability to represent real-world data, we also include masked language modeling (MLM) over several existing table-and-language datasets to regularize the pre-training process. On four popular fully supervised and weakly supervised table semantic parsing benchmarks, GraPPa significantly outperforms RoBERTa-large as the feature representation layers and establishes new state-of-the-art results on all of them.
This research arises as a response to a need identified both in the professional practice of legal translation and in the actual training process: the lack of bilingual legal materials for professional translators and interpreters in the Spanish-Romanian language combination. The main objective of this paper is to describe the process of developing a tool that allows the thematic organization of knowledge, i.e., an ontology of trilingual legal terminology (Spanish-Romanian-English) for translators, as a practical solution to this need. The tool designed is proposed as a model to be followed and adapted and it is part of a broader research process that includes a comparison of legal systems, of text types, of languages and of specific terminology considering the three countries involved (Spain, Romania and United Kingdom). It mainly includes terms related to the criminal procedure as well as a classification of offenses, all of them organized on the basis of the relationship between the main concepts they are based on.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Translating and interpreting