Virginia Francisco | UCM - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Virginia Francisco
La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones par... more La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones para la indexación automática de documentos clínicos mediante el uso de recursos lingüísticos avanzados y de tecnologías de procesamiento del lenguaje.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2022
Making students become intrinsically motivated to participate in daily class activities is an ope... more Making students become intrinsically motivated to participate in daily class activities is an open challenge that has been addressed in different ways. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of an educational innovation project, named TrivialCV, in terms of student motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. We analyze the impact of two types of activities: multiplayer team-based competitions created for delivery during a live class session, and single player competitions created to be played asynchronously from home. We deployed these activities in two different computer engineering courses (programming fundamentals and operating systems) and used questionnaires, grades, and activity tracking in the virtual campus to evaluate their impact. After the analysis, we can assert that the use of TrivialCV activities was useful for providing additional motivation to the students and improving their engagement with the courses in which they were deployed. TrivialCV activities were very well received by the students, who considered them fun, engaging, and useful.
Novelty is a key concept to understand creativity. Evaluating a piece of artwork or other creatio... more Novelty is a key concept to understand creativity. Evaluating a piece of artwork or other creation in terms of novelty requires comparisons to other works and considerations about the elements that have been reused in the creative process. Human beings perform this analysis intuitively, but in order to simulate it using computers, the objects to be compared and the similarity metrics to be used should be formalized and explicitly implemented. In this paper we present a study on relevant elements for the assessment of novelty in computer-generated narratives. We focus on the domain of folk-tales, working with simple plots and basic narrative elements: events, characters, props and scenarios. Based on the empirical results of this study we propose a set of computational metrics for the automatic assessment of novelty. Although oriented to the implementation of our own story generation system, the measurement methodology we propose can be easily generalized to other creative systems.
Memoria final del Proyecto de Innovacion y Mejora de la Calidad Docente, #262 de la convocatoria ... more Memoria final del Proyecto de Innovacion y Mejora de la Calidad Docente, #262 de la convocatoria 2015.
Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communicatio... more Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communication. We currently have very poor models of how figurative language may be constructed in computational terms. The overall aim is to identify possible regularities, intuitions or heuristics that may at a later stage be employed to drive a text generator that is capable of using this type of
Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized a... more Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this paper, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, i.e. language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.
In knowledge bases where concepts have associated properties, there is a large amount of comparat... more In knowledge bases where concepts have associated properties, there is a large amount of comparative information that is implicitly encoded in the values of the properties these concepts share. Although there have been previous approaches to generating riddles, none of them seem to take advantage of structured information stored in knowledge bases such as Thesaurus Rex, which organizes concepts according to the fine grained ad-hoc categories they are placed into by speakers in everyday language, along with associated properties or modifiers. Taking advantage of these shared properties, we have developed a riddle generator that creates riddles about concepts represented as common nouns. The base of these riddles are comparisons between the target concept and other entities that share some of its properties. In this paper, we describe the process we have followed to generate the riddles starting from the target concept and we show the results of the first evaluation we have carried ou...
Executive Summary In this review, we bring together conceptual representations relevant to concep... more Executive Summary In this review, we bring together conceptual representations relevant to concept creation in the scope of ConCreTe. The conceptual representations reviewed are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial, and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. These two distinctions are orthogonal. Moreover, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, i.e., language, music, image, and emotion, are reviewed separately. For each representation reviewed, we also cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation. In the end, we propose a high-level categorization of concept formation, and indicate directions of future research, as identified during this review, according to the proposed categories. Dissemination Level PU Public X PP Restricted to other pro...
Universal Access in the Information Society, 2021
Current technology provides new challenges to improve skills on people with special necessities. ... more Current technology provides new challenges to improve skills on people with special necessities. In fact, persons with communications needs can take advantage of new devices and mobile applications to interact and communicate easily and in the most straightforward way. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems are oriented to users who cannot use natural language due to temporary or permanent impairments, providing an alternative to natural language for communication. In this paper, we present design guidelines for ECO (Easy Communication Application), an AAC tool designed with a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to make functional communication easier for individuals with complex communication needs. ECO tool has two well-defined modules: the Communication User and the Communication Manager. The former is thought as an AAC tool, whilst the Communication Manager module provides a way to edit the content and fit the dynamics of use and application design to the user's interests. In addition, we present an evaluation of the ECO tool from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we have achieved a heuristic-based expert evaluation in order to analyse the functionality corresponding to the Communication Manager module of the tool, in order to check main accessibility requirements and improve functionality accordingly. On the other hand, we have evaluated both the Communication Manager and Communication User modules in a real context, carrying out a qualitative evaluation with final users and their therapists to check whether the tool is useful in concrete daily scenarios. Results corroborate research questions, demonstrating that ECO meets the most important accessibility requirements and it is highly valued by experts and end-users.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Automatic generation of linguistic artifacts is a problem that has been sporadically tackled over... more Automatic generation of linguistic artifacts is a problem that has been sporadically tackled over the years. The main goal of this paper is to explore how concept associations can be useful from a computational creativity point of view to generate some of these artifacts. We present an approach where finding associations between concepts that would not usually be considered as related (for example life and politics or diamond and concrete) could be the seed for the generation of creative and surprising linguistic artifacts such as rhetorical figures (life is like politics) and riddles (what is as hard as concrete?). Human volunteers evaluated the quality and appropriateness of the generated figures and riddles, and the results show that the concept associations obtained are useful for producing these kinds of creative artifacts.
Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2019, 2019
The design and development of computer assistive technologies must be tied to the needs and goals... more The design and development of computer assistive technologies must be tied to the needs and goals of end users and must take into account their capabilities and preferences. In this paper, we present MeDeC@, a Methodology for the Development of Computer Assistive Technologies for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which relies heavily in our experience working with end users with ASD. The aim of this methodology is not to design for a broad group of users, but to design highly customizable tools so that they can be easily adapted to specific situations and small user groups. We also present two applications developed using MeDeC@ in order to test its suitability: Emo-Traductor, a web application for emotion recognition for people with Asperger Syndrome, and ReadIt, a web browser plug-in to help people with ASD with written language understanding difficulties to navigate the Internet. The results of our evaluation with end users show that the use of MeDeC@ helps developers to successfully design computer assistive technologies taking into account the special requirements and scenarios that arise when developing this kind of assistive applications.
ACM Computing Surveys
Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized a... more Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this article, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, such as language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.
Comunicar, 2016
In this work we aim to gain a better understanding of the nature of plagiarism in Higher Educatio... more In this work we aim to gain a better understanding of the nature of plagiarism in Higher Education. We analyse a set of different activities in an online university-level course, aiming to understand which tasks lead more naturally to plagiarism. This analysis concludes that the activities that have a lower rate of plagiarism are activities that encourage involvement, originality and creativity. Subsequently, we reformulate the task that presented the highest rate of plagiarism, taking into account the conclusions of the previous analysis and trying to maintain their relative effort and educational impact. We then compare the newly designed activities with their original counterparts to measure whether there is a significant reduction in plagiarism. The results are clear and show a significant drop in the percentages of plagiarism. In addition, we performed an additional validation to ensure that both groups were, in fact comparable. We found that both groups displayed similar plagi...
Comunicar 48: Ética y plagio en la comunicación científica, Jul 1, 2016
El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender mejor la naturaleza del plagio en la Educación Superior... more El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender mejor la naturaleza del plagio en la Educación Superior. Analizamos una serie de actividades en un curso on-line de nivel universitario, con el objetivo de encontrar qué tareas llevan más naturalmente al plagio. Este análisis concluye que las actividades que tienen una menor tasa de plagio son actividades que fomentan la participación, la originalidad y la creatividad. Posteriormente, reformulamos la tarea que presenta la mayor tasa de plagio, teniendo en cuenta las conclusiones del análisis anterior y tratando de mantener su esfuerzo relativo y el impacto educativo. A continuación, comparamos las actividades del nuevo diseño con las originales para medir si el rediseño conlleva una reducción significativa del plagio. Los resultados son claros y muestran una caída significativa en los porcentajes de plagio. Además, se realizó una validación adicional en la que se analizó la actividad con la segunda tasa de plagio más alta, encontrando que lo...
Natural Language Engineering, 2015
Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing ... more Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing the same communicative act. In Natural Language Processing, variability is a challenge. It hinders some tasks such as evaluation of generated expressions, while it constitutes an interesting resource to achieve naturalness and to avoid repetitiveness. In this work, we present a methodological approach to study the influence of lexical variability. We apply this approach to TUNA, a corpus of referring expression lexicalizations, in order to study the use of different lexical choices. First, we reannotate the TUNA corpus with new information about lexicalization, and then we analyze this reannotation to study how people lexicalize referring expressions. The results show that people tend to be consistent when generating referring expressions. But at the same time, different people also share certain preferences.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
The adequate representation of emotions in affective computing is an important problem and the st... more The adequate representation of emotions in affective computing is an important problem and the starting point of studies related to emotions. There are different approaches for representing emotions, selecting one of this existing methods depends on the purpose of the application. Another problem related to emotions is the amount of different emotional concepts which makes it very difficult to find the most specific emotion to be expressed in each situation. This paper presents a system that reasons with an ontology of emotions implemented with semantic web technologies. Each emotional concept is defined in terms of a range of values along the three-dimensional space of emotional dimensions. The capabilities for automated classification and establishing taxonomical relations between concepts are used to provide a bridge between an unrestricted input and a restricted set of concepts for which particular rules are provided. The rules applied at the end of the process provide configuration parameters for a system for emotional voice synthesis.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
... the one hand how well our process marks the tales from which we have obtained our LEW list an... more ... the one hand how well our process marks the tales from which we have obtained our LEW list and on the other hand how well our approach works with tales that have not been involved in our extraction process. The tales which take part in these tests are English popular tales ...
La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones par... more La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones para la indexación automática de documentos clínicos mediante el uso de recursos lingüísticos avanzados y de tecnologías de procesamiento del lenguaje.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2022
Making students become intrinsically motivated to participate in daily class activities is an ope... more Making students become intrinsically motivated to participate in daily class activities is an open challenge that has been addressed in different ways. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of an educational innovation project, named TrivialCV, in terms of student motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. We analyze the impact of two types of activities: multiplayer team-based competitions created for delivery during a live class session, and single player competitions created to be played asynchronously from home. We deployed these activities in two different computer engineering courses (programming fundamentals and operating systems) and used questionnaires, grades, and activity tracking in the virtual campus to evaluate their impact. After the analysis, we can assert that the use of TrivialCV activities was useful for providing additional motivation to the students and improving their engagement with the courses in which they were deployed. TrivialCV activities were very well received by the students, who considered them fun, engaging, and useful.
Novelty is a key concept to understand creativity. Evaluating a piece of artwork or other creatio... more Novelty is a key concept to understand creativity. Evaluating a piece of artwork or other creation in terms of novelty requires comparisons to other works and considerations about the elements that have been reused in the creative process. Human beings perform this analysis intuitively, but in order to simulate it using computers, the objects to be compared and the similarity metrics to be used should be formalized and explicitly implemented. In this paper we present a study on relevant elements for the assessment of novelty in computer-generated narratives. We focus on the domain of folk-tales, working with simple plots and basic narrative elements: events, characters, props and scenarios. Based on the empirical results of this study we propose a set of computational metrics for the automatic assessment of novelty. Although oriented to the implementation of our own story generation system, the measurement methodology we propose can be easily generalized to other creative systems.
Memoria final del Proyecto de Innovacion y Mejora de la Calidad Docente, #262 de la convocatoria ... more Memoria final del Proyecto de Innovacion y Mejora de la Calidad Docente, #262 de la convocatoria 2015.
Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communicatio... more Figurative language is a fundamental characteristic of elaborate forms of linguistic communication. We currently have very poor models of how figurative language may be constructed in computational terms. The overall aim is to identify possible regularities, intuitions or heuristics that may at a later stage be employed to drive a text generator that is capable of using this type of
Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized a... more Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this paper, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, i.e. language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.
In knowledge bases where concepts have associated properties, there is a large amount of comparat... more In knowledge bases where concepts have associated properties, there is a large amount of comparative information that is implicitly encoded in the values of the properties these concepts share. Although there have been previous approaches to generating riddles, none of them seem to take advantage of structured information stored in knowledge bases such as Thesaurus Rex, which organizes concepts according to the fine grained ad-hoc categories they are placed into by speakers in everyday language, along with associated properties or modifiers. Taking advantage of these shared properties, we have developed a riddle generator that creates riddles about concepts represented as common nouns. The base of these riddles are comparisons between the target concept and other entities that share some of its properties. In this paper, we describe the process we have followed to generate the riddles starting from the target concept and we show the results of the first evaluation we have carried ou...
Executive Summary In this review, we bring together conceptual representations relevant to concep... more Executive Summary In this review, we bring together conceptual representations relevant to concept creation in the scope of ConCreTe. The conceptual representations reviewed are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial, and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. These two distinctions are orthogonal. Moreover, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, i.e., language, music, image, and emotion, are reviewed separately. For each representation reviewed, we also cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation. In the end, we propose a high-level categorization of concept formation, and indicate directions of future research, as identified during this review, according to the proposed categories. Dissemination Level PU Public X PP Restricted to other pro...
Universal Access in the Information Society, 2021
Current technology provides new challenges to improve skills on people with special necessities. ... more Current technology provides new challenges to improve skills on people with special necessities. In fact, persons with communications needs can take advantage of new devices and mobile applications to interact and communicate easily and in the most straightforward way. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems are oriented to users who cannot use natural language due to temporary or permanent impairments, providing an alternative to natural language for communication. In this paper, we present design guidelines for ECO (Easy Communication Application), an AAC tool designed with a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to make functional communication easier for individuals with complex communication needs. ECO tool has two well-defined modules: the Communication User and the Communication Manager. The former is thought as an AAC tool, whilst the Communication Manager module provides a way to edit the content and fit the dynamics of use and application design to the user's interests. In addition, we present an evaluation of the ECO tool from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we have achieved a heuristic-based expert evaluation in order to analyse the functionality corresponding to the Communication Manager module of the tool, in order to check main accessibility requirements and improve functionality accordingly. On the other hand, we have evaluated both the Communication Manager and Communication User modules in a real context, carrying out a qualitative evaluation with final users and their therapists to check whether the tool is useful in concrete daily scenarios. Results corroborate research questions, demonstrating that ECO meets the most important accessibility requirements and it is highly valued by experts and end-users.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Automatic generation of linguistic artifacts is a problem that has been sporadically tackled over... more Automatic generation of linguistic artifacts is a problem that has been sporadically tackled over the years. The main goal of this paper is to explore how concept associations can be useful from a computational creativity point of view to generate some of these artifacts. We present an approach where finding associations between concepts that would not usually be considered as related (for example life and politics or diamond and concrete) could be the seed for the generation of creative and surprising linguistic artifacts such as rhetorical figures (life is like politics) and riddles (what is as hard as concrete?). Human volunteers evaluated the quality and appropriateness of the generated figures and riddles, and the results show that the concept associations obtained are useful for producing these kinds of creative artifacts.
Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2019, 2019
The design and development of computer assistive technologies must be tied to the needs and goals... more The design and development of computer assistive technologies must be tied to the needs and goals of end users and must take into account their capabilities and preferences. In this paper, we present MeDeC@, a Methodology for the Development of Computer Assistive Technologies for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which relies heavily in our experience working with end users with ASD. The aim of this methodology is not to design for a broad group of users, but to design highly customizable tools so that they can be easily adapted to specific situations and small user groups. We also present two applications developed using MeDeC@ in order to test its suitability: Emo-Traductor, a web application for emotion recognition for people with Asperger Syndrome, and ReadIt, a web browser plug-in to help people with ASD with written language understanding difficulties to navigate the Internet. The results of our evaluation with end users show that the use of MeDeC@ helps developers to successfully design computer assistive technologies taking into account the special requirements and scenarios that arise when developing this kind of assistive applications.
ACM Computing Surveys
Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized a... more Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this article, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, such as language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.
Comunicar, 2016
In this work we aim to gain a better understanding of the nature of plagiarism in Higher Educatio... more In this work we aim to gain a better understanding of the nature of plagiarism in Higher Education. We analyse a set of different activities in an online university-level course, aiming to understand which tasks lead more naturally to plagiarism. This analysis concludes that the activities that have a lower rate of plagiarism are activities that encourage involvement, originality and creativity. Subsequently, we reformulate the task that presented the highest rate of plagiarism, taking into account the conclusions of the previous analysis and trying to maintain their relative effort and educational impact. We then compare the newly designed activities with their original counterparts to measure whether there is a significant reduction in plagiarism. The results are clear and show a significant drop in the percentages of plagiarism. In addition, we performed an additional validation to ensure that both groups were, in fact comparable. We found that both groups displayed similar plagi...
Comunicar 48: Ética y plagio en la comunicación científica, Jul 1, 2016
El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender mejor la naturaleza del plagio en la Educación Superior... more El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender mejor la naturaleza del plagio en la Educación Superior. Analizamos una serie de actividades en un curso on-line de nivel universitario, con el objetivo de encontrar qué tareas llevan más naturalmente al plagio. Este análisis concluye que las actividades que tienen una menor tasa de plagio son actividades que fomentan la participación, la originalidad y la creatividad. Posteriormente, reformulamos la tarea que presenta la mayor tasa de plagio, teniendo en cuenta las conclusiones del análisis anterior y tratando de mantener su esfuerzo relativo y el impacto educativo. A continuación, comparamos las actividades del nuevo diseño con las originales para medir si el rediseño conlleva una reducción significativa del plagio. Los resultados son claros y muestran una caída significativa en los porcentajes de plagio. Además, se realizó una validación adicional en la que se analizó la actividad con la segunda tasa de plagio más alta, encontrando que lo...
Natural Language Engineering, 2015
Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing ... more Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing the same communicative act. In Natural Language Processing, variability is a challenge. It hinders some tasks such as evaluation of generated expressions, while it constitutes an interesting resource to achieve naturalness and to avoid repetitiveness. In this work, we present a methodological approach to study the influence of lexical variability. We apply this approach to TUNA, a corpus of referring expression lexicalizations, in order to study the use of different lexical choices. First, we reannotate the TUNA corpus with new information about lexicalization, and then we analyze this reannotation to study how people lexicalize referring expressions. The results show that people tend to be consistent when generating referring expressions. But at the same time, different people also share certain preferences.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
The adequate representation of emotions in affective computing is an important problem and the st... more The adequate representation of emotions in affective computing is an important problem and the starting point of studies related to emotions. There are different approaches for representing emotions, selecting one of this existing methods depends on the purpose of the application. Another problem related to emotions is the amount of different emotional concepts which makes it very difficult to find the most specific emotion to be expressed in each situation. This paper presents a system that reasons with an ontology of emotions implemented with semantic web technologies. Each emotional concept is defined in terms of a range of values along the three-dimensional space of emotional dimensions. The capabilities for automated classification and establishing taxonomical relations between concepts are used to provide a bridge between an unrestricted input and a restricted set of concepts for which particular rules are provided. The rules applied at the end of the process provide configuration parameters for a system for emotional voice synthesis.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
... the one hand how well our process marks the tales from which we have obtained our LEW list an... more ... the one hand how well our process marks the tales from which we have obtained our LEW list and on the other hand how well our approach works with tales that have not been involved in our extraction process. The tales which take part in these tests are English popular tales ...