Questioning sessions are an essential part of teachers’ daily instructional activities. Questions are used to assess students’ knowledge and comprehension and to promote learning. The manual creation of such learning material is a laborious and time-consuming task. Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has shown that Question Generation (QG) systems can be used to efficiently create high-quality learning materials to support teachers in their work and students in their learning process. A number of successful QG applications for education and training have been developed, but these focus mainly on supporting reading materials. However, digital technology is always evolving; there is an ever-growing amount of multimedia content available, and more and more delivery methods for audio-visual content are emerging and easily accessible. At the same time, research provides empirical evidence that multimedia use in the classroom has beneficial effects on student learning. Thus, there is a need to investigate whether QG systems can be used to assist teachers in creating assessment materials from these different types of media that are being employed in classrooms. This thesis serves to explore how NLP tools and techniques can be harnessed to generate questions from non-traditional learning materials, in particular videos. A QG framework which allows the generation of factual questions from video documentaries has been developed and a number of evaluations to analyse the quality of the produced questions have been performed. The developed framework uses several readily available NLP tools to generate questions from the subtitles accompanying a video documentary. The reason for choosing video vii documentaries is two-fold: firstly, they are frequently used by teachers and secondly, their factual nature lends itself well to question generation, as will be explained within the thesis. The questions generated by the framework can be used as a quick way of testing students’ comprehension of what they have learned from the documentary. As part of this research project, the characteristics of documentary videos and their subtitles were analysed and the methodology has been adapted to be able to exploit these characteristics. An evaluation of the system output by domain experts showed promising results but also revealed that generating even shallow questions is a task which is far from trivial. To this end, the evaluation and subsequent error analysis contribute to the literature by highlighting the challenges QG from documentary videos can face. In a user study, it was investigated whether questions generated automatically by the system developed as part of this thesis and a state-of-the-art system can successfully be used to assist multimedia-based learning. Using a novel evaluation methodology, the feasibility of using a QG system’s output as ‘pre-questions’ with different types of prequestions (text-based and with images) used was examined. The psychometric parameters of the automatically generated questions by the two systems and of those generated manually were compared. The results indicate that the presence of pre-questions (preferably with images) improves the performance of test-takers and they highlight that the psychometric parameters of the questions generated by the system are comparable if not better than those of the state-of-the-art system. In another experiment, the productivity of questions in terms of time taken to generate questions manually vs. time taken to post-edit system-generated questions was analysed. A viii post-editing tool which allows for the tracking of several statistics such as edit distance measures, editing time, etc, was used. The quality of questions before and after postediting was also analysed. Not only did the experiments provide quantitative data about automatically and manually generated questions, but qualitative data in the form of user feedback, which provides an insight into how users perceived the quality of questions, was also gathered.

The focus of this study is to analyze in what way the historical novel can be convincing and if the interaction between fictional and factual narration within this genre influences the degree to which it can be convincing. The three novels chosen are Les Naufragés De L’Île Tromelin by Irène Frain, Les Enfants d’Alexandrie by Françoise Chandernagor and Bison by Patrick Grainville, for which all three authors received Le Grand Prix Palatine. In the introduction are presented the general characteristics of the genre as well as its capability of being convincing, outlining that there is a possibility for a fictional work to seem more convincing than a purely factual one. Also defined are differences between the contemporary and the classical historical novel. This is done in order to take into account in the analysis what might be learnt from the contemporary historical novel. The theoretical framework consists of the semantic definitions of fictional versus factual narration as presented by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, as well as theory of how the reader’s immersive experience enables ontological crossings. What the analysis is able to show is that all three novels include four types of truth claims, that the reader can be convinced of all four and that this conviction is connected to the context to which the reader associates the historical/literary character. The analysis also brings forth what can be thought of as the historiographical pact, a term analogous with Philippe Lejeune’s term ‘the autobiographical pact’, which establishes a referential link with history. What is in the end considered the most convincing literary device is the inclusion of factual markers referencing real-world sources. In all three novels, it is also possibly to identify truth claims concerning human nature.

In order to find out why energy-not-supplied in Norway - the most important indicator for the quality of service in the quality-regulation regime there - decreased more pronounced before the introduction of quality-regulation in 2001 than after it, we develop a dynamic quality-DEA-model and apply it to a representative sample of distribution-net operators. Our model enables us to calculate a counter-factual and thus to tentatively answer the question: What would have happened, had there been no quality-regulation? This way we find strong evidence that the quality-regulation in Norway did not have an effect on the behavior of the firms. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers / Research Institute for Regulatory Economics

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2004. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

The submitted master's thesis focuses on issues of fiction. First, it pursues the competing definitions of the term itself in order to define it as non-referential sign afterwards. In chapters two to four it presents and comments three traditional approaches to fiction formal, semantic and pragmatic. In chapter five, which is the largest one of the entire work, it addresses in the writings of theorists who largely try to move around the presumed border between fictional and factual narration, usually represented by historiographical works. And finally in chapter six it deals with insights brought to the traditional theories of fiction by two versions of relatively new discipline the simulation theory.

Action for protection against unlawful interference Abstract This thesis deals with the topic of protection against unlawful interference, instruction or coercion of an administrative authority pursuant to Section 85 et seq. of Act No. 150/2002 Coll., Administrative Procedure Code. The first chapter defines the key elements of a factual intervention as one of the forms of public administration activities, doing so primarily by theoretical comparison with an administrative decision. The chosen approach is primarily guided by the negative definition of factual intervention by an administrative authority contained in Section 85 of the Administrative Procedure Code, which contraposes it with an administrative decision. The first chapter also includes an in-depth analysis of three model examples representing atypical forms of public administration activity, against which, based on the conclusions of court practice, an action for interference may be brought. The second chapter discusses the position of an action for interference within the three basic types of administrative actions, and its relationship to an action against a decision and an action against the inaction of an administrative authority. It also does so on the basis of an analysis of the judicial interpretation of the concept of an administrative...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students' achievement level and the validity of students' self-assessments in the course social studies. The students were divided into two achievement groups, low-achiever and high-achiever. Low achievers were students with the grade F-D in the subject of social science and high achievers were students with the grade C-A in the subject of social science. The students had to do a test which they then had to self-assess. The questions on the test were divided into three abilities; factual knowledge, understanding and skill. The students did three self-assessments, one for each ability. The study found that there is a positive correlation between the students' level of achievement and the validity of the self-assessments. This was in line with previous research (Yao-Ting, 2010). The low achieving students overestimated an average of 0.7 grade points compared to the high achievers who overestimated an average of 0.3. The study saw a certain difference in the validity of self-assessments depending on ability, factual knowledge was the ability that the students overestimated themselves most.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students'achievement level and the validity of students' self-assessments in the coursesocial studies. The students were divided into two achievement groups,low-achiever and high-achiever. Low achievers were students with the grade F-Din the subject of social science and high achievers were students with the gradeC-A in the subject of social science. The students had to do a test which they thenhad to self-assess. The questions on the test were divided into three abilities;factual knowledge, understanding and skill. The students did threeself-assessments, one for each ability. The study found that there is a positivecorrelation between the students' level of achievement and the validity of theself-assessments. This was in line with previous research (Yao-Ting, 2010). Thelow achieving students overestimated an average of 0.7 grade points compared tothe high achievers who overestimated an average of 0.3. The study saw a certaindifference in the validity of self-assessments depending on ability, factualknowledge was the ability that the students overestimated themselves most.

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