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Finite state methods for natural language processing often require the construction and the intersection of several automata. In this paper, we investigate the question of determining the best order in which these intersections should be performed. We take as an example lexical disambiguation in polarity grammars. We show that there is no efficient way to minimize the state complexity of these intersections.
We present an algorithm that computes a function that assigns consecutive integers to trees recognized by a deterministic, acyclic, finite-state, bottom-up tree automaton. Such function is called minimal perfect hashing. It can be used to identify trees recognized by the automaton. Its value may be seen as an index in some other data structures. We also present an algorithm for inverted hashing.
In this work an extension of CSSR algorithm using Maximum Entropy Models is introduced. Preliminary experiments to perform Named Entity Recognition with this new system are presented.
We introduce and discuss a number of issues that arise in the process of building a finite-state morphological analyzer for Urdu, in particular issues with potential ambiguity and non-concatenative morphology. Our approach allows for an underlyingly similar treatment of both Urdu and Hindi via a cascade of finite-state transducers that transliterates the very different scripts into a common ASCII transcription system. As this transliteration system is based on the XFST tools that the Urdu/Hindi common morphological analyzer is also implemented in, no compatibility problems arise.
Nested complementation plays an important role in expressing counter- i.e. star-free and first-order definable languages and their hierarchies. In addition, methods that compile phonological rules into finite-state networks use double-nested complementation or “double negation”. This paper reviews how the double-nested complementation extends to a relatively new operation, generalized restriction (GR), coined by the author (Yli-Jyrä and Koskenniemi 2004). This operation encapsulates a double-nested complementation and elimination of a concatenation marker, diamond, whose finite occurrences align concatenations in the arguments of the operation. The paper demonstrates that the GR operation has an interesting potential in expressing regular languages, various kinds of grammars, bimorphisms and relations. This motivates a further study of optimized implementation of the operator.
This article describes a HMM-based word-alignment method that can selectively enforce a contiguity constraint. This method has a direct application in the extraction of a bilingual terminological lexicon from a parallel corpus, but can also be used as a preliminary step for the extraction of phrase pairs in a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation system. Contiguous source words composing terms are aligned to contiguous target language words. The HMM is transformed into a Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST) and contiguity constraints are enforced by specific multi-tape WFSTs. The proposed method is especially suited when basic linguistic resources (morphological analyzer, part-of-speech taggers and term extractors) are available for the source language only.
Generalized Two-Level Grammar (GTWOL) provides a new method for compilation of parallel replacement rules into transducers. The current paper identifies the role of generalized lenient composition (GLC) in this method. Thanks to the GLC operation, the compilation method becomes bipartite and easily extendible to capture various application modes. In the light of three notions of obligatoriness, a modification to the compilation method is proposed. We argue that the bipartite design makes implementation of parallel obligatoriness, directionality, length and rank based application modes extremely easy, which is the main result of the paper.
Morphological analyses based on word syntax approaches can encounter difficulties with long distance dependencies. The reason is that in some cases an affix has to have access to the inner structure of the form with which it combines. One solution is the percolation of features from ther inner morphemes to the outer morphemes with some process of feature unification. However, the obstacle of percolation constraints or stipulated features has lead some linguists to argue in favour of other frameworks such as, e.g., realizational morphology or parallel approaches like optimality theory. This paper proposes a linguistic analysis of two long distance dependencies in the morphology of Russian verbs, namely secondary imperfectivization and deverbal nominalization.We show how these processes can be reanalysed as local dependencies. Although finitestate frameworks are not bound by such linguistically motivated considerations, we present an implementation of our analysis as proposed in [1] that does not complicate the grammar or enlarge the network unproportionally.
This paper presents a system for the detection and correction of syntactic errors. It combines a robust morphosyntactic analyser and two groups of finite-state transducers specified using the Xerox Finite State Tool (xfst). One of the groups is used for the description of syntactic error patterns while the second one is used for the correction of the detected errors. The system has been tested on a corpus of real texts, containing both correct and incorrect sentences, with good results.
Temporal propositions are mapped to sets of strings that witness (in a precise sense) the propositions over discrete linear Kripke frames. The strings are collected into regular languages to ensure the decidability of entailments given by inclusions between languages. (Various notions of bounded entailment are shown to be expressible as language inclusions.) The languages unwind computations implicit in the logical (and temporal) connectives via a system of finite-state constraints adapted from finite-state morphology. Applications to Hybrid Logic and non-monotonic inertial reasoning are briefly considered.
This paper describes the key aspects of the system SynCoP (Syntactic Constraint Parser) developed at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The parser allows to combine syntactic tagging and chunking by means of constraint grammar using weighted finite state transducers (WFST). Chunks are interpreted as local dependency structures within syntactic tagging. The linguistic theories are formulated by criteria which are formalized by a semiring; these criteria allow structural preferences and gradual grammaticality. The parser is essentially a cascade of WFSTs. To find the most likely syntactic readings a best-path search is used.
In this paper, we present a finite-state approach to constituency and therewith an analysis of coordination phenomena involving so-called non-constituents. We show that non-constituents can be seen as parts of fully-fledged constituents and therefore be coordinated in the same way. We have implemented an algorithm based on finite state automata that generates an LFG grammar assigning valid analyses to non-constituent coordination structures in the German language.
In the last years, statistical machine translation has already demonstrated its usefulness within a wide variety of translation applications. In this line, phrase-based alignment models have become the reference to follow in order to build competitive systems. Finite state models are always an interesting framework because there are well-known efficient algorithms for their representation and manipulation. This document is a contribution to the evolution of finite state models towards a phrase-based approach. The inference of stochastic transducers that are based on bilingual phrases is carefully analysed from a finite state point of view. Indeed, the algorithmic phenomena that have to be taken into account in order to deal with such phrase-based finite state models when in decoding time are also in-depth detailed.
A multitype Dawson-Watanabe process is conditioned, in subcritical and critical cases, on non-extinction in the remote future. On every finite time interval, its distribution is absolutely continuous with respect to the law of the unconditioned process. A martingale problem characterization is also given. Several results on the long time behavior of the conditioned mass process - the conditioned multitype Feller branching diffusion - are then proved. The general case is first considered, where the mutation matrix which models the interaction between the types, is irreducible. Several two-type models with decomposable mutation matrices are analyzed too .
Small livestock is an important resource for rural human populations in dry climates. How strongly will climate change affect the capacity of the rangeland? We used hierarchical modelling to scale quantitatively the growth of shrubs and annual plants, the main food of sheep and goats, to the landscape extent in the eastern Mediterranean region. Without grazing, productivity increased in a sigmoid way with mean annual precipitation. Grazing reduced productivity more strongly the drier the landscape. At a point just under the stocking capacity of the vegetation, productivity declined precipitously with more intense grazing due to a lack of seed production of annuals. We repeated simulations with precipitation patterns projected by two contrasting IPCC scenarios. Compared to results based on historic patterns, productivity and stocking capacity did not differ in most cases. Thus, grazing intensity remains the stronger impact on landscape productivity in this dry region even in the future.
Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus
(2008)
The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.
The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) with a novel preview manipulation was used to examine the extent of parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. Words n+1 and n+2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation (prior to crossing the boundary location). In addition, the manipulation utilized either a high or low frequency word in word n+1 location on the assumption that it would be more likely that n+2 preview effects could be obtained when word n+1 was high frequency. The primary findings were that there was no evidence for a preview benefit for word n+2 and no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects when word n+1 is at least four letters long. We discuss implications for models of eye-movement control in reading.
Microsaccades are very small, involuntary flicks in eye position that occur on average once or twice per second during attempted visual fixation. Microsaccades give rise to EMG eye muscle spikes that can distort the spectrum of the scalp EEG and mimic increases in gamma band power. Here we demonstrate that microsaccades are also accompanied by genuine and sizeable cortical activity, manifested in the EEG. In three experiments, high-resolution eye movements were corecorded with the EEG: during sustained fixation of checkerboard and face stimuli and in a standard visual oddball task that required the counting of target stimuli. Results show that microsaccades as small as 0.15° generate a field potential over occipital cortex and midcentral scalp sites 100 –140 ms after movement onset, which resembles the visual lambda response evoked by larger voluntary saccades. This challenges the standard assumption of human brain imaging studies that saccade-related brain activity is precluded by fixation, even when fully complied with. Instead, additional cortical potentials from microsaccades were present in 86% of the oddball task trials and of similar amplitude as the visual response to stimulus onset. Furthermore, microsaccade probability varied systematically according to the proportion of target stimuli in the oddball task, causing modulations of late stimulus-locked event-related potential (ERP) components. Microsaccades present an unrecognized source of visual brain signal that is of interest for vision research and may have influenced the data of many ERP and neuroimaging studies.
We examined individual differences in masked repetition priming by re-analyzing item-level response-time (RT) data from three experiments. Using a linear mixed model (LMM) with subjects and items specified as crossed random factors, the originally reported priming and word-frequency effects were recovered. In the same LMM, we estimated parameters describing the distributions of these effects across subjects. Subjects’ frequency and priming effects correlated positively with each other and negatively with mean RT. These correlation estimates, however, emerged only with a reciprocal transformation of RT (i.e., -1/RT), justified on the basis of distributional analyses. Different correlations, some with opposite sign, were obtained (1) for untransformed or logarithmic RTs or (2) when correlations were computed using within-subject analyses. We discuss the relevance of the new results for accounts of masked priming, implications of applying RT transformations, and the use of LMMs as a tool for the joint analysis of experimental effects and associated individual differences.
It has recently been demonstrated that the presentation of a rare target in a visual oddball paradigm induces a prolonged inhibition of microsaccades. In the field of electrophysiology, the amplitude of the P300 component in event-related potentials (ERP) has been shown to be sensitive to the stimulus category (target vs. non target) of the eliciting stimulus, its overall probability, and the preceding stimulus sequence. In the present study we further specify the functional underpinnings of the prolonged microsaccadic inhibition in the visual oddball task, showing that the stimulus category, the frequency of a stimulus and the preceding stimulus sequence influence microsaccade rate. Furthermore, by co-recording ERPs and eye-movements, we were able to demonstrate that, despite being largely sensitive to the same experimental manipulation, the amplitude of P300 and the microsaccadic inhibition predict each other very weakly, and thus constitute two independent measures of the brain’s response to rare targets in the visual oddball paradigm.
Abstract interpretation-based model checking provides an approach to verifying properties of infinite-state systems. In practice, most previous work on abstract model checking is either restricted to verifying universal properties, or develops special techniques for temporal logics such as modal transition systems or other dual transition systems. By contrast we apply completely standard techniques for constructing abstract interpretations to the abstraction of a CTL semantic function, without restricting the kind of properties that can be verified. Furthermore we show that this leads directly to implementation of abstract model checking algorithms for abstract domains based on constraints, making use of an SMT solver.
A deterministic cycle scheduling of partitions at the operating system level is supposed for a multiprocessor system. In this paper, we propose a tool for generating such schedules. We use constraint based programming and develop methods and concepts for a combined interactive and automatic partition scheduling system. This paper is also devoted to basic methods and techniques for modeling and solving this partition scheduling problem. Initial application of our partition scheduling tool has proved successful and demonstrated the suitability of the methods used.
A constraint programming system combines two essential components: a constraint solver and a search engine. The constraint solver reasons about satisfiability of conjunctions of constraints, and the search engine controls the search for solutions by iteratively exploring a disjunctive search tree defined by the constraint program. The Monadic Constraint Programming framework gives a monadic definition of constraint programming where the solver is defined as a monad threaded through the monadic search tree. Search and search strategies can then be defined as firstclass objects that can themselves be built or extended by composable search transformers. Search transformers give a powerful and unifying approach to viewing search in constraint programming, and the resulting constraint programming system is first class and extremely flexible.
The interest in extensions of the logic programming paradigm beyond the class of normal logic programs is motivated by the need of an adequate representation and processing of knowledge. One of the most difficult problems in this area is to find an adequate declarative semantics for logic programs. In the present paper a general preference criterion is proposed that selects the ‘intended’ partial models of generalized logic programs which is a conservative extension of the stationary semantics for normal logic programs of [Prz91]. The presented preference criterion defines a partial model of a generalized logic program as intended if it is generated by a stationary chain. It turns out that the stationary generated models coincide with the stationary models on the class of normal logic programs. The general wellfounded semantics of such a program is defined as the set-theoretical intersection of its stationary generated models. For normal logic programs the general wellfounded semantics equals the wellfounded semantics.
Different properties of programs, implemented in Constraint Handling Rules (CHR), have already been investigated. Proving these properties in CHR is fairly simpler than proving them in any type of imperative programming language, which triggered the proposal of a methodology to map imperative programs into equivalent CHR. The equivalence of both programs implies that if a property is satisfied for one, then it is satisfied for the other. The mapping methodology could be put to other beneficial uses. One such use is the automatic generation of global constraints, at an attempt to demonstrate the benefits of having a rule-based implementation for constraint solvers.
In the most abstract definition of its operational semantics, the declarative and concurrent programming language CHR is trivially non-terminating for a significant class of programs. Common refinements of this definition, in closing the gap to real-world implementations, compromise on declarativity and/or concurrency. Building on recent work and the notion of persistent constraints, we introduce an operational semantics avoiding trivial non-termination without compromising on its essential features.
We present the tool Kato which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first tool for plagiarism detection that is directly tailored for answer-set programming (ASP). Kato aims at finding similarities between (segments of) logic programs to help detecting cases of plagiarism. Currently, the tool is realised for DLV programs but it is designed to handle various logic-programming syntax versions. We review basic features and the underlying methodology of the tool.
In this talk, I would like to share my experiences gained from participating in four CSP solver competitions and the second ASP solver competition. In particular, I’ll talk about how various programming techniques can make huge differences in solving some of the benchmark problems used in the competitions. These techniques include global constraints, table constraints, and problem-specific propagators and labeling strategies for selecting variables and values. I’ll present these techniques with experimental results from B-Prolog and other CLP(FD) systems.
We describe a framework to support the implementation of web-based systems to manipulate data stored in relational databases. Since the conceptual model of a relational database is often specified as an entity-relationship (ER) model, we propose to use the ER model to generate a complete implementation in the declarative programming language Curry. This implementation contains operations to create and manipulate entities of the data model, supports authentication, authorization, session handling, and the composition of individual operations to user processes. Furthermore and most important, the implementation ensures the consistency of the database w.r.t. the data dependencies specified in the ER model, i.e., updates initiated by the user cannot lead to an inconsistent state of the database. In order to generate a high-level declarative implementation that can be easily adapted to individual customer requirements, the framework exploits previous works on declarative database programming and web user interface construction in Curry.
Preface
(2010)
The workshops on (constraint) logic programming (WLP) are the annual meeting of the Society of Logic Programming (GLP e.V.) and bring together researchers interested in logic programming, constraint programming, and related areas like databases, artificial intelligence and operations research. In this decade, previous workshops took place in Dresden (2008), Würzburg (2007), Vienna (2006), Ulm (2005), Potsdam (2004), Dresden (2002), Kiel (2001), and Würzburg (2000). Contributions to workshops deal with all theoretical, experimental, and application aspects of constraint programming (CP) and logic programming (LP), including foundations of constraint/ logic programming. Some of the special topics are constraint solving and optimization, extensions of functional logic programming, deductive databases, data mining, nonmonotonic reasoning, , interaction of CP/LP with other formalisms like agents, XML, JAVA, program analysis, program transformation, program verification, meta programming, parallelism and concurrency, answer set programming, implementation and software techniques (e.g., types, modularity, design patterns), applications (e.g., in production, environment, education, internet), constraint/logic programming for semantic web systems and applications, reasoning on the semantic web, data modelling for the web, semistructured data, and web query languages.
In this paper we consider a simple syntactic extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) for dealing with (nested) existential quantifiers and double negation in the rule bodies, in a close way to the recent proposal RASPL-1. The semantics for this extension just resorts to Equilibrium Logic (or, equivalently, to the General Theory of Stable Models), which provides a logic-programming interpretation for any arbitrary theory in the syntax of Predicate Calculus. We present a translation of this syntactic class into standard logic programs with variables (either disjunctive or normal, depending on the input rule heads), as those allowed by current ASP solvers. The translation relies on the introduction of auxiliary predicates and the main result shows that it preserves strong equivalence modulo the original signature.
We propose a paraconsistent declarative semantics of possibly inconsistent generalized logic programs which allows for arbitrary formulas in the body and in the head of a rule (i.e. does not depend on the presence of any specific connective, such as negation(-as-failure), nor on any specific syntax of rules). For consistent generalized logic programs this semantics coincides with the stable generated models introduced in [HW97], and for normal logic programs it yields the stable models in the sense of [GL88].
A wide range of additional forward chaining applications could be realized with deductive databases, if their rule formalism, their immediate consequence operator, and their fixpoint iteration process would be more flexible. Deductive databases normally represent knowledge using stratified Datalog programs with default negation. But many practical applications of forward chaining require an extensible set of user–defined built–in predicates. Moreover, they often need function symbols for building complex data structures, and the stratified fixpoint iteration has to be extended by aggregation operations. We present an new language Datalog*, which extends Datalog by stratified meta–predicates (including default negation), function symbols, and user–defined built–in predicates, which are implemented and evaluated top–down in Prolog. All predicates are subject to the same backtracking mechanism. The bottom–up fixpoint iteration can aggregate the derived facts after each iteration based on user–defined Prolog predicates.
Deductive databases need general formulas in rule bodies, not only conjuctions of literals. This is well known since the work of Lloyd and Topor about extended logic programming. Of course, formulas must be restricted in such a way that they can be effectively evaluated in finite time, and produce only a finite number of new tuples (in each iteration of the TP-operator: the fixpoint can still be infinite). It is also necessary to respect binding restrictions of built-in predicates: many of these predicates can be executed only when certain arguments are ground. Whereas for standard logic programming rules, questions of safety, allowedness, and range-restriction are relatively easy and well understood, the situation for general formulas is a bit more complicated. We give a syntactic analysis of formulas that guarantees the necessary properties.
Parafoveal Load of Word N+1 Modulates Preprocessing Effectivenessof Word N+2 in Chinese Reading
(2010)
Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N+2)and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N+2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N+1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N+2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N+1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N+1 and PB for word N+2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N+1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.
We introduce a simple approach extending the input language of Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems by multi-valued propositions. Our approach is implemented as a (prototypical) preprocessor translating logic programs with multi-valued propositions into logic programs with Boolean propositions only. Our translation is modular and heavily benefits from the expressive input language of ASP. The resulting approach, along with its implementation, allows for solving interesting constraint satisfaction problems in ASP, showing a good performance.
The use of nano zerovalent iron (nZVI) for environmental remediation is a promising new technique for in situ remediation. Due to its high surface area and high reactivity, nZVI is able to dechlorinate organic contaminants and render them harmless. Limited mobility, due to fast aggregation and sedimentation of nZVI, limits the capability for source and plume remediation. Carbo-Iron is a newly developed material consisting of activated carbon particles (d50 = 0,8 µm) that are plated with nZVI particles. These particles combine the mobility of activated carbon and the reactivity of nZVI. This paper presents the first results of the transport experiments.
There has been a substantial increase in the percentage for publications with co-authors located in departments from different countries in 12 major journals of psychology. The results are evidence for a remarkable internationalization of psychological research, starting in the mid 1970s and increasing in rate at the beginning of the 1990s. This growth occurs against a constant number of articles with authors from the same country; it is not due to a concomitant increase in the number of co-authors per article. Thus, international collaboration in psychology is obviously on the rise.
Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers’ eyefixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
A method is presented of acquiring the principles of three sorting algorithms through developing interactive applications in Excel.
Problem solving is one of the central activities performed by computer scientists as well as by computer science learners. Whereas the teaching of algorithms and programming languages is usually well structured within a curriculum, the development of learners’ problem-solving skills is largely implicit and less structured. Students at all levels often face difficulties in problem analysis and solution construction. The basic assumption of the workshop is that without some formal instruction on effective strategies, even the most inventive learner may resort to unproductive trial-and-error problemsolving processes. Hence, it is important to teach problem-solving strategies and to guide teachers on how to teach their pupils this cognitive tool. Computer science educators should be aware of the difficulties and acquire appropriate pedagogical tools to help their learners gain and experience problem-solving skills.
.NET Gadgeteer Workshop
(2013)
The challenge is providing teachers with the resources they need to strengthen their instructions and better prepare students for the jobs of the 21st Century. Technology can help meet the challenge. Teachers’ Tryscience is a noncommercial offer, developed by the New York Hall of Science, TeachEngineering, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and IBM Citizenship to provide teachers with such resources. The workshop provides deeper insight into this tool and discussion of how to support teaching of informatics in schools.
The aim of our article is to collect and present information about contemporary programming environments that are suitable for primary education. We studied the ways they implement (or do not implement) some programming concepts, the ways programs are represented and built in order to support young and novice programmers, as well as their suitability to allow different forms of sharing the results of pupils’ work. We present not only a short description of each considered environment and the taxonomy in the form of a table, but also our understanding and opinions on how and why the environments implement the same concepts and ideas in different ways and which concepts and ideas seem to be important to the creators of such environments.
A comparison of current trends within computer science teaching in school in Germany and the UK
(2013)
In the last two years, CS as a school subject has gained a lot of attention worldwide, although different countries have differing approaches to and experiences of introducing CS in schools. This paper reports on a study comparing current trends in CS at school, with a major focus on two countries, Germany and UK. A survey was carried out of a number of teaching professionals and experts from the UK and Germany with regard to the content and delivery of CS in school. An analysis of the quantitative data reveals a difference in foci in the two countries; putting this into the context of curricular developments we are able to offer interpretations of these trends and suggest ways in which curricula in CS at school should be moving forward.
This article is a summary of the work carried out by the Ministry of Education in Turkey, in terms of the development of a new ICT Curriculum, together with the e-Training of teachers who will play an important role in the forthcoming pilot study. Based on recent literature on the topic, the article starts by introducing the “F@tih Project”, a national project that aims to effectively integrate technology into schools. After assessing teachers’ and students’ ICT competencies, as defined internationally, the review continues with the proposed model for the e-training of teachers. Summarizing the process of development of the new ICT curriculum, researchers underline key points of the curriculum such as dimensions, levels and competencies. Then teachers’ e-training approaches, together with selected tools, are explained in line with the importance and stages of action research that will be used throughout the pilot implementation of the curriculum and e-training process.
Japan launched the new Course of Study in April 2012, which has been carried out in elementary schools and junior high schools. It will also be implemented in senior high schools from April 2013. This article presents an overview of the information studies education in the new Course of Study for K-12. Besides, the authors point out what role experts of informatics and information studies education should play in the general education centered around information studies that is meant to help people of the nation to lead an active, powerful, and flexible life until the satisfying end.
The traditional purpose of algorithm in education is to prepare students for programming. In our effort to introduce the practically missing computing science into Czech general secondary education, we have revisited this purpose.We propose an approach, which is in better accordance with the goals of general secondary education in Czechia. The importance of programming is diminishing, while recognition of algorithmic procedures and precise (yet concise) communication of algorithms is gaining importance. This includes expressing algorithms in natural language, which is more useful for most of the students than programming. We propose criteria to evaluate such descriptions. Finally, an idea about the limitations is required (inefficient algorithms, unsolvable problems, Turing’s test). We describe these adjusted educational goals and an outline of the resulting course. Our experience with carrying out the proposed intentions is satisfactory, although we did not accomplish all the defined goals.