CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences

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Browsing CRACS - Indexed Articles in Conferences by Author "5125"
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    An architecture for the rapid development of XML-based web applications
    ( 2009) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    Our research goal is the generation of working web applications from high level specifications. Based on our experience in using XML transformations for that purpose, we applied this approach to the rapid development of database management applications. The result is an architecture that defines of a web application as a set of XML transformations, and generates these transformations using second order transformations from a database schema. We used the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern to assign different roles to transformations, and defined a pipeline of transformations to process an HTTP request. The definition of these transformations is based on a correspondence between data-oriented XML Schema definitions and the Entity-Relationship model. Using this correspondence we were able produce transformations that implement database operations, forms interfaces generators and application controllers, as well as the second order transformations that produce all of them. This paper includes also a description of a RAD system following this architecture that allowed us to perform a critical evaluation of this proposal.
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    Asura: A Game-Based Assessment Environment for Mooshak (Short Paper)
    ( 2018) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6251
    Learning to program is hard. Students need to remain motivated to keep practicing and to overcome their difficulties. Several approaches have been proposed to foster students’ motivation. As most people enjoy playing games of some kind and play on a regular basis, the use of games is one of the most widely spread approaches. However, taking full advantage of games to teach specific concepts of programming requires much effort. This paper presents Asura, a game-based assessment environment built on top of Mooshak that challenges students to code Software Agents (SAs) to play a game, allowing them to test the SAs against each others’ SAs and watch a movie of the test. Once the challenge development stage ends, teachers are able to organize game-like tournaments among SAs. One of the key features of Asura is that it provides a means to reduce the required effort of building game-based challenges up to that of creating traditional programming exercises. © José Carlos Paiva and José Paulo Leal.
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    Authoring Game-Based Programming Challenges to Improve Students’ Motivation
    ( 2020) José Paulo Leal ; José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 6251 ; 5695
    One of the great challenges in programming education is to keep students motivated while working on their programming assignments. Of the techniques proposed in the literature to engage students, gamification is arguably the most widely spread and effective method. Nevertheless, gamification is not a panacea and can be harmful to students. Challenges comprising intrinsic motivators of games, such as graphical feedback and game-thinking, are more prone to have longterm positive effects on students, but those are typically complex to create or adapt to slightly distinct contexts. This paper presents Asura, a game-based programming assessment environment providing means to minimize the hurdle of building game challenges. These challenges invite the student to code a Software Agent to solve a certain problem, in a way that can defeat every opponent. Moreover, the experiment conducted to assess the difficulty of authoring Asura challenges is described. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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    Automated Assessment in Computer Science: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature
    ( 2022) José Paulo Leal ; Álvaro Figueira ; 5125 ; 5088
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    Automated Assessment of Simple Web Applications (Short Paper)
    ( 2023) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    Web programming education is an important component of modern computer science curricula. Assessing students’ web programming skills can be time-consuming and challenging for educators. This paper introduces Webpal, an automated assessment tool for web programming exercises in entry-level courses. Webpal evaluates web applications coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and provides feedback to students. This tool integrates with Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) through an API, allowing the creation, storage, and access to exercises while assessing student attempts based on the created exercises. The evaluation process comprises various subcomponents: static assessment, interface matching, functional testing, and feedback management. This approach aims to provide feedback that helps students overcome their challenges in web programming assignments. This paper also presents a demo showcasing the tool’s features and functionality in a simulated VLE environment. © Luís Maia Costa, José Paulo Leal, and Ricardo Queirós; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0.
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    Automatic Generation and Delivery of Multiple-Choice Math Quizzes
    ( 2013) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    We present an application of constraint logic programming to create multiple-choice questions for math quizzes. Constraints are used for the configuration of the generator, giving the user some flexibility to customize the forms of the expressions arising in the exercises. Constraints are also used to control the application of the buggy rules in the derivation of plausible wrong solutions to the quiz questions. We developed a prototype based on the core system of AGILMAT [18]. For delivering math quizzes to students, we used an automatic evaluation feature of Mooshak [8] that was improved to handle math expressions. The communication between the two systems - AgilmatQuiz and Mooshak - relies on a specially designed LATEX based quiz format. This tool is being used at our institution to create quizzes to support assessment in a PreCalculus course for first year undergraduate students.
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    Can a Content Management System Provide a Good User Experience to Teachers? (Short Paper)
    ( 2023) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    The paper discusses an ongoing project that aims to enhance the UX of teachers while using e-learning systems. Specifically, the project focuses on developing the teacher’s user interface (UI) for Agni, a web-based code playground for learning JavaScript. The goal is to design an intuitive UI with valuable features that will encourage more teachers to use the system. To achieve this goal, the paper explores the use of a headless Content Management System (CMS) called Strapi. The primary research question the paper seeks to answer is whether a headless CMS, specifically Strapi, can provide a good UX to teachers. A usability evaluation of the built-in Strapi UI for content creation and management reveals it to be generally consistent and user-friendly but challenging and unintuitive to create courses with programming exercises. As a result, the decision was made to develop a new teacher’s UI based on the existing Agni UI for students in an editable version. Once the development is complete, a new usability evaluation of the fully developed teacher’s UI will be conducted with the Strapi UI evaluation as a baseline for comparison. © Yannik Bauer, José Paulo Leal, and Ricardo Queirós; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0.
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    Challenges in Computing Semantic Relatedness for Large Semantic Graphs
    ( 2014) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    The research presented in this paper is part of an ongoing work to define semantic relatedness measures to any given semantic graph. These measures are based on a prior definition of a family of proximity algorithms that computes the semantic relatedness between pairs of concepts, and are parametrized by a semantic graph and a set of weighted properties. The distinctive feature of the proximity algorithms is that they consider all paths connecting two concepts in the semantic graph. These parameters must be tuned in order to maximize the quality of the semantic measure against a benchmark data set. From a previous work, the process of tuning the weight assignment is already developed and relies on a genetic algorithm. The weight tuning process, using all the properties in the semantic graph, was validated using WordNet 2.0 and the data set WordSim-353. The quality of the obtained semantic measure is better than those in the literature. However, this approach did not produce equally good results in larger semantic graphs such as WordNet 3.0, DBPedia and Freebase. This was in part due to the size of these graphs. The current approach is to select a sub-graph of the original semantic graph, small enough to enable processing and large enough to include all the relevant paths. This paper provides an overview of the ongoing work and presents a strategy to overcome the challenges raise by large semantic graphs.
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    Comparing and Benchmarking Semantic Measures Using SMComp
    ( 2016) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    The goal of the semantic measures is to compare pairs of concepts, words, sentences or named entities. Their categorization depends on what they measure. If a measure only considers taxonomy relationships is a similarity measure; if it considers all type of relationships it is a relatedness measure. The evaluation process of these measures usually relies on semantic gold standards. These datasets, with several pairs of words with a rating assigned by persons, are used to assess how well a semantic measure performs. There are a few frameworks that provide tools to compute and analyze several well-known measures. This paper presents a novel tool - SMComp - a testbed designed for path-based semantic measures. At its current state, it is a domain-specific tool using three different versions of WordNet. SMComp has two views: one to compute semantic measures of a pair of words and another to assess a semantic measure using a dataset. On the first view, it offers several measures described in the literature as well as the possibility of creating a new measure, by introducing Java code snippets on the GUI. The other view offers a large set of semantic benchmarks to use in the assessment process. It also offers the possibility of uploading a custom dataset to be used in the assessment. © Teresa Costa and José Paulo Leal;licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY.
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    Computing Semantic Relatedness using DBPedia
    ( 2012) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    Extracting the semantic relatedness of terms is an important topic in several areas, including data mining, information retrieval and web recommendation. This paper presents an approach for computing the semantic relatedness of terms using the knowledge base of DBpedia - a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia. Several approaches to extract semantic relatedness from Wikipedia using bag-of-words vector models are already available in the literature. The research presented in this paper explores a novel approach using paths on an ontological graph extracted from DBpedia. It is based on an algorithm for finding and weighting a collection of paths connecting concept nodes. This algorithm was implemented on a tool called Shakti that extract relevant ontological data for a given domain from DBpedia using its SPARQL endpoint. To validate the proposed approach Shakti was used to recommend web pages on a Portuguese social site related to alternative music and the results of that experiment are reported in this paper.
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    CrimsonHex: A Service Oriented Repository of Specialised Learning Objects
    ( 2009) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    The corner stone of the interoperability of eLearning systems is the standard definition of learning objects. Nevertheless, for some domains this standard is insufficient to fully describe all the assets, especially when they are used as input for other eLearning services. On the other hand, a standard definition of learning objects in not enough to ensure interoperability among eLearning systems; they must also use a standard API to exchange learning objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. This repository is fully compliant with the existing interoperability standards and supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains. We illustrate this feature with the definition of programming problems as learning objects and its validation by the repository. This repository is also prepared to store usage data on learning objects to tailor the presentation order and adapt it to learner profiles.
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    CrimsonHex: A Service Oriented Repository of Specialised Learning Objects
    ( 2009) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    The corner stone of the interoperability of eLearning systems is the standard definition of learning objects. Nevertheless, for some domains this standard is insufficient to fully describe all the assets, especially when they are used as input for other eLearning services. On the other hand, a standard definition of learning objects in not enough to ensure interoperability among eLearning systems; they must also use a standard API to exchange learning objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. This repository is fully compliant with the existing interoperability standards and supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains. We illustrate this feature with the definition of programming problems as learning objects and its validation by the repository. This repository is also prepared to store usage data on learning objects to tailor the presentation order and adapt it to learner profiles.
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    DAOLOT: A Semantic Browser
    ( 2020) José Paulo Leal ; André Fernandes Santos ; 5125 ; 7076
    The goal of the Semantic Web is to allow the software agents around us and AIs to extract information from the Internet as easily as humans do. This semantic web is a network of connected graphs, where relations between concepts and entities make up a layout that is very easy for machines to navigate. At the moment, there are only a few tools that enable humans to navigate this new layer of the Internet, and those that exist are for the most part very specialized tools that require from the user a lot of pre-existing knowledge about the technologies behind this structure. In this article we report on the development of DAOLOT, a search engine that allows users with no previous knowledge of the semantic web to take full advantage of its information network. This paper presents its design, the algorithm behind it and the results of the validation testing conducted with users. The results of our validation testing show that DAOLOT is useful and intuitive to users, even those without any previous knowledge of the field, and provides curated information from multiple sources instantly about any topic.
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    Defining Requirements for a Gamified Programming Exercises Format
    ( 2019) José Carlos Paiva ; Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 6251 ; 5695 ; 5125
    Computer programming is a complex domain both to teach and learn. This incited endeavors to find methods that could mitigate at least some of the existing barriers. In the last years, automatic assessment has been playing an important role in reducing the burden of teachers in the assessment of students' attempts to solve programming exercises and fostering the autonomy of students by allowing them to practice in any place and at any time with timely feedback. Even more recent development is the use of gamification in computer programming education in order to raise the enjoyment and engagement of students. Despite its rising spread, until now, there is not a programming exercise specification format addressing the needs of gamification, such as the definition of challenges, the underlying storyline, including the links to other exercises, or the rewards for solving challenges in form of points, badges or virtual items. Such a data format would allow the exchange of ready-to-use programming exercises along with the gamification-related data among different educational institutions and courses, providing instructors a possibility to make use of gamification in their courses without having to invest their own time in defining gamification rules themselves. In this paper, we analyze a set of concepts related to programming gamification developed in our previous work to identify the requirements for the specification of a gamified exercise format. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
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    Derzis: A Path Aware Linked Data Crawler
    ( 2021) André Fernandes Santos ; José Paulo Leal ; 7076 ; 5125
    Consuming Semantic Web data presents several challenges, from the number of datasets it is composed of, to the (very) large size of some of those datasets and the uncertain availability of querying endpoints. According to its core principles, accessing linked data can be done simply by dereferencing the IRIs of RDF resources. This is a light alternative both for clients and servers when compared to dataset dumps or SPARQL endpoints. The linked data interface does not support complex querying, but using it recursively may suffice to gather information about RDF resources, or to extract the relevant sub-graph which can then be processed and queried using other methods. We present Derzis1, an open source semantic web crawler capable of traversing the linked data cloud starting from a set of seed resources. Derzis maintains information about the paths followed while crawling, which allows to define property path-based restrictions to the crawling frontier.
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    Design of an extensible metadata editor based on RDF
    ( 2010) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    The content of a Learning Object is frequently characterized by metadata from several standards, such as LOM, SCORM and QTI. Specialized domains require new application profiles that further complicate the task of editing the metadata of learning object since their data models are not supported by existing authoring tools. To cope with this problem we designed a metadata editor supporting multiple metadata languages, each with its own data model. It is assumed that the supported languages have an XML binding and we use RDF to create a common metadata representation, independent from the syntax of each metadata languages. The combined data model supported by the editor is defined as an ontology. Thus, the process of extending the editor to support a new metadata language is twofold: firstly, the conversion from the XML binding of the metadata language to RDF and vice-versa; secondly, the extension of the ontology to cover the new metadata model. In this paper we describe the general architecture of the editor, we explain how a typical metadata language for learning objects is represented as an ontology, and how this formalization captures all the data required to generate the graphical user interface of the editor.
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    Designing a user interface for repositories of learning objects
    ( 2009) José Paulo Leal ; Ricardo Queirós ; 5125 ; 5695
    This paper presents the design of a user interface for repositories of learning objects. It integrates several tasks, such as submission, browse, search, and comment/review of learning objects, on a single screen layout. This design is being implemented on the web front-end of crimsonHex, a repository of specialized learning objects, developed as part of the EduJudge, a European project that aims to bring automatic evaluation of programming problems to e-Learning systems. © 2009 IADIS.
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    ELEARNING FRAMEWORKS: A SURVEY
    ( 2010) Ricardo Queirós ; José Paulo Leal ; 5695 ; 5125
    In recent years the concept of eLearning Framework emerged associated with several initiatives promoted by educational organizations. These initiatives share a common goal: to create flexible learning environments by integrating heterogeneous systems already available in many educational institutions. The paper provides an introductory survey on eLearning Frameworks. It gathers information on these initiatives categorizes them and compares their features regarding a set of predefined criteria such as: architecture, business model, primary user groups, technical implementations, adopted standards, maturity and future development.
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    An Emotional Word Analyzer for Portuguese
    ( 2017) José Paulo Leal ; 5125
    The analysis of sentiments, emotions and opinions in texts is increasingly important in the current digital world. The existing lexicons with emotional annotations for the Portuguese language are oriented to polarities, classifying words as positive, negative or neutral. To identify the emotional load intended by the author it is necessary also to categorize the emotions expressed by individual words. EmoSpell is an extension of a morphological analyzer with semantic annotations of the emotional value of words. It uses Jspell as the morphological analyzer and a new dictionary with emotional annotations. This dictionary incorporates the lexical base EMOTAIX.PT, which classifies words based on three di erent levels of emotions – global, specific and intermediate. This paper describes the generation of the EmoSpell dictionary using three sources, the Jspell Portuguese dictionary and the lexical bases EMOTAIX.PT and SentiLex-PT. Also, this paper details the web application and web service that exploit this dictionary. It presents also a validation of the proposed approach using a corpus of student texts with di erent emotional loads. The validation compares the analyses provided by EmoSpell with the mentioned emotional lexical bases on the ability to recognize emotional words and extract the dominant emotion from a text. © Maria Inês Maia and José Paulo Leal
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    Enhancing Feedback to Students in Automated Diagram Assessment
    ( 2017) José Paulo Leal ; Helder Pina Correia ; José Carlos Paiva ; 5125 ; 6549 ; 6251
    Automated assessment is an essential part of eLearning. Although comparatively easy for multiple choice questions (MCQs), automated assessment is more challenging when exercises involve languages used in computer science. In this particular case, the assessment is more than just grading and must include feedback that leads to the improvement of the students’ performance. This paper presents ongoing work to develop Kora, an automated diagram assessment tool with enhanced feedback, targeted to the multiple diagrammatic languages used in computer science. Kora builds on the experience gained with previous research, namely: a diagram assessment tool to compute di erences between graphs; an IDE inspired web learning environment for computer science languages; and an extensible web diagram editor. Kora has several features to enhance feedback: it distinguishes syntactic and semantic errors, providing specialized feedback in each case; it provides progressive feedback disclosure, controlling the quality and quantity shown to each student after a submission; when possible, it integrates feedback within the diagram editor showing actual nodes and edges on the editor itself. © Hélder Correia, José Paulo Leal, and José Carlos Paiva