arXiv subjects

Jose M. Alonso

Publications and source records attributed to Jose M. Alonso.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2018

Meteorologists and Students: A resource for language grounding of geographical descriptors

We present a data resource which can be useful for research purposes on language grounding tasks in the context of geographical referring expression generation. The resource is composed of two data sets that encompass 25 different geographical descriptors and a set of associated graphical representations, drawn as polygons on a map by two groups of human subjects: teenage students and expert meteorologists.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

An Empirical Approach for Modeling Fuzzy Geographical Descriptors

We present a novel heuristic approach that defines fuzzy geographical descriptors using data gathered from a survey with human subjects. The participants were asked to provide graphical interpretations of the descriptors `north' and `south' for the Galician region (Spain). Based on these interpretations, our approach builds fuzzy descriptors that are able to compute membership degrees for geographical locations. We evaluated our approach in terms of efficiency and precision. The fuzzy descriptors are meant to be used as the cornerstones of a geographical referring expression generation algorithm that is able to linguistically characterize geographical locations and regions. This work is also part of a general research effort that intends to establish a methodology which reunites the empirical studies traditionally practiced in data-to-text and the use of fuzzy sets to model imprecision and vagueness in words and expressions for text generation purposes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Measuring educational attainment as a continuous variable: a new database (1970-2010)

In this paper, we introduce a new comprehensive data set on educational attainment and inequality measures of education for 142 countries over the period 1970 to 2010. Most of the previous attempts to measure educational attainment have treated education as a categorical variable, whose mean is computed as a weighted average of the official duration of each cycle and attainment rates, thus omitting differences in educational achievement within levels of education. This aggregation into different groups may result in a loss of information introducing, therefore, a potential source of measurement error. We explore here a more nuanced alternative to estimate educational attainment, which considers the continuous nature of the educational variable. This `continuous approach' allows us to impose more plausible assumptions about the distribution of years of schooling within each level of education, and to take into account the right censoring of the data in the estimation, thus leading to more accurate estimates of educational attainment and education inequality. These improved series may help to better understand the role of education on different socio-economic aspects, such as quality of life and human capital formation.

stat.AP↗