This paper discusses the classification of books purely based on cover image and title, without prior knowledge or context of author and origin. Several methods were implemented to assess the ability to distinguish books based on only these two characteristics. First we used a color-based distribution approach. Then we implemented transfer learning with convolutional neural networks on the cove...

The Filibuster text-to-speech system is specifically designed and developed for the production of digital talking textbooks at university level for students with print impairments. Currently, the system has one Swedish voice, 'Folke', which has been used in production at the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB) since 2007. In August 2008 the development of a Norwegian voice (bokmå...

purpose: this study aimed to identify and introduce the most important evaluation and production criteria of audio books based on users’ point of view.method: in terms of methodology, this study was among the quantitative studies and done with descriptive survey. the research instrument was researcher-made questionnaire. population was all users of audiolib website that used from audio books mo...

This study investigated the influence of book genre (narrative or didactic) on mothers’ language use during a book sharing interaction with their 18to 25-month-olds. Motherchild dyads were videotaped sharing both a narrative and a didactic book, adapted from two commercially-available books, and matched in terms of length, quantity of text, and target content. A greater proportion of mothers’ t...

In this paper we introduce a method that significantly reduces the character error rates for OCR text obtained from OCRopus models trained on early printed books. The method uses a combination of cross fold training and confidence based voting. After allocating the available ground truth in different subsets several training processes are performed, each resulting in a specific OCR model. The O...

he Mitten, Little Bear, Caps for Sale—What do these and so many other books in early childhood classrooms have in common? They are stories or narrative texts. Research indicates that storybooks are indeed the most common type of text found in early childhood classrooms (Duke, Bennett-Armistead, & Roberts 2002). Literacy research and theory both provide lots of good reasons for including so many...

Project Gutenberg is a digital library that contains mostly public domain books, including a large number of works that belong to children’s literature. Many of these classic books are offered in a text-only format, which does not make them appealing for children to read. Moreover, stories that were written for children one hundred or more years ago, might not be readily understandable by child...

We present data-driven log file analyses of an electronic text book for history, called the mBook, to support teachers in preparing lessons for their students. We represent user sessions as contextualised Markov processes of user sessions and propose a probabilistic clustering using expectation maximisation to detect groups of similar (i) sessions and (ii) users.

In this paper, we present an automatic question generation system that can generate gap-fill questions for content in a document. Gap-fill questions are fill-in-the-blank questions with multiple choices (one correct answer and three distractors) provided. The system finds the informative sentences from the document and generates gap-fill questions from them by first blanking keys from the sente...

Creating new voices for a TTS system often requires a costly procedure of designing and recording an audio corpus, a time consuming and effort intensive task. Using publicly available audiobooks as the raw material of a spoken corpus for such systems creates new perspectives regarding the possibility of creating new synthetic voices quickly and with limited effort. This paper addresses the issu...