Dasa Munkova

The study focuses on the identification of relationships and/or rules between computational thinking (CT) concepts among the undergraduate students of Applied Informatics due to their attitudes towards mathematics. We analyze three CT concepts - decomposition, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking. We assume that students who have a closer relationship with mathematics, a positive attitude towards mathematics, have better developed CT. We conducted the experiment during the 2022/2023 academic year on the Information Coding and Displaying subject. The results indicate that those students who have no relationship to mathematics, negative attitude towards mathematics, have no problem with decomposition and pattern recognition, but without significant algorithmic thinking. On the other hand, students who have a close relationship with mathematics are also able to decompose or recognize patterns, but moreover they have shown algorithmic thinking. The contribution of the study comprises the identification of relationships and/or patterns of computational thinking concepts among students who have a relationship to mathematics, who cannot assess their relationship to mathematics, as well as among students who have no relationship to mathematics. Our results indicate a different occurrence of computational thinking concepts as well as links and/or relationships between them.

Summary: While the rule of thumb that translators translate into their first language (L1) is often desirable, the demand for translations from lesser used into widely used languages often forces translators into this practice because it outstrips supply. The aim of this study is to show readers how the quality of the reference human translation (REF) produced by translators with Slovak as their L1 can influence the assessment of the quality of machine translation output (MT output), using the example of the light post-edited machine translation output (MTPE output) of technical documentation (TD) from Slovak into German by post-editors (PE) with Slovak as their L1. We therefore use the percentage difference between the TER and HTER scores to compare those segments of the studied TD that the machine translated differently than the human, whereby the PE nonetheless adopted such MT output or only partially changed it. We have divided the results into 6 categories of segments based on the differences between TER and HTER, where the difference between TER and HTER was below 50 %. We found that inappropriate REF and different, but not always wrong, solutions adopted by the PE compared to the REF translator can also result in poor evaluation of the MTPE output.

Introduction: Understanding how category width of cognitive style and power distance impact language use in cultures is crucial for improving cross-cultural communication. We attempt to reveal how English foreign language students, affected by high-context culture, communicate in English as a foreign language. What models of foreign communicative competence do they create?Methods: We applied association rule analysis to find out how the category width of cognitive style affects the foreign communication competence in relation to culture and language.Results: The requester tends to be more formal and transfers conventional norms of the culture of the mother tongue into English, which mainly affects the use of alerters and external modifications of the head act of request.Discussion: A broad categorizer, regardless of social distance, prefers to formulate the request in a conditional over the present tense form, contrary to narrow categorizers who, in a situation of social proximity, prefer the request form in the present tense. A similar finding was shown in the case of external modifications of the head act, where we observed the inversion between broad and narrow categorizers, mainly in the use of minimizers and mitigating devices.