New language technologies are coming, thanks to the huge and competing private investment fuelling rapid progress; we can either understand and foresee their effects, or be taken by surprise and spend our time trying to catch up. This report scketches out some transformative new technologies that are likely to fundamentally change our use of language. Some of these may feel unrealistically futuristic or far-fetched, but a central purpose of this report - and the wider LITHME network - is to illustrate that these are mostly just the logical development and maturation of technologies currently in prototype. But will everyone benefit from all these shiny new gadgets? Throughout this report we emphasise a range of groups who will be disadvantaged and issues of inequality. Important issues of security and privacy will accompany new language technologies. A further caution is to re-emphasise the current limitations of AI. Looking ahead, we see many intriguing opportunities and new capabilities, but a range of other uncertainties and inequalities. New devices will enable new ways to talk, to translate, to remember, and to learn. But advances in technology will reproduce existing inequalities among those who cannot afford these devices, among the world’s smaller languages, and especially for sign language. Debates over privacy and security will flare and crackle with every new immersive gadget. We will move together into this curious new world with a mix of excitement and apprehension - reacting, debating, sharing and disagreeing as we always do. Plug in, as the human-machine era dawns.

The world is facing the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to an unprecedented change in the lifestyle routines of millions. Beyond the general physical health, financial, and social repercussions of the pandemic, the adopted mitigation measures also present significant challenges in the populations mental health and health programs. It is complex for public organizations to measure the populations mental health in order to incorporate it into their own decision-making process. Traditional survey methods are time-consuming, expensive, and fail to provide the continuous information needed to respond to the rapidly evolving effects of governmental policies on the populations mental health. A significant portion of the population has turned to social media to express the details of their daily life, rendering this public data a rich field for understanding emotional and mental well-being. This study aims to track and measure the sentiment changes of the Mexican population in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we analyzed 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies using open sentiment analysis tools. Sentiment analysis polarity scores, which oscillate around -0.15, show a weekly seasonality according to Twitters usage and a consistently negative outlook from the population. It also remarks on the increased controversy after the governmental decision to terminate the lockdown and the celebrated holidays, which encouraged the people to incur social gatherings. These findings expose the adverse emotional effects of the ongoing pandemic while showing an increase in social media usage rates of 2.38 times, which users employ as a coping mechanism to mitigate the feelings of isolation related to long-term social distancing. The findings have important implications in the mental health infrastructure for ongoing mitigation efforts and feedback on the perception of policies and other measures. The overall trend of the sentiment polarity is 0.0001110643.

PRESENTACIÓN. El aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras mediante tecnología móvil en el contexto de la educación a distancia y combinada

Maritime safety and security are being constantly jeopardized. Therefore, identifying maritime flow irregularities (semi-)automatically may be crucial to ensure maritime security in the future. This paper presents a Ship Semantic Information-Based, Image Similarity Calculation System (Ship-SIBISCaS), which constitutes a first step towards the automatic identification of this kind of maritime irregularities. In particular, the main goal of Ship-SIBISCaS is to automatically identify the type of ship depicted in a given image (such as abandoned, cargo, container, hospital, passenger, pirate, submersible, three-decker, or warship) and, thus, classify it accordingly. This classification is achieved in Ship-SIBISCaS by finding out the similarity of the ship image and/or description with other ship images and descriptions included in its knowledge base. This similarity is calculated by means of an LSA algorithm implementation that is run on a parallel architecture consisting of CPUs and GPUs (i.e., a heterogeneous system). This implementation of the LSA algorithm has been trained with a collection of texts, extracted from Wikipedia, that associate some semantic information to ImageNet ship images. Thanks to its parallel architecture, the indexing process of this image retrieval system has been accelerated 10 times (for the 1261 ships included in ImageNet). The range of the precision of the image similarity method is 46% to 92% with 100% recall (that is, a 100% coverage of the database).