Die Frage nach der Ausgestaltung künftiger Daseinsvorsorge und der zugehörigen Informationskompetenz der Bürger/innen im ländlichen Raum spielt im Zuge der fortschreitenden Digitalisierung der Lebensräume eine tragende Rolle. In dem Projekt DILRA soll eine holistische Sicht zur daseinsbezogenen Informationskompetenz und Informationsnutzung erschlossen werden. Aus den Ergebnissen heraus werden für Kommunen und kommunale Bildungsanbieter Handlungsempfehlungen in Bezug auf die Beförderung von Informationskompetenz und die Bereitstellung daseinsbezogener Informationsdienste argumentiert. Das Projekt untersucht mittels empirischer Studien, welche Kompetenzen aus der Nutzerperspektive für den digitalen Wandel in ländlicher Region von Nöten sind. Hierbei soll insbesondere die Informationskompetenz näher betrachtet werden, die als Voraussetzung dafür gilt, dass Bürger*innen souverän im Sinne eines lebenslangen Lernens digitale Angebote bewerten und mit diesen umgehen können. Die Studien innerhalb des Projektes sollen genau diese Herausforderungen näher analysierbar machen und so einen Erkenntnistransfer in die Praxis ermöglichen und damit neue Handlungsoptionen aufzeigen.

Recent studies show that more than half of the German population have difficulties in accessing, understanding, appraising, and applying health information, thus giving accessibility in health communication new traction. This volume links research and practice in the areas of accessible communication, health information and health literacy. The articles focus on these fields from a methodological, text and/or user perspective. The authors examine how to improve accessibility of research methods and how to adapt existing methods to answer questions about accessibility of health information. They discuss accessibility of text types and link accessibility to individual, organisational and professional health literacy. Contributions also give insight to the implementation of Easy and Plain Language in health information. All articles stem from different fields: in bringing them together, this volume fosters interdisciplinary exchange to communicate accessible health information and methods to specific vulnerable target groups.

Accessibility is becoming increasingly established as an important topic in human-computer interaction (HCI). HCI is regarded as an interdisciplinary subject area involving various disciplines (work science, ergonomics, computer science, information science, medicine, psychology, etc.). In information science, the scientific perspective of which will be assumed here, the general objective is to provide equal access to information and knowledge as well as technologies and tools used for this purpose. This form of participation is not only focused on reception of knowledge, but also on the creation of own content, e.g. in social networks in the form of user-generated content or in the World Wide Web.

In the past, virtually nothing was known about how pupils acquired spelling skills for foreign words. This may well be surprising, given the fact that the acquisition of orthographic competence has been the subject of an increasing amount of empirical research over the past 20 years. The fact that no separate attention has been given to foreign words points out a grave imbalance in conventional research into how spelling is learned. That research does not distinguish between divergent orthographic patterns and thus does not differentiate between native and foreign words in the teaching of spelling competence. Assuming that the rules for the correct spelling of native and foreign words differ substantially, and further assuming that learning how to spell is in fact learning about a system, this paper will undertake an empirical examination of the factors that influence success when learning how to spell foreign words correctly. The results of the study show clearly that the pedagogy of orthography has to address the writing of foreign words as a distinct and separate domain. Of particular significance is the finding that especially those pupils who are strong in spelling increasingly internalize and automate native spelling practices and then transfer them to the spelling of foreign words; this may be of central importance for the models used to teach spelling. In addition, new paths for spelling pedagogy are suggested by the awareness that acquiring spelling skills for foreign words presumes stable orthographic competence in one’s own native language, but that these skills need to be augmented in the classroom by teaching specific patterns governing the spelling of foreign words. Also of significance is the insight that native and foreign words follow differing spelling patterns, making it necessary to deal with them not simultaneously in the learning processes, but successively instead.

In the latest decades, machine learning approaches have been intensively experimented for natural language processing. Most of the time, systems rely on using statistics within the system, by analyzing texts at the token level and, for labelling tasks, categorizing each among possible classes. One may notice that previous symbolic approaches (e.g. transducers) where designed to delimit pieces of text. Our research team developped mXS, a system that aims at combining both approaches. It locates boundaries of entities by using sequential pattern mining and machine learning. This system, intially developped for French, has been adapted to German.

There is a current trend towards natural, adaptive in-vehicle spoken dialogue systems which react flexibly to the individual requirements of a driver or the driving situation. They aim to provide the driver with the most efficient form of interaction and to thereby reduce his cognitive load. Studies show that even the syntactic form of system output has an influence on the driver and his driving performance. Against this background, in this paper we present our user-centered approach for a user- and situation-adaptive strategy for the syntactic design of voice output. Based on the collected data of two user studies, we combine the two aspects of speech production and perception and compare actual language behaviour with syntactic preferences. The resulting strategy will be evaluated and elaborate further in future user studies.

This M.A. thesis describes the conception and realization of a cross-lingual information retrieval system for Japanese based on the MIMOR (“Mehrfachindexierung zur dynamischen Methoden-Objekt-Relationierung im Information Retrieval”) framework. After an analysis of the characteristics of Japanese and their implications for IR, an overview of established approaches and the state-of-the art in Japanese IR and crosslingual IR with Japanese is provided. It is followed by a description of the implemented system and its integration into the existing framework. Finally, the evaluation experiments carried out with two different document genres (newspaper articles and scientific abstracts) are reported. The main focus hereby was on the testing and analysis of different indexing strategies, in particular a yomi- or pronunciation-based index in addition to conventional word-based and n-gram-based indices, and the benefits of their fusion.

The topic of this thesis is the adaptation of a graphical user interface for three user groups at Blaupunkt GmbH, a subsidiary of Bosch GmbH. In accordance with the established usability engineering methods, user requirements data is gathered and analyzed. An interface prototype was developed by applying user-centered design methods and evaluated by usability testing. The development process is described focusing on the call center work environment for a technical support hotline and agent-computer interaction.