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This study examines the relationship between Thai anaphoric expressions and their antecedents' Accessibility, analyzing 3,453 expressions from Thai-Zlatev Corpus (Zlatev and Yangklang 2001), Aakanee Website (Aakanee, "Thai Recordings") and Thai Folktale Database (Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre, "Folktales"). Grounded in Ariel's Accessibility Theory (1988, 1990), which asserts that referring expressions are universally arranged on an Accessibility scale but marking systems vary by language, we propose an Accessibility Marking Scale for Thai anaphoric expressions, informed by the factors of Distance, Competition, Saliency and Unity. Some anaphoric expressions showed no significant differences in mean Accessibility, leading them to share ranks. Our newly identified anaphoric expressions align on the scale with those of similar discourse function and pattern. The study also reveals that factors like Saliency and Unity account for the distinctions between the Thai Accessibility Marking Scale and the English Accessibility Marking Scale as proposed by Ariel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid transformation of English linguistic landscapes has introduced the world to newly emerging English varieties or World Englishes, which are not typically employed in the Inner Circle. To address the defying phenomenon, this qualitative study explored the perceptions of Thai university lecturers on World Englishes, Thai English and the feasibility of implementing World Englishes and Thai English in the classrooms. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 15 English lecturers in 5 universities across the Thai regions. Analyzed by content analysis, findings revealed that the participants demonstrated mixed perceptions. While most of the participants viewed British and American Englishes as representations of standard English varieties and questioned the legitimacy of World Englishes and Thai English, others reportedly recognized and accepted the existence of World Englishes and considered Thai English as a tool to convey Thai identities and cultures. The findings also indicated that most participants outright disapproved of World Englishes and Thai English in teaching practices, and these varieties were substantially marginalized and devalued. However, to prepare learners for realistic use of English and increase their awareness of World Englishes and Thai English, the remaining participants suggested that English language teaching should embrace flexible linguistic conventions that allow spaces for Inner Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research seeks to develop an improved teaching method in the Thai-listening comprehension through feedback and peer-assisted learning. The researchers studied the developing result of Chinese students who had different roles and levels of self-regulation in the learning. Single subject research has been adopted in this research with 31 undergraduate Chinese students participating in the study. These students were 2nd year students majoring in the Thai language. They had all registered in the Listening course at - Level 2. The researchers measured the student's abilities and self-regulation to make precise conclusion in their listening comprehension over 9 practices. To data were analyzed using content analysis and repeated measurement with independent variables. The research result revealed that using feedback providing method for homework No. 1 - 9 given to individual and using learning method as peer-assisted in doing homework for No. 4-5. After that, let each student did his/her homework by himself/herself or No. 6-7 and back to learning method using peer-assisted again on doing homework for No. 8-9. The developing result of listening comprehension shown that in general, the students have improved in listening comprehension skill. The "High and Medium" student group develops better listening comprehension skill than "Develop and Low" student group. The students with different self-regulation had the diversified scores for 9 homework not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of areal linguistics, this paper examines the similarities in tonal behavior between Sinitic and Kam-Tai, the two most populous language groups in Lingnan. By relying on some frameworks for investigating tone systems, i.e., tone-box theories, which largely involve the evolution of tones, the following duplicating patterns and paths of diffusion of areal features are identified. (1) The secondary tonal split conditioned by vowel length on checked syllables, as well as the secondary tonal split of the upper-register tones conditioned by the laryngeal features of initial consonants, both originated in Kam-Tai languages and have diffused into some neighboring Sinitic languages. (2) The pattern of the secondary tonal split of the lower-register tones conditioned by laryngeal features of the initial consonants originated in northern authoritative Sinitic languages and spread widely among different subgroups of Sinitic languages; its diffusion into the Kam-Tai languages is limited to the lexical category of loanwords. (3) The upper-register tones associated with sonorant initials found in Lingnan Sinitic languages are suggested to be of a Kam-Tai origin trait. Further, their underlying areal typological rules are also summarized, concentrating on different upper limits for the possible secondary tonal split in the Sinitic and Kam-Tai languages, which were determined by the historically distinct laryngeal features of the initial consonants of the two language groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The purpose of this research was to develop teaching and learning management using vocabulary learning strategies. This study mainly uses the vocabulary expansion method to improve 37 freshmen in the course of Thai Language speaking in majoring in Chinese Language International Education. The researcher created a vocabulary table and lessons related to the students' daily lives to help them practice speaking Thai. A rubric scoring was used as a research tool to measure their Thai speaking skills, and it was divided into 2 parts: 1) vocabulary knowledge and 2) the ability to apply vocabulary. A total of five assessments were conducted over 12 weeks. The statistical method used to analyze the data was repeated measurement ANOVA with a covariate, using the scores of speaking skills in the previous semester as the covariate variable. The results showed that the Thai speaking skills of these Chinese students had effectively been improved according to their vocabulary knowledge development after the experiment using the vocabulary expansion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-construal can influence the ways people in distinct cultures think, perceive and interact with others. To date, scholars still present different arguments on the prominent self-construal of Thais. The present study aims at examining Thai linguistic data including proverbs, sayings, cultural key terms and interactional data in response to the question of whether Thai culture places emphasis on independent or interdependent perspectives of the self. The findings reveal that Thai sayings, proverbs and cultural key terms reflect both independent and interdependent self-construals. Yet, those that stress interdependency outnumber independency. As for interactional practices in daily exchanges, the usage of pronominal terms, final particles for (im)politeness and lexical variants marking interpersonal relationships make it mandatory for Thai speakers to pay attention to interpersonal relationships. Lastly, in task-based superior-subordinate conversations, collaborative and non-confrontational styles are preferred by Thai superiors. Their interactional style reflects features influenced by interdependent self-construal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages can be divided into three types with respect to the encoding of comitatives and instrumentals: identity, differentiation and mixed (Stolz, Stroh and Urdze 2013). Diachronic data from Thai dating from 13th to 21st centuries CE suggests that these three language types correspond to the three stages of development of the relation between the two categories in Thai, which progress as follows. Between the 13th and the mid-18th centuries, Thai employed the pattern of identity. In general, the preposition dûaj 'with' was the relator for the two categories. Later, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Thai displayed mixed structures. While the preposition dûaj was preserved to encode both categories, the preposition kàp 'and/with' was also the relator for the comitative. Still later, from the mid-19th century to the present, Thai favored differentiation. The preposition dûaj remains in its function as an instrumental relator, while the preposition kàp has been employed as a comitative relator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses findings from interviews with 26 Thai actors on their methods of characterization. It was found that Thai actors have two concepts regarding their style and beliefs towards acting: (1) good acting naturally portrays normal characters in a realistic manner, (2) a major component of acting is 'becoming the character.' Participants reported needing a character's actions to be logical, and therefore need to thoroughly analyze a character so they can completely transform into the character. Methods of characterization were found to be consistent with approaches in the works of Stanislavski. This is in part due from Pantoomkomol (1995)'s import of these ideas into Thai performing arts contexts. However, it was also found that participants' methods were still flexible, and a view of characters as unique was prevalent. In sum, actors were found to focus on the characters rather than the methods as the best means to communicate with an audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The languages spoken in Asia share common morphological analysis errors in word segmentation which normally propagate to higher-level processing, i.e., part-of-speech (POS) tagging, syntactic parsing, word extraction, and named entity recognition (NER), as we discuss in this research. We introduce the Thai character cluster (TCC) to reduce the errors propagated from word segmentation and POS tagging by incorporating it into the character representation layer of bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) for NER. The initial NER model is created from the original THAI-NEST named-entity (NE) tagged corpus by applying the best performing BiLSTM-CNN-CRF model (the combination of BiLSTM, convolutional neural network (CNN), and conditional random field (CRF)) with the word, POS, and TCC embedding. We determine the errors and improve the consistency of the NE annotation through our holdout method by retraining the model with the corrected training set. After the iteration, the overall result of the annotation F1-score has been improved to reach 89.22%, which improves 16.21% from the model trained on the original corpus. The result of our iterative verification is a promising method for low resource language modeling. As a result, The NE silver standard corpus is newly generated for the Thai NER task, called Bangkok Data NE tagged Corpus (BKD). The consistency of annotation is checked and revised according to the improvement of the scope of NE detection by TCC which can recover the errors in word segmentation.

The educational innovation on Thai conversation means any newly created product for Thai conversational problems solution or help foreign students develop their Thai conversational skill. The objectives of this research were to explore the educational innovative book with QR Code and device entitled 'Thai Conversation in Everyday Life' produced by Kowit Pimpuang and its result to enhance the potential of Thai conversation for foreign students at Kasetsart University Thailand. The total population in this study consisted of 50 foreign students enrolled in the subject 'Thai Conversation in Everyday Life.' They were first year exchange students in the first semester academic year 2019 at Kasetsart University (KU) Thailand. There are only 5 foreign students who were selected by purposive sampling technique with certain goals and criteria. Research tools in this study were; 1) Thai word and short sentence speaking skill exercises 2) Thai word and sentence cards with short messages and 3) Helping media; QR Code and device for speaking and conversation. It was found that the causes of the problem were; 1) foreign students lacked of speaking skill, 2) foreign students had no skill on Thai words and sentences and 3) foreign students had different fundamental knowledge on Thai language. After they took the speaking test three times, they can pass it, which was equally 100%. Obviously, foreign students had the development on Thai speaking and conversation accorded with the standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To translate the Gout Assessment Questionnaire version 2.0 (GAQ2.0) with Gout Impact (GI) Scale (GIS) into Thai and determine its psychometric property in gout patients with acute arthritis (acute arthritis group) and during the intercritical period (chronic gout group). Methods: Translation followed the ISPOR recommendations. Cronbach's α, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and standardized response mean (SRM) were used to determine internal consistency, reliability and responsiveness to change, respectively. Correlations between GI subscales with generic health-related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaires (SF-36, HAQ-DI and EQ-5D-5L) and gout clinical parameters were determined. Results: The acute arthritis group and the chronic gout group comprised 27 and 92 patients, respectively. Internal consistency was sufficient for all GI subscales (Cronbach's α = 0.80–0.98), reliability was moderate to good in most GI subscales (ICC = 0.54–0.88) and responsiveness to change was moderate to large in most GI subscales (SRM = 0.43–0.98). The GI subscales correlated better with SF-36 than HAQ-DI and EQ-5D-5L. In the acute arthritis group, the unmet gout treatment needs subscale showed large and moderate negative correlation with tophi and serum uric acid, respectively. In the chronic gout group, the gout concern overall subscale had statistically significant, moderate correlation with overall gout severity rated by the patients and number of gout attacks over the past year, while the well-being during attack subscale and total GIS score had statistically significant, moderate correlation with overall gout severity rated by the patients. Conclusion: The Thai GAQ2.0 GIS showed acceptable internal consistency, reliability and responsiveness to change and correlated significantly with generic HRQoL questionnaires and clinical parameters. Key Points • The Thai GAQ2.0 GIS showed acceptable internal consistency, reliability and responsiveness to change in gout patients both during acute attack and during the intercritical period • The GI subscales showed significant correlation with SF-36 and HAQ questionnaires and gout clinical parameters in gout patients both during acute attack and during the intercritical period • The Thai GAQ2.0 GIS subscales should be used in conjunction with generic HRQoL for complete HRQoL assessment in gout patients [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Thai vowel pronunciation, it is very important to know that when mispronunciation occurs, the meanings of words change completely. Thus, effective and standardized practice is essential to pronouncing words correctly as a native speaker. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has become increasingly popular. For example, an online pronunciation application system was introduced that has virtual teachers and an intelligent process of evaluating students that is similar to standardized training by a teacher in a real classroom. This research presents an online automatic computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) using deep learning to recognize Thai vowels in speech. The automatic CAPT is developed to solve the inadequacy of instruction specialists and the complex vowel teaching process. It is a unique system that develops computer techniques integrated with linguistic theory. The deep learning model is the most significant part of recognizing vowels pronounced for the automatic CAPT. The major challenge in Thai vowel recognition is the correct identification of Thai vowels when spoken in real-world situations. A convolutional neural network (CNN), a deep learning model, is applied and developed in the classification of pronounced Thai vowels. A new dataset for Thai vowels was designed, collected, and examined by linguists. The result of an optimal CNN model with Mel spectrogram (MS) achieves the highest accuracy of 98.61%, compared with Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) with the baseline long short-term memory (LSTM) model and MS with the baseline LSTM model have an accuracy of 94.44% and 90.00% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of our work is to build a large-scale English–Thai dataset for training neural machine translation models. We construct scb-mt-en-th-2020, an English–Thai machine translation dataset with over 1 million segment pairs, curated from various sources: news, Wikipedia articles, SMS messages, task-based dialogs, web-crawled data, government documents, and text artificially generated by a pretrained language model. We present the methods for gathering data, aligning texts, and removing preprocessing noise and translation errors automatically. We also train machine translation models based on this dataset to assess the quality of the corpus. Our models perform comparably to Google Translation API (as of May 2020) for Thai–English and outperform Google when the Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) is included in the training data for both Thai–English and English–Thai translation. The dataset is available for public use under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License. The pre-trained models and source code to reproduce our work are available under Apache-2.0 License. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• PaSCoNT is a parallel speech corpus of Northern-Central Thai recorded 100 h of speech. • PaSCoNT consists of 907,832 words and 6279 vocabulary items. • There were statistically significant differences speech tempo between Central Thai and Northern Thai. • ASR model using the PaSCoNT can be used for both Northern Thai and Central Thai dialect speech recognition. This paper proposed a Parallel Speech Corpus of Northern-central Thai (PaSCoNT). The purpose of this research is not only to understand the different linguistic characteristics between Northern and Central Thai, but also to utilize this corpus for automatic speech recognition. The corpus is composed of speech data from dialogues of daily life among northern Thai people. We designed 2,000 Northern Thai sentences covering all phonemes, in collaboration with linguists specialized in the Northern Thai dialect. The samples in this study are 200 Northern Thai dialect speakers who had been living in Chiang Mai province for more than 18 years. The speech was recorded in both open and closed environments. In the speech recording, each speaker must read 100 pairs of Northern-Central Thai sentences to ensure that the speech data comes from the same speaker. In total, 100 h of speech were recorded: 50 h of Northern Thai and 50 h of Central Thai. Overall, PaSCoNT consists of 907,832 words and 6,279 vocabulary items. Statistical analysis of the PaSCoNT corpus revealed that 49.64 % of words in the lexicon belongs to the Northern Thai dialect, 50.36 % from the Central Thai dialect, and 1,621 vocabulary items appeared in both Northern and Central Thai. Statistical analysis is used to examine the difference in speech tempo, i.e. time per phoneme (TTP), syllable per minute (SPM), between Northern and Central Thai. The results revealed that there were statistically significant differences speech tempo between Central and Northern Thai. The TTP speaking and articulation rate of Central Thai is lower than Northern Thai whereas SPM speaking and articulation rate of Central Thai is higher than Northern Thai. The results also showed that the ASR model training using Northern Thai speech corpus provides the lower WER% when testing using Northern Thai testing speech data and provides the higher WER% when testing using Central Thai Testing speech data and vice versa. However, the ASR model training using the PaSCoNT speech corpus provides the lower WER% for both Northern Thai and Central Thai testing speech data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on translating the bMHQ to the Thai language and assessing the reliability of the Thai version of the bMHQ in patients with hand problems. Topics include Dupuytren contracture, trigger finger, distal radius fractures, rheumatoid arthritis, and thumb carpometacarpal arthritis; and evaluating hand functions in patients with hand problems being useful for tracking the functionality of the affected hand.

In handwriting recognition research, a public image dataset is necessary to evaluate algorithm correctness and runtime performance. Unfortunately, in existing Thai language script image datasets, there is a lack of variety of standard handwriting types. This paper focuses on a new offline Thai handwriting image dataset named Burapha-TH. The dataset has 68 character classes, 10 digit classes, and 320 syllable classes. For constructing the dataset, 1072 Thai native speakers wrote on collection datasheets that were then digitized using a 300 dpi scanner. De-skewing, detection box and segmentation algorithms were applied to the raw scans for image extraction. The experiment used different deep convolutional models with the proposed dataset. The result shows that the VGG-13 model (with batch normalization) achieved accuracy rates of 95.00%, 98.29%, and 96.16% on character, digit, and syllable classes, respectively. The Burapha-TH dataset, unlike all other known Thai handwriting datasets, retains existing noise, the white background, and all artifacts generated by scanning. This comprehensive, raw, and more realistic dataset will be helpful for a variety of research purposes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ability of L2 Thai learners to identify eleven British English monophthongs/iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/. Among these vowels, /æ/, /iː/, /uː/, /e/ and /ɔː/ are vowels that occur in both Thai and English phonological inventories (shared sounds) whereas the other six vowels occur only in English (non-shared sounds). The subjects were split into two groups of L2 Thai learners: highexperienced and low-experienced. The degree to which L2 experience influenced subjects’ ability to identify British English monophthongs was measured by their ability to match spoken L2 vowels to their written counterparts. The hypotheses of this study were generated from the results of the perceptual assimilation task in the study of Kitikanan (2020). The results showed that the low-experienced group performed poorly, with low identification scores, across all vowels. However, the high-experienced group obtained high scores identifying British English /e/, /ɔː/, /ɪ/ and /ɜː/. The scores of correct identifications for these four British English vowels of the high-experienced group were significantly higher than that of the low-experienced group, suggesting the positive effect of the L2 experience. For other vowels, the scores of both groups were not significantly different from one another. The predictions of the perceptual assimilation task failed to predict most results. These results might imply the need for other means to compare L1 and L2 sounds to understand the mechanism regarding the identification ability of the L2 sounds. They may also suggest that some vowels are easier to learn than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominance of Thai as a foreign language in Asia has significantly increased the prevalence of Standard Thai and the demand for native Thai-speaking teachers. As a result, universities in China, Japan, and South Korea have officially recruited native Thai lecturers to instruct their L2 learners using an authentic language. The students' responses to native Thai lecturers, on the other hand, are not fully understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate how learners with varying language backgrounds perceive the pronunciation and grammar instruction of native-speaking teachers. A total of 108 international students completed a questionnaire eliciting lecturers' use of L1 in pronunciation and grammar instruction, and 12 participants shared their opinions in follow-up interviews. The results revealed that while all three groups valued instruction by native teachers, significant differences were discovered between the Chinese and the others. Japanese and Korean learners, in particular, had a more favorable attitude toward the various roles of native speaker teachers in grammar and pronunciation teaching than Chinese students did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burnout syndrome is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, professional efficacy and cynicism. A significant proportion of medical students reported having burnout syndrome during their training in medical education. Several tools including the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (CBI-SS) are considered to be a valid measurement of burnout syndrome in medical students. This study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the CBI-SS for assessing burnout syndrome among preclinical medical students in Thailand. This study was conducted during February to March 2019 at the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University (Bangkok, Thailand), which is Thailand's largest and oldest medical school, and Thailand's largest national tertiary referral center. After receiving formal permission to do so from the copyright owner, the original English language version of the CBI-SS was translated to Thai language using an internationally recommended and accepted forward-backward translation protocol. The Thai version of the CBI-SS (Thai CBI-SS) comprises 25 items, including 6 items for personal burnout, 7 items for study-related burnout, 6 items for colleague-related burnout, and 6 items for teacher-related burnout. Standardized Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated to evaluate internal consistency reliability, and correlation coefficient was computed to determine test-retest reliability. A total of 414 preclinical medical students participated in this study. Due to sub-optimal factor weights (<0.50), items 6, 10 and 17 were excluded. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the 22-item Thai CBI-SS for personal, study-related, colleague-related, and teacher-related burnout were 0.898, 0.896, 0.910 and 0.900 respectively. The correlation coefficients for test-retest reliability after three weeks were 0.820, 0.870, 0.821, and 0.787 for personal, study-related, colleague-related, and teacher-related burnout, respectively. Maximum likelihood analysis with oblimin rotation indicated four main components, and confirmatory factor analysis revealed good fit indices of the Thai CBI-SS. Confirmatory factor analysis showed good fit indices of CBI-SS domains (χ2/df = 2.39; CFI = 0.957; GFI = 0.909; RMSEA = 0.058; TLI = 0.949; and NFI = 0.928). The convergent validity analysis using the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) and the Composite Reliability (CR) was adequate for all dimensions (personal: AVE = 0.626, CR = 0.893; study-related: AVE = 0.601, CR = 0.899; colleague-related: AVE = 0.677, CR = 0.913; teacher-related: AVE = 0.606, CR = 0.900). The HTMT values for all variables are in the range from 0.315 to 0.833, confirming the discriminant validity. The Thai CBI-SS was found to be a valid and reliable tool for evaluating burnout syndrome in preclinical medical students in Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thai rarely use punctuation, and there are no obvious separators between sentences. Sentences need to be segmented by semantics, which brings extra difficulties to natural language processing tasks such as lexical analysis, syntactic analysis and machine translation. This paper proposes a sentence segmentation method based on dual-path neural network. Compared with the traditional Thai sentence segmentation method, this method does not need to define the feature manually, but uses a unified circular neural network to encode the sequence of words before and after the candidate interval. Then, the coding vector of the sequence before and after the sequence is used as the feature to construct the Thai segmentation classification model. Experimental results on the Orchid97 Thai corpus show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional Thai sentence segmentation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Context: The Spine Oncology Study Group Outcomes Questionnaire version 2.0 (SOSGOQ2.0) is a spinal metastasis (SM)-specific quality of life (QoL) questionnaire that was previously reported to have good reliability and validity. There is currently no Thai version of the SOSGOQ 2.0. (TH-SOSGOQ2.0).Purpose: To assess the psychometric properties of the TH-SOSGOQ 2.0.Study Design/setting: Cross-sectional study. Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University.Patient Sample: Patients who were confirmed diagnosis of metastatic spinal disease, age 18 to 75 years, and having already undergone surgery and/or radiotherapy for the treatment of spinal metastasis.Outcome Measures: Validity and reliability of the TH-SOSGOQ 2.0 to assess QoL in Patients with SM.Methods: Using the forward-backward translation technique, the SOSGOQ2.0 was translated into Thai language to create the TH-SOSGOQ2.0. SM patients were prospectively enrolled and evaluated for patient QoL using both the TH-SOSGOQ2.0 and the EQ-5D-5L (Thai version) at baseline and 3 months after treatment. Construct validity was assessed using multi-trait scaling analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and correlation with EQ-5D-5L. Test-retest reliability was assessed in a subgroup of patients who took the TH-SOSGOQ2.0 two times one week apart.Results: Sixty-eight patients (mean age: 57 years; 30 males, 38 females) were included. The Cronbach's alpha values for the total score, physical function, neurological function, pain, mental health, social function, and post-therapy domains were 0.87, 0.89, 0.91, 0.84, 0.82, 0.75, and 0.85, respectively. Good reliability was demonstrated (interclass correlation coefficient range: 0.70-0.84), except for the social function domain (0.60). Regarding concurrent validity, the TH-SOSGOQ2.0 domains demonstrated moderate to good correlation with the corresponding EQ-5D-5L 9 (Thai version) domains (range: -0.32 to -0.78). Physical function was the most well-correlated domain with the EQ-5D-5L (Thai version) (-0.77).Conclusions: TH-SOSGOQ2.0 demonstrated good reliability and validity for assessing QoL in Thai SM patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Question Answering (QA) is a natural language processing task that enables the machine to understand a given context and answer a given question. There are several QA research trials containing high resources of the English language. However, Thai is one of the languages that have low availability of labeled corpora in QA studies. According to previous studies, while the English QA models could achieve more than 90% of F1 scores, Thai QA models could obtain only 70% in our baseline. In this study, we aim to improve the performance of Thai QA models by generating more question-answer pairs with Multilingual Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (mT5) along with data preprocessing methods for Thai. With this method, the question-answer pairs can synthesize more than 100 thousand pairs from provided Thai Wikipedia articles. Utilizing our synthesized data, many fine-tuning strategies were investigated to achieve the highest model performance. Furthermore, we have presented that the syllable-level F1 is a more suitable evaluation measure than Exact Match (EM) and the word-level F1 for Thai QA corpora. The experiment was conducted on two Thai QA corpora: Thai Wiki QA and iApp Wiki QA. The results show that our augmented model is the winner on both datasets compared to other modern transformer models: Roberta and mT5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the little-known "bare classifier phrase" construction in Modern Standard Thai. It describes the syntax, semantics and discourse functions of Thai bare classifier phrases, and further proposes a diachronic account of their origin in reduction of post-posed numeral 'one'. Following this synchronic and diachronic description, this article attempts to locate Thai within a working typology of bare classifier constructions in mainland Asian languages, and further argues for the importance of bare classifier constructions to the theory of classifiers more generally. Following Bisang (1999) and others, it argues that bare classifier constructions reveal the core function of classifiers in Asian languages to be individuation – a referential function. It therefore cautions against some recent proposals to merge classifiers and gender markers within a single categorical space defined on the semantic basis of nominal classification, and in favour of continuing to treat classifiers as a discrete linguistic category – in mainland Asian languages, at least. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive speech audiometry is the assessment of speech comprehension and phonological discrimination through automated means. In order for the performance of such assessments in preschoolers to be successful, the employed list of words and pictures must be easily recognized both linguistically and visually. That is, the children must be able to easily associate the sound they hear with the picture they see with a high degree of certainty. To this end, a Thai monosyllabic word and picture list called NCU-20 (NECTEC-CU-20) is proposed. The word lists for Thai vowel and consonant hearing tests are designed with an awareness of phonetic environments. Regarding Thai vowels, both monophthongs and diphthongs, with all qualities and quantities, are examined. Initial consonants are categorized based on places and manners of articulation. The effectiveness of the list is objectively and subjectively verified through Thai Textbook Corpus, Thai National Corpus, Zipf scores, a listening test of preschoolers with normal hearing, and our proposed ranking systems referred to as Tier-1st, Tier-3/3, and Overall Tier. The final suggested word and picture list comprises 45 items (words) covering 35 vowels and consonant groups in the Thai Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapidly changed in our society and education may influence to nature of learning and learning behaviors in young new generation. The 21st century learning is requiring educators to prepare our children by quality of learning and teaching. Teachers are key change agent to help learners live and learn with new learning environments. The study aimed to explore perspective of Thai educators toward 21st century learning and teaching by surveying method. The study investigated 41,991 educators who have responsibility or concerns in teaching and learning. Data were collected through online questionnaire and then analyzed by statistical package in terms of frequency and percentage. Finding revealed that 21st century learning and teaching in classroom should be conducted in appropriate ways, but a few misunderstand in support system and learning environment were reported. Educators should be discussed and prepared both teachers and learners to modern classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a transcription of a video recording Thai Finger Spelling (TFS)—a specific signing mode used in Thai sign language—to a corresponding Thai word. TFS copes with 42 Thai alphabets and 20 vowels using multiple and complex schemes. This leads to many technical challenges uncommon in spelling schemes of other sign languages. Our proposed system, Automatic Thai Finger Spelling Transcription (ATFS), processes a signing video in 3 stages: ALS marking video frames to easily remove any non-signing frame as well as conveniently group frames associating to the same alphabet, SR classifying a signing image frame to a sign label (or its equivalence), and SSR transcribing a series of signs into alphabets. ALS utilizes the TFS practice of signing different alphabets at different locations. SR and SSC employ well-adopted spatial and sequential models. Our ATFS has been found to achieve Alphabet Error Rate (AER) 0.256 (c.f. 0.63 of the baseline method). In addition to ATFS, our findings have disclosed a benefit of coupling image classification and sequence modeling stages by using a feature or penultimate vector for label representation rather than a definitive label or one-hot coding. Our results also assert the necessity of a smoothening mechanism in ALS and reveal a benefit of our proposed WFS, which could lead to over 15.88 % improvement. For TFS transcription, our work emphasizes the utilization of signing location in the identification of different alphabets. This is contrary to a common belief of exploiting signing time duration, which are shown to be ineffective by our data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aimed at assessing the cross-cultural reliability and validation of the Thai version of the Working Style Assessment (WSA). The original scales were translated into the Thai language and back translated and approved by PAR (Psychological Assessment Resources), Inc. Questionnaires were collected from 896 Thai participants (388 males and 508 females) who were employed in the workforce aged between 18 and 60 years. The Thai version has acceptable reliability and validity. Analysis of invariances and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) revealed that the US original and the Thai WSA model forms were "partially invariant". To broaden the knowledge, the approach used in this study could be adopted as guidelines for developing a WSA in countries where localized versions are unavailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since English is extensively used among linguacultural users to access life opportunities, it has become a requisite foreign language in the Thai educational system. To prepare Thai learners for this new changing role of English and reduce English Language Teaching dependency on the native English variety, this study aimed to explore English lecturers' voices in Thai universities on existing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pedagogies at the Thai tertiary level with the research question: how do English lecturers in Thai universities perceive EFL in Thai universities? Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 25 Thai EFL university lecturers selected from ten different universities in Thailand and analyzed using content analysis. The finding reveals that EFL-oriented pedagogy plays a dominant role in English language teaching (ELT) education in Thai classrooms, illustrating three main salient themes from the study: (1) EFL pedagogies; (2) EFL materials; and (3) EFL curriculums. The result shows that the pedagogy is less responsive in the changing roles of English use and its widespread worldwide, especially among diverse linguacultural interlocutors. Hence, English university lecturers should reconsider, adjust, and made more practical glocal changes in English language teaching for the purpose of language teaching, language planning and predicting language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurement of a psychological construct across populations without a common linguistic medium often necessitates the development of multiple translations of the psychometric tool across multiple languages, dialects, or other population-specific variations. In this follow-up (Stage 2) study, a listening test using a shared set of 27 stimuli from the Soundscape Attribute Translation Project (SATP) was conducted with Thai-speaking participants using the set of Thai translations of the eight perceptual affective quality (PAQ) descriptors selected in earlier (Stage 1) work through a structured evaluation questionnaire. Principal component analysis was performed on the listening test data to obtain a rank-two reduction of the responses with maximal explained variance. In order to align the principal component space to the two-dimensional circumplex space, this work presents a simple and numerically stable method based on the orthogonal Procrustes projection, to find the optimal two-dimensional orthogonal transform that aligns the first two principal components with the axes corresponding to Pleasantness and Eventfulness as defined in ISO/TS 12913-3:2019. Analysis of the listening test responses indicated good to excellent interrater reliability, reflecting the general comprehensibility of the translations to laypersons. Subsequent analyses yielded a two-dimensional projection with ▪ explained variance and near-perfect alignment of the composite Pleasantness and Eventfulness axes. Angular locations of the individual translated PAQs are located within ▪ of their theoretically ideal locations and preserve angular ordering, albeit with imperfect equiangularity. Cross-analysis against the results from Stage 1 showed that the structured evaluation may be partially useful in anticipating potential imperfections of the PAQ translations and their angular locations in Stage 2. • A listening test on the SATP dataset was conducted with Thai-speaking participants using translations of 8 soundscape PAQs. • An orthogonal Procrustes projection was developed to align the principal component space and the circumplex space • Translated PAQs are located within 16° of their ideal locations and preserve angular ordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instruction attack is a malicious attempt to manipulate a chatbot by providing misleading or harmful prompts to achieve unintended outcomes. Detecting instruction attacks is crucial to protect the integrity and safety of chatbot interactions. In this study, we focus on identifying different types of instruction attacks which includes Goal Hijacking, Prompt Leaking, Reverse Exposure, Role Play Instruction and Unsafe Instruction Topic. Given the widening threat scope and the lack of research thus far in this field in a Thai language-oriented context, our intentions are to develop an effective defence system. We suggest an innovative approach: combining XLM-RoBERTa, a state-of-the art language model, with a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU). By combining rigorous experimentation and comprehensive evaluation, our method provides outstanding accuracy of 96.52% , precision 96.50% , Recall and F1-score 96.41%. This research contributes to creating a safer and more trustworthy environment for chatbot-mediated interactions in the Thai language context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributional semantics in the form of word embeddings are an essential ingredient to many modern natural language processing systems. The quantification of semantic similarity between words can be used to evaluate the ability of a system to perform semantic interpretation. To this end, a number of word similarity datasets have been created for the English language over the last decades. For Thai language few such resources are available. In this work, we create three Thai word similarity datasets by translating and re-rating the popular WordSim-353, SimLex-999 and SemEval-2017-Task-2 datasets. The three datasets contain 1852 word pairs in total and have different characteristics in terms of difficulty, domain coverage, and notion of similarity (relatedness vs. similarity). These features help to gain a broader picture of the properties of an evaluated word embedding model. We include baseline evaluations with existing Thai embedding models, and identify the high ratio of out-of-vocabulary words as one of the biggest challenges in the evaluation process. All datasets, evaluation results, and a tool for easy evaluation of new Thai embedding models are available to the NLP community online.