22,899 research outputs found
Geospatial Narratives and their Spatio-Temporal Dynamics: Commonsense Reasoning for High-level Analyses in Geographic Information Systems
The modelling, analysis, and visualisation of dynamic geospatial phenomena
has been identified as a key developmental challenge for next-generation
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this context, the envisaged
paradigmatic extensions to contemporary foundational GIS technology raises
fundamental questions concerning the ontological, formal representational, and
(analytical) computational methods that would underlie their spatial
information theoretic underpinnings.
We present the conceptual overview and architecture for the development of
high-level semantic and qualitative analytical capabilities for dynamic
geospatial domains. Building on formal methods in the areas of commonsense
reasoning, qualitative reasoning, spatial and temporal representation and
reasoning, reasoning about actions and change, and computational models of
narrative, we identify concrete theoretical and practical challenges that
accrue in the context of formal reasoning about `space, events, actions, and
change'. With this as a basis, and within the backdrop of an illustrated
scenario involving the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban narratives, we address
specific problems and solutions techniques chiefly involving `qualitative
abstraction', `data integration and spatial consistency', and `practical
geospatial abduction'. From a broad topical viewpoint, we propose that
next-generation dynamic GIS technology demands a transdisciplinary scientific
perspective that brings together Geography, Artificial Intelligence, and
Cognitive Science.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive systems; human-computer
interaction; geographic information systems; spatio-temporal dynamics;
computational models of narrative; geospatial analysis; geospatial modelling;
ontology; qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning; spatial assistance
systemsComment: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (ISSN 2220-9964);
Special Issue on: Geospatial Monitoring and Modelling of Environmental
Change}. IJGI. Editor: Duccio Rocchini. (pre-print of article in press
Indexing the Event Calculus with Kd-trees to Monitor Diabetes
Personal Health Systems (PHS) are mobile solutions tailored to monitoring
patients affected by chronic non communicable diseases. A patient affected by a
chronic disease can generate large amounts of events. Type 1 Diabetic patients
generate several glucose events per day, ranging from at least 6 events per day
(under normal monitoring) to 288 per day when wearing a continuous glucose
monitor (CGM) that samples the blood every 5 minutes for several days. This is
a large number of events to monitor for medical doctors, in particular when
considering that they may have to take decisions concerning adjusting the
treatment, which may impact the life of the patients for a long time. Given the
need to analyse such a large stream of data, doctors need a simple approach
towards physiological time series that allows them to promptly transfer their
knowledge into queries to identify interesting patterns in the data. Achieving
this with current technology is not an easy task, as on one hand it cannot be
expected that medical doctors have the technical knowledge to query databases
and on the other hand these time series include thousands of events, which
requires to re-think the way data is indexed. In order to tackle the knowledge
representation and efficiency problem, this contribution presents the kd-tree
cached event calculus (\ceckd) an event calculus extension for knowledge
engineering of temporal rules capable to handle many thousands events produced
by a diabetic patient. \ceckd\ is built as a support to a graphical interface
to represent monitoring rules for diabetes type 1. In addition, the paper
evaluates the \ceckd\ with respect to the cached event calculus (CEC) to show
how indexing events using kd-trees improves scalability with respect to the
current state of the art.Comment: 24 pages, preliminary results calculated on an implementation of
CECKD, precursor to Journal paper being submitted in 2017, with further
indexing and results possibilities, put here for reference and chronological
purposes to remember how the idea evolve
Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse
The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational
linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation.
In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal
with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of
registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web
discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and
argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation
model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold
standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several
machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data,
source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses.
Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is
a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in
User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17
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Conspiracy in the Time of Corona: Automatic detection of Emerging Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories in Social Media and the News
Abstract
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confi- dence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of scientific consensus on the virus’s spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G telecommunication network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a broad vaccination program to facilitate a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of cell phone towers, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders, and wide-scale defiance of scientifically sound public mandates such as those to wear masks and practice social distancing, countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frame- works supporting the generation of rumors and conspiracy theories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling these stories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread
Simple and Effective Curriculum Pointer-Generator Networks for Reading Comprehension over Long Narratives
This paper tackles the problem of reading comprehension over long narratives
where documents easily span over thousands of tokens. We propose a curriculum
learning (CL) based Pointer-Generator framework for reading/sampling over large
documents, enabling diverse training of the neural model based on the notion of
alternating contextual difficulty. This can be interpreted as a form of domain
randomization and/or generative pretraining during training. To this end, the
usage of the Pointer-Generator softens the requirement of having the answer
within the context, enabling us to construct diverse training samples for
learning. Additionally, we propose a new Introspective Alignment Layer (IAL),
which reasons over decomposed alignments using block-based self-attention. We
evaluate our proposed method on the NarrativeQA reading comprehension
benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art performance, improving existing baselines
by relative improvement on BLEU-4 and relative improvement on
Rouge-L. Extensive ablations confirm the effectiveness of our proposed IAL and
CL components.Comment: Accepted to ACL 201
Sentiment Analysis for Words and Fiction Characters From The Perspective of Computational (Neuro-)Poetics
Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., ‘fearful’ passages) and figures (e.g., ‘Voldemort’) from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997 - 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the > 2 million words of the vector space model. After testing the tool’s accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive study, it was applied to compute emotional figure profiles and personality figure profiles (inspired by the so-called ‚big five’ personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures
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