155,954 research outputs found
Gossip at Work: Unsanctioned Evaluative Talk in Formal School Meetings
This article uses a form of linguistic ethnography to analyze videotaped recordings of gossip that took place during formal school meetings. By comparing this gossip data against existing models of gossip based on data collected in informal settings, we identify eleven new response classes, including four forms of indirectness that operate to cloak gossip under ambiguity, and seven forms of avoidance that change the trajectory of gossip. In doing so, this article makes three larger contributions. First, it opens a new front in research on organizational politics by providing an empirically grounded, conceptually rich vocabulary for analyzing gossip in formal contexts. Second, it contributes to knowledge about social interactions in organizations. By examining gossip talk embedded within a work context, this project highlights the nexus between structure, agency, and interaction. Third, it contributes to understandings of gossip in general. By examining gossip in a context previously unexamined, this project provides analytical leverage for theorizing conditions under which gossip is likely and when it will take various forms
Seamlessly Unifying Attributes and Items: Conversational Recommendation for Cold-Start Users
Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the
inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start
users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this
limitation by interactively exploring user preference online and pursuing the
exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off. However, existing bandit-based methods
model recommendation actions homogeneously. Specifically, they only consider
the items as the arms, being incapable of handling the item attributes, which
naturally provide interpretable information of user's current demands and can
effectively filter out undesired items. In this work, we consider the
conversational recommendation for cold-start users, where a system can both ask
the attributes from and recommend items to a user interactively. This important
scenario was studied in a recent work. However, it employs a hand-crafted
function to decide when to ask attributes or make recommendations. Such
separate modeling of attributes and items makes the effectiveness of the system
highly rely on the choice of the hand-crafted function, thus introducing
fragility to the system. To address this limitation, we seamlessly unify
attributes and items in the same arm space and achieve their EE trade-offs
automatically using the framework of Thompson Sampling. Our Conversational
Thompson Sampling (ConTS) model holistically solves all questions in
conversational recommendation by choosing the arm with the maximal reward to
play. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ConTS
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods Conversational UCB (ConUCB) and
Estimation-Action-Reflection model in both metrics of success rate and average
number of conversation turns.Comment: TOIS 202
On the Cohomology of Contextuality
Recent work by Abramsky and Brandenburger used sheaf theory to give a
mathematical formulation of non-locality and contextuality. By adopting this
viewpoint, it has been possible to define cohomological obstructions to the
existence of global sections. In the present work, we illustrate new insights
into different aspects of this theory. We shed light on the power of detection
of the cohomological obstruction by showing that it is not a complete invariant
for strong contextuality even under symmetry and connectedness restrictions on
the measurement cover, disproving a previous conjecture. We generalise
obstructions to higher cohomology groups and show that they give rise to a
refinement of the notion of cohomological contextuality: different "levels" of
contextuality are organised in a hierarchy of logical implications. Finally, we
present an alternative description of the first cohomology group in terms of
torsors, resulting in a new interpretation of the cohomological obstructions.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2016, arXiv:1701.0024
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