An Unsupervised Approach to Biography Production using Wikipedia

We describe an unsupervised approach to multi-document sentence-extraction based summarization for the task of producing biographies. We utilize Wikipedia to automatically construct a corpus of biographical sentences and TDT4 to construct a corpus of non-biographical sentences. We build a biographical-sentence classifier from these corpora and an SVM regression model for sentence ordering from the Wikipedia corpus. We evaluate our work on the DUC2004 evaluation data and with human judges. Overall, our system significantly outperforms all systems that participated in DUC2004, according to the ROUGE-L metric, and is preferred by human subjects

Tell Me What You Do and I’ll Tell You What You Are: Learning Occupation-Related Activities for Biographies

Biography creation requires the identification of important events in the life of the individual in question. While there are events such as birth and death that apply to everyone, most of the other activities tend to be occupation-specific. Hence, occupation gives important clues as to which activities should be included in the biography. We present techniques for automatically identifying which important events apply to the general population, which ones are occupation-specific, and which ones are person-specific. We use the extracted information as features for a multi-class SVM classifier, which is then used to automatically identify the occupation of a previously unseen individual. We present experiments involving 189 individuals from ten occupations, and we show that our approach accurately identifies general and occupation-specific activities and assigns unseen individuals to the correct occupations. Finally, we present evidence that our technique can lead to efficient and effective biography generation relying only on statistical techniques

Possibilities of Enacting and Researching Epistemic Communities

This article explores what the concept of epistemic community can contribute to studies of science and technology and to existing analytical frames of epistemic cultures, technosocial network and community of practice. Reviewing conceptions of epistemic community in political science, organisational studies and feminist epistemologies I suggest that heuristic dimensions include a focus on historical contingencies and timings; on particular epistemic projects and technologies that work as boundary objects; and on epistemic responsibilities and stratifications. These dimensions are further explored in two research vignettes. The first vignette follows the mobilisation and expectations of the Czech synchrotron user community at a funding event as a focal point for examining epistemic responsibilities and the genderings of community. The second vignette follows a biographical narrative about being and becoming a member of an epistemic community and amplifies the importance of different configurations of community. I argue that the contours, distributions and textures of an epistemic community cannot be studied at a single analytical site such as the laboratory and conclude by outlining what can be gained by using a refined concept of epistemic communities and sketching some strategies for further research.Epistemic Community, Epistemic Responsibility, Epistemic Cultures, Community of Practice, Gendering of Community, Synchrotron User Community

Edufare for the future precariat: the moral agenda in Australia’s ‘earning or learning’ policy

This paper considers the educational experience constructed under Australia’s policy decision in 2009 to extend compulsory education by requiring that students must be ‘earning or learning’ till 17 years of age. The discussion draws on an empirical project that explored the moral order operating in classrooms for students retained under this policy in non-academic pathways in high schools and Technical and Further Education colleges across three towns experiencing youth employment stress. It asks how the policy regulating these students’ prolonged engagement with formal education plays out in classroom interactions, to what end and to whose benefit. A theoretical lens informed by work by Standing and Wacquant is used to understand the contemporary moment, and work by Durkheim and Bernstein unpacks the moral work implicated in classroom interactions. The analysis describes the light curriculum and the heavy compliance demanded in these ‘edufare’ programmes then argues that in essence the policy seeks to manage the social risk posed by the future precariat. The conclusion reflects on whether this is an adequate policy response to broad generational changes in fortunes and prospects to which education may not have the answers

Special Libraries, November 1945

Volume 36, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1945/1008/thumbnail.jp