22,158 research outputs found
Predicting the Law Area and Decisions of French Supreme Court Cases
In this paper, we investigate the application of text classification methods
to predict the law area and the decision of cases judged by the French Supreme
Court. We also investigate the influence of the time period in which a ruling
was made over the textual form of the case description and the extent to which
it is necessary to mask the judge's motivation for a ruling to emulate a
real-world test scenario. We report results of 96% f1 score in predicting a
case ruling, 90% f1 score in predicting the law area of a case, and 75.9% f1
score in estimating the time span when a ruling has been issued using a linear
Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained on lexical features.Comment: RANLP 201
Persuasive argumentation as a cultural practice
In this article author traces relation between argumentation and cultural practice. The first part focuses on definition of argumentation in informal logic tradition. In particular, it discusses argument in terms of verbal and social activity involving the use of everyday language. Author claims that there is no argumentation beyond language. The second part explains persuasive argumentation as a form of cultural practice. The persuasive arguments found in âsocial practiceâ can be understood as a social activity, analysable within the context of a given cultural system. Author refers to an approach taking the argumentative expression as a certain type of communicative practice, directed towards respecting, recognising or accepting specific actions. The inclusion of persuasive argumentation in the âcircuit of cultural activitiesâ to be studied makes it possible to compare this type of argumentation with other social practices, and to posit a clear historical dimension in the study of argumentation. It also makes it possible to view persuasive argumentation as one of many cultural activities aimed at changing or perpetuating behaviours, attitudes, thinking, etc. The third part of the paper concerns the problem of humanistic interpretation of persuasive argumentation. Author attempts to develop this intuition, at the same time demonstrating the problems that arise from this approach. In conclusion, author tries to analyze argumentation in terms of culture theory and humanistic interpretation
How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations
We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify
discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data
from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very
uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic
roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of
question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very
much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion
dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two
different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model
outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using
platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word
relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively
to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions.
Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn
discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed,
with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism
enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to
their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil
important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our
text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous
non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play
their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook
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A collaborative-project memory tool for participatory planning
Technology is more and more providing planners and designer with tools and methods to collect and communicate spatial data and assist spatial analysis. When we think about new technologies supporting planning we mainly think about GIS, urban modelling, simulation models and virtual reality. But many other challenges to the planning practice need for tools to support and improve planning activities. In this paper we discuss the need of new tools to support knowledge representation and knowledge sharing in participatory planning processes. The paper describes the use of a hypermedia and sensemaking tool (Compendium) to structure the knowledge produced in a real participatory planning process. In the present application Compendium has been used not for real-time capturing but for a post-hoc analysis of a real participatory planning experience.
Compendium has been used to represent and reconstruct the group memory of consultation meetings in order to allow both the planning team and the citizens to navigate into the contents of those meetings. Moreover the paper describes the main features and potential of the use of Compendium in Participatory Planning domain, and it describes the results of the group memory reconstruction. Finally the case study opens reflections on the need of new planning technologies supporting participatory knowledge generation, representation and management
A Framework for Combining Defeasible Argumentation with Labeled Deduction
In the last years, there has been an increasing demand of a variety of
logical systems, prompted mostly by applications of logic in AI and other
related areas. Labeled Deductive Systems (LDS) were developed as a flexible
methodology to formalize such a kind of complex logical systems. Defeasible
argumentation has proven to be a successful approach to formalizing commonsense
reasoning, encompassing many other alternative formalisms for defeasible
reasoning. Argument-based frameworks share some common notions (such as the
concept of argument, defeater, etc.) along with a number of particular features
which make it difficult to compare them with each other from a logical
viewpoint. This paper introduces LDSar, a LDS for defeasible argumentation in
which many important issues concerning defeasible argumentation are captured
within a unified logical framework. We also discuss some logical properties and
extensions that emerge from the proposed framework.Comment: 15 pages, presented at CMSRA Workshop 2003. Buenos Aires, Argentin
THE USE OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN RELATION TO THE QUALITY OF THE STUDENTSâ ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING
The ability to compose an argumentative text is important for ESL and EFL learners.
In terms of the communicative nature of writing, cohesion is regarded as an essential textual
component, not only to create organized text but also to the comprehensiveness of the text.
Therefore, the use of cohesive devices is really important. Based on Halliday and Hasan
Cohesion theory (1976)this study is intended to investigate the use of cohesive devices and
also the relationship between the frequency of cohesive devices using and the quality of
argumentative writing. An analysis of 30 studentsâ argumentative writing showed that the
students were familiar with various cohesive devices and used them in their writing. Among
the cohesive devices, reference had the largest percentage of the total number cohesive
devices, followed by lexical devices and conjunction devices. Furthermore, it was found that
there was no significant relationship between the number of cohesive devi ces used and the
quality of writing. The findings of the study have some important implications for EFL writing
teachers and learners
Exploring the interplay of mode of discourse and proficiency level in ESL writing performance
Recent theory in discourse and practice in rhetoric has suggested that writers require different skills and strategies when writing for different purposes, and in using different genres and modes (Kinneavy, 1972; Carrell and Connor, 1991) in writing. The importance of taking into account these various aspectual skills and forms of writing is recognised in teaching (e.g. Scarcella and Oxford, 1992), and in the assessment of writing (e.g. Odell and Cooper, 1980). For instance, Odell and Cooper argued that any claims about writing ability cannot be made until studentsâ performance on a variety of writing tasks has been examined. Thus, the issue of what writing task(s) are to be included in a test is crucial, since a task will be regarded as useless if it does not provide the basis for
making generalisations regarding an individualâs writing ability. This paper presents the findings of a study on the effects of mode of discourse on L2 writing performance as well as the interplay between learner variable, namely, proficiency level and task variable, mode of discourse amongst Malaysian upper secondary ESL learners. The findings
provide some evidence for the need to re-examine issues of reliability and validity in test practice of manipulating variables in the design of assessment tasks to evaluate ESL
writing performance. Given the status and complexity of the writing skill, it stands to reason that studies into this area will continue to shed light onto how best the construct
can be understood, taught and tested to give a fair chance for language learners to exhibit their true ability and be reliably reported on
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