"Nec tecum nec sine te" : Language-Music Interplays in Musical Responses to Samuel Beckett

Intermediality is rarely a one-way street: Throughout his career, Samuel Beckett employed a variety of modes of expression and media in his works, and – vice versa – it is partly owing to the strong role played by music in his works that Samuel Beckett's works figure so prominently in compositional history from 1930 to the present day. In fact, with more than 250 Beckett-based compositions of different genres and styles and from various countries responding to virtually the entire Beckettian œuvre, Beckett's poems, plays and prose have exerted an influence on composers unequalled by those of any other 20th-century author. This study shows that Beckett's double-coded language, sounds and images have served as a blueprint for crossing medial and social gaps in favor of a de-hierarchization of both the author-audience relationship and the intermedial interplay. As a result of this paradigm shift toward more participatory artistic modes and toward a postmodern "radical pluralization" (Wolfgang Welsch) of meaning and expressive vehicles, Beckett regarded music as an equal interlocutor of language and, vice versa, composers have become more receptive to entirely new modes of text-setting. "Nec tecum nec sine te," a Latin phrase by Ovid cited by Beckett to describe the double-edged relationship between Hamm and Clov from Endgame – interdependent yet noncommittal – equally applies to the text-music interplays portrayed in the present work

Named entity extraction for speech

Named entity extraction is a field that has generated much interest over recent years with the explosion of the World Wide Web and the necessity for accurate information retrieval. Named entity extraction, the task of finding specific entities within documents, has proven of great benefit for numerous information extraction and information retrieval tasks.As well as multiple language evaluations, named entity extraction has been investigated on a variety of media forms with varying success. In general, these media forms have all been based upon standard text and assumed that any variation from standard text constitutes noise.We investigate how it is possible to find named entities in speech data.. Where others have focussed on applying named entity extraction techniques to transcriptions of speech, we investigate a method for finding the named entities direct from the word lattices associated with the speech signal. The results show that it is possible to improve named entity recognition at the expense of word error rate (WER) in contrast to the general view that F -score is directly proportional to WER.We use a. Hidden Markov Model {HMM) style approach to the task of named entity extraction and show how it is possible to utilise a HMM to find named entities within speech lattices. We further investigate how it is possible to improve results by considering an alternative derivation of the joint probability of words and entities than is traditionally used. This new derivation is particularly appropriate to speech lattices as no presumptions are made about the sequence of words.The HMM style approach that we use requires using a number of language models in parallel. We have developed a system for discriminately retraining these language models based upon the results of the output, and we show how it is possible to improve named entity recognition by iterations over both training data and development data. We also consider how part-of-speech (POS) can be used within word lattices. We devise a method of labelling a word lattice with POS tags and adapt the model to make use of these POS tags when producing the best path through the lattice. The resulting path provides the most likely sequence of words, entities and POS tags and we show how this new path is better than the previous path which ignored the POS tags

Partitioning Method for Emergent Behavior Systems Modeled by Agent-Based Simulations

Used to describe some interesting and usually unanticipated pattern or behavior, the term emergence is often associated with time-evolutionary systems comprised of relatively large numbers of interacting yet simple entities. A significant amount of previous research has recognized the emergence phenomena in many real-world applications such as collaborative robotics, supply chain analysis, social science, economics and ecology. As improvements in computational technologies combined with new modeling paradigms allow the simulation of ever more dynamic and complex systems, the generation of data from simulations of these systems can provide data to explore the phenomena of emergence. To explore some of the modeling implications of systems where emergent phenomena tend to dominate, this research examines three simulations based on familiar natural systems where each is readily recognized as exhibiting emergent phenomena. To facilitate this exploration, a taxonomy of Emergent Behavior Systems (EBS) is developed and a modeling formalism consisting of an EBS lexicon and a formal specification for models of EBS is synthesized from the long history of theories and observations concerning emergence. This modeling formalism is applied to each of the systems and then each is simulated using an agent-based modeling framework. To develop quantifiable measures, associations are asserted: 1) between agent-based models of EBS and graph-theoretical methods, 2) with respect to the formation of relationships between entities comprising a system and 3) concerning the change in uncertainty of organization as the system evolves. These associations form the basis for three measurements related to the information flow, entity complexity, and spatial entropy of the simulated systems. These measurements are used to: 1) detect the existence of emergence and 2) differentiate amongst the three systems. The results suggest that the taxonomy and formal specification developed provide a workable, simulation-centric definition of emergent behavior systems consistent with both historical concepts concerning the emergence phenomena and modern ideas in complexity science. Furthermore, the results support a structured approach to modeling these systems using agent-based methods and offers quantitative measures useful for characterizing the emergence phenomena in the simulations

Reinforcement Learning

Brains rule the world, and brain-like computation is increasingly used in computers and electronic devices. Brain-like computation is about processing and interpreting data or directly putting forward and performing actions. Learning is a very important aspect. This book is on reinforcement learning which involves performing actions to achieve a goal. The first 11 chapters of this book describe and extend the scope of reinforcement learning. The remaining 11 chapters show that there is already wide usage in numerous fields. Reinforcement learning can tackle control tasks that are too complex for traditional, hand-designed, non-learning controllers. As learning computers can deal with technical complexities, the tasks of human operators remain to specify goals on increasingly higher levels. This book shows that reinforcement learning is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and applications and it shall stimulate and encourage new research in this field

They are not machines: Korean women workers and their fight for democratic trade unionism in the 1970's

The 1960's and the 1970's were decades of extraordinarily rapid change in South Korea. The military coup that took place in May, 1961 presaged eighteen years of increasingly harsh and oppressive authoritarian rule under the leadership of Park Chung-hee, during which time South Korea shed its centuries old dependency upon rural agrarianism and emerged as one of the world's premier industrial economies. At the forefront of this advance was the textile and garment industry; a manufacturing complex characterised by a myriad of sweat-shop factories in which the overwhelming majority of employees were girls and young women. Working conditions in these establishments were of a universally low standard, and all notions of workers' rights and dignities were sacrificed for the government-sponsored imperative to maximise exports and minimise costs. To facilitate this circumstance, the Park Chung-hee regime constructed a nation-wide trade union organisation that was, in effect, nothing more than an agent of the state: unrepresentative of, and unresponsive to, the interests of workers in all industries. With little, or no, support from male co-workers, and despite their political naivety and the traditionally subordinate status of Korean females, the women textile and garment workers confronted the state, the employers, and their 'official' trade union representatives, and succeeded in forming the nucleus of a fully democratic labour organisation. The enterprise-level democratic trade unions thus formed were not isolated or transient phenomena but included educational and vocational 'outreach' programmes of mutual support, the purposes of which were to enhance individual awareness and extend the concepts of solidarity and collectivity throughout the industrial sector. One of the purposes of this dissertation is to make visible the hidden history of these women. Writers and commentators on South Korean industrial relations share a common disregard for the achievements of the women activists of the 1970's and, instead, locate elsewhere the birth of democratic trade unionism. This study takes advantage of unique access to the life histories and personal records of many individuals, both male and female, who were actively involved in the events of the period. It presents a narrative of the lives and the attainments of women workers whose struggles have gone largely unrecorded, and whose outstanding accomplishments have, until now, remained uncelebrated

Policies and Practice of Political Culture: Theory and Sustainabilty

The ideaof political culture has remained intuitively appealing as a framework for political explanation and assessment, despite a large body of compelling criticism that has accumulated since its introduction three decades ago. However, even recently, adherents of the political culture approach have been unsuccessfulto address the fundamental shortcomings of the concept and its application. This book has two goals. First, a thoroughanalytical critique is undertaken of a dominant strand of political culture theory, closely examining major formative works (e.g.Almond and Verba) as well as numerousrecent studies (e.g., Inglehart). Secondly, on the basis of this critique, a recasting of the concept is presented.The thesis underlying the examinationis that theoretical and methodological problems were built into the concept of political culture at the outset. The chief conceptual problems identified are that: 1) the conceptual melding of the broader culture with political culture has muddled the identification of causes and subverted the investigation of political structures and procedures; 2) the assumption of cultural continuity has left change to be explained only outside the model; and 3) the insistence upon national units of analysis has obscured the significanceof subnational political groupings. Major political trends in recent decades defy explanation in terms of the predictableapproach to political culture, forprominent subculturalcleavages and rapid changes in collectively held political attitudes imply not only important effects emanating from the functioning of politics itself, but also a lack of uniformity across subnational groupings. Political cultures are shaped, not of broader cultural forces, but of individual subjective perceptions gleaned from a limited variety and quantityof interactions with the structures and processes of politics. Theseperceptions produceexpectations, assumptions, choices, and incentives concerning the functioning of politics, all of which comprise political cultures. In this model, political cultures manifest themselves not in terms of national political cultures, butrather of political cultural subgroupings based on differentialperspectives on politics (e.g.socioeconomic, demographic, regional...). The book concludes with discussions of the model and of its implications for research

College and Research Libraries 50 (1) January 1989

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