17,423 research outputs found
Words are Malleable: Computing Semantic Shifts in Political and Media Discourse
Recently, researchers started to pay attention to the detection of temporal
shifts in the meaning of words. However, most (if not all) of these approaches
restricted their efforts to uncovering change over time, thus neglecting other
valuable dimensions such as social or political variability. We propose an
approach for detecting semantic shifts between different viewpoints--broadly
defined as a set of texts that share a specific metadata feature, which can be
a time-period, but also a social entity such as a political party. For each
viewpoint, we learn a semantic space in which each word is represented as a low
dimensional neural embedded vector. The challenge is to compare the meaning of
a word in one space to its meaning in another space and measure the size of the
semantic shifts. We compare the effectiveness of a measure based on optimal
transformations between the two spaces with a measure based on the similarity
of the neighbors of the word in the respective spaces. Our experiments
demonstrate that the combination of these two performs best. We show that the
semantic shifts not only occur over time, but also along different viewpoints
in a short period of time. For evaluation, we demonstrate how this approach
captures meaningful semantic shifts and can help improve other tasks such as
the contrastive viewpoint summarization and ideology detection (measured as
classification accuracy) in political texts. We also show that the two laws of
semantic change which were empirically shown to hold for temporal shifts also
hold for shifts across viewpoints. These laws state that frequent words are
less likely to shift meaning while words with many senses are more likely to do
so.Comment: In Proceedings of the 26th ACM International on Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017
Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network
Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and
disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. Such
dynamics are especially notable during a period of crisis. This work addresses
several important tasks of measuring, visualizing and predicting short term
text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word's contextual semantics,
and contrasting such shift with surface level word dynamics, or concept drift,
observed in social media streams. Unlike previous approaches on learning word
representations from text, we study the relationship between short-term concept
drift and representation shift on a large social media corpus - VKontakte posts
in Russian collected during the Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2014-2015. Our novel
contributions include quantitative and qualitative approaches to (1) measure
short-term representation shift and contrast it with surface level concept
drift; (2) build predictive models to forecast short-term shifts in meaning
from previous meaning as well as from concept drift; and (3) visualize
short-term representation shift for example keywords to demonstrate the
practical use of our approach to discover and track meaning of newly emerging
terms in social media. We show that short-term representation shift can be
accurately predicted up to several weeks in advance. Our unique approach to
modeling and visualizing word representation shifts in social media can be used
to explore and characterize specific aspects of the streaming corpus during
crisis events and potentially improve other downstream classification tasks
including real-time event detection
Assessment of sensor performance
There is an international commitment to develop a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained ocean observation system. However, a foundation for any observing, monitoring or research effort is effective and reliable in situ sensor technologies that accurately measure key environmental parameters. Ultimately, the data used for modelling efforts, management decisions and rapid responses to ocean hazards are only as good as the instruments that collect them. There is also a compelling need to develop and incorporate new or novel technologies to improve all aspects of existing observing systems and meet various emerging challenges.
Assessment of Sensor Performance was a cross-cutting issues session at the international OceanSensors08 workshop in Warnemünde, Germany, which also has penetrated some of the papers published as a result of the workshop (Denuault, 2009; Kröger et al., 2009; Zielinski et al., 2009). The discussions were focused on how best to classify and validate the instruments required for effective and reliable ocean observations and research. The following is a summary of the discussions and conclusions drawn from this workshop, which specifically addresses the characterisation of sensor systems, technology readiness levels, verification of sensor performance and quality management of sensor systems
Contrasting approaches to preparedness: a reflection on two case studies
This chapter reflects on ongoing research in SMEs in the manufacturing and service sectors. It contrasts different approaches to the issue of preparedness from an organisational and social perspective, in two cases where new enterprise-wide business processes were implemented and integrated in different settings. In both cases, the emergence of new systems presented a huge challenge to companies hard-pressed to marshal the resources to mount effective change and implementation projects on this scale. The cases presented enable a comparison of different strategies used, one firm responding to organic growth, and the other to rapid industry-driven change. The chapter focuses not on the implementations per se, but instead on the issue of preparedness for change. The chapter concludes by drawing out general lessons concerning how to support and maintain organisational preparedness for enterprise wide change in different industry setting
The Open method of co-ordination and the analysis of mutual learning processes of the European employment strategy: methodological and theoretical considerations
The purpose of this paper is solely to address two interlinked methodological and theoretical questions concerning the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), using the European Employment Strategy as a case: First, what is the most appropriate approach to learning in the analyses of the processes of the European Employment Strategy (EES)? Second, how is mutual learning processes diffused among the Member States? In answering these two questions the paper draws on a social constructivist approach to learning thereby contributing to the debate about learning in the political science literature. At the same time, based on this concept of learning, it is concluded that the learning effects of the EES are probably somewhat larger than what is normally suggested, but that successful diffusion still depends on a variety of contextual factors.OMC, Social constructivism, Learning, Discourse analysis, Policy diffusion, European Employment Strategy
Sourcing semiclassical gravity from spontaneously localized quantum matter
The possibility that a classical space-time and quantum matter cohabit at the
deepest level, i.e. the possibility of having a fundamental and not
phenomenological semiclassical gravity, is often disregarded for lack of a good
candidate theory. The standard semiclassical theory suffers from fundamental
inconsistencies (e.g.: Schr\"odinger cat sources, faster-than-light
communication and violation of the Born rule) which can only be ignored in
simple typical situations. We harness the power of spontaneous localization
models, historically constructed to solve the measurement problem in quantum
mechanics, to build a consistent theory of (stochastic) semiclassical gravity
in the Newtonian limit. Our model makes quantitative and potentially testable
predictions: we recover the Newtonian pair potential up to a short distance
cut-off (hence we predict no 1 particle self-interaction) and uncover an
additional gravitational decoherence term which depends on the specifics of the
underlying spontaneous localization model considered. We hint at a possible
program to go past the Newtonian limit, towards a consistent general
relativistic semiclassical gravity.Comment: 9 pages + refs, 1 figure, typos corrected and minor modification
The analysis of mutual learning processes in the European employment strategy: a social constructivist approach
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the recent debate in the political science literature on analytical approaches to learning, which has gradually developed in a direction of being less and less individualistic. Section 3 follows up on this development and introduces a social constructivist approach to learning that redefines learning as changes in language-constituted relations to others. In section 4 this argument is elaborated into a model for mutual learning. Section 5 contains a qualitative analysis of the organisation of the EES in practice with regard to the possibilities of policy diffusion of the EES learning processes as predicted in the model in section 4. Section 6 deals with the conflictual views on the size and character of the learning processes of the EES in recent studies and proposes a new methodological path to investigate the mutual learning processes based upon a social constructivist approach. Section 7 is the conclusion of the article which sums up the examination of the both the various approaches to learning analysed in the paper and the evaluation of the possibilities of policy diffusion resulting from the learning processes.Mutual learning, European employment strategy, social constructivism
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