One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective

Properhood

A history of the notion of PROPERHOOD in philosophy and linguistics is given. Two long-standing ideas, (i) that proper names have no sense, and (ii) that they are expressions whose purpose is to refer to individuals, cannot be made to work comprehensively while PROPER is understood as a subcategory of linguistic units, whether of lexemes or phrases. Phrases of the type the old vicarage, which are potentially ambiguous with regard to properhood, encourage the suggestion that PROPER is best understood as mode of reference contrasting with SEMANTIC reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled. PROPER NAMES are all those expressions that refer nonintensionally. Linguistic evidence is given that this opposition can be grammaticalized, speculation is made about its neurological basis, and psycholinguistic evidence is adduced in support. The PROPER NOUN,asa lexical category, is argued to be epiphenomenal on proper names as newly defined. Some consequences of the view that proper names have no sense in the act of reference are explored; they are not debarred from having senses (better: synchronic etymologies) accessible during other (meta)linguistic activities

Personality profiles and problematic internet use in a sample of Italian adolescents

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between specific personality profiles and Internet use in a sample of Italian adolescents. Method: Four hundred thirty-two adolescents (58.3% males) with an average age of 14.41 years (SD=.95) were enrolled in the study. Participants were administered the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory – Adolescent Form (MMPI-A). A two-step cluster analysis was relied according to IAT items’ scores. Results: Participants were grouped into three clusters labeled “Regulated Internet users” (n=180), “Involved with Internet activities” (n=105), and “At risk for problematic Internet use” (n=147). Consistently, the group at-risk for problematic Internet use showed higher IAT score and MMPI-A scores than the other groups, while no differences emerged between the group of regulated Internet users and the group of those involved with Internet activities. For the group at risk for problematic Internet use, the MMPI-A Clinical Scales on Paranoia (Pa) and Schizophrenia (Sc) showed the highest elevation, indicating a MMPI-A codetype 6-8/8-6 which describes adolescents with ego immaturity, dysregulated affects and behaviors, and reduced reality testing. Conclusions: Adolescents at risk for developing a dysfunctional use of the Internet may have little insight, bizarre beliefs, grandiose thought, and a persecutory view of the external world that may limit their capacity to counteract feelings of hopelessness and anguish. They could perceive the Internet as safe environment where it is possible to express such dysregulated feelings and behaviors, and to cope with emotional distress

From transnational voluntary standards to local practices. A case study of forest certification in Russia

In this paper, I discuss how local actors translate transnational voluntary standards of responsible natural resource management into on-the-ground practices in domestic settings. Building on an extensive study of forest certification in Russia, I argue that implementation is not a straightforward execution of transnational rules imposed by powerful transnational actors - e.g., international NGOs, multinationals, governments or consumers. Rather, local actors negotiate the ways in which transnational standards are implemented locally in both formal and informal settings, and thereby settle political conflicts over natural resource management and construct new knowledge related to standard implementation and good natural resource management. They use both global ideas reflected in transnational standards and locally available concepts and practices as building blocks, and combine them in various ways in order to construct new knowledge. I therefore emphasize stakeholder interest negotiation and collective learning as core social processes which enable the translation of transnational standards into on-the-ground practices. -- Das Papier beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie lokale Akteure freiwillige transnationale Standards für verantwortliches Ressourcenmanagement unter lokalen Rahmenbedingungen umsetzen. Auf der Grundlage einer umfangreichen Untersuchung der Waldzertifizierungspraxis in Russland wird argumentiert, dass die Einführung der Standards nicht über die direkte Implementierung transnationaler und durch einflussreiche transnationale Akteure (internationale Nichtregierungsorganisationen, multinationale Konzerne, Regierungen oder Konsumenten) erfolgt. Wie transnationale Standards vor Ort implementiert werden, verhandeln lokale Akteure in formalen und informellen Foren. Sie lösen politische Konflikte im Bereich des Managements natürlicher Ressourcen und bauen neues Wissen über die Implementierung der Standards und ein gutes Ressourcenmanagement auf. Als Bausteine nutzen sie dabei die in transnationalen Standards reflektierten globalen Grundgedanken sowie vor Ort verfügbare Konzepte und Praktiken und kombinieren diese auf verschiedene Weise. Die Verhandlung von Stakeholder-Interessen und kollektives Lernen sind somit zentrale soziale Prozesse bei der Übertragung transnationaler Standards in die Praxis vor Ort.

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

What Stories Do Young People Tell About Their Past Experience of Social Withdrawal?

This study took as its subject the stories that young people, aged 16 and over, tell about their experience of social withdrawal. It is argued that social withdrawal highlights some of the tensions between paternalistic and enabling modes of supporting young people, particularly in the ‘intermediate period’ of late adolescence and early adulthood. Social interaction is increasingly seen as a necessary element in the development of a full range of capacities in adulthood. At the same time, a critique of this tendency can be identified which appeals to diversity and autonomy, including in relation to social motivation. A review of the literature revealed a sophisticated model of the development of social withdrawal and its associated difficulties, as well as subtypes with distinctive pathways. However, there was a dearth of qualitative analysis of young people’s subjective experience of social withdrawal. A narrative methodology was adopted to answer research questions centred on stories told and explanations offered about the experience of withdrawal. This was informed by an Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and related epistemology. Interviews with four participants were followed up with the co-construction of timelines. Their narratives revealed the importance of specific incidents over longer term tendencies. They also revealed the interaction of power and resistance with feelings of shame and humiliation. Finally, they discussed the changing nature of their selves, discussed in the study in terms of ‘symbiosis’. It is suggested that further research locating withdrawn young people in their social context would be beneficial

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other