Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology

Mapping scholarly debates is an important genre of what can be called Knowledge Domain Analytics (KDA) technology – i.e. technology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysing specialist knowledge domains. However, current KDA technology research has emerged from diverse traditions and thus lacks a common conceptual foundation. This paper reports on the design of a KDA ontology that aims to provide this foundation. The paper then describes the argumentation extensions to the ontology for supporting scholarly debate mapping as a special form of KDA and demonstrates its expressive capabilities using a case study debate

A corpus analysis of discourse relations for Natural Language Generation

We are developing a Natural Language Generation (NLG) system that generates texts tailored for the reading ability of individual readers. As part of building the system, GIRL (Generator for Individual Reading Levels), we carried out an analysis of the RST Discourse Treebank Corpus to find out how human writers linguistically realise discourse relations. The goal of the analysis was (a) to create a model of the choices that need to be made when realising discourse relations, and (b) to understand how these choices were typically made for “normal” readers, for a variety of discourse relations. We present our results for discourse relations: concession, condition, elaboration additional, evaluation, example, reason and restatement. We discuss the results and how they were used in GIRL

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Structure strategy use in children\u27s comprehension of expository texts

This study reviewed a body of literature largely written between the mid 1970s and 1990s that was concerned with the rhetorical structure of written expository text and its relationship to memory and comprehension. This dissertation follows from an argument that the earlier research often confused memory and comprehension and that it was limited in its attempt to clarify the relationship between text structure and reading comprehension. The current study sought to provide a fuller description of the manner in which schoolchildren of different ages and abilities employ rhetorical structure in the comprehension process. In contrast to the earlier research this study makes a distinction between the top-level structure of a text and the structure of the reader’s meaning. It sought to discover what, if any, was the relationship between the structure of the reader’s comprehension and the top-level structure of the text, the educational stage of the reader, and the reading comprehension ability of the reader. A sample of 229 schoolchildren from Years 5, 7, and 9, and further subdivided by reading ability, was given a task of reading three passages and carrying out an underlining task to identify the seven sentences in each passage that best captured the its overall meaning. The three passages employed were natural passages of text, each approximately 700 words in length, and each with a different top-level structure. Minor adjustments were made in respect of vocabulary and sentence length to match the different age groups within the sample. Each participant’s sentence selections were analysed for a collective structure in an effort to discover any structure employed by the reader in constructing the meaning of the respective text. The effectiveness of structure usage was measured by the degree of coherence captured by the sentence selections. As might be expected, good readers and older children generally performed the task more successfully and effectively than poorer and younger readers. The results indicated, contrary to a common assumption of the earlier research, that the structures employed by the participants reflected two different and distinct categories: content structures which selected information based on association and rhetorical structures based on logical argument. It was subsequently considered that semantic information might be relatively more influential in using content structure whereas syntax might play the more significant role in the use of rhetorical structure. The more able readers generally maximised coherence by combining rhetorical and content structures in the construction of meaning except where a passage was limited to description only. There was a complex relationship between the structure of the text and the structure of the reader’s meaning that reflected a constructivist explanation of reading comprehension. It was found that whilst many children of all ages and ability had a capacity to recognise the various content and rhetorical structures regardless of their relative complexity, that effective use was related to practice. Other factors that might complicate structure strategy use in reading comprehension were identified

Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology

Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA research: Library and Information Science (LIS), which commits to a citation-based Bibliometrics paradigm, and Knowledge Engineering (KE), which adopts an ontology-based Conceptual Modelling paradigm. A key limitation of work to date is its inability to provide machine-readable models of the debate in academic knowledge domains. This thesis argues that KDA tools should support users in understanding the features of scholarly debate as a prerequisite for engaging with their chosen domain. To this end, the thesis proposes a Scholarly Debate Ontology which specifies the formal vocabulary for constructing representations of debate in academic knowledge domains. The thesis also proposes an analytical approach that is used to automatically detect clusters of viewpoints as particularly important features of scholarly debate. This approach combines aspects of both the Conceptual Modelling and Bibliometrics paradigms. That is, the method combines an ontological focus on semantics and a graph-theoretical focus on structure in order to identify and reveal new insights about viewpoint-clusters in a given knowledge domain. This combined ontological and graph-theoretical approach is demonstrated and evaluated by modelling and analysing debates in two domains. The thesis reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach, and considers the directions which this work opens up for future research into KDA technology

Contrasting the rhetoric of abstracts in medical discourse: Implications and applications for English/Spanish translation

Producción CientíficaThe present study aims at offering a contrastive analysis framework for the specific textual patterns of the expert-to-expert communicative setting from a semantic and a functional approach. Our methodology tries to identify patterns of behaviour in one of the genres that might be said to be exclusive of expert-to-expert discourse in medicine: abstracts. By means of describing regularities, differences in the way information is distributed will be pinpointed. Since textual realizations have been agreed to bridge the distance between the semantic and the functional component, cohesion will be analyzed both as a semantic marker and as an indicator of information distribution — pragmatic marker — according to functional constraints. ‘Ad hoc’ comparable and translation corpora have been built, extracted from medical journals with a significant impact. Intra and interlingual analysis of those corpora has been carried out to attain a comprehensive description of textual patterns from the above mentioned semantic, formal and functional parametrical levels.Junta de Castilla y León (2005–2007) - Project (UEMC01A05)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2005-01215

Creating a method for video game subtitle analysis and presenting a demonstrative case study on Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles

In this study, I set out to create a method for video game subtitle analysis that could benefit translation studies, especially the study of video game subtitling. I demonstrate the use of my method by conducting a case study on the video game Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles in comparison to the English original subtitles. Much of the popularity of video games can be credited to their translations, as having been translated to multiple different languages has enabled them to be marketed all around the world. However, little research on video games is done by translation studies, even though video games have become a globally popular pastime in the past few decades. I chose this topic for my study as I believed it could benefit the field of translation studies by bringing a new research topic and a practical method of research into the attention of a larger audience. The study begins by presenting background information on both subtitling and video games, as they are the essential factors of this study. Then, the study introduces the theoretical background on which the new analysing method is based on, which is by the works of Díaz-Cintas and Remael Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling (2014) and Mangiron Subtitling in game localisation: A descriptive study (2012). Linguistic subtitle analysis by Diaz-Cintas and Remael (2014) and video game subtitling conventions by Mangiron (2012) are combined into a new analysing method for video game subtitles. The method consists of two main categories; linguistic analysis components and video game subtitling attributes. There are three linguistic analysis components: text reduction, linguistic cohesion and coherence in subtitling and segmentation and line breaks; and five video game subtitling attributes: subtitle length and duration, font: size, type colour, and background, character identification, sound effects and emotions, reduction and segmentation. The method is introduced on its own, and then demonstrated in use in the case study on Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles. The case study on Trine 2 successfully demonstrated the use of my method for video game subtitle analysis. The Finnish subtitles were compared to the English originals by using the new method, and the analysis provided much results. The case study proved that this method could be used by translation studies to study video game subtitles and lay the foundation for future work in video game translation studies