Language engineering - a champion for European culture

Language is key to culture. It is a direct cultural medium as well as a means of recording and providing access to non-lingual elements of culture. Language is also fundamental to a sense of cultural identity. For this reason, it is vital, in a changing Europe, that we preserve the multi-lingual character of our society in order to move successfully towards closer co-operation at a political, economic, and social level. Language engineering is the application of knowledge of language to the development of computer software which can recognise, understand, interpret, and generate human language in all its forms. The paper provides a high level view of the ‘state of the art’ in language engineering and indicates ways in which it will have a profound impact on our culture in the future. It shows how advances in language engineering are an important aid in maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-lingual European society, while enabling the development of social cohesion across cultural and national divides. It addresses issues raised by the prospect of the Multi-lingual Information Society, including education, human communication with technology and information management, as well as aspects of digital cities such as tele-presence in digital libraries, virtual art galleries and electronic museums. The paper raises the issue of language as a factor in cultural domination, showing the contribution that language engineering can make towards countering it. The paper also raises a number of controversial issues concerning the likely benefits arising from the ways in which language is likely to influence the culture of Europe

Dialogue Games for Crosslingual Communication

We describe a novel approach to crosslingual dialogue that supports highly accurate communication of semantically complex content between people who do not speak the same language. The approach is introduced through an implemented application that covers the same ground as the chapter of a conventional phrase book for food shopping. We position the approach with respect to dialogue systems and Machine Translation-based approaches to crosslingual dialogue. The current work is offered as a first step towards the innovative use of dialogue theories for the enhancement of human–human dialogue

Comparative Analysis of Word Embeddings for Capturing Word Similarities

Distributed language representation has become the most widely used technique for language representation in various natural language processing tasks. Most of the natural language processing models that are based on deep learning techniques use already pre-trained distributed word representations, commonly called word embeddings. Determining the most qualitative word embeddings is of crucial importance for such models. However, selecting the appropriate word embeddings is a perplexing task since the projected embedding space is not intuitive to humans. In this paper, we explore different approaches for creating distributed word representations. We perform an intrinsic evaluation of several state-of-the-art word embedding methods. Their performance on capturing word similarities is analysed with existing benchmark datasets for word pairs similarities. The research in this paper conducts a correlation analysis between ground truth word similarities and similarities obtained by different word embedding methods.Comment: Part of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (NATP 2020

Towards a pivotal-based approach for business process alignment.

This article focuses on business process engineering, especially on alignment between business analysis and implementation. Through a business process management approach, different transformations interfere with process models in order to make them executable. To keep the consistency of process model from business model to IT model, we propose a pivotal metamodel-centric methodology. It aims at keeping or giving all requisite structural and semantic data needed to perform such transformations without loss of information. Through this we can ensure the alignment between business and IT. This article describes the concept of pivotal metamodel and proposes a methodology using such an approach. In addition, we present an example and the resulting benefits

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

Conceptual Modelling and The Quality of Ontologies: Endurantism Vs. Perdurantism

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentration on the issues related to the quality of the conceptualisations produced. The paper aims to demonstrate the impact of the modelling paradigm adopted on the quality of ontological models and, consequently, the potential impact that such a decision can have in relation to the development of software applications. To this aim, an ontology that is conceptualised based on the Object-Role Modelling (ORM) approach (a representative of endurantism) is re-engineered into a one modelled on the basis of the Object Paradigm (OP) (a representative of perdurantism). Next, the two ontologies are analytically compared using the specified criteria. The conducted comparison highlights that using the OP for ontology conceptualisation can provide more expressive, reusable, objective and temporal ontologies than those conceptualised on the basis of the ORM approach