Harnessing Collective Intelligence on Social Networks

Crowdsourcing is an approach to replace the work traditionally done by a single person with the collective action of a group of people via the Internet. It has established itself in the mainstream of research methodology in recent years using a variety of approaches to engage humans in solving problems that computers, as yet, cannot solve. Several common approaches to crowdsourcing have been successful, including peer production (in which the participants are inherently interested in contributing), microworking (in which participants are paid small amounts of money per task) and games or gamification (in which the participants are entertained as they complete the tasks). An alternative approach to crowdsourcing using social networks is proposed here. Social networks offer access to large user communities through integrated software applications and, as they mature, are utilised in different ways, with decentralised and unevenly-distributed organisation of content. This research investigates whether collective intelligence systems are facilitated better on social networks and how the contributed human effort can be optimised. These questions are investigated using two case studies of problem solving: anaphoric coreference in text documents and classifying images in the marine biology domain. Social networks themselves can be considered inherent, self-organised problem solving systems, an approach defined here as ?groupsourcing?, sharing common features with other crowdsourcing approaches; however, the benefits are tempered with the many challenges this approach presents. In comparison to other methods of crowdsourcing, harnessing collective intelligence on social networks offers a high-accuracy, data-driven and low-cost approach

Gamifying Language Resource Acquisition

PhD ThesisNatural Language Processing, is an important collection of methods for processing the vast amounts of available natural language text we continually produce. These methods make use of supervised learning, an approach that learns from large amounts of annotated data. As humans, we’re able to provide information about text that such systems can learn from. Historically, this was carried out by small groups of experts. However, this did not scale. This led to various crowdsourcing approaches being taken that used large pools of non-experts. The traditional form of crowdsourcing was to pay users small amounts of money to complete tasks. As time progressed, gamification approaches such as GWAPs, showed various benefits over the micro-payment methods used before. These included a cost saving, worker training opportunities, increased worker engagement and potential to far exceed the scale of crowdsourcing. While these were successful in domains such as image labelling, they struggled in the domain of text annotation, which wasn’t such a natural fit. Despite many challenges, there were also clearly many opportunities and benefits to applying this approach to text annotation. Many of these are demonstrated by Phrase Detectives. Based on lessons learned from Phrase Detectives and investigations into other GWAPs, in this work, we attempt to create full GWAPs for NLP, extracting the benefits of the methodology. This includes training, high quality output from non-experts and a truly game-like GWAP design that players are happy to play voluntarily

An anthropology of the police: semantic constructs of social order

The police play an increasing role in the public construction of order and control. This thesis explores the modes of thought by which police practices are generated in pursuit of this control. A publicly proclaimed approval of social research is not supported by the analysis and academic enquiry is shown to be a binary opposite to a preferred ‘practical mastery'. This suggests the police maintain structural invisibility while appearing to be massively accessible to society. The 'insider/anthropologist' operates in a kind of extended liminality, with the potential to illuminate such hidden beliefs by a seditious interpretation. Reflexive participant observation therefore threatens and creates anti-structural possibilities for a society obsessed with conserving known and inculcated practice. This analysis of manufactured reality reveals a dramatic creation of ‘real’ and marginal policemen and villains, where the use of extreme metaphor, language and masculine symbols of status translate thought into action. Intrusion of women into this ideal world creates structural anomaly, for the world of ‘crime’ is dramatised to reinforce traditional belief in a masculine criminal justice system. An exploration of ambiguity caused by policewomen illustrates their incorrect place in the world of 'street-visible crime control’. Archetypes of feminine susceptibility are invoked, just as the archetype of 'hero‘ is attributed to the detective, 'fighting his war against crime’. However, analysis explodes the mythology surrounding the idea of 'crime', showing it to be an arbitrary police construct directed against the 'dangerous classes', manipulated and produced as a social drama. The revelation that this major structuring principle is used to preserve a known social etiquette is impossible to acknowledge and explains how research or academic enquiry into philosophies of power must be resisted. The police world has a public face, but a well-concealed private reality which this semantic exploration makes apparent

Undressing readerly anxieties: a study of clothing and accessories in short crime fiction 1841-1911

Dress changes the way that we, as readers, perceive and interpret characters within fiction because of the hugely subjective way that it influences individuals. We all have some experiences and opinions of dress because we have all been exposed to it in some way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and therefore the way that we read dress is fraught with ambiguity because our own experiences are so varied. Clothing functions as an indicator of gender, class, identity, aesthetic taste, fashion and social and economic success. It can sexualise and desexualise, entice and repel, reveal and conceal, lead and mislead and thus functions as a useful tool for writers to influence readers. Despite the instability of dress as a stable sign, writers make assumptions that readers understand what is being implied by dress and make conscious decisions to describe dress within their narratives. In crime fiction, clothing is particularly useful because it allows hiding in plain sight: as an item so mundane it is barely noticed by the reader, yet it can function as compelling clue to reveal the identity of a criminal. There is a tension between what is obvious and what is implied and thus readers are both empowered and frustrated by depictions of clothing in crime fiction. Clothing is deployed by crime writers in a different way from other fiction because the genre encourages close reading in which every detail must count, familiar to readers through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories yet also vital in a range of other texts discussed in this study such as the serialised adventures of C.L.Pirkis’s female detective Loveday Brooke and the escapades of Grant Allen’s master criminal Colonel Clay. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the anxieties generated by readings of dress in Victorian and Edwardian short crime fiction at a time when sartorial matters constituted a form of language in upper- and middle-class society. Considering short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, L.T. Meade, Guy Boothby, Baroness Orczy and George Sims alongside lesser known writers including Mrs George Corbett, Rodrigues Ottolengui and Mary Wilkins Freeman amongst others, this study examines visual, verbal and haptic considerations of dress to analyse how nineteenth and early twentieth century writers used clothing to enable and disable their readers

Of Virtuoso Cynics: Plays on Language, Sleights of Hand, and Moving with Music

Of Virtuoso Cynics: Plays on Language, Sleights of Hand, & Moving with Music analyzes the ludic elements of colloquial language, fútbol criollo, and communal music in Latin America as a possibility of acknowledging collective experiences that offer alternatives to dominant cultural patterns and practices. This dissertation proposes to critique standards of language, football, and music that consider language as immaterial, football a mechanism for social discipline and gentlemanly conduct, and music being a higher art form not to be carried out in the street. By putting into dialogue the everyday of Henri Lefebvre and Julia Kristeva’s poetic, I articulate the material elements of popular manifestations of language, football, and music in Latin America, to express the symbolic weight they carry in popular cultures. Popular peoples’ inscriptions into the world are made through the knowledges of experiencing the actual conflicts of society. Drawing from Johan Huizinga’s notion of sacred play, and Alenka Zupančič’s short-circuit, I make a move to say that true play involves an actual virtuosic handling of symbols in their materiality in the day to day as a praxis. The handling being informed by a cynical out view of life, understanding it as having multiple lenses of interpretation, and openly questioning the dominant one by signaling its faults. I articulate the value in playing with colloquial language by emphasizing the poetic as a praxis in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes, where the poetic is found in the materiality of language. I look at Diego Maradona and fútbol criollo as expressing an alternate way of playing the world’s sport that undermines the discriminatory standards that wish to universalize the sport. Later, I explore the participatory and agency creating communal music, candombe, and how that reading of the Afrouruguayan musical tradition informs and gives a democratic perspective to Jorge Drexler’s music application, “N”. I wish to highlight the social and cultural functions of colloquial language, fútbol criollo, and communal music because as platforms of the commons in Latin America, they are widely felt, not only making them apt to express a collective grievance but also be an expressive force for existence in the world

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families

Out of time and into history: representations of changing identity in twenty-first-century Irish literature

This study explores notions of changing identity in contemporary Ireland. It examines the changing nature of Irish identity as represented in works of contemporary literature produced by Irish writers at the start of the twenty-first century, spanning a twelve year period from 1999 to 2011. Drawing upon literary works of contemporary Irish literature published during this period of prolific change in Ireland, the focus of this study is to explore various aspects of Ireland’s social, economic, political, cultural and religious life during this time. Close analysis of a range of contemporary novels by celebrated award-winning popular writers will consider the ways in which each of these writers respond to the interconnected themes of history, memory and belonging to present their perspective on the experience of the contemporary in Ireland. The notion of how contemporary Irish literature reflects the development of Irish national identity in this particular time phase is explored through three key genre studies: contemporary fiction about historical events; contemporary Irish crime fiction; and twenty-first century Irish diasporic fiction. Each of these genre studies is set against concepts of the nation - both backward and forward looking - in the sense that Ireland is seeking both a return to the certainties of Catholic Ireland, whilst also seeking to create a new cultural nation-code extending beyond existing frameworks. Through the frame of these two strands of Irish identity, this study considers how Irish writers are defining possibilities of the future – through perceptions of different moments of the past and present – with boundaries that are continually being redefined