15 research outputs found
Attribution: a computational approach
Our society is overwhelmed with an ever growing amount of information. Effective
management of this information requires novel ways to filter and select the most relevant
pieces of information. Some of this information can be associated with the source
or sources expressing it. Sources and their relation to what they express affect information
and whether we perceive it as relevant, biased or truthful. In news texts in
particular, it is common practice to report third-party statements and opinions. Recognizing
relations of attribution is therefore a necessary step toward detecting statements
and opinions of specific sources and selecting and evaluating information on the basis
of its source.
The automatic identification of Attribution Relations has applications in numerous
research areas. Quotation and opinion extraction, discourse and factuality have
all partly addressed the annotation and identification of Attribution Relations. However,
disjoint efforts have provided a partial and partly inaccurate picture of attribution.
Moreover, these research efforts have generated small or incomplete resources, thus
limiting the applicability of machine learning approaches. Existing approaches to extract
Attribution Relations have focused on rule-based models, which are limited both
in coverage and precision.
This thesis presents a computational approach to attribution that recasts attribution
extraction as the identification of the attributed text, its source and the lexical cue linking
them in a relation. Drawing on preliminary data-driven investigation, I present a
comprehensive lexicalised approach to attribution and further refine and test a previously
defined annotation scheme. The scheme has been used to create a corpus annotated
with Attribution Relations, with the goal of contributing a large and complete
resource than can lay the foundations for future attribution studies.
Based on this resource, I developed a system for the automatic extraction of attribution
relations that surpasses traditional syntactic pattern-based approaches. The system
is a pipeline of classification and sequence labelling models that identify and link each
of the components of an attribution relation. The results show concrete opportunities
for attribution-based applications
Atti del IX Convegno Annuale AIUCD. La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica.
La nona edizione del convegno annuale dell'Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD 2020; Milano, 15-17 gennaio 2020) ha come tema “La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica”, con lo specifico obiettivo di fornire un'occasione per riflettere
sulle conseguenze della crescente diffusione dell’approccio computazionale al trattamento dei dati connessi all’ambito umanistico.
Questo volume raccoglie gli articoli i cui contenuti sono stati presentati al convegno. A diversa stregua, essi affrontano il tema proposto da un punto di vista ora più teorico-metodologico, ora più empirico-pratico, presentando i risultati di lavori e progetti (conclusi o in corso) che considerino centrale il trattamento computazionale dei dati
Empirical modelling of translation and interpreting
"Empirical research is carried out in a cyclic way: approaching a research area bottom-up, data lead to interpretations and ideally to the abstraction of laws, on the basis of which a theory can be derived. Deductive research is based on a theory, on the basis of which hypotheses can be formulated and tested against the background of empirical data. Looking at the state-of-the-art in translation studies, either theories as well as models are designed or empirical data are collected and interpreted. However, the final step is still lacking: so far, empirical data has not lead to the formulation of theories or models, whereas existing theories and models have not yet been comprehensively tested with empirical methods. This publication addresses these issues from several perspectives: multi-method product- as well as process-based research may gain insights into translation as well as interpreting phenomena. These phenomena may include cognitive and organizational processes, procedures and strategies, competence and performance, translation properties and universals, etc. Empirical findings about the deeper structures of translation and interpreting will reduce the gap between translation and interpreting practice and model and theory building. Furthermore, the availability of more large-scale empirical testing triggers the development of models and theories concerning translation and interpreting phenomena and behavior based on quantifiable, replicable and transparent data.
The Apothecary's Tales: a game of language in a language of games
A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure,
provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse
Mobile Mapping
This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography - and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey - it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched