Parsing Argumentation Structures in Persuasive Essays

In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using integer linear programming. We show that our model considerably improves the performance of base classifiers and significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines. Moreover, we introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement. This corpus and the annotation guidelines are freely available for ensuring reproducibility and to encourage future research in computational argumentation.Comment: Under review in Computational Linguistics. First submission: 26 October 2015. Revised submission: 15 July 201

Caught in the Middle: the Construction, Expression, and Transformation of Identity Among Haitian Youth in Montreal.

This dissertation examines identity issues among Haitian youth in Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Because Haitians are the largest group of visible minorities in the province and are an integral part of the Quebec mosaic, the distinctive sense of belonging felt by youth in the Haitian community necessitates further inquiry into what connections they (Haitian youth) have with both the majority Quebecois culture and the minority Haitian immigrant culture of Montreal. Since Quebec is a Francophone society in a North America that is majority Anglophone, this linguistic and cultural confusion sometimes results in immigrant youth assuming multiple identities in order to fit in, and survive. The present study examines two groups of Haitian youth: Young Haitians born in Haiti, and those born in Quebec. In this dissertation, I research how these two groups construct, express, and transform their identity as a result of the surrounding environment. To do this, this dissertation presents data from a cultural, sociological, and sociolinguistic intervention undertaken with 108 young Haitians from Montreal, aged 17 to 25, who were interviewed during the Summer of 2000. Two sets of interviews were prepared: A short questionnaire, and a long personal interview. The schema of these two interviews researched various pre selected issues relating to identity, with the premise of delineating how Haitian youth felt concerning these issues. These interviews took place throughout the Island of Montreal in various locales (on public transportation, in parks, at festivals, etc.). The results of these inquiries were tabulated, categorized, and arranged into numerical tables and graphs, which can be found in the sixth, seventh and eighth chapters of the present dissertation, with a subsequent chapter analyzing these findings. It was discovered that Haitian youth in Montreal, (as is the case with other immigrant youth), possess multiple identities, and are not deconstructed and reconfigured into a single set category, as they borrow from the two cultures that surround them (the majority Quebecois culture, and the heritage Haitian culture), forming their own distinct category. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implication of the findings for future study on the Quebec Allophone community

Linguistics Landscape: a Cross Culture Perspective

This paper was to aim in discussing the linguistic landscape. It was the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region (Landry and Bourhis 1997). The linguistic landscape has been described as being somewhere at the junction of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography, and media studies. It is a concept used in sociolinguistics as scholars study how languages are visually used in multilingual societies, from large metropolitan centers to Amazonia. For example, some public signs in Jerusalem are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic (Spolsky and Cooper 1991, Ben-Rafael et al., 2006). Studies of the linguistic landscape have been published from research done around the world. The field of study is relatively recent; the linguistic landscape paradigm has evolved rapidly and while it has some key names associated with it, it currently has no clear orthodoxy or theoretical core

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

EXAMINING THE CONCEPT OF GOVERNANCE IN TOURISM RESEARCH

Purpose – Governance is a polysemous concept that has been gaining the attention of social scientists and humanists over the last three decades. Tourism governance studies have mirrored the knowledge developed within traditional disciplines to analyse processes in different spheres of action. This paper aims to perceive how tourism governance has been applied in scientific research over recent decades, in terms of its conceptualization, territorial scale and the type of territory studied. Design – Using a literature review, we present an analysis of governance in tourism studies and we show the potential of textual statistics for the analysis of huge amounts of textual data. Methodology – Data were extracted from SCOPUS, from 1999 to 2020, based on the keywords ‘governance’ and ‘tourism’. All abstracts were encoded and analysed using ALCESTE software. Findings – The findings reveal a great concern with sustainability, especially with the environmental and social impacts generated by tourism, and destination management, with an emphasis on the performance of the public sector through local and regional institutions and their relations with local tourism stakeholders. Originality of the research – The novelty of this work is the analysis of the conceptual framework and implementation practises in governance and tourism using an innovative software tool for textual analysis

Politics and Prejudice

RésuméCette thèse s’intéresse à l’impact du genre, de l’âge et de l’ethnicité des chef·fes de partis au Canada sur la réception de leur candidature par les électeur·rices. La perception sociale est intrinsèquement relationnelle et met autant en scène l’identité du/de la candidat·e que de l’électeur·rice. Par conséquent, cette thèse s’attarde à la fois au profil sociodémographique des chef·fes de partis et des électeur·ices qui sont appelé·es à les évaluer. Ce faisant, elle contribue aux champs des études électorales et de la psychologie politique.Trois méthodes complémentaires sont employées. La première partie de la thèse s’appuie sur une analyse quantitative de données électorales fédérales (1988-2015) ainsi que dans trois provinces canadiennes (Québec (2012-2014), Alberta (2012) et Colombie Britannique (2013)). Elle s’intéresse à l’évaluation des chef·fes de partis ainsi qu’aux intentions de vote en fonction du profil sociodémographique des leaders politiques et des électeur·rices en ancrant fermement l’analyse dans le contexte social et politique canadien. Pour finir, un dernier chapitre présentant une analyse quantitative de démocraties occidentales (l’Allemagne (2017), la Nouvelle-Zélande (2017), la France (2017) et les États-Unis (2016)) permet de mettre les conclusionstirées au sujet du Canada en perspective. La seconde partie de cette thèse présente deux expériences, l’une réalisée en laboratoire à l’Université Laval et l’autre en ligne. Basées surdes élections fictives mettant en scène des candidat·es varié·es en termes de genre, d’âge etd’ethnicité, ces expériences s’attardent à la teneur de la relation causale entre l’apparencede candidats et le comportement politique des électeur·rices. La dernière partie de la thèse consiste, quant à elle, en l’analyse de données qualitatives recueillies lors de six groupes de discussion ayant eu lieu entre 2018 et 2019 à l’Université Laval. Trois d’entre eux ont été réalisés avec des personnes ayant participé à l’expérience en laboratoire, et trois autres suites à un appel de volontaires. L’étude de ces discussions met en lumière le mécanisme causal à l’étude en identifiant la teneur des stéréotypes politiques basés sur le genre, l’âge et l’ethnicité au Québec ainsi que la façon dont des stéréotypes sont employés, réprimés, pensés et remis en question par l’électorat. En particulier, cette section de la thèse s’attarde à la possibilité d’inférence de valeurs et d’idées politiques en fonction du profil et de l’apparence d’un·e candidat·e. La principale conclusion de cet ouvrage est le caractère conditionnel, mais bien réel, des comportements politiques pouvant être qualifiés d’affinitaires (liés a l’appui politique de candidat·es partageant des caractéristiques sociodémographiques avec des électeur·ices) au Canada et basés sur l’apparence des candidat·es politique. En d’autres mots, les électeurs sont bel et bien au courant des narratifs sociaux entourant la présence de personnes issues de groupes historiquement marginalisés dans l’arène politique, et ils emploient et questionnent les notions préconçues liées à certains groupes sociaux à différents degrés. Bien que les stéréotypes associés à l’"outsider" politique s’avère parfois nettement divergents du profil du politicien dittypique, cette déviation face à la norme politique n’est pas systématiquement sanctionnée.Dépendant du profil de l’électeur, des idéologies qu’il porte et de l’offre politique en place àun moment donné, cette marginalité peut être activement recherchée, car associée à la per-formance de "la politique autrement" ou encore à une meilleure représentation politique d’ungroupe social auquel l’électeur peut s’identifier. Un survol de l’état de la question dans d’autresdémocraties occidentales soulève cependant la question des règles du jeu politique. Il révèleque ces comportements politiques au Canada en contexte électoral ressemblent davantage auxphénomènes observés lors d’élections présidentielles que lorsqu’il est question d’autres régimesparlementaires s’appuyant quant à eu sur un mode de scrutin proportionnel mixte.This thesis examines the impact of the gender, age, and ethnicity of party leaders in Canada on the way these candidates are received by electors. Social perception is intrinsically relational and puts as much emphasis on the identity of the candidate as the voter. Consequently, this thesis focuses on both the socio-demographic profile of party leaders and the electors who are called upon to evaluate them. In doing so, she contributes to the fields of electoral studies and political psychology. To do this, three complementary research methods are employed. The first part of the thesis is based on a quantitative analysis of federal electoral data (1988-2015) as well as three Canadian provinces (Quebec (2012-2014), Alberta (2012) and British Columbia (2013)). It looks at the evaluation of party leaders and votes intentions according to the socio-demographic profile of political leaders and voters. The analysis is firmly anchored in the Canadian social and political context. However, a last chapter presenting a quantitative analysis of Western democracies (Germany (2017), New Zealand (2017), France (2017) and the United States (2016)) provides a different perspective on the conclusions drawn in about Canada. The second part of thist hesis presents two experiments, one done in a laboratory at Université Laval and the other online. Based on fictitious elections featuring diverse candidates in terms of gender, age and ethnicity, these experiments focus on the content of the causal relationship between the appearance of candidates and voters’ political behaviour. The last part of the thesis consists in the analysis of qualitative data collected during six discussion groups held between 2018 and 2019 at Université Laval. Three of them were done with people who had participated in the lab experiment, and three others after a call for volunteers. The analysis of these discussions highlights the causal mechanism under study by identifying the content of political stereotypes based on gender, age, and ethnicity in Quebec as well as the way stereotypes are used, repressed, thought out, and questioned by the electorate. In particular, this section of the thesis focuses on the possibility of inferring values and political ideas based on the appearance of a candidate. The main conclusion of this work is the conditional, but very real, occurrence of political be-haviours that can be described as affinity-based (linked to the political support of candidates sharing socio-demographic characteristics with electors) in Canada. In other words, voters are well aware of the social narratives surrounding the presence of people from historically marginalized groups in the political arena, and they use and question preconceived notions related to these groups to different degrees. Although a particular set of characteristics maybe associated with the political "outsider", this deviation from the political norm is not systematically sanctioned. Depending on the profile of voters, the ideologies they carry and the political offer in place at a given moment, this marginality can be actively sought, because associated with the performance of "politics differently" or the better political representation of a social group to which the elector can identify. An overview of the state of affairs in other Western democracies, however, raises the question of the rules of the political game. It reveals that these political behaviours in Canada are more similar to the phenomena observed in pres-idential elections than when we look at other parliamentary systems using mixed proportional voting