A :) Is Worth a Thousand Words: How People Attach Sentiment to Emoticons and Words in Tweets

Emoticons are widely used to express positive or negative sentiment on Twitter. We report on a study with live users to determine whether emoticons are used to merely emphasize the sentiment of tweets, or whether they are the main elements carrying the sentiment. We found that the sentiment of an emoticon is in substantial agreement with the sentiment of the entire tweet. Thus, emoticons are useful as predictors of tweet sentiment and should not be ignored in sentiment classification. However, the sentiment expressed by an emoticon agrees with the sentiment of the accompanying text only slightly better than random. Thus, using the text accompanying emoticons to train sentiment models is not likely to produce the best results, a fact that we show by comparing lexicons generated using emoticons with others generated using simple textual features. © 2013 IEEE

Leveraging Sentiment Analysis for Twitter Data to Uncover User Opinions and Emotions

Huge amounts of emotion are expressed on social media in the form of tweets, blogs, and updates to posts, statuses, etc. Twitter, one of the most well-known microblogging platforms, is used in this essay. Twitter is a social networking site that enables users to post status updates and other brief messages with a maximum character count of 280. Twitter sentiment analysis is the application of sentiment analysis to Twitter data (tweets) in order to derive user sentiments and opinions. Due to the extensive usage, we intend to reflect the mood of the general people by examining the thoughts conveyed in the tweets. Numerous applications require the analysis of public opinion, including businesses attempting to gauge the market response to their products, the prediction of political outcomes, and the analysis of socioeconomic phenomena like stock exchange. Sentiment classification attempts to estimate the sentiment polarity of user updates automatically. So, in order to categorize a tweet as good or negative, we need a model that can accurately discern sarcasm from the lexical meaning of the text. The main objective is to create a practical classifier that can accurately classify the sentiment of twitter streams relating to GST and Tax. Python is used to carry out the suggested algorithm

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian Proceedings of the Final Workshop

Editor of the proceedings of EVALITA 2016

WRITING UTOPIA NOW: Utopian Poetics In The Work Of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This thesis examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), Audience Distant Relative (1977) and Reveillé dans la Brume (Awakened in the Mist) (1977). The premise of the thesis is an exploration of the various ways in which these works both perform and gesture toward the possibility of a ‘utopian’ experience of nonalienation. In Cha’s vocabulary, this takes the form of ‘interfusion’ and is related to the role of the artist as alchemist. Cha employs formal and linguistic innovations in her text, mail art and performance works to invite active participation from her readers and audience in a gesture toward embodied intersubjectivity. Her grappling with the challenges relating to the articulation of subjectivity place her work at the centre of contemporary critical debates around subjectivity and innovative poetics. In particular, recent scholarship on race and the poetic avant-garde has called for cross-disciplinary approaches to reading DICTEE as a text that explores the intersections of subjectivity and its performance in contemporary innovative poetics. Developing a theory of Utopian Poetics from my reading of Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy, I explore the ways in which DICTEE and Cha’s other works perform a yearning for non-alienated subjectivity that remains necessarily open and incomplete. My reading of DICTEE, in particular, is primarily informed by my own practices of yoga and meditation, and these practices form the basis of both my scholarly and creative engagements with this research. This scholarly thesis comprises Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2 comprises my own creative experiments with UtopianPoetics

Practice makes practice

Graphic Designers today must operate independently of specific tools and media. Modes of production are democratized, and so it is in the ways we choose to operate within these modes that define the value of the field. Practice Makes Practice is a response to this condition, refocusing attention from the products of design as endpoints of process to visual evidence of persistent questioning by the designer. Through my work I question roles and media, enfolding audience, client, and collaborators into my process. My practice is improvisational, quick, and performative in its response to the specifics of site and circumstance. Through constructing temporary conditions for design, I reformat the everyday and produce in real-time. My thesis traces a trajectory of work demonstrating consistent methods over a wide range of academic and applied projects. I work intuitively to couple learning and making, and through continuous production enact a practice that persists at any scale

On the development of evolutionary artificial artists

The creation and the evaluation of aesthetic artifacts are tasks related to design, music and art, which are highly interesting from the computational point of view. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence systems face the challenge of performing tasks that are typically human, highly subjective, and eventually social. The present paper introduces an architecture which is capable of evaluating aesthetic characteristics of artifacts and of creating artifacts that obey certain aesthetic properties. The development methodology and motivation, as well as the results achieved by the various components of the architecture, are described. The potential contributions of this type of systems in the context of digital art are also considered.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TYG-4PTMXVB-1/1/265a0f6c8e478822e6de32b87bc2fb1

Kgarebe (virgin) and carnal knowledge: Reading Genesis 19:30–38 from the margins

In this article, issues of carnal knowledge, gender (read: daughters) and agency as evident in selected texts from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the African context in South Africa are interrogated. Do the ideologies embedded in religious texts endorse unequal power relations between male and female human beings (batho)? Of particular interest for the present investigation is the issue of carnal knowledge as it is understood in African (Northern Sotho) contexts and the Hebrew Bible (cf. Gn 19) context. Informed by the insights from both the African and the ancient Israelite contexts, the key questions that this essay seeks to engage are: when the notion of carnal knowledge is engaged with, in the context of daughters in both African and biblical contexts, which insights may emerge? Can such insights contribute to the affirmation of daughters as persons with agency? Contribution: Dealing with a scarcely researched upon topic within the circles of South African Old Testament scholarship, that is, the OT text (Genesis) (sex)uality and the agency of younger women (read: daughters), through the knowledge produced herein, the HTS will be enabled to make a needed impact in patriarchal African and global contexts

I Cannot Read This Story Without Rewriting It : Haraway, Cyborg Writing, and Burkean Form

In this study, my overarching principle is that readers’ ideologies are likely to influence the way they read texts, and that texts, in turn, often influence readers’ preconceived ideologies. This thesis is an attempt to understand how to use the theories of Kenneth Burke, Donna Haraway, and rhetoric of technology scholars toward the goal of social change in favor of Haraway’s cyborg political model, which stresses the need for unity within feminism, socialism, and other politically left groups. Burke argues that form in texts is the creation and fulfillment of desires in the audience. I examine several of Burke’s texts to construct a genealogy of Burkean form. Burke states that desire is connected to the psychology of the audience, in which ideology plays a key role. Burke concludes that readers’ ideologies are rooted in economic class. I then look to Haraway, who gives a more accurate theory of factors that influence ideology in her notion of the informatics of domination, which include racism, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, and colonialism, and rhetoric scholars who have responded to Haraway’s cyborg theory. I review rhetoric scholarship that is concerned with the idea of cyborg writing, and point out ways the rhetoric community has implemented Haraway’s theory well and ways they have misunderstood it. I conclude that cyborg writing has been associated too closely with hypertext, and that more focus should be given to the political content of texts. I argue that postcolonial literature, which is most often written from the perspective of marginalized groups, is a stronger and more thought-provoking example of cyborg writing, even if it is not hypertext. I also call for a renewed emphasis on Haraway’s argument that academics need to be more involved in the activist community if social change in favor of the cyborg is to occur

Automated Classification of Argument Stance in Student Essays: A Linguistically Motivated Approach with an Application for Supporting Argument Summarization

This study describes a set of document- and sentence-level classification models designed to automate the task of determining the argument stance (for or against) of a student argumentative essay and the task of identifying any arguments in the essay that provide reasons in support of that stance. A suggested application utilizing these models is presented which involves the automated extraction of a single-sentence summary of an argumentative essay. This summary sentence indicates the overall argument stance of the essay from which the sentence was extracted and provides a representative argument in support of that stance. A novel set of document-level stance classification features motivated by linguistic research involving stancetaking language is described. Several document-level classification models incorporating these features are trained and tested on a corpus of student essays annotated for stance. These models achieve accuracies significantly above those of two baseline models. High-accuracy features used by these models include a dependency subtree feature incorporating information about the targets of any stancetaking language in the essay text and a feature capturing the semantic relationship between the essay prompt text and stancetaking language in the essay text. We also describe the construction of a corpus of essay sentences annotated for supporting argument stance. The resulting corpus is used to train and test two sentence-level classification models. The first model is designed to classify a given sentence as a supporting argument or as not a supporting argument, while the second model is designed to classify a supporting argument as holding a for or against stance. Features motivated by influential linguistic analyses of the lexical, discourse, and rhetorical features of supporting arguments are used to build these two models, both of which achieve accuracies above their respective baseline models. An application illustrating an interesting use-case for the models presented in this dissertation is described. This application incorporates all three classification models to extract a single sentence summarizing both the overall stance of a given text along with a convincing reason in support of that stance

Lyric Petrologies: Languages of Stone in Rilke, Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan, and Sachs.

Lyric Petrologies: Languages of Stone in Rilke, Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan, and Sachs examines the poetics of stone in twentieth-century German and Russian lyric. I illuminate a diverse line of development whereby stone—traditionally a signal of silence, immutability, insignificance, even a crushing heaviness—emerges as the conceptual and figurative ground of reconfigured lyric languages and subjectivities. My close, comparative readings demonstrate that for authors like Celan, Mandelstam, and Sachs, who could hardly have lived through darker times, stone offers alternative but affirmative models for lyric subjectivity. My project defines a set of rhetorical devices that characterize the varying lyrics of stone. Lyrics by Rilke, Trakl, and Mandelstam from the first decades of the century demonstrate what I call invocations of stone, by addressing crafted works (i.e., architecture and sculpture) as signs of human history and affect. Later texts from Celan’s collections of the 1950s and 1960s gravitate toward “found” stone, and import geological discourse into lyric—a project foreshadowed in the later texts of Mandelstam, a poet whom Celan translated and declared a formative influence. Their texts think in terms of stone, aligning lyric with notions of stone’s alternative, natural history. Celan's texts, along with those of his contemporary Sachs, also seek to write as stone, by emulating stone’s varying legibilities—as a scientific or mystical record of the readable earth, or as a tabula rasa for more idiosyncratic, phenomenological readings. In the light of debates about the legitimacy and efficacy of post-Holocaust lyric, Celan's and Sachs' texts demonstrate stone's potentiality to model reconceptualized lyric languages and subjectivities. My readings are buttressed by considerations of the “language of things” in texts by Benjamin and others, as well as ideas about lyric subjectivity drawn from Nietzsche, Susman, Adorno, and Anglo-American literary theory. Challenging the suppositions that lyric represents an individual subjectivity, expression, and voice, Lyric Petrologies introduces the poetics of nonhuman, recalcitrant, and mute stone within the context of contemporary revisions of the idea of lyric. My readings in Lyric Petrologies also add to contemporary critical conversations on object theories and new materialisms, by acknowledging and investigating varying ways in which poetic language mediates matter.PHDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113578/1/pierrer_1.pd