Notes on narrative, cognition, and cultural evolution

Drawing on non-Darwinian cultural-evolutionary approaches, the paper develops a broad, non-representational perspective on narrative, necessary to account for the narrative “ubiquity” hypothesis. It considers narrativity as a feature of intelligent behaviour and as a formative principle of symbolic representation (“narrative proclivity”). The narrative representation retains a relationship with the “primary” pre-symbolic narrativity of the basic orientational-interpretive (semiotic) behaviour affected by perceptually salient objects and “fits” in natural environments. The paper distinguishes between implicit narrativity (as the basic form of perceptual-cognitive mapping) of intelligent behaviour or non-narrative media, and the “narrative” as a symbolic representation. Human perceptual-attentional routines are enhanced by symbolic representations: due to its attention-monitoring and information-gathering function, narrative serves as a cognitive-exploratory tool facilitating cultural dynamics. The rise of new media and mass communication on the Web has thrown the ability of narrative to shape the public sphere through the ongoing process of negotiated sensemaking and interpretation in a particularly sharp relief

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Fouille de données de santé

Dans le domaine de la santé, les techniques d’analyse de données sont de plus en plus populaires et se révèlent même indispensables pour gérer les gros volumes de données produits pour un patient et par le patient. Deux thématiques seront abordées dans cette présentation d'HDR.La première porte sur la définition, la formalisation, l’implémentation et la validation de méthodes d’analyse permettant de décrire le contenu de bases de données médicales. Je me suis particulièrement intéressée aux données séquentielles. J’ai fait évoluer la classique notion de motif séquentiel pour y intégrer des composantes contextuelles, spatiales et sur l’ordre partiel des éléments composant les motifs. Ces nouvelles informations enrichissent la sémantique initiale de ces motifs.La seconde thématique se focalise sur l’analyse des productions et des interactions des patients au travers des médias sociaux. J’ai principalement travaillé sur des méthodes permettant d’analyser les productions narratives des patients selon leurs temporalités, leurs thématiques, les sentiments associés ou encore le rôle et la réputation du locuteur s’étant exprimé dans les messages

Business Intelligence on Non-Conventional Data

The revolution in digital communications witnessed over the last decade had a significant impact on the world of Business Intelligence (BI). In the big data era, the amount and diversity of data that can be collected and analyzed for the decision-making process transcends the restricted and structured set of internal data that BI systems are conventionally limited to. This thesis investigates the unique challenges imposed by three specific categories of non-conventional data: social data, linked data and schemaless data. Social data comprises the user-generated contents published through websites and social media, which can provide a fresh and timely perception about people’s tastes and opinions. In Social BI (SBI), the analysis focuses on topics, meant as specific concepts of interest within the subject area. In this context, this thesis proposes meta-star, an alternative strategy to the traditional star-schema for modeling hierarchies of topics to enable OLAP analyses. The thesis also presents an architectural framework of a real SBI project and a cross-disciplinary benchmark for SBI. Linked data employ the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide a public network of interlinked, structured, cross-domain knowledge. In this context, this thesis proposes an interactive and collaborative approach to build aggregation hierarchies from linked data. Schemaless data refers to the storage of data in NoSQL databases that do not force a predefined schema, but let database instances embed their own local schemata. In this context, this thesis proposes an approach to determine the schema profile of a document-based database; the goal is to facilitate users in a schema-on-read analysis process by understanding the rules that drove the usage of the different schemata. A final and complementary contribution of this thesis is an innovative technique in the field of recommendation systems to overcome user disorientation in the analysis of a large and heterogeneous wealth of data

Critical Analysis of Language Ideologies in Czech Public Discourse

Disertační práce se zabývá jazykovými ideologiemi v českém veřejném diskurzu. Po úvodní kapitole představující téma, motivaci a rozvržení práce se v druhé kapitole věnuje důkladnému rozboru výzkumné oblasti jazykových ideologií. Představuje různé varianty jejich vymezování, dva rozdílné přístupy k nim a několik klíčových rysů, které jazykové ideologie charakterizují. Načrtává se zde vztah jazykových ideologií k dalším příbuzným pojmům, mapují se možnosti a způsoby výzkumu v této oblasti a několik poznámek se věnuje i existujícím výčtům jazykových ideologií. Jádrem kapitoly je vlastní, komplexní definice jazykových ideologií opřená o kritickou reflexi dosavadních přístupů. Třetí kapitola shrnuje relevantní existující poznatky a na tomto základě formuluje hlavní cíl práce - na základě analýzy a interpretace jejích výsledků přispět k poznání východisek a způsobů konceptualizace jazyka v českém veřejném diskurzu. Čtvrtá kapitola rozpracovává metodologický rámec práce. Jako východisko volí kritickou analýzu diskurzu - shrnuje její základy, reflektuje hlavní dosavadní kritické výtky vůči tomuto přístupu a jako jejich částečné řešení navrhuje využití nástrojů korpusové lingvistiky. Druhá část kapitoly je věnována konceptu klíčovosti jako jednomu z hlavních principů využívaných v korpusových analýzách...The thesis deals with language ideologies in Czech public discourse. After introducing its topic, motivation and structure in the opening chapter, it devotes the second chapter to a thorough analysis of the research field of language ideologies. It presents various ways of defining them, two different approaches to them and a few key features which characterize language ideologies. The relation of language ideologies and other related notions is outlined, possibilities and ways of investigation are surveyed. Some remarks focus on existing lists or glossaries of language ideologies. The core of this chapter is an original, complex definition of language ideologies grounded in a critical reflection of approaches up to now. The third chapter summarizes relevant existing findings and on that basis, it formulates the main aim of the thesis - to make a contribution to knowledge on the foundations and ways of conceptualizing language in Czech public discourse. The fourth chapter elaborates the methodological frame of the thesis. Critical discourse analysis is chosen as a basis - its basics are summarized, main critical comments are considered and a partial solutions are proposed in use of corpus linguistics' tools. Another part of this chapter concerns with keyness as one of the dominant principles used...Institute of Czech Language and Theory of CommunicationÚstav českého jazyka a teorie komunikaceFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art