67 research outputs found
Pragmatics and Prosody
Most of the papers collected in this book resulted from presentations and discussions undertaken during the V Lablita Workshop that took place at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on August 23-25, 2011. The workshop was held in conjunction with the II Brazilian Seminar on Pragmatics and Prosody. The guiding themes for the joint event were illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation. Thus, all papers presented here are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of speech. Among the papers in this volume, there are different theoretical orientations, which are mirrored through the methodological designs of studies pursued. However, all papers are based on the analysis of actual speech, be it from corpora or from experimental contexts trying to emulate natural speech. Prosody is the keyword that comes out from all the papers in this publication, which indicates the high standing of this category in relation to studies that are geared towards the understanding of major elements that are constitutive of the structuring of speech
Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation
Most of the papers collected in this book resulted from presentations and discussions undertaken during the V Lablita Workshop that took place at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on August 23-25, 2011. The workshop was held in conjunction with the II Brazilian Seminar on Pragmatics and Prosody. The guiding themes for the joint event were illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation. Thus, all papers presented here are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of speech. Among the papers in this volume, there are different theoretical orientations, which are mirrored through the methodological designs of studies pursued. However, all papers are based on the analysis of actual speech, be it from corpora or from experimental contexts trying to emulate natural speech. Prosody is the keyword that comes out from all the papers in this publication, which indicates the high standing of this category in relation to studies that are geared towards the understanding of major elements that are constitutive of the structuring of speech
The Generation of Compound Nominals to Represent the Essence of Text The COMMIX System
This thesis concerns the COMMIX system, which automatically extracts
information on what a text is about, and generates that information in the highly
compacted form of compound nominal expressions. The expressions generated
are complex and may include novel terms which do not appear themselves in
the input text.
From the practical point of view, the work is driven by the need for better
representations of content: for representations which are shorter and more
concise than would appear in an abstract, yet more informative and
representative of the actual aboutness than commonly occurs in indexing
expressions and key terms. This additional layer of representation is referred to in
this work as pertaining to the essence of a particular text.
From a theoretical standpoint, the thesis shows how the compound
nominal as a construct can be successfully employed in these highly informative
representations. It involves an exploration of the claim that there is sufficient
semantic information contained within the standard dictionary glosses for
individual words to enable the construction of useful and highly representative
novel compound nominal expressions, without recourse to standard syntactic
and statistical methods. It shows how a shallow semantic approach to content
identification which is based on lexical overlap can produce some very
encouraging results.
The methodology employed, and described herein, is domain-independent,
and does not require the specification of templates with which the
input text must comply. In these two respects, the methodology developed in this
work avoids two of the most common problems associated with information
extraction.
As regards the evaluation of this type of work, the thesis introduces and
utilises the notion of percentage attainment value, which is used in conjunction
with subjects' opinions about the degree to which the aboutness terms succeed in
indicating the subject matter of the texts for which they were generated
Assume the position : play's mediation of institutional anxiety
Assume the Position uses visual artâs flexible methodologies to consider the complex structural, affective, socioeconomic, and spatial relations between visual artists and the cultural institutions with which they are imbricated. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach that draws from visual art, cultural studies, and sociology, my practice-based research explores anxiety as a physical and temporal approach, as well as a significant relation-to-objects under neoliberalism. Materially diverse projects privilege playful approaches and new attitudes toward temporality as strategies for mediating these contemporary affects. Projects cohere by their strategic complication of vision and time, privileging the local, and emphasizing approachability by engaging humour, play, and the saturated, visual language of childhood.Alberta Foundation for the Art
Building Puzzles And Growing Pearls: AQualitative Exploration Of DeterminingAboutness
Despite centuries of organizing information in libraries and other information institutions, little is known about how a document is analyzed to determine its subject matter. This case study is a qualitative exploration to better understand the processes involved in the conceptual analysis of documents. Conceptual analysis, an essential step in the subject analysis process, is the attempt by a cataloger or indexer to determine the subject matter, or the aboutness, of a document. The purpose of this research is to examine how interested yet untrained participants perform the tasks of conceptual analysis when no process is suggested. The study uses observation, think-aloud procedures, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews to understand the participants' subject determination processes. Transcripts of the analysis sessions and interviews were examined for underlying patterns of analysis. The aims of this research are to understand how individuals approach the process of determining aboutness, what bibliographic, content, or visual cues they use to find key aboutness data, and what patterns emerge during the subject determination process. This research begins an attempt to develop a model of conceptual analysis to be used in teaching, research, and praxis
Toward summarization of communicative activities in spoken conversation
This thesis is an inquiry into the nature and structure of face-to-face conversation, with a
special focus on group meetings in the workplace. I argue that conversations are composed
of episodes, each of which corresponds to an identifiable communicative activity such as
giving instructions or telling a story. These activities are important because they are part
of participantsâ commonsense understanding of what happens in a conversation. They
appear in natural summaries of conversations such as meeting minutes, and participants
talk about them within the conversation itself. Episodic communicative activities therefore
represent an essential component of practical, commonsense descriptions of conversations.
The thesis objective is to provide a deeper understanding of how such activities may be
recognized and differentiated from one another, and to develop a computational method
for doing so automatically. The experiments are thus intended as initial steps toward future
applications that will require analysis of such activities, such as an automatic minute-taker
for workplace meetings, a browser for broadcast news archives, or an automatic decision
mapper for planning interactions.
My main theoretical contribution is to propose a novel analytical framework called participant
relational analysis. The proposal argues that communicative activities are principally
indicated through participant-relational features, i.e., expressions of relationships between
participants and the dialogue. Participant-relational features, such as subjective language,
verbal reference to the participants, and the distribution of speech activity amongst
the participants, are therefore argued to be a principal means for analyzing the nature and
structure of communicative activities.
I then apply the proposed framework to two computational problems: automatic discourse
segmentation and automatic discourse segment labeling. The first set of experiments
test whether participant-relational features can serve as a basis for automatically
segmenting conversations into discourse segments, e.g., activity episodes. Results show
that they are effective across different levels of segmentation and different corpora, and indeed sometimes more effective than the commonly-used method of using semantic links
between content words, i.e., lexical cohesion. They also show that feature performance is
highly dependent on segment type, suggesting that human-annotated âtopic segmentsâ are
in fact a multi-dimensional, heterogeneous collection of topic and activity-oriented units.
Analysis of commonly used evaluation measures, performed in conjunction with the
segmentation experiments, reveals that they fail to penalize substantially defective results
due to inherent biases in the measures. I therefore preface the experiments with a comprehensive
analysis of these biases and a proposal for a novel evaluation measure. A reevaluation
of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms using the novel measure produces
substantially different results from previous studies. This raises serious questions about the
effectiveness of some state-of-the-art algorithms and helps to identify the most appropriate
ones to employ in the subsequent experiments.
I also preface the experiments with an investigation of participant reference, an important
type of participant-relational feature. I propose an annotation scheme with novel distinctions
for vagueness, discourse function, and addressing-based referent inclusion, each
of which are assessed for inter-coder reliability. The produced dataset includes annotations
of 11,000 occasions of person-referring.
The second set of experiments concern the use of participant-relational features to
automatically identify labels for discourse segments. In contrast to assigning semantic topic
labels, such as topical headlines, the proposed algorithm automatically labels segments
according to activity type, e.g., presentation, discussion, and evaluation. The method is
unsupervised and does not learn from annotated ground truth labels. Rather, it induces the
labels through correlations between discourse segment boundaries and the occurrence of
bracketing meta-discourse, i.e., occasions when the participants talk explicitly about what
has just occurred or what is about to occur. Results show that bracketing meta-discourse
is an effective basis for identifying some labels automatically, but that its use is limited if
global correlations to segment features are not employed.
This thesis addresses important pre-requisites to the automatic summarization of conversation.
What I provide is a novel activity-oriented perspective on how summarization
should be approached, and a novel participant-relational approach to conversational analysis.
The experimental results show that analysis of participant-relational features is
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