Cross-Document Narrative Frame Alignment

Automated cross-document comparison of narrative facilitates co-reference and event similarity identification in the retellings of stories from different perspectives. With attention to these outcomes, we introduce a method for the unsupervised generation and comparison of graph representations of narrative texts. Composed of the entity-entity relations that appear in the events of a narrative, these graphs are represented by adjacency matrices populated with text extracted using various natural language processing tools. Graph similarity analysis techniques are then used to measure the similarity of events and the similarity of character function between stories. Designed as an automated process, our first application of this method is against a test corpus of 10 variations of the Aarne-Thompson type 333 story, "Little Red Riding Hood." Preliminary experiments correctly co-referenced differently named entities from story variations and indicated the relative similarity of events in different iterations of the tale despite their order differences. Though promising, this work in progress also indicated some incorrect correlations between dissimilar entities

Contracts, relationships and innovation in business-to-business exchanges

Purpose: – This paper aims to contrast two approaches to the study of contracts in business and industrial marketing: first, as a legal document in shaping at the outset exchanges and interactions, for instance in projects; and second, as relational norms in becoming integrated into a business relationship through interactions, for instance as a resource. Design/methodology/approach: – The paper draws on cross-case comparison of three projects, as actors develop an engineering service for optimizing the maintenance of large-scale capital equipment by analyzing real-time data from sensors and user records. Comparison is by coding interview and observational data as micro-sequences of interactions among actors. Findings: – Preparing contracts allows a project to commence and is an early form of interaction, intensifying new relationships or cutting into and recasting established ones. Relational norms augment and can supersede the early focus on the contract, thus incorporating incremental innovation and absorbing some uncertainties. Research limitations/implications: – The research approach benefits from detailed comparison and captures some variety across its three cases, but the discussion is limited to theoretical generalization. Practical implications: – The analysis and discussion highlights and focuses on when different approaches to understanding contracting are more apparent across durable business relationships. Transitions from a contractual document to a view of relational norms are subtle, vulnerable and not always made successfully. Originality/value: – This paper’s originality is in it comparison of overlapping approaches to understanding businesses’ uses of contacts in business and industrial marketing, of contract and relational norms. It develops a valuable research proposition, in the transition from a mainly contractual to a mainly relational uses of contracts, thus identifying contract as a particular business resource, to be deployed and embedded

Soft reboot : the making of Hard Reset

textDirector, Writer and MFA Candidate Deepak Chetty will discuss his history as a filmmaker from an early age up until present day as well as the entire process of conceptualizing, creating, producing and finishing Hard Reset. Hard Reset, a science fiction thriller is the first short film out of UT3D and the first graduate thesis film shot natively in stereoscopic 3D in North America.Radio-Television-Fil

Transactions, Transformations, Translations: Metrics that Matter for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements

This report provides an evaluative framework and key milestones to gauge movement building. Aiming to bridge the gap between the field of community organizing that relies on the one-on-one epiphanies of leaders and the growing philanthropic emphasis on evidence-based giving, the report stresses three main insights. The first is that any good set of movement metrics should capture quantity and quality, numbers and nuance, transactions and transformations. They are related -- an energized leader with a clear power analysis (a transformative measure) may turn out more members for a coalition rally (a transactional measure) -- and the report offers a matrix that weaves together both types of metrics across ten different movement-building strategies. The second is that a movement is more than one organization -- and if the whole is to be greater than the sum of its parts, we must measure accordingly. While report includes measures of success at the organizational level, it attempts to move beyond and focus on whether groups can align and work together to create a more powerful force for social change -- suggesting that in the same way that movements need to scale up to face the challenges of our times, metrics, too, must expand to capture the whole. The third is that metrics must be co-created, not imposed. Recognizing the gravity of the times and hoping to gauge their effectiveness, movement builders are eager to come up with a common language and framework for themselves -- and are developing the tools and capacities to do so. The report suggests that the funder-grantee relationship can build on this wisdom in the field and develop a set of evaluative measures that are not onerous requirements but tools for mutual accountability. The report also offers a set of recommendations to funders and the field, ranging from practical steps (like building a new toolbox of measures, improving the capacity to use them, and documenting innovation and experimentation) to more far-reaching suggestions about leadership development, the connection of policy outcomes with broader social change, and the need to generate movement-level measures. We, at USC PERE, hope this report contributes to a conversation about how to best capture transformations as well as transactions in social movement organizing, and how to build the broader public and philanthropic support necessary to realize the promise of a more inclusive America

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Storying leaks for sharing: The case of leaking the “Moscovici draft” on Twitter

This article proposes a discourse-narrative approach to news making online as a networked practice of storying and sharing. This approach is illustrated in the examination of the release of a draft Eurogroup statement via journalist Paul Mason’s Facebook, Scribd and Twitter accounts on the 16th February 2015. The analysis draws on small story insights (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and the empirical framework of sharing (Androutsopoulos, 2014). It shows how the release of this leak event on Twitter is storied as a breaking news story unfolding moment-by-moment as it happens, at the same time as making up an incipient record of the event as it happened. It is argued that breaking news (micro)stories are shared as moments of narrative stancetaking, featuring a concise, portable storyline and cumulative evaluation(s) that foreground the relevance of the leak for the ongoing discussions on the Greek bailout negotiations as well as the continued importance of the journalist as the mediator of the leak. In this case of sharing a leaked document with networked participants, narrativity is drawn upon as a key resource for producing and circulating alternative stances on the Greek crisis, creating a range of networked participation positions. This article contributes to the study of news sharing online and digital storytelling based on the qualitative analysis of ‘small’ data

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Electronic Dance Music in Narrative Film

As a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from the traditional model of orchestral underscoring in favor of a more contemporary approach to film sound, electronic dance music (EDM) is playing an increasingly important role in current soundtrack practice. With a focus on two specific examples, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), this essay discusses the possibilities that such a distinctive aesthetics brings to filmmaking, especially with regard to audiovisual rhythm and sonic integration