Detecting Summarization Hot Spots in Meetings Using Group Level Involvement and Turn-Taking Features

In this paper we investigate how participant involvement and turn-taking features relate to extractive summarization of meeting dialogues. In particular, we examine whether automatically derived measures of group level involvement, like participation equality and turn-taking freedom, can help detect where summarization relevant meeting segments will be. Results show that classification using turn-taking features performed better than the majority class baseline for data from both AMI and ICSI meeting corpora in identifying whether meeting segments contain extractive summary dialogue acts. The feature based approach also provided better recall than using manual ICSI involvement hot spot annotations. Turn-taking features were additionally found to be predictive of the amount of extractive summary content in a segment. In general, we find that summary content decreases with higher participation equality and overlap, while it increases with the number of very short utterances. Differences in results between the AMI and ICSI data sets suggest how group participatory structure can be used to understand what makes meetings easy or difficult to summarize. Index Terms: Turn-taking, involvement, hot spots, summarization, meetings, dialogu

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 participants’ 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 “topic segments” 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

Politeness in Libyan Arabic: A Third-Wave Perspective

This study examines politeness and ritualistic forms of politeness from a third-wave perspective, using empirical data from Libyan Arabic, in order to contribute to our understanding of these phenomena. The objectives of this study are threefold. First, it aims to find out the most dominant norms of Libyan politeness. Second, it aims to examine the role of religion, if any, in the understandings of Libyan politeness. Third, it aims to investigate the relationship between politeness and rituals and how rituals are used to occasion politeness in Libyan culture. In order to address these aims, authentic discourse is explored using Kádár and Haugh‟s (2013) analytical framework to politeness. Further to the fact that this framework draws from multiple loci of understanding, i.e. there is not one single understanding of politeness, it allows the researcher to cover the macro-aspects of politeness, without losing sight of the micro aspects. This study also benefited significantly from consulting other relevant views to (im)politeness and ritual including Kádár‟s (2013) typology of relational rituals as well as Haugh‟s (2013) view of (im)politeness as a social practice, Culpeper‟s (2011a) concept of impoliteness, and Goffman‟s (1967) notion of face. Encounters of spontaneous interactional data and post-interviews data produced by native speakers of Arabic of both genders and of different age groups were recorded in various secular and institutional settings. The mundane data includes interactions among friends, family members, and tribal members, whereas institutional discourse is gathered from three Libyan workplaces. For organisational purposes, data analysis is presented in four analytical chapters (5, 6, 7, and 8) in an increasing scale of formality. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data revealed a number of significant findings including: 1) hospitality and politeness are closely related in Libyan Arab culture; and therefore, it represents one of the most dominant norms of Libyan politeness; 2) religion is the prime-mover of most of the cultural aspects of Libyan society , where religious teachings are clearly reflected in most daily life interactions, such as understanding and expressing politeness; 3) there is a strong relationship between politeness and rituals, where religious rituals in particular play a silent role in occasioning politeness

Critical point of view: a Wikipedia reader

For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform. The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion

A case study of a school in Zimbabwe: Investigating challenges faced by rural O-level students and strategies used by teachers in the English Reading- comprehension classes.

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Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 2: Living, Making, Value

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 2 includes papers from Living, Making and Value tracks of the conference

Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and the Far Right

The publication of this work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis have all, to varying degrees, been the subject of studies that explore their ideology. All too often, however, these studies have not tackled the issue adequately, limiting their analytical approach to fascism or other phenomena such as anti-Semitism. Frequently, they have also sought to exculpate these writers or to normalise their political tendencies in an effort to circumnavigate the dilemma of how to address the paradox of right-wing artists who are both harbingers and opponents of the imagined trajectory of progressive modernity. This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology. By raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this study ultimately challenges its readers to see their cultural practices as political. It wants to make visible and problematize the interdependencies of right-wing ideology and cultural production as well as reception in order to explain the (far) Right as a phenomenon deeply rooted in European history and cultural development. It thus lays bare the misconceptions, the gaps as well as the complicity in the debate about right-wing ideology in literature

The relevance of prediction markets for corporate forecasting

Prediction markets (PMs) are virtual stock markets on which shares are traded taking advantage of the wisdom-of-crowds principle to access collective intelligence. It is claimed that the accumulation of information by groups leads to joint group decisions often better than individual participants’ approaches to solutions. A PM share represents a future event or a market condition (e.g. expected sales figures of a product for a specific month) and provides forecasts via its price which is interpreted as the probability of the event occurring. PMs can be used in competition with other forecasting tools; when applied for forecasting purposes within a company they are called corporate prediction markets (CPMs). Despite great praise in the (academic) literature for the use of PMs as an efficient instrument for bringing together scattered information and opinions, corporate usage and applications are limited. This research was directed towards an examination of this discrepancy by means of focusing on the barriers to adoption within enterprises. Literature and reality diverged and neglected the important aspect of corporate culture. Screening existing research and interviews with business executives and corporate planners revealed challenges of company hierarchy as an inhibitor to the acceptance of CPM outcomes. Findings from 55 interviews and a thematic analysis of the literature exposed that CPMs are useful but rarely used. Their lack of use arises from senior executives’ perception of the organisational hierarchy being taxed and fear of losing power as CPMs (can) include lower rungs of the corporate ladder in decision-making processes. If these challenges can be overcome the potential of CPMs can be released. It emerged – buttressed by ten additional interviews – that CPMs would be worthwhile for company forecasting, particularly supporting innovation management which would allow idea markets (as an embodiment of CPMs) to excel. A contribution of this research lies in its additions to the PM literature, explaining the lack of adoption of CPMs despite their apparent benefits and making a case for the incorporation of CPMs as a forecasting instrument to facilitate innovation management. Furthermore, a framework to understand decision-making in the adoption of strategic tools is provided. This framework permits tools to be accepted on a more rational base and curb the emotional and political influences which can act against the adoption of good and effective tools