A study on text-score disagreement in online reviews

In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa); and 2) detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts. To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with around 160k hotel reviews collected from Tripadvisor, with the aim of detecting a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in line, or not, with the associated score. Using well established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score, we find that -on a scale of five stars- those reviews ranked with middle scores include a mixture of positive and negative aspects. The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an effective selection of reviews -on an initial very large dataset- that may allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset featuring a text/score disagreement, which conveniently convey to the user a summary of positive and negative features of the review target.Comment: This is the accepted version of the paper. The final version will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Computation, available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12559-017-9496-

National Identity and Young Children: A Comparative Study of 4th and 5th graders in Singapore and the United States.

Debates about nationality and identity have particular relevance for multicultural nations such as Singapore and the United States where trends in immigration and an increasing multiplicity of identities problematize the notion of citizenship. Given that a nation’s schools are where the dominant discourse of nation identity and history are promulgated, we need to study the role of schools in citizenship formation if we are to understand how and why citizens develop commitment to the nation. My study adopts a comparative perspective by looking at the curriculum and students in Singapore and the United States. I propose that Singapore shares with the U.S. the need to conceptualize and clarify what citizenship and citizenship education mean in the face of debates over immigration and multiculturalism. This study investigates the symbols and strategies children use as they reflect on issues related to nationality. Using a combination of interviews and observations, it also examines whether children embrace the nationalizing function of the school or whether they resist and/or reshape this endeavor to suit their own understandings. Analyses reveal a master narrative that characterizes national identity in each country- in general, children in Singapore talk about national identity in material terms while American children evoke more abstract ideas. However, these opinions vary interestingly by cultural groupings such as ethnicity and immigrant status. I also show that children do not merely passively react to and accept the social and political world that is presented to them, but instead consciously struggle with the tensions of identity in multicultural societies. Results from this study speak to the discursiveness of national identity formation, the agency that children exercise in identity construction, and the important role of schools in this process. This dissertation proposes that in order for citizenship education to instill in children informed allegiance to their nations, teachers, curriculum planners, and teacher-educators need to know more about how children think about these issues. It also provides insights about when it is appropriate to teach children to think critically about issues of diversity and nationality, and has implications for curriculum and policy related to citizenship education in multicultural nations.Ph.D.EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78918/1/serenek_1.pd

Kodrah Kristang: The Initiative to Revitalize the Kristang Language in Singapore

Kristang is the critically endangered heritage language of the Portuguese-Eurasian community in Singapore and the wider Malayan region, and is spoken by an estimated less than 100 fluent speakers in Singapore. In Singapore, especially, up to 2015, there was almost no known documentation of Kristang, and a declining awareness of its existence, even among the Portuguese-Eurasian community. However, efforts to revitalize Kristang in Singapore under the auspices of the community-based non-profit, multiracial and intergenerational Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’) initiative since March 2016 appear to have successfully reinvigorated community and public interest in the language; more than 400 individuals, including heritage speakers, children and many people outside the Portuguese-Eurasian community, have joined ongoing free Kodrah Kristang classes, while another 1,400 participated in the inaugural Kristang Language Festival in May 2017, including Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and the Portuguese Ambassador to Singapore. Unique features of the initiative include the initiative and its associated Portuguese-Eurasian community being situated in the highly urbanized setting of Singapore, a relatively low reliance on financial support, visible, if cautious positive interest from the Singapore state, a multiracial orientation and set of aims that embrace and move beyond the language’s original community of mainly Portuguese-Eurasian speakers, and, by design, a multiracial youth-led core team

The Convenient Label of ‘Third Culture Kids’: an exploration into the impact of an international school upbringing on the development of cultural identity, belonging, and place

The rise in globalisation has promoted and necessitated the need for the world to become more interdependent through economic, social, cultural, technological, and institutional processes. As this occurs, the number of families and their children are also increasing, with many enrolling into international schools abroad. In literature, children who have this international school upbringing have often fallen under the umbrella term of a ‘Third Culture Kid’ (TCK). As understandings of the intricacies of this unique international community deepen, the TCK label has undergone definitional changes for the label to be more comprehensive to reflect the expanding and diversifying population. The aim of this study was to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the TCK label and investigate the impact of an international school upbringing on identity, sense of belonging, and place. To achieve this, I conducted a qualitative study aligned with a constructivist/interpretivist approach that employed a hermeneutic phenomenological method. I carried out 11 in-depth interviews with participants remotely via videotelephone programmes as this research was occurring during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the findings suggest that there were perceptible ideological inconsistencies between the international school curriculum and their proclaimed ideology of international mindedness. Second, participants’ experiences were conditional to their perceived ‘internationalness’, and this was inherently tied to their race. Participants who were Caucasian were regarded as more international as it was often tied to their English-speaking ability and adhered more to the ‘Traditional TCK’ framework. Third, while international schools were reliant on visible diversity to uphold images of ‘internationalness’, the same observable diversities (i.e., variations in English) were invalidated and paradoxically considered ‘un-international’. Fourth, the unequal treatment towards international school kids were shown to have long-lasting implications on self-perceptions of identity, belonging, and place. These findings coalesce to indicate that there is a lack of awareness and institutional guidance to support international school students. Without intervention, the structural and racial inequalities within international schools may reverberate into wider society

Triangulating Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

To study ideology is to some extent, to study the ways in which language and meaning are used in everyday forms of social interaction. This is why a theory of language and a linguistic tradition which concerns itself with ideology will be much richer than narrow approaches which concern themselves only with system of signs, fixed meanings or well formed sentences. A theory of language as a social semiotic and of language and ideology has to concern itself with language as a form of social interaction, a meaning potential in and through which subjects and the social are constructed and reproduce while cultural and human conflict are negotiated. Such an analysis depends upon an account of relations of power which takes into account on cultural conflict and the problem of lack of consensus about systems of ideas or beliefs which characterize social systems and includes an account of the relations between action, institutions and social structures.CDA takes particular interest in the relationship between language and power. It is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted. Critical discourse analysts, then, take explicit position and want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality.This study attempts to transcend linguistic elements and to include a systematic fashion of the historical and political, sociological and/or psychological dimension in the analysis and interpretation of specific texts by using the principle of triangulating CDA. This involves Gaventa’s Power Cube, Fairclough’s Three Dimension’s of Discourse and Martin and Rose’ Appraisal System as a conceptual framework of analysis of blogging, one of various social media discourse.

Asian Values, Asian Democracy

“Asian values” is more than the articulation of cultural difference; its propositions of “Asian Capitalism” and “Asian Democracy” indicate a project to legitimise particular economic and political structures that have come under challenge. While capitalism and authoritarianism may have elective affinity, the “end of history” thesis argues that contradictions in late-capitalism would threaten authoritarianism and propel societies towards liberal democracy. Singapore’s “Asian Democracy” is significant in its ability to detour at history’s end and to re-amalgamate authoritarianism with (late)-capitalism. “Asian Values,” by emphasising communitarianism and consensus over conflict, creates a normative centre that guides media policy, civil society and inter-personal interactions. Good Asian citizens value prosperity over Western dreams (of non-consensual democracy). They also subordinate personal whims to the good of the community - the “silent (Asian) majority.” By allowing ideological pluralism without fragmentation, “Asian values” de-legitimises dissent and legitimises authoritarianism. The Singapore one-party government’s hegemony is based less on belief than on rhetorical compliance, which is produced through a combination of consent, consensus and coercion. Coercion (authoritarianism) is tolerated or consented to upon a consensus that it is worthwhile to trade freedom for prosperity and that there are no viable alternatives. Fuelled by personal desire for prosperity and pressurised by social expectations, citizens privatise/subordinate their dissent, producing an aura of public support for the government. This appearance of ideological unity crucially accords one-party governments the legitimacy to claim to represent the nation and deny multi-party representation. Despite the importance of economic legitimacy to the Singapore government, an economic crisis is not necessarily an ideological/hegemonic crisis because it is the hope rather than the reality of prosperity that sustains its hegemony. This relative autonomy from economic conditions, together with its anti-pluralism nature and its claim of cultural legitimacy makes “Asian Values” a superlative ideology for the evolution of government authoritarianism into soft/popular authoritarianism, thereby enabling Asian Democracy to carve a new trajectory and spark off a resurgent of authoritarianism