Can dialogues advance EU-China trade relations? CEPS Research Paper 09 Nov 2020.

The EU pursues its trade agenda with China through a web of economic and sectoral dialogues. We show that these dialogues do matter for wider EU trade policy. After a brief overview of the architecture, we map the trade-related dialogues and identify seven possible functions of them, giving examples of dialogues on public procurement; reforms of state-owned enterprises (SOEs); forced technology transfer; the protection of intellectual property rights; and sustainable forestry and the timber trade. The assessment seeks to answer four specific questions: Do dialogues improve market access? Dialogues would seem to have facilitated market access in a variety of ways. The EU has also insisted on reforms in China with a view to easing restrictions that hinder effective market access. For some aspects this seems to have worked, but not for the big issues, for example SOE reforms. Can the web of dialogues be seen as an ‘unbundled’ free trade agreement (FTA)? The answer is, not really. The trade dialogues do not seem to substitute, even imperfectly, for an FTA. Can the dialogues stimulate ‘sustainable development’? A recent convergence of EU and Chinese objectives has been extremely helpful for effective bilateral cooperation, on social matters (labour standards and social protection) and the environment & climate. Cooperation on energy, climate strategies and other environmental concerns, following dreadful neglect and indifference in China, are achieving results, such as better (for instance, risk-based) regulation, higher ambitions and more effective enforcement. Can dialogues reconcile or at least mitigate ‘systemic’ differences? Here, dialogues have not proved very useful in terms of results. From the EU end, addressing systemic differences effectively when the partner country takes pride in enjoying a ‘socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics’ is intrinsically impossible. It is an accomplishment when channels of cooperation are kept open

Market dialogue in public procurement : Buyer-supplier interfaces and relational abilities

Previous studies have suggested that public procurement promotes transactional and standardized interfaces between public buyers and suppliers. The use of more interactive and translational interfaces in market dialogues during the pre-tender phase of public procurement has received limited academic interest. Based on a multiple-case study, this paper aims to address this research gap by focusing on public buyer-supplier interfaces and the buyer's and the suppliers' abilities to interact during market dialogues. Thereby, we contribute to the literature on public procurement and supplier management. First, we enrich the interface framework by showing that interaction can be achieved in market dialogues and highlighting that the dialogues do not necessarily feature only one interface but may contain a configuration of interfaces varying by interface type and sequencing. Second, we elaborate on the subdimensions of the public buyer's and the suppliers' relational abilities, which influence the buyer-supplier interfaces obtained through the market dialogue. We offer implications for organizing market dialogues in public procurement.© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

ChatSubs: A dataset of dialogues in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician extracted from movie subtitles for developing advanced conversational models

The ChatSubs dataset [5] contains dialogue data in Spanish and three of Spain’s co-official languages (Catalan, Basque, and Galician). It has been obtained from OpenSubtitles, from which we have gathered the movie subtitles in our languages of interest and processed them to generate clearly segmented dialogues and their turns. The data processing code is pub- licly accessible. The result is 206.706 JSON files with more than 20 million dialogues and 96 million turns, which rep- resents one of the biggest dialogue corpus available, as other similar datasets in better resourced languages do not reach 500k dialogues or present less defined conversations. Thus, the ChatSubs dataset is an ideal resource for research teams that are interested in training dialogue models in Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and GalicianCONVERSA ( TED2021-132470B-I00 ) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110 0 011033European Union NextGenerationEU/PRT

The Eldercare Dialogues: A Grassroots Strategy to Transform Long-Term Care

This report is the culmination of observations of 11 Eldercare Dialogues, 15 in-depth interviews with Dialogue organizers and participants, and six focus groups, one with each participating organization. It explores the experiences of caregivers and care recipients in the movement to transform long-term care and ensure that caregivers and recipients have the support they need to age and work with dignity. The full report includes a toolkit so other communities can learn from and replicate the Dialogue process

Moving Along the Learning Curve: From Values to Public Judgment: Citizen Dialogues on K-12 Education Reform

Based on dialogues with California's public, policy makers, and other stakeholders, assesses the public's priorities for K-12 reform and support for giving districts more authority and resources to meet state standards. Includes implications for leaders

Critical Dialogues : Scotland + Venice 2012

Alberto Campo Baeza writing in the catalogue, Young Spanish Architecture, an Ark Monograph of 1985, talks about, ‘’a world riddled with noise and yet paradoxically mute, creatively speaking, a group of young Spanish architects are playing a very engaging song, their own song, the most beautiful song.’’ Twenty-seven years later that Spanish song has grown in quality and projection as subsequent architects took their lead from this earlier generation resulting in a Spanish architectural culture of great stature and depth. New voices are occasionally heard, often emanating from the architectural edge, such as Pascal Flammer and Raphael Zuber’s work in Switzerland and Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental Housing in Chile. Some of the most beautiful and poignant songs have emerged from China in Atelier Archmixing’s Twin Trees Pavilion and Amateur Architecture Studio’s early Ceramic House, projects that can be heard through the din of the architectural circus that travels the globe, a circus with an increasingly desperate and cynical appetite. For a song to become engaging and powerful, three components are critical: personality, passion and technique. Scotland’s presence in Venice 2012 is about the recognition of four voices that are on the verge of making themselves heard. Scotland lies on the periphery of Europe, nascent both politically and in contemporary terms architecturally. Yet once its architects stood shoulder to shoulder with the best in Europe and many claim that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sublime Glasgow School of Art 1899-1909 heralded modernism not just in the UK but also in Europe. In the post-Second World War period Gillespie Kidd and Coia in the West and Morris and Steedman in the East helped propel Scottish architecture in new directions, the former becoming part of a west coast figurative culture that explored a phenomenological sense of section and atmosphere, the latter by an east coast sense of abstraction, detachment and refinement. It seems to me there has always been this kind of architectural watershed that splits Scotland in two. The west possesses a character like its fractured romantic coastline that is passionate about layers, complexity and conversation, whilst the east with its more austere coastline nurtures a more ascetic, reflective, emotionless and silent quality in both its art and architecture. More recently the architectural scene seems to have lost this sense of split personality that came out of place. The new architecture has a tendency towards an image of rediscovered modernism albeit executed with a new graphic material suaveness that could equally be seen anywhere in the UK. The years from the 1970’s have seen a gradual dissolution in the architect’s role. It is a situation that has been greatly exacerbated by the current recession in which many architects have lost not just their voice, but their ability to make architecture altogether. The four architectural practices represented in Venice are all based in Glasgow; they all share a concern for people, the ordinary, and the street. They all have passion and an emerging personality even though their technique has had little opportunity to develop. The critical word that connects these architects is architectural practice. They explore the act of practicing as an architect in a marginal situation, politically, socially, professionally and culturally. Their approach is primarily concerned with conversation and engagement. Venice itself is a city on the edge. Once the edge of Europe and a portal to a far eastern imagination, a city barely founded on land or sea, a mirage. The Scottish contribution to the Venice Biennale itself is a marginal act, emerging, hopeful, outside the main event. Four Northern figures flit amongst southern shadows

The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems

This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.Comment: SIGDIAL 2015. 10 pages, 5 figures. Update includes link to new version of the dataset, with some added features and bug fixes. See: https://github.com/rkadlec/ubuntu-ranking-dataset-creato

Poets in dialogue, dialogues in poets

Is there something noticeably peculiar about dialogues with poets when transformed into writing, be it in electronic or printed form? The pauses and hesitations, the thrust and parry, the slurrings and overlappings of ordinary speech by and large disappear. In their place is an artifice, a deliberate creation of a script, with questions and responses clearly marked for our attention. Might we be approaching a tidied duologue which, some might also cynically remark, largely reproduces a dual monologue? Moreover, when poets are in dialogue, with whom or what does the poet converse