307 research outputs found

    An Emotion Type Informed Multi-Task Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

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    Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to jointly extract emotion clauses and the corresponding cause clauses from a document, which is important for user evaluation or public opinion analysis. Existing research addresses the ECPE task through a two-step or an end-to-end approach. Although previous work shows promising performances, they suffer from two limitations: 1) they fail to take full advantage of emotion type information, which has advantages for modelling the dependencies between emotion and cause clauses from a semantic perspective; 2) they ignored the interaction between local and global information, which is important for ECPE. To address these issues, we propose an ECPE Pair Generator (ECPE-PG), with a Clause-Encoder layer, a Pre-Output layer and an Information Interaction-based Pair Generation (IIPG) Module embedded. This model first encodes clauses into vector representations through the Clause-Encoder layer and then preforms emotion clause extraction (EE), cause clause extraction (CE) and emotion type extraction (ETE), respectively, through the Pre-Output layer, on the basis of which the IIPG module analyzes the complex emotional logic of relationships between clauses and estimates the candidate pairs based on the interaction of global and local information. It should be noted that emotion type information is regarded as a crucial indication in the IIPG module to assist the identification of emotion-cause pairs. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets

    Decoding the Real World: Tackling Virtual Ethnographic Challenges through Data-Driven Methods

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    Examining the Relationships Between Distance Education Students’ Self-Efficacy and Their Achievement

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    This study aimed to examine the relationships between students’ self-efficacy (SSE) and students’ achievement (SA) in distance education. The instruments were administered to 100 undergraduate students in a distance university who work as migrant workers in Taiwan to gather data, while their SA scores were obtained from the university. The semi-structured interviews for 8 participants consisted of questions that showed the specific conditions of SSE and SA. The findings of this study were reported as follows: There was a significantly positive correlation between targeted SSE (overall scales and general self-efficacy) and SA. Targeted students' self-efficacy effectively predicted their achievement; besides, general self- efficacy had the most significant influence. In the qualitative findings, four themes were extracted for those students with lower self-efficacy but higher achievement—physical and emotional condition, teaching and learning strategy, positive social interaction, and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, three themes were extracted for those students with moderate or higher self-efficacy but lower achievement—more time for leisure (not hard-working), less social interaction, and external excuses. Providing effective learning environments, social interactions, and teaching and learning strategies are suggested in distance education

    Translation and Feminism in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century China:A Case Study on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

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    As the circuitry of literature grows increasingly international, translation studies of women writers have in recent years attracted great critical attention. This thesis will explore the Chinese translation and the power of feminism expressed in the translated text. This thesis will mainly focus on the reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which is one of the most popular English novels in China. The 20th century is an important period for China when Chinese society developed from a feudalist to modern society. And the 21st century is a new period for China when achievements came into being following two decades of reform and opening-up policies. The translations of Western writers’ works bringing feminism, a new trend of thought in China, provided a new figure and image of women and prompted Chinese women’s ideas of liberation and independence. In this thesis, I enquire after the connection between the development of feminism and translations. I research how women’s agency and feminist thought are presented through the comparison between translations by both feminist-leaning and non-feminist translators. The ideology of translators is evaluated and classified with an analysis of their prefaces, academic study, and life experience. I build the corpora of translated texts and collect data to study the language features of texts. Comparative analysis is directed towards the actual language used consciously or unconsciously in texts by translators with different feminist thoughts. The findings address three issues: firstly, feminism tends to be presented through strong-woman models in the Chinese context; secondly, feminist translations have contributed to the reconstruction of Chinese femininity; and finally, feminist strategies are used as special tendencies in the Chinese context

    A Study on the “Coupling” Phenomenon in the Chinese Fandom of English Cultural Products and Intercultural Imagination of Fan Creation

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    This doctoral thesis examines the emerging CP fan culture in Chinese cyberspace and explores its representation in the Chinese fandom of English-language cultural products such as Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts. As a cultural category initiated by predominantly female participants for imagining intimate relationships between 2-dimensional characters and 3-dimensional real people, CP fan culture shares some cultural homologies and proximities with Japanese Boy’s Love (BL) culture and Western slash fan culture. However, existing research has focused almost exclusively on these two cultural subsets, which have a long history and transcultural influence beyond their geographical boundaries, and scholars have usually analysed them from the perspectives of feminism and queer theory, whereas there is a serious lack of systematic academic discussion of the distinctive connotations and local cultural characteristics of CP culture, which has become the centre of public opinion and the core of the cultural industry in China. Even the few English-language studies of CP fan culture tend to confuse it with BL culture and slash fan culture, and tend to discuss negative features such as the CP fan struggle and the censorship of homoerotic literature in China from a critical perspective. The present research uses the mixed methods approach consisting of aca-fan, online questionnaire (N = 136), textual analysis, feminism with ‘only daughter’ as a generational characteristic, postmodern culturalism, and intercultural fandom to construct a new theoretical system, which is committed to analysing how CP fans of English-language cultural products, as a transcultural fandom, engage in transmedia CP activities compared to early Chinese media fans and CP fans of Chinese-language cultural products based on the following five perspectives: 1. the genesis of CP fan culture; 2. the ‘setting supremacy’ that serves as a guiding principle in the creative approach of CP fan culture on two levels; 3. the preference of some CP fans for English-language cultural products; 4. the original La Lang CP created by CP fans of English-language cultural products; and 5. the fandom nationalism that caused the termination of transnational CP activities. Within this context, the present research defines for the first time a series of important concepts in CP fan culture, including the sense of CP, the intimacy of CP, the top/bottom character configuration of CP, La Lang CP, and the fandom nationalism of CP fans of English-language cultural products. Moreover, the present research reveals that CP fan creations abide by the rule of ‘setting supremacy’, dissecting the ‘2.5-dimensional setting’ which is the fundamental component of CP fan culture, and setting it apart from the ‘moe element’ put forth by Japanese ACGN culture researcher Azuma Hiroki and frequently misconstrued by Chinese fan culture scholars. Based on this, the present research uniquely proposes that the essence of CP fan culture is the creation and consumption of a ‘dynamic 2.5-dimensional settings database’. As a result, the present research focuses on the CP fan culture of English-language cultural products with both localised and intercultural characteristics, which not only reveals the cultural innovation capacity of female CP fans in the context of the grand narrative collapsing, as well as their willingness to question and transform the imbalanced gender-rights operating mechanism, but also effectively removes the cultural misinterpretation and stigmatisation attached to CP fans of English-language cultural products that are less visible. Keywords: CP fans of English-language cultural products, personal settings, worldview settings, setting supremacy, 2.5-dimensional settings database, only daughter, intimate relationshi

    SoMeIL: A social media infodemic listening for public health behaviours conceptual framework

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    Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has escalated health infodemics given substantially digitalized daily life since the pandemic began. The number of social media users has skyrocketed. However, this has brought issues given misleading health information circulating on social media platforms that can lead to undesirable behaviours compromising individual or public health in real life. One long-lasting health issue is vaccine hesitancy, which has been further compounded by health infodemics on social media. According to the World Health Organization, health infodemics occur when too much information that makes true information competes with misinformation for people’s attention, understanding, and adherence to recommended health interventions. Existing theories and theoretical constructs have been applied to study public behaviours influenced by health infodemics on social media. However, these theories have limited to individual behaviours and ignored other critical factors. Furthermore, the current theories have rarely reflected the nature of social media as information can be disseminated instantly and massively without geographical restrictions regardless of information quality. Therefore, this dissertation aimed to address these limitations by proposing a solution that can listen to public discourse on social media and infer their behavioural intentions in real life. Methods The scoping review (Study I) was conducted by following the methods of Arksey and O'Malley as well as Levac et al. to identify and synthesize literature related to the research question. The theory construction methodology was used in the conceptual paper (Study II) to review existing theories and propose a new conceptual framework. Next, the Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling and qualitative thematic analysis were applied in the preliminary and partial qualitative validation study (Study III). The last study (Study IV) applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to infer people’s intentions toward COVID-19 vaccination in real life from Twitter amid the pandemic as a preliminary and partial validation for the proposed conceptual framework. Results A total of 2,405 articles published between November 1, 2019, and November 4, 2020, were retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, and PsycINFO. After removing duplicates, non-empirical literature, and irrelevant studies, a total of 81 articles written in English published in peer-reviewed journals were included in the scoping review (Study I). Six themes were found and reported: (1) surveying public attitudes, (2) identifying infodemics, (3) assessing mental health, (4) detecting or predicting COVID-19 cases, (5) analyzing government responses to the pandemic, and (6) evaluating quality of health information in prevention education videos. The findings also suggested knowledge gaps in real-time COVID-19 surveillance using social media data and limited machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques used in overall COVID-19 research using social media data except the first theme. In the conceptual paper (Study II), a new conceptual framework—social media infodemic listening for public health behaviors (SoMeIL) —was proposed to address limitations in existing theories given lacking systematic and theoretical foundation for such research. After the SoMeIL was proposed, validations were needed. A preliminary qualitative validation and demonstration using Twitter data about the Canadian Freedom Convoy were conductedto partially validate and illustrate how the SoMeIL conceptual framework could be applied (Study III). Finally, the findings from SEM in the last study (Study IV) showed statistically significant associations between the latent variable and the observed variables derived from Twitter. This study provided preliminary evidence to validate partial components in the proposed SoMeIL conceptual framework that could be used as a proxy to infer people’s vaccination intentions in real life. It also demonstrated the feasibility of using Twitter data in SEM research besides typical surveys. Conclusion The scoping review (Study I) was important since it identified various roles that social media data have played in research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also informed us of knowledge gaps to be bridged. This led us to the conceptual paper (Study II) since we identified limitations in existing theories when the current theories or theoretical constructs were applied in health research that analyzed social media data. A new conceptual framework—SoMeIL—was proposed accordingly. A preliminary qualitative study was followed to validate and demonstrate partial components of the SoMeIL conceptual framework. The last study (Study IV) showed preliminary evidence to show that parts of the SoMeIL conceptual framework was workable given statistically significant relationships found among certain constructs. As a result, Twitter data in this dissertation could be used as a proxy to infer people’s vaccination behavior in real life as suggested by the proposed conceptual framework. Yet more research is needed to further validate and improve the proposed SoMeIL conceptual framework. If social media listening can be integrated into future pandemic preparedness as the proposed conceptual framework suggests, it can help health authorities and governmental agencies promptly shape public perception, disseminate more scientific information, and influence behaviors during a health crisis in a timely fashion
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