Proceedings of the Workshop Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation (SCAR) 2007

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation, held in conjunction with NODALIDA 2007, on May 24 2007 in Tartu, Estonia.</p

Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and Twitter

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product. Here, we examine expressions made on the online, global microblog and social networking service Twitter, uncovering and explaining temporal variations in happiness and information levels over timescales ranging from hours to years. Our data set comprises over 46 billion words contained in nearly 4.6 billion expressions posted over a 33 month span by over 63 million unique users. In measuring happiness, we use a real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based approach---a kind of hedonometer. In building our metric, made available with this paper, we conducted a survey to obtain happiness evaluations of over 10,000 individual words, representing a tenfold size improvement over similar existing word sets. Rather than being ad hoc, our word list is chosen solely by frequency of usage and we show how a highly robust metric can be constructed and defended.Comment: 27 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables. Supplementary Information: 1 table, 52 figure

Promoting Multilingual Reader in Efl Classrooms: a Portrait on the Reading Strategies

This paper reports on how English as a Foreign Language Learner (EFL learners) explored their reading strategis when dealing with L1 and L2 texts. The destination of reading, a notion called comprehension, is by no means is a complicated process. This complexity can only be simplified only if a reader can employ the available reading strategies. The capacity to employ and develop the 20 reading strategies, as suggested by Grabe and Stoller (2002), can be injected both in L1 and L2 context. In EFL reading context, comprehension must first take place in students\u27 first language (L1), and eventually lead to comprehension in their second language (L2) (Alwasilah 2012; 2001). From this perspective, EFL classroom now serves as a ‘sacred\u27 site for promoting multilingual reader in which students are encouraged to demonstrate engagement dynamically both in their L1 and L2. From the 20 strategies employed by two selected respondents, four strategies seem to be a big puzzle for EFL leerners: focus on generic structure, intertextuality, inferences, and discourse markers. This, however, should be seen as a milestone rather than as a weakness. The more strategies employed, the more strategic the readers will be. This is the phenomenon captured in EFL reading classroom presented in this study. Keywords: L1 and L2 reading, strategic reading, comprehension