6 research outputs found
Guess who? Multilingual approach for the automated generation of author-stylized poetry
This paper addresses the problem of stylized text generation in a
multilingual setup. A version of a language model based on a long short-term
memory (LSTM) artificial neural network with extended phonetic and semantic
embeddings is used for stylized poetry generation. The quality of the resulting
poems generated by the network is estimated through bilingual evaluation
understudy (BLEU), a survey and a new cross-entropy based metric that is
suggested for the problems of such type. The experiments show that the proposed
model consistently outperforms random sample and vanilla-LSTM baselines, humans
also tend to associate machine generated texts with the target author
Technology-enabled planning participation: Designing & deploying digital technology to encourage citizen participation in urban planning
Ph. D. Thesis.Citizens increasingly want to formally engage with the governmental and policy processes that
manage how places change. Whilst enhancing the role of citizens in urban planning has been
a longstanding objective for academics and communities, translating these aspirations into
practice has proved to be more challenging. Although a range of conceptual ideas and
practical techniques have been developed in planning to provide opportunities to enhance
citizen involvement, these ideas and methods have faced several challenges. These include the
strict legalistic and policy parameters that determine what sort of comments that are
permissible, the governmental initiators of public engagement, and the need to understand
and utilise the often complex language of planning. And yet citizens and communities are
increasingly resorting to social media and digital communication to express their views about
urban change.
This research assesses the degree to which new digital technology can be designed and
deployed to enhance citizen engagement within urban planning and identify whether it offers
one potential method to address and overcome some of the challenges being experienced in
citizen engagement. Through designing, deploying and evaluating speculative digital
technologies, the research aims to understand the potential role of technology in facilitating
enhanced citizen participation in planning. Working with citizens, community organisations
and planners, the research explores the factors at play when innovative and bespoke
engagement methods are used to amplify citizens’ voices in urban change. An action research
approach was taken, which uses a continual cycle of designing and planning, deploying
different types of technologies and reflections to inform design. Three technologies were
piloted in different settings and contexts: a social media example addressing a complex
planning issues; a smart watch application to support in-place engagement; and an interactive
digital device that encourages people to communicate their feelings and aspirations through
visual and oral means. Across the three examples, over 1400 citizens participated in the
research.
Findings demonstrate how the three digital initiatives encouraged people to be expressive
when communicating complicated feelings towards urban change, and the influence different
methods have on what people communicate. They illustrate how different participation
methods can support differing levels of engagement, and how digital technologies might better
align with how citizens would like to participate.
The research critiques the suitability of current participation methods, and the extent to
which they can support a genuine discussion about where people live and what they care
about. It concludes by questioning whether current planning engagement methods can
adequately equip non-experts with the tools to participate. The overall conclusion is that by
employing digital technologies, a much more productive and fruitful conversation can be
designed to facilitate citizen participation in planning compared to traditional methods