A Survey on Text Classification Algorithms: From Text to Predictions

In recent years, the exponential growth of digital documents has been met by rapid progress in text classification techniques. Newly proposed machine learning algorithms leverage the latest advancements in deep learning methods, allowing for the automatic extraction of expressive features. The swift development of these methods has led to a plethora of strategies to encode natural language into machine-interpretable data. The latest language modelling algorithms are used in conjunction with ad hoc preprocessing procedures, of which the description is often omitted in favour of a more detailed explanation of the classification step. This paper offers a concise review of recent text classification models, with emphasis on the flow of data, from raw text to output labels. We highlight the differences between earlier methods and more recent, deep learning-based methods in both their functioning and in how they transform input data. To give a better perspective on the text classification landscape, we provide an overview of datasets for the English language, as well as supplying instructions for the synthesis of two new multilabel datasets, which we found to be particularly scarce in this setting. Finally, we provide an outline of new experimental results and discuss the open research challenges posed by deep learning-based language models

Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Cosmopolitan Subjectivity and the Transnationalization of the Culture Industry

This thesis investigates the Japanese film industry's interactions with the West and Asia, the development of transnational filmmaking practices, and the transition of discursive regimes through which different types of cosmopolitan subjectivities are produced. It draws upon Ulrich Deck's concept of "banal cosmopolitanization" (2006) - which inextricably enmeshes the everyday lives of individuals across the industrialized societies within the global market economy. As has often been pointed out, modem Japanese national identity since the 19th century has been constructed from a geopolitical condition of being both a "centre" and a "periphery", in the sense that it has always seen itself as the centre of East Asia, while being peripheral to the flow of Western global processes. Contrary to the common belief that defeat in the war sixty years ago radically changed the Japanese social structure and value system, this sense of national identity and of Japan being "different from the West but above Asia" was left intact if not ideologically encouraged by the American Occupation policy through the preservation of many pre-war institutions (cf., Dower 1999; Sakai 2006). In a world that was to become dominated by a hierarchical logic of "the West and the rest" established against the backdrop of the Cold War, Japan and its culture effectively found itself in a privileged but ambiguous position as part of but not part of the `West', something which was solidified by the international success of Japanese national cinema in the 1950s. But all this was to change with the process of globalization in the late 1980s and 1990s. The main goal of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which globalization brought about a historic rupture in a national filmmaking community and discover the significance of this process. It shows how economic globalization undermined the material and discursive conditions that had sustained the form of national identity that had resulted from the process described above and gave rise to forms of cosmopolitan subjectivity which reveal a very different way of thinking about both Japan's position in the world and the sense of identification that younger filmmakers have towards it. This is illustrated through extensive interviews conducted with many filmmakers and producers in the Japanese filmmaking community

Crowdsourcing Global Culture: Visual Representation in the Age of Information

This doctoral dissertation extends existing frameworks of visual content analysis by coupling them with crowdsourcing technologies for international data collection and an iterative, interpretative visual analysis. In the age of information, imagery continues to be consumed and circulated at exponential rates, influencing and changing global flows of information that parallels Internet communication technology as it penetrates and gains ubiquity in new regions. To investigate the visual, media, and cultural phenomena that lie within these globalized pictorial exchanges, a flexible, visually-based inquiry is essential. This qualitative, visual-ethnographic survey was conducted over the Internet and aims to help inform visually-based literacy and media studies and further image-based research methodologies. The researcher collected over 2000 drawings from 61 countries diverse in geography and culture. The researcher revealed fresh insights into the visual-textual relationship, identity, and representation in a globalized context, specifically looking at emergent tensions between local and global ways of interpretation and meaning construction online. The researcher also considers the effects of a technologically mediated visual culture and its potential to influence or change deeply ingrained ideas once specific to geography and culture into new global trends and evolving material practices. The analysis is centred on a selection of drawings from 106 Asian participants who drew intercultural representations of the words meal, marriage, and home. The most striking discoveries indicate varying degrees of homogeneity and hybridity among the visual cultural representations received and reveals connections among language, the Internet, advertising, and identity. The findings break with more traditional views of globalization occurring in a direct West-East flow and highlight regional powers that can serve as cultural hubs of attention. These hubs act as filters, possibly creating and hybridizing new commercial and cultural trends and positioning themselves as beacons of modernity with considerable visual cultural influence. The researcher also makes suggestions for future studies using an extended multimedia visual methodology as well as the potential inherent in emerging technologies for exploring phenomena in artistic, educative, and academic contexts

Translation as metaphor: Yan Fu and his translation principles

This thesis was motivated by turn-of-the-century concerns in Chinese translation studies about the validity of the long-held translation principles proposed by Chinese translator Yan Fu and about the relevance of Yan's paradigmatic translation project to future research. It rereads the translation practice and intellectual thought of Yan Fu by adopting an interdisciplinary approach restructuring past studies that have been isolated in the areas of intellectual history and translation theory. The examination of his translation practice through a series of metaphor suggests, contrary to existing consensus, that faithfulness to the source text is irrelevant to his translation project. His translation principles are not pure literary notions; rather they are tied to the Confucian literary and exegetical tradition. These findings unfold new potentialities for a major research topic that has been challenged as having reached a cul-de-sac and point to a new direction for development in Chinese translation studies. New findings from the field of intellectual history help to clarify existing inconsistencies and political biases concerning Yan Fu's persona and historicize him as a persistent seeker of the Confucian dao. This testifies to the need to reassess his translation project in relation to the Confucian-based Chinese tradition. Close examination of his remarks on translation, correspondence and other writings suggests that his words and deeds are steeped in Confucian poetics, which represents a totally different concept from modern pure literary poetics. His commitment to Confucian ontological faith and ultimate concern for spiritual or cosmological transcendence are similar to the ends of some of the most influential translators in Chinese history and marks a higher level operation of translation as a tool for higher learning than as an occupation. Through translation as-intellectual critique, Yan mended indigenous coordinates for gauging alien propositions and constructed a hybridized discourse for reforming indigenous epistemology and methodology. His manipulative translations, as he claimed in his last extended translation, were intended for metaphorical explication of a certain subject with the source text as a point of departure, rather than an end to return to. Ironically the repercussions of the manipulative evolutionary discourse he engendered became further manipulated by the newer generations and fuelled more violent changes in a system on the verge of a crisis. While this subsequently led to the disruption of the conservative Confucian poetics and the gradual reform agenda he had desired, the reexamination of his translations and translation practice sheds light on system regeneration and the inheritance of Chinese culture in a modern world. The presentation of Yan Fu's translations suggests that he followed the Confucian literary tradition, which allowed exegetical and eisegetical interpretation of classics and commentaries for narrating the dao, and attempted mediation of a changing dao through translation as intellectual critique. Hermeneutical rereading of his xin-da-ya translation principles in relation to the Confucian exegetical tradition frees the study of his principles from recurrent perspectives and offers a systematic approach to the study of xin, da and ya as core values in Confucian poetics meaning faith, decorum and virtue respectively. His exercise of Confucian cosmological faith through translation releases the source text for a dialogue with a broader cosmic text, whereby the interaction of time and tradition-bound discourses obliges the translator to repeatedly highlight and transcend his own interpretive horizons and move the physical text beyond its original psychological and historical contexts, evincing dynamic interaction with the reader. This perspective offers a philosophical dimension to translation and valourizes translation as a virtuous act of conduct in the Chinese tradition and as cosmological transference of concepts and images in human's pursuit of truth and being. The promotion of the complex notion of translation beyond the word itself to the realm of metaphor facilitates exchange between languages and systems at the level of tertium comparationis and enables reasoning at the level of the universal logos. In the present study of Yan Fu, this helps to avoid recurrent arguments and leads to more balanced and constructive perspectives for the future development of a major research topic in Chinese translation studies. It also opens the possibility of exchange between a traditional theory and modern theories and between the Chinese translation tradition and other traditions

Low-Resource Unsupervised NMT:Diagnosing the Problem and Providing a Linguistically Motivated Solution

Unsupervised Machine Translation hasbeen advancing our ability to translatewithout parallel data, but state-of-the-artmethods assume an abundance of mono-lingual data. This paper investigates thescenario where monolingual data is lim-ited as well, finding that current unsuper-vised methods suffer in performance un-der this stricter setting. We find that theperformance loss originates from the poorquality of the pretrained monolingual em-beddings, and we propose using linguis-tic information in the embedding train-ing scheme. To support this, we look attwo linguistic features that may help im-prove alignment quality: dependency in-formation and sub-word information. Us-ing dependency-based embeddings resultsin a complementary word representationwhich offers a boost in performance ofaround 1.5 BLEU points compared to stan-dardWORD2VECwhen monolingual datais limited to 1 million sentences per lan-guage. We also find that the inclusion ofsub-word information is crucial to improv-ing the quality of the embedding

Japan beyond its borders: transnational approaches to film and media

Book synopsis: The present publication is the result of a collaborative project originally entitled ‘Japanese Transnational Cinema,’ whose aim was bringing together well-established scholars as well as young researchers working on innovative approaches towards Japanese cinema. The aim of this project is proposing new analytical methodologies and theoretical frameworks concerning the transnational complexities of film and media culture related to Japan and challenging the old ‘national’ paradigm by highlighting the limitations of studying film and media as a phenomenon confined to its national borders

From Gangnam to global: K-pop transcultural fan labour and South Korean soft power

Over the past two decades, the steady global popularity of South Korean pop music, known as K-pop, has brought with it a rise in scholarly inquiry surrounding not only the reception of the music itself, but also the potential it possesses in terms of soft power for the nation state. Much of the focus has been directed towards initiatives at the level of the government, the industry, and even the recognition of audiences across the world. Adding to this field of study, this project instead proposes to investigate how global fan labour in particular plays a role in the cultural diplomacy field through its inherent connectivity. More specifically, this project aims to elucidate the ways in which K-pop fan creation exists as a transcultural labour network that re sides within the affective spaces of attachment and exchange. Through employing a conjunct political economy and fandom studies lens, this thesis argues that it is the value of affective attachment constructed and promoted by the labour of fans that not only positions the fandom as active agents of soft power alongside industry and government but allows the work to be transformative in its position as a resistive experience and expression

Performing modern Korea in the U.S.: Korean immigrants' theatrical activities in California and Hawai'i during the first half of the twentieth century

This dissertation investigates theatrical activities by Korean immigrants in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the fact that Koreans regarded their national territory as tainted by the Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), they developed their national identity based on ethnic commonality, and expected Korean diaspora, particularly those residing in the U.S., to lead the construction of a modern Korea by taking advantage of their distance from colonialism as well as proximity to modernity. Though largely overlooked in contemporary scholarship, Korean immigrants in the U.S. produced a variety of nationalistic activities, including theatrical performances. News of these activities was conveyed via newspapers, which were surreptitiously but widely circulated on the Korean peninsula. By using those newspapers as primary sources, this dissertation demonstrates the vibrancy of theatrical activities by Korean immigrants in the U.S. and their critical significance in the formation of ethnic nationalism in early modern Korea. This dissertation asserts that theatre was promoted as essential in the building of the modern nation, particularly when providing affective experiences with modernity by incorporating Western cultural elements. By focusing on experiments in theatre genres with which Korean immigrants in the U.S. engaged, this research illuminates the performances produced with hybrid theatrical forms – specifically docudrama, chain drama, and music drama – which facilitated the suspension of disbelief in an envisioned “pure modern” Korea by providing tangible embodiments of the illusory vision. The analysis of the historical significance of hybrid theatrical forms challenges the Korean national theatre historiography that has denounced such forms as aesthetically and politically impure. While enriching early modern Korean and Korean American theatre histories, this dissertation ultimately contributes to discourses on national theatre historiography by engaging with geographical as well as aesthetic concerns involved in writing a national theatre history