Artequakt: Generating tailored biographies from automatically annotated fragments from the web

The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrativebiographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

"El nen s'ha menjat una aranya": The development of narratives in Catalan speaking children

The production of a well-constructed narrative is the culmination of several years of language acquisition and is an important milestone in children's development. There is no current description of narrative development for Catalan speaking children. This study collected elicited narratives in Catalan from 118 children aged 4;0-10;11. Narratives were scored for macrostructure and microstructure. Narrative scores improved with age with maximum performance for macrostructure by 9 years. Children's ability to use micro-structural components of Catalan is variable with some developments continuing beyond 9 years. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical arguments about universal and specific features of narrative development. We conclude by highlighting the usefulness of the new test for future language assessment of children acquiring Catalan

Evaluation in media texts: a cross-cultural linguistic investigation

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies