Improving the Recognizability of Syntactic Relations Using Contextualized Examples

A common task in qualitative data analy-sis is to characterize the usage of a linguis-tic entity by issuing queries over syntac-tic relations between words. Previous in-terfaces for searching over syntactic struc-tures require programming-style queries. User interface research suggests that it is easier to recognize a pattern than to com-pose it from scratch; therefore, interfaces for non-experts should show previews of syntactic relations. What these previews should look like is an open question that we explored with a 400-participant Me-chanical Turk experiment. We found that syntactic relations are recognized with 34 % higher accuracy when contextual ex-amples are shown than a baseline of nam-ing the relations alone. This suggests that user interfaces should display contex-tual examples of syntactic relations to help users choose between different relations.

WordSeer: A Text Analysis Environment for Literature Study

This project will continue on the success of a Digital Humanities Startup grant (HD-51244-11) to produce a software environment for literary text analysis. Literature study is a cycle of reading, interpretation, exploration, and understanding. Called WordSeer, this software system integrates tools for automated processing of text with interaction techniques that support the interpretive, exploratory, and note-taking aspects of scholarship. Development of the tool follows best practices surrounding user-centered design and evaluation. At present, the system supports grammatical search and contextual similarity determination, visualization of patterns of word context. This implementation grant will allow for incorporating additional tools to aid comparison, exploration, grouping, and hypothesis formation, and to make the software more robust and therefore sharable and usable by a wide community of scholars

Facilitating the modelling and automated analysis of cryptographic protocols

Includes bibliographical references.Multi-dimensional security protocol engineering is effective for creating cryptographic protocols since it encompasses a variety of design, analysis and deployment techniques, thereby providing a higher level of confidence than individual approaches. SPEAR II, the Security Protocol Engineering and Analysis Resource n, is a protocol engineering tool built on the foundation of previous experience garnered during the SPEAR I project in 1997. The goal of the SPEAR II tool is to facilitate cryptographic protocol engineering and aid users in distilling the critical issues during an engineering session by presenting them with an appropriate level of detail and guiding them as much as possible. The SPEAR II tool currently consists of four components that have been created as part of this dissertation and integrated into one consistent and unified graphical interface: a protocol specification environment (GYPSIE), a GNY statement construction interface (Visual GNY), a Prolog-based GNY analysis engine (GYNGER) and a message rounds calculator

Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages

Title: Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages Author: Ondřej Procházka Affiliation: Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences This thesis explores the capacity of Internet memes to inflect social realities in the communities organized around them on social media, particularly Facebook. Memes are not mere playful ‘jokes’ or ‘parodies’ spreading virally on the Internet in countless variations, they are also powerful tools for political investment aimed to sway public attention and opinions. Memes have been increasingly documented as a vital component in the unprecedented spread and ‘normalization’ of hateful sentiments and ideologies characterized by ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ politics appealing to emotions rather than ‘facts’ in the digital mainstream. Based on author’s more than five-year observation of communities around Countryball memes, this work argues that much of the socio-cultural and communicative dynamics involving memes can be understood in terms of ludic play. The object of the study – Countryballs memes – are simple meme-comics featuring ball-shaped creatures in colors denoting nation-states while satirically reinventing international ‘drama’ through the prism of socio-cultural and linguistic stereotypes. Having become a household name among memes, Countryballs offer communicative resources to playfully engage not only with wider socio-political issues, but also to with the linguistic, semiotic and ideological boundaries of our communicative norms shaped by the affordances of social media. The present work demonstrates how play can be used as a useful concept for understanding not only how matters of public attention are packed, framed and transmitted in the digital culture via (Countryball) memes, but more importantly how such matters are in fact interpreted by those who engage with them. More specifically, it shows how play enables alternative modes of expression and meaning making with different normative patterns and preferences which stand outside ‘standard’, ‘rational’ or ‘civil’ expectations. And it is precisely ludic play that fosters different types of communication and sociality which are often done ‘just for fun’, however serious or offensive their effects may be. To identify these effects and their implications in the contemporary digital age, the thesis employs a discourse-analytical methodology informed by current advances in digital ethnography and sociolinguistics. It focuses on negotiations among participants in memetic communities about what counts as ‘appropriate’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘correct’ in their socio-communicative behavior. Together in four case studies, the present work provides a comprehensive account of how participants articulate, police, break and re-construct ludic normativity in connection with recent socio-political issues and digital culture at large. This includes the role of memes in the newly emerging forms of communication, in the rise of populism and nationalism, algorithmic manipulation and exploitation, curating digital content and more. The concept of play is continually revisited throughout the discussion against the developments in the scholarship on Internet memes and their ludic genealogy. In doing so, the thesis also revisits some of the traditional concepts such as the notion of ‘community’ and ‘communicative competence’ to arrive at more precise accounts of the concrete processes of globalization and digitalization in our societies and their effects

Software-based dialogue systems: Survey, taxonomy and challenges

The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks, the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, have brought back the attention of the community to software-based dialogue systems, generally known as conversational agents or chatbots. Nonetheless, and given the novelty of the field, a generic, context-independent overview on the current state of research of conversational agents covering all research perspectives involved is missing. Motivated by this context, this paper reports a survey of the current state of research of conversational agents through a systematic literature review of secondary studies. The conducted research is designed to develop an exhaustive perspective through a clear presentation of the aggregated knowledge published by recent literature within a variety of domains, research focuses and contexts. As a result, this research proposes a holistic taxonomy of the different dimensions involved in the conversational agents’ field, which is expected to help researchers and to lay the groundwork for future research in the field of natural language interfaces.With the support from the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the European Social Fund. The corresponding author gratefully acknowledges the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Banco Santander for the inancial support of his predoctoral grant FPI-UPC. This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project / funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00 / AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Käsitteellinen lähestymistapa organisatoristen verkostojen tutkimukseen

Tutkimusympäristöt joissa eri tieteenalojen tutkijat toimivat yhdessä ratkaistakseen verkostoissa toimivien kumppaniyritysten ongelmia ovat haasteellisia tiedonvaihdon ja tutkimustiedon keräämisen kannalta. Vaikka tutkimuskohde on yhteinen, tutkijat lähestyvät sitä omien tieteidensä näkökulmasta käyttäen siihen teorioita ja menetelmiä jotka eivät ole yhteensopiva muiden kanssa. Lapin yliopistossa tehdyn tutkimustyön aikana nämä ongelmat tulivat esiin, kun useissa monialaisissa projekteissa tarkasteltiin liiketoimintaverkostoja sekä teollisuusliiketoiminnan että matkailun alalta. Projektien kohteina olevissa verkostoissa yritykset pyrkivät tyypillisesti hakemaan verkostotoiminnasta hyötyjä informaatioteknologian avulla tehostaakseen liiketoimintasuhteitaan ja siten edesauttamaan johtamiseen ja operatiiviseen toimintaan liittyvää tiedonkulkua. Pääasiallinen ongelma näissä ympäristöissä tapahtuvassa tutkimuksessa on, että uudet projektit eivät helposti pysty hyödyntämään edellisten projektien tuotoksia, koska aikaisemmin kerättyä tutkimustietoa, analyysejä tai luotuja ratkaisumalleja ei ole saatavilla siinä muodossa että ne voitaisiin ottaa uuden tutkimuksen pohjaksi. Tässä työssä on tarkasteltu ja kehitetty käsitteellisiä malleja ja niihin liittyviä menetelmiä, jotka tukevat monitieteistä liiketoimintaverkostojen tutkimusta, ja samalla tekevät mahdolliseksi hyödyntää jo olemassa olevaa tutkimustietoa. Tässä diplomityössä kehitetty ratkaisu perustuu liiketoimintaverkostojen analysointiin käsitemallintamisen avulla. Tämän tuloksena on luotu organisatoristen ympäristöjen käsitemalli, joka keskittyy integraatiota edistäviin yhteistoimintasuhteisiin, ja kuvattu siihen liittyvä tutkimuksellinen prosessi joka mahdollistaa projektin aikana syntyvän tutkimusaineiston käsitteellistämisen ja lisätiedon liitämisen niihin. Tämä helpottaa tutkimustiedon jäsentämistä ja sen jakamista tutkijoiden ja kohdealueen toimijoiden välillä. Lisäksi työssä määritellään metatietokuvauksia ja rajattuja sanastoja jotka perustuvat semanttisen webin tekniikoihin, joilla voidaan luokitella eri projektien aikana syntyviä tutkimusartefakteja ja hallinnoida tutkimustietoa.The research settings, where project teams consisting of researchers from different scientific fields, and working together to provide solutions to the issues of networked partner organizations, are challenging in terms of communicating and accumulating research knowledge. Although the focus of the research is shared, difficulties emerge because it is explored from different scientific perspectives, relying on theories and methods that do not match with others. This observation was made during research work conducted at the University of Lapland in projects that concentrated on business networks in the manufacturing and tourism industries. The organizations in these commercial environments typically seek benefits from information technology to intensify the network-wide business relationships and to improve knowledge-intensive operations and management. The main problem is that new projects cannot easily benefit from the results of past projects because the collected research materials, analyses and models are not easily found and they are difficult to align with the objectives of new projects. In this work, to resolve theses issues, conceptual models and related approaches have been analyzed and elaborated to support cross disciplinary research on business networks, and at the same time enable the re-use and sharing of research knowledge. The solution presented in this Master's thesis has been developed by relying on conceptual modelling approaches to analyze business networks. As a result, general concept model of inter-organizational environments has been built that focuses on the integrative relationships in them. Further, accompanying research process that enabies the conceptualization and annotating of the project research outcomes has been constructed. This helps in organizing and sharing research information between researchers and stakeholders. Additionally, metadata descriptions and controlled vocabularies based on semantic web technologies are defined to align research constructs originating from different projects and to support research knowledge management

Teaching Classics in the Digital Age

The papers and videos presented here are the result of the international conference 'Teaching Classics in the Digital Age' held online on the 15 and 16 June 2020. As digital media provide new possibilities for teaching and outreach in Classics, the conference 'Teaching Classics in the Digital Age' aimed at presenting current approaches to digital teaching and sharing best practices by bringing together different projects and practitioners from all fields of Classics (including Classical Archaeology, Greek and Latin Studies and Ancient History). Furthermore, it aimed at starting a discussion about principles, problems and the future of teaching Classics in the 21st century within and beyond its single fields