465,441 research outputs found
Limited Attention and Discourse Structure
This squib examines the role of limited attention in a theory of discourse
structure and proposes a model of attentional state that relates current
hierarchical theories of discourse structure to empirical evidence about human
discourse processing capabilities. First, I present examples that are not
predicted by Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state. Then I
consider an alternative model of attentional state, the cache model, which
accounts for the examples, and which makes particular processing predictions.
Finally I suggest a number of ways that future research could distinguish the
predictions of the cache model and the stack model.Comment: 9 pages, uses twoside,cl,lingmacro
Lived religion as an emerging field: an assessment of its contours and frontiers
Over the last three decades, lived religion has emerged as a distinct field of study, with an identifiable “canon” of originating sources. With this body of work reaching maturity, a critical assessment is in order. This study analyzes sixty-four journal articles published in English, since 1997, which have used either “lived religion” or “everyday religion” in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. We find that the field has largely been defined by what it excludes. It includes attention to laity, not clergy or elites; to practices rather than beliefs; to practices outside religious institutions rather than inside; and to individual agency and autonomy rather than collectivities or traditions. Substantively, the focus on practice has encompassed dimensions of embodiment, discourse and materiality; and I argue here that these substantive foci can form the analytical structure for expanding the domain of lived religion to include the traditions and institutions that have so far largely been excluded from study. In doing so, lived religion’s attention to gender, power, and previously-excluded voices must be maintained. But that task cannot be accomplished without continuing to expand the field beyond the still-limited geographic and religious terrain it has so far covered
Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy
We address an important gap in detection of political bias in news articles.
Previous works that perform supervised document classification can be biased
towards the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and
limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering
both the sentence-level semantics and the document-level rhetorical structure,
resulting in a more robust and style-agnostic approach to detecting political
bias in news articles. We introduce a novel multi-head hierarchical attention
model that effectively encodes the structure of long documents through a
diverse ensemble of attention heads. While journalism follows a formalized
rhetorical structure, the writing style may vary by news outlet. We demonstrate
that our method overcomes this domain dependency and outperforms previous
approaches for robustness and accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates the
ability of our model to capture the discourse structures commonly used in the
journalism domain.Comment: Preprint. Under revie
Centering in-the-large: Computing referential discourse segments
We specify an algorithm that builds up a hierarchy of referential discourse
segments from local centering data. The spatial extension and nesting of these
discourse segments constrain the reachability of potential antecedents of an
anaphoric expression beyond the local level of adjacent center pairs. Thus, the
centering model is scaled up to the level of the global referential structure
of discourse. An empirical evaluation of the algorithm is supplied.Comment: LaTeX, 8 page
Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom
Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium
Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom
Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium
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