Proceedings of the 1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020)

1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020), 29-30 August, 2020 Santiago de Compostela, SpainThe DC-ECAI 2020 provides a unique opportunity for PhD students, who are close to finishing their doctorate research, to interact with experienced researchers in the field. Senior members of the community are assigned as mentors for each group of students based on the student’s research or similarity of research interests. The DC-ECAI 2020, which is held virtually this year, allows students from all over the world to present their research and discuss their ongoing research and career plans with their mentor, to do networking with other participants, and to receive training and mentoring about career planning and career option

POLIS: a probabilistic summarisation logic for structured documents

PhDAs the availability of structured documents, formatted in markup languages such as SGML, RDF, or XML, increases, retrieval systems increasingly focus on the retrieval of document-elements, rather than entire documents. Additionally, abstraction layers in the form of formalised retrieval logics have allowed developers to include search facilities into numerous applications, without the need of having detailed knowledge of retrieval models. Although automatic document summarisation has been recognised as a useful tool for reducing the workload of information system users, very few such abstraction layers have been developed for the task of automatic document summarisation. This thesis describes the development of an abstraction logic for summarisation, called POLIS, which provides users (such as developers or knowledge engineers) with a high-level access to summarisation facilities. Furthermore, POLIS allows users to exploit the hierarchical information provided by structured documents. The development of POLIS is carried out in a step-by-step way. We start by defining a series of probabilistic summarisation models, which provide weights to document-elements at a user selected level. These summarisation models are those accessible through POLIS. The formal definition of POLIS is performed in three steps. We start by providing a syntax for POLIS, through which users/knowledge engineers interact with the logic. This is followed by a definition of the logics semantics. Finally, we provide details of an implementation of POLIS. The final chapters of this dissertation are concerned with the evaluation of POLIS, which is conducted in two stages. Firstly, we evaluate the performance of the summarisation models by applying POLIS to two test collections, the DUC AQUAINT corpus, and the INEX IEEE corpus. This is followed by application scenarios for POLIS, in which we discuss how POLIS can be used in specific IR tasks

Autonomia: a movement of refusal: social movements and social conflict in Italy in the 1970's

This thesis examines the continuing significance in contemporary Italy of the Italian new social movement of 1973-83, Autonomia, by positing it as a movement of refusal: of capitalist work, of the party form, of the clandestine form of political violence, and of the politics of `taking power'. It was in discontinuity with the value systems of the reformist Old Left and the revolutionary New Left, but in continuity with contemporary Italian antagonist and global anti-capitalist movements. In defining the research subject, the concept of individual and collective autonomy emerges as a central characteristic of the Italian new social movements. Autonomy is understood not only as independence from the capitalist State and economy and their institutions of mediation, but also as the self-determination of everyday life, related to the needs, desires and subjectivity of what Italian `workerism' defined as the Fordist `mass worker' and the post-Fordist `socialised worker'. Using the `class composition' theoretical perspective of Autonomist Marxism to critique classical Marxism, neo-Marxism and new social movement theory's minimalisation of the political content of new social movements and dismissive analysis of Autonomia, the scope of research was limited to the interpretation of 48 interviews of former participants and observers, of primary texts produced by Autonomia and of secondary accounts based on `collective historical memory'. The thematic framework consists of chapters on workers' autonomy and the refusal of work; forms of political organisation and violence involving `organised', `diffused' and `armed' Autonomia; and on the youth counter-cultures and antagonist communication of `creative Autonomia' and the 1977 Movement. The thesis concludes that Autonomia expressed the violent social conflicts produced by the rapid transformation of an industrial into a post-industrial society, but ultimately was only a partial break from the traditions and practices of the Old and New Lefts, leaving an ambiguous legacy for contemporary Italian autonomous social movements

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse