An analysis of core-competences of successful multinational team leaders

Copyright @ 2010 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Researchers have endeavoured to understand the factors that enable effective functioning of multinational teams (MNTs) but with few exceptions they have ignored studying the competences of MNT leaders. In this paper we present those competences leaders must possess in order to effectively lead MNTs. Our findings are based on 70 problem-centred interviews with MNT leaders and members from five multinational corporations. The competences our interviewees mentioned most frequently for effective leadership were knowledge management and transfer. Results further indicated that a leader must be cross-culturally competent and multilingual in order to motivate MNT members to fully explore, exploit and transfer valuable knowledge within the team and beyond

Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology

Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new, publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12 languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their metadata is also released.Comment: 11 pages, to appear at ACM MM'1

Applying digital content management to support localisation

The retrieval and presentation of digital content such as that on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a substantial area of research. While recent years have seen huge expansion in the size of web-based archives that can be searched efficiently by commercial search engines, the presentation of potentially relevant content is still limited to ranked document lists represented by simple text snippets or image keyframe surrogates. There is expanding interest in techniques to personalise the presentation of content to improve the richness and effectiveness of the user experience. One of the most significant challenges to achieving this is the increasingly multilingual nature of this data, and the need to provide suitably localised responses to users based on this content. The Digital Content Management (DCM) track of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is seeking to develop technologies to support advanced personalised access and presentation of information by combining elements from the existing research areas of Adaptive Hypermedia and Information Retrieval. The combination of these technologies is intended to produce significant improvements in the way users access information. We review key features of these technologies and introduce early ideas for how these technologies can support localisation and localised content before concluding with some impressions of future directions in DCM

Own-language use in language teaching and learning: state of the art

Until recently, the assumption of the language-teaching literature has been that new languages are best taught and learned monolingually, without the use of the students’ own language(s). In recent years, however, this monolingual assumption has been increasingly questioned, and a re-evaluation of teaching that relates the language being taught to the students’ own language has begun. This article surveys the developing English language literature on the role of students’ own language(s) in the language classroom. After clarifying key terms, the paper charts the continuing widespread use of students’ own languages in classrooms around the world and the contemporary academic and societal trends which have led to a revival of support for this. It then explores key arguments which underpin this revival, and reviews a range of empirical studies which examine the extent and functions of own-language use within language classrooms. Next, the article examines the support for own-language use that a range of theoretical frameworks provide, including psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches, general learning theory and sociocultural approaches. Having explored the notion of ‘optimal’ in-class own-language use, the article then reviews research into teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards own-language use. It concludes by examining how a bilingual approach to language teaching and learning might be implemented in practice

Searching and organizing images across languages

With the continual growth of users on the Web from a wide range of countries, supporting such users in their search of cultural heritage collections will grow in importance. In the next few years, the growth areas of Internet users will come from the Indian sub-continent and China. Consequently, if holders of cultural heritage collections wish their content to be viewable by the full range of users coming to the Internet, the range of languages that they need to support will have to grow. This paper will present recent work conducted at the University of Sheffield (and now being implemented in BRICKS) on how to use automatic translation to provide search and organisation facilities for a historical image search engine. The system allows users to search for images in seven different languages, providing means for the user to examine translated image captions and browse retrieved images organised by categories written in their native language

Linguistics Landscape: a Cross Culture Perspective

This paper was to aim in discussing the linguistic landscape. It was the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region (Landry and Bourhis 1997). The linguistic landscape has been described as being somewhere at the junction of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography, and media studies. It is a concept used in sociolinguistics as scholars study how languages are visually used in multilingual societies, from large metropolitan centers to Amazonia. For example, some public signs in Jerusalem are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic (Spolsky and Cooper 1991, Ben-Rafael et al., 2006). Studies of the linguistic landscape have been published from research done around the world. The field of study is relatively recent; the linguistic landscape paradigm has evolved rapidly and while it has some key names associated with it, it currently has no clear orthodoxy or theoretical core

Further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: The key role of context

Drawing on theoretical insights from a complex dynamic systems framework, this work explores the ways that learner selves, as they relate to learning and using languages, manifest across different contexts and timescales and emerge in interaction with various factors. First, a broad overview of dynamically-oriented L2 motivation research is provided before critically considering the need for research that aligns with conceptual advances made under the dynamic turn in SLA. In particular, this critical overview highlights a crucial need for more research employing dynamic methods capable of revealing how learner perceptions of self emerge in relation to their interlocutors and in interaction with external factors, including language ideologies that may uniquely characterize sociocultural contexts where target languages other than English are learned. The chapter concludes by discussing ways to implement dynamically oriented methodology that can provide much needed insights into the inherent dynamic, emergent, and contextually and socially embedded nature of learner selves