CebuaNER:A New Baseline Cebuano Named Entity Recognition Model

Despite being one of the most linguistically diverse groups of countries, computational linguistics and language processing research in Southeast Asia has struggled to match the level of countries from the Global North. Thus, initiatives such as open-sourcing corpora and the development of baseline models for basic language processing tasks are important stepping stones to encourage the growth of research efforts in the field. To answer this call, we introduce CebuaNER, a new baseline model for named entity recognition (NER) in the Cebuano language. Cebuano is the second most-used native language in the Philippines, with over 20 million speakers. To build the model, we collected and annotated over 4,000 news articles, the largest of any work in the language, retrieved from online local Cebuano platforms to train algorithms such as Conditional Random Field and Bidirectional LSTM. Our findings show promising results as a new baseline model, achieving over 70% performance on precision, recall, and F1 across all entity tags, as well as potential efficacy in a crosslingual setup with Tagalog

Social Actors and the Language of Othering: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Representation of Covid-19 in Selected Western and Asian English Newspapers

As of May 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused approximately 3.5 million deaths and 168 million confirmed cases worldwide. Unfortunately, this crisis has not only resulted in a devastating loss of human life but has also given rise to racism, national insecurity, and general xenophobia. This phenomenon can be understood through the concept of ”othering,” which refers to the exclusion of individuals or entire groups based on their ascribed or enacted identities. This study aims to investigate how social actors are constructed by selected Western and Asian English newspapers in relation to Covid-19. Specifically, it seeks to examine whether language of othering is used by different English users (West vs. Asia, inner circle vs. outer circle) in representing the 2020’s deadliest pandemic. To achieve this, the researcher has custom-collected six different newspapers: New Straits Times (Malaysia), The Straits Times (Singapore), Philippines Daily Inquirer (Philippines), The New York Times (US), The Guardian (UK), and The Australian (Australia). A simple corpus query language is used to analyze common nouns in the corpus, focusing on proper nouns and possessive nouns, which will be ranked by frequency. The semantic preference of the most frequent nomination strategy for social actors will be further explored through tagging and categorization of collocates. This study aims to reveal if any social actors were dehumanized or discriminated against through the language used in relation to Covid-19 across the selected Western and Asian newspapers. Keywords: Covid-19, othering, newspapers, social actors, corpu

Laws and Policies Affecting Volunteerism Since 2001

This Research Report represents an attempt to synthesize lessons learned over the last eight years in order to promote best practices and analyze obstacles and impediments that continue to block the development of volunteerism law and policy

Mining Twitter for crisis management: realtime floods detection in the Arabian Peninsula

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy.In recent years, large amounts of data have been made available on microblog platforms such as Twitter, however, it is difficult to filter and extract information and knowledge from such data because of the high volume, including noisy data. On Twitter, the general public are able to report real-world events such as floods in real time, and act as social sensors. Consequently, it is beneficial to have a method that can detect flood events automatically in real time to help governmental authorities, such as crisis management authorities, to detect the event and make decisions during the early stages of the event. This thesis proposes a real time flood detection system by mining Arabic Tweets using machine learning and data mining techniques. The proposed system comprises five main components: data collection, pre-processing, flooding event extract, location inferring, location named entity link, and flooding event visualisation. An effective method of flood detection from Arabic tweets is presented and evaluated by using supervised learning techniques. Furthermore, this work presents a location named entity inferring method based on the Learning to Search method, the results show that the proposed method outperformed the existing systems with significantly higher accuracy in tasks of inferring flood locations from tweets which are written in colloquial Arabic. For the location named entity link, a method has been designed by utilising Google API services as a knowledge base to extract accurate geocode coordinates that are associated with location named entities mentioned in tweets. The results show that the proposed location link method locate 56.8% of tweets with a distance range of 0 – 10 km from the actual location. Further analysis has shown that the accuracy in locating tweets in an actual city and region are 78.9% and 84.2% respectively

Vibrancy of Public Spaces: Inclusivity and Participation Amidst the Challenges in Transformative Process in the City of Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

This study examines the dynamics which lead to revitalization of everyday life in the public spaces of Cagayan de Oro, a medium-sized urban center in Northern Mindanao, the Philippines. By employing the oriental philosophies together with western thoughts such as Henri Lefebvre, Alain Touraine and Jürgen Habermas, this study elucidates that the core of perceived, lived and conceived spaces is ‘the Subject.’ Once the Subject utilizes the public sphere to instill social action, social space is ultimately produced. Hawkers, grassroots environmental activists, street readers and artists are the social Subjects who partake in the vibrancy of public spaces. The social Subjects utilize public spaces as venues of social transformation. Thus, this study argues that the social Subjects’ role in democratic process lead to inclusivity of the marginalized sector in the public spaces of the city

Floodwaters of death - Vulnerability and disaster in Ormoc City, Philippines: Assessing the 1991 flood and twenty years of recovery

On 5 November 1991, a relatively weak and slow-moving Typhoon Thelma—locally codenamed ‘Uring’—with maximum winds of 55 kph, triggered deadly flashfloods that left an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 people dead, over 2,000 missing, at least 3,000 injured, and massive devastation in infrastructure and agriculture valued at over 200 million pesos, or approximately US$7.3 million. Using ethnography, documentary research and interviews, this dissertation asks about the nature of social change and transformation in a calamitous situation. It assesses the causes of the 1991 flood, its impacts, and twenty-two years of recovery, focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable communities and families. It argues that, in the face of the systematic exploitation and privatization of land for cash crop agriculture since the turn of the twentieth century and the consequent creation of social vulnerability, it was not a ‘natural’ disaster. It is the first known study of its kind to document personal stories of continuing survival in the Philippines after a massive disaster, and as such challenges conventional wisdom that vulnerability for families and communities is resolved after the implementation of intervention programs by government agencies and well-meaning non-government organizations. Using case studies of three communities that survived the 1991 flash floods, it provides a three-fold conclusion. First, poverty and vulnerability are twin situations that remain persistent even after twentytwo years of intervention, with new forms of economic dependency being established in these new communities. Second, the lack of accountability and learning continue to predispose a large portion of Ormoc society to persistent poverty and vulnerability. Finally, the lack of a wide-ranging social memory of that disaster contributes to the lack of accountability and learning

No-Fault Vaccine Injury Compensation Systems Adopted Pursuant to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Response

No-fault vaccine injury compensation systems have developed over the course of the twentieth century, mostly in the richest countries in the world. Acknowledging that severe reactions to vaccines are rare, but can result in serious and sometimes complex injury, these systems provide financial and social support for those suffering these rare side effects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rapid development and deployment of vaccines using novel technologies, these systems have proliferated not only among wealthy countries, where in their modern form they originated and spread, but also low- and middle-income ones. Adopting varying approaches to funding, eligibility, administration, process, and components of compensation and rights of appeal, these new systems offer protections to populations in low- and middle-income countries that until 2020 covered only those in relatively wealthy states, especially Europe and North America. The purpose of this Article is twofold. First, it provides the first comprehensive landscape analysis of no-fault vaccine injury compensation systems since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That analysis identifies twenty-five such systems, almost all of which were established for routine immunizations. Second, it provides an accessible resource for advocates and planners in low- and middle-income countries that may benefit from an analysis of administrative, funding, eligibility, and compensation alternatives that they may consult when considering whether and how to construct their own no-fault vaccine injury compensation systems

Home lands: island and archipelagic states’ policymaking for human mobility in the context of climate change

Climate change related migration and displacement are already a reality for many people around the world. A growing body of research suggests that the number of people affected will rise over the coming decades, which will create additional risks for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. This trend and the related issues are an increasing topic of discussion at international policy fora. The Task Force on Displacement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) are addressing these policy challenges. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) is calling for the development of “coherent approaches to address the challenges of migration movements in the context of sudden-onset and slow-onset natural disasters”. This report reflects what is currently known about the impacts of climate change on people living in island nations and highlights the necessity to develop policies that address human mobility dynamics resulting from adaptation to these changes. By looking at island and archipelagic states as diverse as Kiribati, Saint Lucia and the Philippines, the various political frameworks within which they operate and the different response mechanisms they have adopted can be examined. First-hand interviews with experts from across the regions show the multiplicity of challenges governments are facing: from difficulties in distribution of relief goods to land scarcity, aid dependency, insufficient data and personnel capacities. Yet the key interviewees underline ways in which governments can capitalise on the strengths inherent to island and coastal communities to further build resilience using existing and innovative practices

Solidarity and crisis-derived identities in Samar and Leyte, Philippines, 1565 to present

The study sheds light on local responses to 2013’s Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, then the strongest storm to make landfall, by examining the local history and culture of the people of Samar and Leyte, Philippines, the area worst affected by the storm’s strong winds and storm surges. It linked contemporary responses to the typhoon with the ways people in the region had historically coped with frequent adversity in one of the most environmentally-hazardous countries in the world and one that had also experienced centuries of foreign occupations and internal social conflict.Through a historical and cultural analysis of various written and oral sources, the study identifies local concepts and practices that helped to generate what has been called “community resilience” against various forms of crises across several generations. Previous studies in Philippine history have mainly focused on the emergence of Filipino nationalism from centuries of colonial rule while ethnographic studies on the Philippines have mainly concentrated on local practices and beliefs without establishing their historicity. As a result, little headway has been gained in understanding the cultural tenacity of various Philippine ethnolinguistic groups in the face of frequent crises. This study sought to bridge this gap by linking the two fields to explore people’s responses to social and environmental adversity.The study argues that people in Samar and Leyte coped with frequent hardship in part by appropriating the colonial (Bisaya-Christiano ), national (Filipino ) and migrant (Waray ) identities imposed on them by outsiders. These labels evoked local solidarities that, although transformed by factors such as colonialism and outmigration, gave them several rallying points for collective action. The study ultimately suggests that understanding resilience cannot be achieved through quantitative methods alone but should be complemented with qualitative approaches that take into account the local history, culture, and environment of the study area/s under consideration