Negative Statements Considered Useful

Knowledge bases (KBs), pragmatic collections of knowledge about notable entities, are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialogue. Rooted in a long tradition in knowledge representation, all popular KBs only store positive information, while they abstain from taking any stance towards statements not contained in them. In this paper, we make the case for explicitly stating interesting statements which are not true. Negative statements would be important to overcome current limitations of question answering, yet due to their potential abundance, any effort towards compiling them needs a tight coupling with ranking. We introduce two approaches towards compiling negative statements. (i) In peer-based statistical inferences, we compare entities with highly related entities in order to derive potential negative statements, which we then rank using supervised and unsupervised features. (ii) In query-log-based text extraction, we use a pattern-based approach for harvesting search engine query logs. Experimental results show that both approaches hold promising and complementary potential. Along with this paper, we publish the first datasets on interesting negative information, containing over 1.1M statements for 100K popular Wikidata entities

Negative Statements Considered Useful

Knowledge bases (KBs) about notable entities and their properties are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialogue. All popular KBs capture virtually only positive statements, and abstain from taking any stance on statements not stored in the KB. This paper makes the case for explicitly stating salient statements that do not hold. Negative statements are useful to overcome limitations of question answering systems that are mainly geared for positive questions; they can also contribute to informative summaries of entities. Due to the abundance of such invalid statements, any effort to compile them needs to address ranking by saliency. We present a statisticalinference method for compiling and ranking negative statements, based on expectations from positive statements of related entities in peer groups. Experimental results, with a variety of datasets, show that the method can effectively discover notable negative statements, and extrinsic studies underline their usefulness for entity summarization. Datasets and code are released as resources for further research

A Qualitative Analysis of Client Perceptions of the Effects of Helpful Therapist Self-Disclosure in Long-Term Therapy

Thirteen adult psychotherapy clients currently in long-term therapy were interviewed twice, with semistructured protocols, about their experiences with helpful instances of therapist self-disclosure. Data were analyzed with a qualitative methodology. Results indicated that helpful therapist self-disclosures (a) occurred when these clients were discussing important personal issues, (b) were perceived as being intended by therapists to normalize or reassure the clients, and (c) consisted of a disclosure of personal nonimmediate information about the therapists. The therapist self-disclosures resulted in positive consequences for these clients that included insight or a new perspective from which to make changes, an improved or more equalized therapeutic relationship, normalization, and reassurance. Implications for psychotherapy are discussed

Operational criteria used by professional social workers to assess relationship

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Do students value feedback? Student perceptions of tutors' written responses

The topic of feedback to students is an under-researched area, and there has been little empirical research published which focuses on student perceptions. This study explores student perceptions of written feedback and examines whether feedback received demonstrated a student-centred approach to learning. A multi-method approach of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis was used to survey 44 students in the faculties of Business and Art & Design. Student responses show feedback is valued, but believed tutor comments could be more helpful. Survey results indicate that students may need advice on understanding and using feedback before they can engage with it. Content analysis of feedback samples and student responses uncovered four main themes of feedback considered unhelpful to improve learning: comments which were too general or vague, lacked guidance, focused on the negative, or were unrelated to assessment criteria. It is suggested that by focusing on messages conveyed by their writing, providing feedback set in the context of assessment criteria and learning outcomes, and by ensuring that it is timely, tutors could greatly improve the value of feedback

The role of performance appraisal in further education : the case of a post-secondary college in Malta

This paper is based on part of the research findings of a study conducted on the role of performance appraisal (PA) in post-secondary education that used a mixed methodology approach. The literature on PA highlights the divergence in opinion among practitioners and academics as to what the role of PA is, the form that it should take, and its effectiveness as an HRM tool. Given these conflicting viewpoints, the initial research study sought to determine the perceptions of academic staff on PA in an educational setting. This involved researching their views on the benefits and negative aspects of PA, the role of PA, the appraisal criteria and source to be used, and how the PA process is best conducted. This paper only focuses on respondents’ views on the benefits and shortfalls of PA, its role in educational institutions, and the source of appraisal; and on certain aspects of the quantitative data that was collected in the original research. The research findings confirm that PA is expected to be used concurrently for both developmental and administrative decisions. Furthermore, PA is primarily regarded as a positive process that is expected to result in a number of benefits for both the organization and the individual academics. PA is expected to result in the identification of clear work goals, improved performance, increased motivation, better feedback, increased accountability, and fairer distribution of rewards. Despite its important role and the expected benefits arising from PA’s use in education, the respondents identify a number of issues that impinge on PA’s success when put into practice. These include; an inappropriate PA model being used, PA being applied in isolation, lack of commitment to the process, inappropriate/lack of training on the conduction of appraisal, an organizational culture and management/staff relationships that do not encourage openness, and an appraisal process that focuses too much on the allocation of monetary rewards. Respondents also singled out a number of issues that need to be tackled for PA’s successful implementation; such as the identification of joint objectives, improved communication and continuous feedback, an open management approach, and for management to believe in the positive role of appraisal.peer-reviewe

Teaching the third law of thermodynamics

This work gives a brief summary of major formulations of the third law of thermodynamics and their implications, including the impossibility of perpetual motion of the third kind. The last sections of this work review more advanced applications of the third law to systems with negative temperatures and negative heat capacities. The relevance of the third law to protecting the arrow of time in general relativity is also discussed. Additional information, which may useful in analysis of the third law, is given in the Appendices. This short review is written to assist lecturers in selecting a strategy for teaching the third law of thermodynamics to engineering and science students. The paper provides a good summary of the various issues associated with the third law, which are typically scattered over numerous research publications and not discussed in standard textbooks.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Comparing teacher and student perspectives regarding the use of L1 in EFL chilean high school classrooms

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)In the Chilean context, English teachers are commanded to perform one hundred percent English classes, but unfortunately, this is not accomplished in every context; hence, this study decided to explore and compare teachers’ and students’ perspectives regarding the use of L1 in the EFL Chilean high school classroom. A quantitative instrument was applied to a total population of 510 being both teachers and students from different districts of Santiago. The results obtained in this study portrayed that both teachers and students agreed on the L1 usage under different situations, these ranging from grammar explanation lessons to managing discipline