Multilingual simultaneous sentence end and punctuation prediction

This paper describes the model and its corresponding setup, proposed by the Unbabel & INESC-ID team for the 1st Shared Task on Sentence End and Punctuation Prediction in NLG Text (SEPP-NLG 2021). The shared task covers 4 languages (English, German, French and Italian) and includes two subtasks: Subtask 1 - detecting the end of a sentence, and subtask 2 - predicting a range of punctuation marks. Our team proposes a single multilingual and multitask model that is able to produce suitable results for all the languages and subtasks involved. The results show that it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art results using one single multilingual model for both tasks and multiple languages. Using a single multilingual model to solve the task for multiple languages is of particular importance, since training a different model for each language is a cumbersome and time-consuming process.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Early voice recordings of Japanese storytelling

This paper will use one of the 1903 recordings to articulate some of the unique characteristics of Japan's professional storytelling tradition as it existed during the Meiji period. First, I will sketch the background leading up to the ninjobanashi boom of the 1880s and 1890s. Then, after describing the quirks of fate whereby the rare recordings were made, I will present a transcription and analysis of one ninjobanashi from the series, illustrating some of the oral components typical of the genre. In the process I hope to give readers unfamiliar with the Japanese oral tradition a taste of the art form as it existed during its Golden Age approximately a century ago.Not

Gender(ed) violence in neo-authoritarian times

As conservative and neo-authoritarian tendencies in Europe move across political and geo-cultural borders, we bear witness to a renewed attack on gender and sexual rights. This is a challenge to democratic citizenship that demands that we think anew the pervasive and multifaceted violence that structures the social organisation of gendered and sexual lives. How to think about the relationship between the hindering of sexual citizenship and current debates about sexual and gender-based violence in a historical present marked by a growing and revived conservative reaction? How to re-articulate a critical analysis of gender and sexual based violence that also accounts for the violence of gender? How to orient the condemnation of gender and sexual based violence towards a deepening of democracy? Taking Spain as a point of departure, this article examines recent legislative developments and argues for an expansive, albeit differentiated, approach to gender-based violence, in line with citizenship rights. Articulated in intersectional terms, this approach, it is contended, should challenge the intensification of racism and other exclusionary discourses that are gaining traction in Europe, and recognise that violence against those who experience gender and sexuality beyond normative heterosexuality also amounts to gendered forms of violence. It is along these lines that it would be possible to think of a feminist critique of violence in pursuit of a more democratic and just society

The problem with Kappa

It is becoming clear that traditional evaluation measures used in Computational Linguistics (including Error Rates, Accuracy, Recall, Precision and F-measure) are of limited value for unbiased evaluation of systems, and are not meaningful for comparison of algorithms unless both the dataset and algorithm parameters are strictly controlled for skew (Prevalence and Bias). The use of techniques originally designed for other purposes, in particular Receiver Operating Characteristics Area Under Curve, plus variants of Kappa, have been proposed to fill the void. This paper aims to clear up some of the confusion relating to evaluation, by demonstrating that the usefulness of each evaluation method is highly dependent on the assumptions made about the distributions of the dataset and the underlying populations. The behaviour of a number of evaluation measures is compared under common assumptions. Deploying a system in a context which has the opposite skew from its validation set can be expected to approximately negate Fleiss Kappa and halve Cohen Kappa but leave Powers Kappa unchanged. For most performance evaluation purposes, the latter is thus most appropriate, whilst for comparison of behaviour, Matthews Correlation is recommended

Beyond Symptom Accumulation: A Lacanian Clinical Approach to Obsession - A Case Study and Theoretical Exposition

Contemporary approaches to psychotherapeutic intervention increasingly utilize a medical-based diagnostic system focused on identifying and eradicating discrete symptoms. Mental disorders are determined by identifying pathological behaviors and superficial symptoms which are then lumped together arbitrarily and labeled as specific mental illnesses. Despite a gross lack of supporting evidence, these mental illnesses are then attributed to various brain abnormalities and biological malfunctions, most often with reference to chemical imbalances believed to be the origin of mental distress. Evidence for such biological reductionism is presented conclusively, with little regard for the implicit ontological assumptions made by such a positivist perspective. When psychopathology is viewed in this way, the role of human experience is devalued, resulting in an egregious medicalization of human distress that has devastating consequences for those who suffer. The work of Jacques Lacan offers a radically different approach to diagnostic formulation and treatment that has, until recently, largely been ignored in Western psychology. This dissertation seeks to participate in correcting this imbalance by offering a Lacanian clinical approach to working with obsession. I offer two case studies of former patients--both of whom presented with classic symptoms of the medical syndrome known as obsessive-compulsive disorder--to illustrate Lacan\u27s structural approach in contradistinction to a descriptive, symptom-based approach. I endeavor to make Lacan\u27s obsessive structure and his diagnostic schema accessible to mental health professionals interested in employing Lacan\u27s work. To do so, I utilize a qualitative case study methodology, with particular emphasis on the psychoanalytic interview. I draw specific attention to the difference between obsessive-compulsive disorder and Lacan\u27s obsessional structure. Finally, I highlight the ethical implications for clinicians of the ideological construction of mental distress as solely biological and suggest that Lacan offers a diametrically opposed discourse that is sorely lacking and needed at this time

Context-aware gestural interaction in the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyTechnology is becoming pervasive and the current interfaces are not adequate for the interaction with the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era. Recently, researchers have started to address this issue introducing the concept of natural user interface, which is mainly based on gestural interactions. Many issues are still open in this emerging domain and, in particular, there is a lack of common guidelines for coherent implementation of gestural interfaces. This research investigates gestural interactions between humans and smart environments. It proposes a novel framework for the high-level organization of the context information. The framework is conceived to provide the support for a novel approach using functional gestures to reduce the gesture ambiguity and the number of gestures in taxonomies and improve the usability. In order to validate this framework, a proof-of-concept has been developed. A prototype has been developed by implementing a novel method for the view-invariant recognition of deictic and dynamic gestures. Tests have been conducted to assess the gesture recognition accuracy and the usability of the interfaces developed following the proposed framework. The results show that the method provides optimal gesture recognition from very different view-points whilst the usability tests have yielded high scores. Further investigation on the context information has been performed tackling the problem of user status. It is intended as human activity and a technique based on an innovative application of electromyography is proposed. The tests show that the proposed technique has achieved good activity recognition accuracy. The context is treated also as system status. In ubiquitous computing, the system can adopt different paradigms: wearable, environmental and pervasive. A novel paradigm, called synergistic paradigm, is presented combining the advantages of the wearable and environmental paradigms. Moreover, it augments the interaction possibilities of the user and ensures better gesture recognition accuracy than with the other paradigms

’Foucault's Ironies and the Important Earnestness of Theory’

Foucault’s History of Sexuality 1 cannot be understood without sustained attention to its ironies, which are written into every level from diction to structure. The little book does not intend to deliver a theory, queer or otherwise. It means rather to display and then to frustrate the desire for theory—especially when it comes to sexuality

Widening the context for interdisciplinary social research : SFL as a method for sociology, anthropology, and communication research

In this paper, I show clear links between the theoretical underpinnings of SFL and those of specific sociological, anthropological, and communication research traditions. My purpose in doing so is to argue that SFL is an excellent interdisciplinary research method for the social sciences, especially considering the emergent form of political economy being touted by new media enthusiasts: the so called knowledge (or information) economy. To demonstrate the flexibility and salience of SFL in diverse traditions of social research, and as evidence of its ability to be deployed as a flexible research method across formerly impermeable disciplinary and social boundaries, I use analyses from my doctoral research, relating these - theoretically speaking - to specific research traditions in sociology, communication, and anthropology