Enunciation and topic/comment structure: the offensive replies to Pope Francis' tweets

Sentiment analysis is an automatised technique of analysis aimed to measure the â polarityâ and the â subjectivityâ of large corpora of messages. The case study of the present paper consists of a selection of Pope Francisâ tweets on ecological, social, religious themes and the relative polemic replies. In the degree of agreement/disagreement in response to a tweet, the referential function is not relevant; the emotive and conative functions prevail. The political strategies aimed at corroborating or refuting claims in terms of â fact checkingâ seem not relevant to these forms of communication based on personal enunciation, on the relation between the two simulacra â meâ and â youâ , and on the manifestation of one's own comment with respect to a topic. Furthermore, the techniques aimed at detecting the presence of hate speeches to apply, possibly, a precautionary censorship are lexical-sensitive, and fail to consider the context in which words co-occur. Finally, the paper presents a technique of analysis based on quantum information retrieval which can provide new insights on the relation between hashtag, address sign, topic, and reply

Emotion Quantification Using Variational Quantum State Fidelity Estimation

Sentiment analysis has been instrumental in developing artificial intelligence when applied to various domains. However, most sentiments and emotions are temporal and often exist in a complex manner. Several emotions can be experienced at the same time. Instead of recognizing only categorical information about emotions, there is a need to understand and quantify the intensity of emotions. The proposed research intends to investigate a quantum-inspired approach for quantifying emotional intensities in runtime. The inspiration comes from manifesting human cognition and decision-making capabilities, which may adopt a brief explanation through quantum theory. Quantum state fidelity was used to characterize states and estimate emotion intensities rendered by subjects from the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES) dataset. The Quantum variational classifier technique was used to perform this experiment on the IBM Quantum Experience platform. The proposed method successfully quantifies the intensities of joy, sadness, contempt, anger, surprise, and fear emotions of labelled subjects from the ADFES dataset

Beneath Thy Protection: Portrait of the Holy Virgin as a semantic operator

Starting from the third century, many songs, prayers, and icons testify to the way the Virgin Mary – Mother of God – has been attributed the role of protecting the community. Examples include the Akhathist hymn traditionally dated to the siege of Constantinople (626), the Polish anthem “Bogurodzica”, associated with the battle of Grunwald (1410), the icon of Częstochowa that protected Poland from the Swedish invasion (1655), and numerous others. The role of menace is embodied by different enemies: infidels, heretics, or atheists. The Virgin watches over the frontier between two cultural spaces: the inside and the outside of the semiosphere. A case study will provide insight into the function played by the Madonna at the border: the Madonna of the Rocciamelone, the highest sanctuary in Europe, founded by the crusader knight Rotharius (1358). A bronze statue of the Virgin was placed in the sanctuary in 1899. A small corpus of pastoral letters written by blessed Edoardo Rosaz, bishop of Susa (Piedmont), expresses the hope that the Virgin will protect Catholics from liberal heresy. Plastic oppositions such as top/bottom, resulting from the relationship between the Virgin and the landscape, are used to manifest abstract oppositions such as reason/passion, order/disorder, and Church/revolution. This homologation helps us understand how the Virgin, placed in upper space, embodies knowledge and cognition: she becomes a lookout, allowing a transfer of values from the semantic field of war to the religious one. The Virgin guards the border of the semiosphere, the border dividing the self from the other. Her function is the semiotization of incoming materials, transforming external non-communication into information and meaning. This article thus considers the Virgin as a semantic operator inverting the values of liberal discourse into information stored in Catholic cultural space. A mathematical model of the function played by the Virgin will be presented in the terms of quantum computing

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

A Field Theory of Leadership

Existing leadership theories tend to explain that leaders induce others to follow as a function of one or more of the following: i) A specific set of traits possessed by the leader (e.g., charisma); ii) Different types of behaviours the leader exhibits depending on the situation (e.g., a focus on tasks or a focus on relationships); iii) Specifics relating to the structure and dynamics of the leader-follower relationship (e.g., economic, social, or psychological exchange, or a ‘customized’ focus on the ‘follower’). Leadership is thus seen largely as getting others to do what the leader wants based on what the leader does for them (some kind of exchange mechanism), or on his/her character or style. Whether intended or not, one can argue that these theories are characterized by a somewhat manipulative and self-serving view of leaders and leadership, even when there is a focus as well on ‘elevating’ those who follow. We argue that existing theories are based on assumptions and logic that pose significant challenges, and that there is a gap in understanding the essence of the leadership phenomenon, particularly how it emerges in the first place in the perception of observers. We advance an alternate view, drawing in particular on psychological field theory, whereby leadership emerges as the result of the perception of meaningful acts of challenge or resistance undertaken by individuals that compel others to follow, without invoking exchange mechanisms, character traits or style. More specifically, we find that leadership is the phenomenon of engaging a collective by: - meaningfully challenging the status quo or system over a sustained period of time, combined with the associated accumulation of legitimate power sufficient to align the collective to overcome opposing stabilizing forces, and creation of a new status quo/system and equilibrium; or, - meaningfully resisting challenges to the status quo or system over a sustained period of time, combined with the associated accumulation of legitimate power sufficient to align the collective to bolster stabilizing forces that would otherwise be overcome by the challenging forces, thereby consolidating the status quo/system and equilibrium. We claim that this is an essence that people perceive and respond to in seeking out and reacting to leaders. Five studies were conducted to test and validate the theory. Studies 1, 2, and 3 provided experimental evidence confirming our first hypothesis that an individual who meaningfully challenges the status quo more strongly than another over time will be perceived to be a stronger leader. Studies 4 and 5 provided qualitative evidence supporting our second hypothesis that individuals who are asked to recount in some detail specific acts of leadership they have experienced will share the unique common thread of perceiving another individual (or individuals) meaningfully challenging the status quo or system with respect to an issue of concern over a sustained period, or meaningfully resisting challenges to the status quo or system. We conclude with a general discussion of what has been learned and recommendations for future work

Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)