CLiFF Notes: Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania

One concern of the Computer Graphics Research Lab is in simulating human task behavior and understanding why the visualization of the appearance, capabilities and performance of humans is so challenging. Our research has produced a system, called Jack, for the definition, manipulation, animation and human factors analysis of simulated human figures. Jack permits the envisionment of human motion by interactive specification and simultaneous execution of multiple constraints, and is sensitive to such issues as body shape and size, linkage, and plausible motions. Enhanced control is provided by natural behaviors such as looking, reaching, balancing, lifting, stepping, walking, grasping, and so on. Although intended for highly interactive applications, Jack is a foundation for other research. The very ubiquitousness of other people in our lives poses a tantalizing challenge to the computational modeler: people are at once the most common object around us, and yet the most structurally complex. Their everyday movements are amazingly fluid, yet demanding to reproduce, with actions driven not just mechanically by muscles and bones but also cognitively by beliefs and intentions. Our motor systems manage to learn how to make us move without leaving us the burden or pleasure of knowing how we did it. Likewise we learn how to describe the actions and behaviors of others without consciously struggling with the processes of perception, recognition, and language. Present technology lets us approach human appearance and motion through computer graphics modeling and three dimensional animation, but there is considerable distance to go before purely synthesized figures trick our senses. We seek to build computational models of human like figures which manifest animacy and convincing behavior. Towards this end, we: Create an interactive computer graphics human model; Endow it with reasonable biomechanical properties; Provide it with human like behaviors; Use this simulated figure as an agent to effect changes in its world; Describe and guide its tasks through natural language instructions. There are presently no perfect solutions to any of these problems; ultimately, however, we should be able to give our surrogate human directions that, in conjunction with suitable symbolic reasoning processes, make it appear to behave in a natural, appropriate, and intelligent fashion. Compromises will be essential, due to limits in computation, throughput of display hardware, and demands of real-time interaction, but our algorithms aim to balance the physical device constraints with carefully crafted models, general solutions, and thoughtful organization. The Jack software is built on Silicon Graphics Iris 4D workstations because those systems have 3-D graphics features that greatly aid the process of interacting with highly articulated figures such as the human body. Of course, graphics capabilities themselves do not make a usable system. Our research has therefore focused on software to make the manipulation of a simulated human figure easy for a rather specific user population: human factors design engineers or ergonomics analysts involved in visualizing and assessing human motor performance, fit, reach, view, and other physical tasks in a workplace environment. The software also happens to be quite usable by others, including graduate students and animators. The point, however, is that program design has tried to take into account a wide variety of physical problem oriented tasks, rather than just offer a computer graphics and animation tool for the already computer sophisticated or skilled animator. As an alternative to interactive specification, a simulation system allows a convenient temporal and spatial parallel programming language for behaviors. The Graphics Lab is working with the Natural Language Group to explore the possibility of using natural language instructions, such as those found in assembly or maintenance manuals, to drive the behavior of our animated human agents. (See the CLiFF note entry for the AnimNL group for details.) Even though Jack is under continual development, it has nonetheless already proved to be a substantial computational tool in analyzing human abilities in physical workplaces. It is being applied to actual problems involving space vehicle inhabitants, helicopter pilots, maintenance technicians, foot soldiers, and tractor drivers. This broad range of applications is precisely the target we intended to reach. The general capabilities embedded in Jack attempt to mirror certain aspects of human performance, rather than the specific requirements of the corresponding workplace. We view the Jack system as the basis of a virtual animated agent that can carry out tasks and instructions in a simulated 3D environment. While we have not yet fooled anyone into believing that the Jack figure is real , its behaviors are becoming more reasonable and its repertoire of actions more extensive. When interactive control becomes more labor intensive than natural language instructional control, we will have reached a significant milestone toward an intelligent agent

From Cooperation to Confrontation? Trade Unionism, British Politics and the Media, 1945-1979

Despite the media’s significant influence on British society’s transformation between 1945 and 1979, relatively little is understood about their effect on the mythologised decline of trade unionism. In response, this research forms the first comprehensive study of the media’s role in the battle for public support between government and trade unions. Facilitated by the recent digitisation of newspaper sources and television reports, this research assesses media content from across the political spectrum, including five national dailies. It explores coverage of particular moments in the political relationship between the government and unions, as well as wider structural concerns in economic discourse. Beyond content, this thesis assesses the personal and political motivations behind production, utilising memoirs from prominent editors and journalists, as well as evidence from the BBC and TUC archives. It reflects on the way changes to the media landscape, including the waning influence of left-wing media and the rise of right-wing tabloids, shaped and restricted the dominant frames of explanation for Britain’s supposed decline. The influence of the media on public attitudes is assessed through extensive exploration of Gallup polls and political surveys, enriching our understanding of trade unionism’s engagement with wider social change. Through these processes, the research seeks to scrutinise the validity of common simplistic assumptions about the media’s attitudes towards the labour movement. Rather than a story of inevitability and relentless hostility – an impression which is difficult to reconcile with union’s rising membership during the period – coverage of industrial relations was fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions which at times favoured the union cause. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to illuminate the cumulative power of industrial relations coverage over several decades, which was fundamental to the political battles of the 1980s

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families

The impact of Thatcherism on representation of work and unemployment in television drama.

This thesis argues for an analysis of popular television in relation to the dominant political\ud ideas and values of Thatcherism.\ud Examining the power of popular entertainment genres to inscribe and inform public\ud understanding of political debates, the thesis offers an analysis of television realism in\ud relation to genres such as situation comedy and drama serials. Using the work of Antonio\ud Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and the Bakhtin Circle, the\ud methodology concentrates on a discursive model of interpretation which draws on elements\ud of semiotic and discourse analysis. It refers to the field of hermeneutics in order to address\ud some of the problems of textual analysis and considers the ontological problems of\ud television realism, particularly as they relate to the representation of political ideas.\ud The thesis also considers the role of realism as an important ideological feature of dramatic\ud representation on television. The contribution of the thesis to the field of Media Studies lies\ud in its engagement with the sphere of political discourse in relation to popular television\ud programmes over a specific period of intense ideological activity. In choosing to examine\ud Thatcherite discourse in relation to work and unemployment, the thesis considers issues of\ud class and gender in relation to changing attitudes to unemployment as expressed through\ud narrative and other discursive patterns in the medium of television drama. The thesis argues\ud that television drama of the period responded to the dominant rhetoric of Thatcherite politics\ud concerning work and unemployment with a variety of identifiable structures and dramatic\ud strategies. The ideological import of these strategies is assessed through a combination of\ud textual analyses and socio-political appraisal of the phenomenon of Thatcherism

Framework for collaborative knowledge management in organizations

Nowadays organizations have been pushed to speed up the rate of industrial transformation to high value products and services. The capability to agilely respond to new market demands became a strategic pillar for innovation, and knowledge management could support organizations to achieve that goal. However, current knowledge management approaches tend to be over complex or too academic, with interfaces difficult to manage, even more if cooperative handling is required. Nevertheless, in an ideal framework, both tacit and explicit knowledge management should be addressed to achieve knowledge handling with precise and semantically meaningful definitions. Moreover, with the increase of Internet usage, the amount of available information explodes. It leads to the observed progress in the creation of mechanisms to retrieve useful knowledge from the huge existent amount of information sources. However, a same knowledge representation of a thing could mean differently to different people and applications. Contributing towards this direction, this thesis proposes a framework capable of gathering the knowledge held by domain experts and domain sources through a knowledge management system and transform it into explicit ontologies. This enables to build tools with advanced reasoning capacities with the aim to support enterprises decision-making processes. The author also intends to address the problem of knowledge transference within an among organizations. This will be done through a module (part of the proposed framework) for domain’s lexicon establishment which purpose is to represent and unify the understanding of the domain’s used semantic

Alternation-Sensitive Phoneme Learning: Implications For Children\u27s Development And Language Change

This dissertation develops a cognitive model describing when children learn to group distinct sound segments (allophones) into abstract equivalence classes (phonemes). The allophones an individual acquires are arbitrary and determined by their particular input, yet are intricately involved in language cognition once learned. The proposed acquisition model characterises the role of surface segment alternations in children\u27s input by using the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016) to evaluate the cognitive cost of possible phoneme inventory structures iteratively as a child’s vocabulary grows. This Alternation-sensitive Phoneme Learning model therefore traces the emergence of abstract representations from concrete speech stimuli, starting from a default representation where underlying contrasts simply mirror surface-segment contrasts (Invariant Transparency Hypothesis, Ringe & Eska 2013). A longitudinal corpus study of four children\u27s alveolar stop and flap productions establishes that English medial flap allophony follows a U-shaped acquisition course, which is characteristic of learning linguistic rules or generalisations. The Alternation-sensitive Phoneme Learning cognitive model is then validated by accurately predicting the timing of changes in each child\u27s productions, which signal allophone acquisition. A second case study models the historical process of secondary split in Menominee mid and high back vowels. Here, the acquisition model serves as an independently motivated quantitative test for the occurrence of phonemic split, providing an alternative to traditional reliance on linguists\u27 case-specific subjective judgements about when it might occur. A third case study examines the phonemic status of the velar nasal in German, showing how this acquisition model can discriminate between tolerable grammars and the subset of tolerable grammars that are learnable, with implications for the relationship between formal language description and psychological representation. This dissertation\u27s approach synthesises insights from computational modelling, naturalistic corpus data, historical linguistics, and experimental research on child language acquisition

The Performance of Industry Culture: Assumptions, Sources and Evolutionary Patterns as Revealed in the Paradigmatic Interplay of Reporting Structures and Communicative Processes

This study (1) describes cultural assumptions in the student travel industry, relying upon protocols previously established within the functionalist perspective and (2) explains how these assumptions may have evolved by examining the basic communicative processes (performances) wherein industry culture has been made manifest. The study identifies eight members of the student travel industry and uses qualitative methods that consist of in-depth interviews with the industry\u27s elite members, as well as content analysis of selected historical and contemporary documents. Data were analyzed, first by thematic coding and then by interpretive analysis of codes that emerged. To frame the analysis, Phillips\u27 (1990) functional reporting structure (categories) for cultural assumptions was cross-referenced with Pacanowsky and O\u27Donnell-Trujillo\u27s (1983) heuristic listing of Performances of Passion -- e.g. storytelling and repartee (constructs, jargon, vocabulary, and metaphor). One result of adopting this paradigm interplay as a metatheoretical perspective has been to demonstrate that the functionalist perspective may serve as an heuristic frame for interpretation, while the rich description and depth of understanding generated by interpretive analysis may enhance the scope and understanding of the emerging frame. Not an original goal of the research, this phenomenon nonetheless materialized as the study progressed. Beyond that, this study not only joins the growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that industry cultures underlie corporate cultures but also describes how an industry\u27s culture has evolved by examining communicative performances of its cultural assumptions. In doing so, it uncovers a primary source of these assumptions, and provides insight, not only into existing theories of organizational and industry culture, but also into the relationship of communication and culture, per se

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available