SAD-based Italian Forced Alignment Strategies

Abstract. The Evalita 2011 contest proposed two forced alignment tasks, word and phone segmentation, and two modalities, "open" and "closed". A system for each combination of task and modality has been proposed and submitted for evaluation. Direct use of silence/activity detection in forced alignment has been tested. Positive effects were shown in the acoustic model training step, especially when dealing with long pauses. Exploitation of multiple forced alignment systems through a voting procedure has also been tested

Cluster Analysis of Differential Spectral Envelopes on Emotional Speech

This paper reports on the analysis of the spectral variation of emotional speech. Spectral envelopes of time aligned speech frames are compared between emotionally neutral and active utterances. Statistics are computed over the resulting differential spectral envelopes for each phoneme. Finally, these statistics are classified using agglomerative hierarchical clustering and a measure of dissimilarity between statistical distributions and the resulting clusters are analysed. The results show that there are systematic changes in spectral envelopes when going from neutral to sad or happy speech, and those changes depend on the valence of the emotional content (negative, positive) as well as on the phonetic properties of the sounds such as voicing and place of articulation

Geographical scattering in Italian inner areas, politics and COVID-19

In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has been fervently considered from the perspective of various disciplines in the scientific community. Many of the proposed approaches are tied to reflections on the imminent and future effects of the pandemic. This contribution begins with a study of the recent past in Italy, analyzing the hurdles in politics that came to light due to the wave of COVID-19 infections worldwide. Particularly, the research considers the criticality of the geographical scale of reference in Italy‘s political actions. COVID-19 induced a need for the government to interact with people locally, especially through small municipalities in geographically central, inner areas, is emphasized. The main aim of this research is to attribute to this specific COVID-19 disaster the instrumental role of turning on the lights on the need to intervene in the inner areas of Italy, often very neglected. So the focus of the work is on inner areas and the probable catalysis of the political management dynamics that concern them, as an effect of the COVID's impacts. The pandemic is, therefore, only the contingent phenomenon which, in this case, can perhaps accelerate political interventions in inner areas. To explain the reason for this, we show how the vulnerability of inner areas, already generally risky, has become one of the weak links in the chain of protection from COVID-19 in terms of a geographical scattering phenomenon

Italy's Balkan Strategies (19th-20th Century)

Among the foreign influences in the Balkans, the Italian one was probably the last to express itself, but certainly not the least important. From the early 19th century, the Italian national movement, and later the Italian kingdom, was first a source of inspiration, and then a potential ally; finally, it would become an economic and political rival for the Balkan nations. Yet, the history of the two shores of Adriatic evolved in similar if not identical stages. The Risorgimento ended in 1870 and most of the Balkan states won their independence in 1878. The liberal Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance, while the Balkan states opted in their turn for one alliance or the other among the Concert of European powers at the turn of the century. The World War I brought to an end the respective national unifications on both shores of Adriatic and set the stage for their conflict or – in some cases – their alliances, in view of their respective strategies during the interwar period. The brief and inconclusive Italian war in the Balkans (1940-1943) ended in utter defeat, and opened the way for a different type of relations between Italy led by Christian Democrats and communist (with the exception of Greece) Balkan states. Economy and culture were the basis of relations between Italy and the Balkans in the post World War II period.Special Editions 123. Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art

Scalable System for Opinion Mining on Twitter Data. Dynamic Visualization for Data Related to Refugees’ Crisis and to Terrorist Attacks

Social networks such as Twitter or Facebook grew rapidly in popularity, and users use them to share opinions about topics of interest, to be part of the community or to post messages that are available everywhere. This paper presents a system created in order to process streamed data taken from Twitter and classify it into positive, negative or neutral. The results of these processing’s can be visualized in a suggestive manner on Google Maps, users can select the language of the tweets, can group tweets that present the same news and can even display a dynamic evolution of the news in terms of its appearance. With all this amount of information it is very opportune to do some data analysis to detect different types of events (and their locations) that happen worldwide, especially at the time when this data represents information related to refugee crisis or signals terrorist attacks

Management in the national airlines: a step back in time to the Alitalia case.

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The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report

Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change

Organisational Use of Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement

This thesis consists of three empirical studies examining how social media are used by corporations, advocacy non-governmental organisations (A-NGOs) and hybrid organisations to engage with stakeholders and enhance stakeholder accountability. The first study examines the use of social media by corporations to disclose CSR information and manage stakeholder perceptions. Drawing on organised hypocrisy and organisational theory and through the analysis of Facebook posts from S&P100 companies, this study finds that CSR actions disclosures attract both positive and negative stakeholder reactions. CSR talk and decisions disclosures generate positive reactions and reduce negative perceptions. It is also evident that the reputational façade in CSR disclosures is more likely to attract positive reactions and less likely to attract negative reactions than the rational façade. The progressive façade is more likely to attract positive reactions than the rational façade, and it is more likely to attract negative reactions than the reputational façade. Overall, the findings suggest that corporations employ various strategies in social media CSR disclosures to manage stakeholder perceptions and maintain legitimacy. The second study examines the use of social media by A-NGOs to attract stakeholder engagement, and whether such engagement leads to large-scale stakeholder support outside social media platforms. This study draws on Castells’ (2013) network-making power perspective and employs a unique dataset of Greenpeace signups (i.e. the proxy for stakeholder support) to the “Save the Arctic” (STA) petition from over 236 countries and a sample of 8,336 Greenpeace Facebook messages related to the STA campaigns in 29 languages. The findings suggest that Greenpeace communicates advocacy information that appeals to logic and emotions to attract stakeholder engagement. In examining the social impacts of A-NGO social media engagement, the level of national stakeholder support is positively associated with the effectiveness of advocacy information in attracting stakeholder engagement at the Facebook account level. The level of global stakeholder support is positively associated with both the effectiveness and global dissemination of advocacy information at the Facebook network level. Overall, this study affirms that social media can assist A-NGOs in engaging with stakeholders and obtaining their support on advocated issues on a large scale, thereby enhancing downward accountability. The last study focuses on the use of social media by a type of hybrid organisation - B Corp - and examines the effect of its governance mechanisms on social media engagement activities. B Corp firms face a mission drift risk in which financial objectives may overshadow CSR considerations. This study posits that B Corp’s legal responsibility, ethical standards and mission-alignment policies positively influence the extent and quality of its social media engagement. After analysing CSR-related tweets posted by 1,074 U.S. B Corp firms certified between 2014 and 2018 and those posted by stakeholders towards the firm, it is found that the quality of social media engagement is positively associated with B Corp’s legal responsibility, ethical standards and mission-alignment policies. In addition, this study finds that the extent of social media engagement is positively associated with mission-alignment policies. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of B Corp’s governance mechanisms in improving stakeholder accountability