European Language Grid

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects

Arab Media Systems

"This volume provides a comparative analysis of media systems in the Arab world, based on criteria informed by the historical, political, social, and economic factors influencing a country’s media. Reaching beyond classical western media system typologies, Arab Media Systems brings together contributions from experts in the field of media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to provide valuable insights into the heterogeneity of this region’s media systems. It focuses on trends in government stances towards media, media ownership models, technological innovation, and the role of transnational mobility in shaping media structure and practices. Each chapter in the volume traces a specific country’s media – from Lebanon to Morocco – and assesses its media system in terms of historical roots, political and legal frameworks, media economy and ownership patterns, technology and infrastructure, and social factors (including diversity and equality in gender, age, ethnicities, religions, and languages). This book is a welcome contribution to the field of media studies, constituting the only edited collection in recent years to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of Arab media systems. As such, it will be of great use to students and scholars in media, journalism and communication studies, as well as political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists with an interest in the MENA region.

2011, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 3, 2011 and December 30, 2011

The politics of internet infrastructure: communication policy, governmentality and subjectivation in Chhattisgarh, India

This thesis examines the role of internet infrastructure and its associated discourses in processes of governmentality and subject formation in low and middle-income countries of the global South. Using data collected in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh as its core case, it asks questions about the interrelationship between policy and political discourse, new information and communications infrastructure, private capital, and how citizens come to know and/or experience internet infrastructure in their everyday lives. Since 2014, The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN, which began in 2011 under the then UPA government) has been reshaped and rebranded as part of ‘Digital India’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Alongside the cables and connectivity, the BJP and allied Hindu extremist organisations have targeted minorities and women through mob violence and (on and offline) hate speech, while a small number of crony capitalist corporations have seen immense profits. Unpicking the links between these processes, the thesis argues that internet infrastructure has become crucial to expanding a particular unregulated brand of capitalism and to narrowing civic subjectivities. Infrastructures constellate and circulate material and symbolic goods in an institutionalised manner to produce collectivities. Using discourse analysis shows that since the late 1980s, in a context of increasing neoliberalism, internet infrastructure emerged within a discursive regime marked by the fetishisation of systems rationality, enumeration, scientism and economism to produce what can be called digital governmentality. Digital governmentality enables and reinforces a centralised Hindu nationalism mediated by digital technologies and networks. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the city of Ambikapur, and close to 50 villages in Surguja district of Chhattisgarh, data chapters describe a wide range of ‘infrastructural practices.’ The analysis centres on how subjects imagine, frame and experience these practices. Dominant caste groups in Ambikapur seek to subvert governmentality in practice but also uphold and reproduce the rationalities that drive governmental authority – such as efficiency and transparency. Adivasis (indigenous groups) who reside in surrounding rural areas are subject to a political economic regime overdetermined by coal mining and destruction of their land, forests and water resources. Internet infrastructure is non-existent or broken, along with other missing infrastructural substrates such as electricity and water. Adivasis face infrastructural control as a specific mode of governmentality where power is exerted not from the top in directly coercive ways but rather through mundane infrastructural practices, thereby exerting authority in procedural ways. In other instances, Adivasis’ processes of subject formation are entangled with (the reality and promise of) internet infrastructure in complex ways – ranging from cruel optimism to social haunting. The thesis makes an original contribution to the emerging sub-field of infrastructure studies by providing a new way of studying communicative infrastructures involving: a renewed emphasis on relationality (infrastructures, governmentality and subjectivation as relational processes and practices); situating internet infrastructures within broader infrastructures; and a historical analysis of how infrastructure is caught up in exercise of power relations. With significant emphasis on the concerns and interests of indigenous peoples in India, the final chapters of the thesis also contribute to a decolonisation of media and communications as a field, and to avoiding orientalist essentialism

Examining Second Language Reading: A Critical Review of the Singapore Cambridge General Certificate of Education Ordinary-Level Chinese Language Examination

This mixed methods study critically reviews how the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Ordinary-Level Chinese Language Examination (GCE 1162) examines second language reading. The main research question asks, ‘To what degree have the intended measurement objectives of the GCE 1162 reading examination been achieved?’ Four sub research questions address issues of specifications and administration, test-taker characteristics, cognitive parameters and contextual parameters. Resources drawn on include Singapore Ministry of Education and Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board documents, specifically, examination information booklets, syllabuses, committee reports and annual reviews. Subject matter experts were appointed to analyse the reading comprehension passages and test items from 22 sets of GCE 1162 reading examination papers from 2006 to 2016. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 22 stakeholders involved in coordination, test design, item construction, marking and reviewing. The interviewees included members of an elite policy group with privileged access to test specifications and procedures. Further interviews were carried out with secondary school Chinese language teachers and students, whose perspectives are seldom considered in validation processes. Opinions were also sought from experts in the field of Chinese as a second language, reading and assessment. The study begins with an account of the concepts of validity and reading constructs. Chapter 2 discusses the Singapore education and examination system, foregrounding the history of Chinese language education and the bilingual policy introduced in 1966. A methodology chapter follows. Chapters 4 to 8 address separately each of the four sub research questions in which claims, assumptions, supporting evidence and rebuttals are presented. The final chapter, Chapter 9, addresses a posteriori inferences, including scoring, criterion-related components, and washback and impact. A cautious conclusion is drawn, namely that the measurement quality of the GCE 1162 reading examination is at a moderately unsatisfactory level