28,773 research outputs found
Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech
The ACM SIGIR Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech was held as part of the 2007 ACM SIGIR Conference in Amsterdam.\ud
The workshop program was a mix of elements, including a keynote speech, paper presentations and panel discussions. This brief report describes the organization of this workshop and summarizes the discussions
Evaluation of spoken document retrieval for historic speech collections
The re-use of spoken word audio collections maintained by audiovisual archives is severely hindered by their generally limited access. The CHoral project, which is part of the CATCH program funded by the Dutch Research Council, aims to provide users of speech archives with online, instead of on-location, access to relevant fragments, instead of full documents. To meet this goal, a spoken document retrieval framework is being developed. In this paper the evaluation efforts undertaken so far to assess and improve various aspects of the framework are presented. These efforts include (i) evaluation of the automatically generated textual representations of the spoken word documents that enable word-based search, (ii) the development of measures to estimate the quality of the textual representations for use in information retrieval, and (iii) studies to establish the potential user groups of the to-be-developed technology, and the first versions of the user interface supporting online access to spoken word collections
Popular education and the digital citizen: a genealogical analysis
This paper historicises and problematises the concept of the digital citizen and how it is constructed in Sweden today. Specifically, it examines the role of popular education in such an entanglement. It makes use of a genealogical analysis to produce a critical âhistory of the presentâ by mapping out the debates and controversies around the emergence of the digital citizen in the 1970s and 1980s, and following to its manifestations in contemporary debates. This article argues that free and voluntary adult education (popular education) is and has been fundamental in efforts to construe the digital citizen. A central argument of the paper is that popular education aiming for digital inclusion is not a 21st century phenomenon; it actually commenced in the 1970s. However, this digitisation of citizens has also changed focus dramatically since the 1970s. During the 1970s, computers and computerisation were described as disconcerting, and as requiring popular education in order to counter the risk of the technology ârunning wildâ. In current discourses, digitalisation is constructed in a non-ideological and post-political way. These post-political tendencies of today can be referred to as a post-digital present where computers have become so ordinary, domesticized and ubiquitous in everyday life that they are thereby also beyond criticism. (DIPF/Orig.
Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda
Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed
Revisiting Play School: A historical case study of the BBCâs address to the pre-school audience
Although clearly recognised in broader institutional histories of British childrenâs television as a significant moment in the BBCâs address toward the pre-school child, Play School (BBC 1964-88) has not been the focus of sustained archival analysis. This arguably reflects the fact that a good deal of work on childrenâs television in Britain adopts either an institutional or an audience focus, and the study of programmes cultures is often more neglected. This article seeks to revisit Play School using available historical documentation â including memos, scripts and press cuttings - from the BBC Written Archive Centre, as well as early surviving episodes (principally from 1964). In doing so, it seeks to explore how it fitted into BBCâs historical address to the pre-school child, how it intersected with discourses on pre-school education, and the range of institutional and social contexts surrounding its emergence. Key Words: Play School * Pre-school television * BBC * Child audienc
The influence of linguistic and social factors on the recent decline of French ne
In this article we present some results showing the decline in radio speech in the use of the French negative particle ne over the last forty years or so. These results derive from a comparison of two radio corpora: an archival corpus recorded by Ă
gren (1973) in 1960â61. The second, contemporary corpus was recorded and analysed by one of the present authors (Smith) in 1997. Having described the variable in question, we present these corpora in turn and analyse results deriving from them. We then examine some of the linguistic constraints that endorse the progressive decline of ne in some contexts while hindering the process in others. Finally we consider some elements of the social context within which the decline of ne has been occurring
Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective
behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other
and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the
dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation
of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and
patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US
presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the
impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective
social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the
debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name
on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover,
interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also
highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the
debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment;
peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion
across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public
attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the
debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across
a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods
and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of
large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version
revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of
the methods, and grounding of the hypothese
The 'public inquisitor' as media celebrity
This article looks at the development and utility of celebrity among high-profile political interviewers. Offering the revised description 'public inquisitor', the article presents an overview of the rise of the political interviewer as a celebrity form of the 'tribune of the people' (Clayman 2002). It focuses on the UK-based journalists and broadcasters Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, and looks at the expansion of their professional activities and their attendant construction as media personalities. It argues that the forms of celebrity presented by Paxman and Humphrys draw upon discourses of integrity and authenticity associated with practices of advocacy, and suggests that their extension beyond the formal political realm into media genres traditionally excluded from the established political domain might work to consolidate the public inquisitor as a discursive figure. Therefore, while acknowledging that this depends on the effective management of individual media profiles, the article proposes a critical reappraisal of the place of the celebrity personae in political communication in order to account for the possibility of constructive modes of media performance
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