Linguistic Tests for Discourse Relations

Discourse structure and discourse relations are an important ingredient in systems for the analysis of text that go beyond the boundary of single clauses. Discourse relations often indicate important additional information about the connection between two clauses, such as causality, and are widely believed to have an influence on aspects of reference resolution.In this article, we first present the general design choices that are to be made in the design of an annotation scheme for discourse structure and discourse relations. In a second part, we present the scheme used in our annotation of selected articles from the TüBa-D/Z treebank of German (Telljohann et al., 2009). The scheme used in the annotation is theory-neutral, but informed by more detailed linguistic knowledge in the way of linguistic tests that can help disambiguate between several plausible relations

Determinants and results of Corporate Social Responsibility as a stakeholder engagement tool

Dada la relevancia que han ido adquiriendo las actividades de Responsabilidad Social Corporativa (RSC) en el mundo empresarial, acentuadas en el año 2015 con la definición de los 17 Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), se entiende la necesidad de estudiar la implicación y el efecto que tienen estas actividades en los stakeholders que lo rodean. Para ello, y con el objetivo de analizar los determinantes y resultados de la RSC como una herramienta de stakeholder engagement, se realiza un estudio en el que, además de conocer el estado de la literatura sobre el tema, se plantea el papel de la RSC como mecanismo para mejorar ciertas actitudes de los trabajadores, se estudian cómo las diferentes características idiosincráticas de los CEO pueden influir en el nivel de divulgación de los ODS y, finalmente, qué efecto tiene la RSC en el rendimiento empresarial

Teachers’ use of reform-oriented mathematics textbooks: A multiple-case study of Delhi government primary school teachers

India in the last two decades has introduced several policy reforms to improve primary school mathematics teaching and learning, especially to make it more accessible for children. One such policy, National Curriculum Framework – 2005, outlines the need for making mathematics relevant to all children and connecting school mathematics to students’ lives. Based on these reforms, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) developed new primary school mathematics textbooks. These books are a radical departure from traditional mathematics textbooks, as they explicitly restructure its form, pedagogy and mathematical content. The crucial enabling link in actualising transformational ideals in textbooks are, the teachers. Yet, both in India and globally, very little is understood on how teachers use textbooks in their teaching. To fill this gap, my study explores how teachers view and use textbooks in a reform context. The study adopts a participatory view of the relationship between the textbook and the teacher; which is both influenced by the textbook’s features as well teachers’ thinking. The study explores the cases of ten primary school teachers in Grades 4 and 5, in four government schools of Delhi. Data were collected from classroom observations, semi- structured teacher interviews, and textbooks. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the textbooks, classroom observations as well as interviews. The textbook analysis reveals that several pedagogical changes are introduced within the textbook. The reformed textbook challenges the authority relations between school mathematics and the learner. Additionally, social justice messaging is implicitly embedded within the textbook. Teachers in turn make textbook related choices at two levels: first, at the level of task selection; second at an interpretive level. Challenging the predominant understanding of textbooks-centric teaching, my findings show that teachers use a range of strategies to engage with the textbook. These include following the textbook as a script, customising it to fit their own notions of mathematics teaching and institutional realities, as well as avoidance of the textbooks and the subject all together. There are two important implications of the study. First, in relation to producing reform oriented textbooks, the thesis argues for a simultaneous focus on teachers must be maintained, so that textbooks become educative materials for professional development. Second, the study also highlights the significance of institutional and cultural opportunities and barriers in enabling teachers’ productive interpretations of textbooks

Satellite Workshop On Language, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science for Natural Language Processing Applications (LAICS-NLP): Discovery of Meaning from Text

This paper proposes a novel method to disambiguate important words from a collection of documents. The hypothesis that underlies this approach is that there is a minimal set of senses that are significant in characterizing a context. We extend Yarowsky’s one sense per discourse [13] further to a collection of related documents rather than a single document. We perform distributed clustering on a set of features representing each of the top ten categories of documents in the Reuters-21578 dataset. Groups of terms that have a similar term distributional pattern across documents were identified. WordNet-based similarity measurement was then computed for terms within each cluster. An aggregation of the associations in WordNet that was employed to ascertain term similarity within clusters has provided a means of identifying clusters’ root senses

Carlos Bulosan and Filipino Collective Memory: Teaching, Transgression, and Transformation

Who is Carlos Bulosan? Why is he significant? Why teach Bulosan in our classrooms? These questions function as points of departure for this lecture delivered in Summer 2021 for the UNITAS International Lecture Series cosponsored by CLASS and Kritika Kultura. By reviewing the significance of Carlos Bulosan, this talk provides an opportunity to examine the continued relevance of Bulosan and his works for the twenty-first century. A pioneering Filipino writer of the twentieth century, Bulosan developed a unique transgressive aesthetic that travels across national and literary boundaries and, in the process, reimagines the boundaries of Filipino identity and literary categorization. Emphasis is placed on approaches to teaching Bulosan within the Asian American studies classroom at Bryant University. Within Bulosan’s literary imagination, transgression is inextricably interconnected with transformation