Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Change and planning in chance discovery.

The discovery of risks and opportunities, known collectively as chances, can have a significant impact on decision making. Chances (risks or opportunities) can be discovered from our daily observations and background knowledge. A person can easily identify chances in a news article. In doing so, the person combines the new information in the article with some background knowledge. Hence, we develop a deductive system to discover relative chances with respect to a particular chance seeker. A chance discovery system that uses a general purpose knowledge base and specialized reasoning algorithms is proposed. The thesis evaluates the implementation of this chance discovery system and discusses the achievements and limitations of its elements, such as Natural Language Processing Tool, Knowledge Entry Tool, Inference Engine and Planner. Finally, A case study about a virtual transportation planning domain implemented using SHOP planner is presented. Example chances are detected in this domain. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .W89. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1418. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Excavating Feminist Phenomenology: Lived-Experiences and Wellbeing of Indigenous Students at Western University

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission underscores the need to incorporate narrative accounts of Indigenous students’ experiences as part of wide-scale de-colonizing efforts. This dissertation asks; how do Indigenous students experience their identities at Western University? What is at stake for phenomenology, feminist methods, and Indigenous theory, in the post Truth and Reconciliation era? There is a gap between theories centering on reflective cognition in philosophy and the embodiment of land, prevalent across Indigenous cultures. However, phenomenology can provide a method to facilitate dialogues with discourses outside Eurocentric domains that empathize with marginalized communities’ struggles, through an understanding of location-based knowledge. I will explore how Indigenous learners’ experiences inform concepts in phenomenology, Haudenosaunee, Cree, and Anishinaabe thinking, before they become marked literary categories. I undertake a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach, from Eurocentric and Indigenous perspectives, to connect non-hierarchal epistemologies across nation-specific expressions. In chapter two, I discuss relational, land-based methods, through Dolleen Manning’s Anishinaabe ‘mnidoo’ concept, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and feminist epistemologies, in terms of dialogues with Indigenous students and Elders. In our discussions, I explore concepts about community, home, health, and belonging, in relation to lived theories of embodiment, places, and beings, within an interpretive circle. Chapter three discusses the impacts of language, reflexivity, emotion, oppression, environmental repossession, and experience, within feminist research methods and Indigenous paradigms, through anthropology’s ontological turn. Chapter four discusses how experiences influence Indigenous artists, in their efforts to create work that is emergent from, and reflexive of culture and identity. Chapter five surveys concepts that include, citizenship, human rights, and freedom, through Indigenous scholars’ episodes of wellbeing and theories about emergent governance. I conclude, by offering Indigenous students’ reflections about education, ally-ship, and reconciliation. Indigenous subjectivities are unique, not homogenously categorized. This project’s interviews bring forth information missing from research involving community-based wellness services, without statistical representation in government and university strategic plan reports. Hearing individuals articulate desires to instigate healing in their communities is a powerful gesture and offers teachable moments, for the listener. I hope that when interviewees speak their gifts and insights, in our interactions, it inspires continued activist incentives that foster community-wide changes

Proceedings of ECER 2020 NW 29. Research on Arts Education

This work is a Proceedings book that compiles the accepted submissions to network 29 in conference ECER 2020. Network 29. Research on Arts Education focuses on the disciplinary discourses, politics, institutional and non-institutional practices and research of arts and education at an international level with a special emphasis on European practices. The submissions are grouped into four chapters: 1) Rethinking Teaching and Arts Practices; 2) Arts-Based Research for Transforming Society; 3) Art Practices for Opening Gazes; 4) Arts and Education Across Concepts

ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.Comment: Manuscript under review; The code will be available at https://github.com/idiap/atco2-corpu

The Politics of Post-Industrial Cultural Knowledge Work

Orignal file updated with a new version at the request of the author on 16.06.14 by NC TISThis dissertation conducts in-depth inquiries into the practices, nature and theory of post-industrial cultural work and the humanities- and arts-based civic dialogues which cultural work promotes. Given the broad neglect of utopian thinking in the mainstream of critical social science and in an attempt to sketch out a vision of an alternative future, the aim of this thesis is to outline an “epistemology” for post-industrial cultural work as well as to reflect upon the outlook for educational cultural work practices and their function as a catalyst for civic dialogue and cultural change. The main concerns are the signification, interests and aims embodied in cultural production touching on issues of cultural and scientific learning, alternative modes of democratic governance of science and technology (Felt, Wynne et al. 2007), industrial society’s logic of accumulation and market rationality, the primacy of contemporary instrumental and capitalist values, neoliberalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. With a view to addressing elementary questions regarding the future of cultural work, which are explored and theorised alongside future perspectives of a new form of knowledge work for the humanities and the arts, the actual challenges of cultural work are considered from within the wider context of the risk society (Beck 1986) and the threats which affect everybody today. In relying on Beck’s (2009) conceptualization of the world risk society as a “non-knowledge society” characterised by the global existence of incalculable risks/threats and non-knowing, the thesis addresses the problem of non-knowledge and unrecognised contingencies as a challenge for cultural work to design processes of (un)learning in civic dialogues. In exploring the social, cultural and political relevance of three empirical case studies, the thesis ventures into the prospects of a new socio-epistemological perspective for cultural work and workspaces for knowledge. The studies investigate three different (techno-)socio-cultural spaces of knowledge: a public exhibition about the new Gotthard Base Tunnel currently under construction in the Swiss Alps, Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (2006) about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and China’s industrial revolution, and the living intervention Fairytale at Documenta 12, 2007, which brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is employed as a tool for the analysis of the material-semiotic properties of differing knowledges, the heterogeneous relations of socio-economic networks, and the global and uncertain conditions of the post-industrial world in which cultural work is embedded. What is colloquially referred to as post-industrial cultural knowledge work in this thesis is elaborated in the context of a propositional socio-epistemological second-order framework (Von Foerster 1984; Pakman 2003) for cultural work and its entanglements with ethics, aesthetics, pragmatics, politics—and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2009). In order to build “third spaces” of knowledge (Turnbull 2000) and to nurture uncertainty-oriented approaches and contingencies, the findings propose the development of more open, (self-)reflexive and anticipating forms of thinking and acting in cultural production fields with the aim to catalyse societal developments, to foster intrinsic values and to create cultural workplace identities with a moral-ecological-political awareness (cf. Banks 2006; 2007) invoking new interactions between viewers, audiences and the environment

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Programming Language Techniques for Natural Language Applications

It is easy to imagine machines that can communicate in natural language. Constructing such machines is more difficult. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how declarative grammar formalisms that distinguish between abstract and concrete syntax make it easier to develop natural language applications. We describe how the type-theorectical grammar formalism Grammatical Framework (GF) can be used as a high-level language for natural language applications. By taking advantage of techniques from the field of programming language implementation, we can use GF grammars to perform portable and efficient parsing and linearization, generate speech recognition language models, implement multimodal fusion and fission, generate support code for abstract syntax transformations, generate dialogue managers, and implement speech translators and web-based syntax-aware editors. By generating application components from a declarative grammar, we can reduce duplicated work, ensure consistency, make it easier to build multilingual systems, improve linguistic quality, enable re-use across system domains, and make systems more portable