Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summaries

Characterizing relationships between people is fundamental for the understanding of narratives. In this work, we address the problem of inferring the polarity of relationships between people in narrative summaries. We formulate the problem as a joint structured prediction for each narrative, and present a model that combines evidence from linguistic and semantic features, as well as features based on the structure of the social community in the text. We also provide a clustering-based approach that can exploit regularities in narrative types. e.g., learn an affinity for love-triangles in romantic stories. On a dataset of movie summaries from Wikipedia, our structured models provide more than a 30% error-reduction over a competitive baseline that considers pairs of characters in isolation

Sociology Students as Storytellers: What Narrative Sociology and C. Wright Mills Can Teach Us about Writing in the Discipline

The Writing in the Disciplines approach encourages writing instruction in specific majors so that students learn the writing conventions of their discipline. As writing instructors, however, the role of the sociologist is problematic. Not only has standard sociological writing been jargon laden, it has privileged a clinical style of writing. Thus, we ask whether learning sociology also means learning how to write poorly or at least narrowly. Drawing from narrative sociology, we suggest that mainstream sociological writing should be viewed as a writing genre—one of many genres that students, and sociologists themselves, can choose from. Framing sociologists as both truth tellers and storytellers, we invite sociology instructors to consider at least three alternative genres for assignment in the classroom: life stories, fiction stories, and visual stories. Finally, we offer C. Wright Mills as a model for how to think like a sociologist while still writing well

From the Book Page to the Big Screen: An Exploration of Literature-to-Film Adaptions and Their Use in the Classroom

Many classic titles of children’s literature have been adapted into feature film presentations. Although often regarded as a mere form of entertainment, movies can and should be incorporated into the elementary classroom as supplementary material to be paired with their corresponding works of literature. The four examples provided include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. Each of these four works originated as a book that was later recreated into a film format with varying degrees of accuracy to the original story. Through a close examination of the author, theme, classroom application, and film connection, a greater appreciation is gained for the integration of film in the language arts classroom

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

ENCOURAGING CHILDREN IN LEARNING ENGLISH COMMUNICATIVELY BY USING SOME FUN ACTIVITIES IN THE CLASSROOM

This paper is talking about the interesting and fun way in teaching children as the young learner in English. It refers to an approach that is called the functional approach that focusesin the method of communicative language teaching. In this method children are not onlytaught English structurally, but also the communicative aspect of learning English for secondlanguage. By using this method it is really hoped that the children will not only learningEnglish and practicing in the classroom. Later, the children are asked to practice theirEnglish in real life situation, therefore, the material and the atmosphere of teaching andlearning English must be fun and bring the children as if they face it in the real life. So, theEnglish teacher must give some task and activities that support this method, it can be in theform of games, role play, projects, and telling stories

Understanding Actors and Evaluating Personae with Gaussian Embeddings

Understanding narrative content has become an increasingly popular topic. Nonetheless, research on identifying common types of narrative characters, or personae, is impeded by the lack of automatic and broad-coverage evaluation methods. We argue that computationally modeling actors provides benefits, including novel evaluation mechanisms for personae. Specifically, we propose two actor-modeling tasks, cast prediction and versatility ranking, which can capture complementary aspects of the relation between actors and the characters they portray. For an actor model, we present a technique for embedding actors, movies, character roles, genres, and descriptive keywords as Gaussian distributions and translation vectors, where the Gaussian variance corresponds to actors' versatility. Empirical results indicate that (1) the technique considerably outperforms TransE (Bordes et al. 2013) and ablation baselines and (2) automatically identified persona topics (Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith 2013) yield statistically significant improvements in both tasks, whereas simplistic persona descriptors including age and gender perform inconsistently, validating prior research.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 201

USING CONSTRUCTIVISM METHOD TO TEACH HORTATORY EXPOSITION FOR GRADE 8 JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

The types of learners are really different. They have their own style in understanding some materials. The teacher will face any obstacle in giving some materials for the grade 8 students of junior high school because there are some students who are really fast in catching some materials but we couldn’t forget that there are some students who are really slowly in getting some materials. The wise method to be applied in this case is constructivist because it will involve whole students for having collaborating in lesson activity. Moreover that the material will be taught is about hortatory exposition where students can share and argue their opinion relating with some recent issues. That is why there are so many beneficial in conducting this project. In the end of process, we will know that they will increase their comprehension and it will be shown an improvement in their attitude toward what hortatory exposition is