5,333 research outputs found

    The Diasporic Sublime in the Works of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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    The doctoral research aims to redefine the theory of the sublime within the transcultural identities through the works of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The involvement and elevation of Indian American women in migration has not been emphasised enough in the discussion of indentured labour, globalization and effects of cultural appropriation. Considering the German traditions of aesthetics, specifically Immanuel Kant’s theorization of the sublime in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beauty and the Sublime (1790/2011), the dissertation focuses to challenge the specific Kantian notion of female inability to be the sovereign and elevated (sublime) subject. ‘Diasporic sublime’ hence highlights the journey of Indian immigrant women in the United States of America and facing the conflicts to reach the sublime state of body and mind. The dissertation structures the conceptualisation of the postcolonial fear, power and agency through the changes of body, food and home to evince the manifestation of the sublime. Following the contemporary works of Christina Battersby, Bonnie Mann and Barbara Claire Freeman, the dissertation renegotiates the term sublime as a process to confront the submissive identity, dehumanised socio-economical state of immigrant women

    Assessing the species boundary and ecological niche in freshwater gastropods of the family Physidae (Gastropoda, Hygrophila)

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    The present thesis contributed to increasing the knowledge about the diversity of the neotropical freshwater mollusks. Through the use of different methodologies for analyzing molecular and geographical occurrence data, we address important taxonomic issues and show new paths for future taxonomic research on the Physidae family. This family for a long time had classification proposals based only on morphological characters of the shell and, later, on the anatomy of the soft parts. The application of molecular delimitation methods based on coalescence showed the inadequacy of morphological criteria in discriminating intraspecific variability (overestimating family diversity) and in detecting the existence of cryptic species complexes (underestimating family diversity). The data on the occurrence along with the use of georeferencing tools, modeling, and ecological niche analyses applied to South American physid species, indicated the possibility of errors in species identification and the need to reassess the distribution of these physids using other operational criteria such as molecular approaches to access the actual family diversity and distribution for the continent.A presente tese contribuiu para ampliar o conhecimento sobre a diversidade da malacofauna dulcícola neotropical. Através do emprego de diferentes metodologias de análise de dados moleculares e de ocorrência geográfica abordamos importantes questões taxonômicas e mostramos novos caminhos para futuras pesquisas taxonômicas da família Physidae. Família essa que por muito tempo teve propostas de classificação embasadas apenas em caracteres morfológicos da concha e, posteriormente, na anatomia das partes moles. A aplicação de métodos de delimitação molecular baseados em coalescência, evidenciou a insuficiência dos critérios morfológicos em discriminar a variabilidade intraespecífica (superestimando a diversidade da família) e, em detectar a existência de complexos de espécies crípticas (subestimando a diversidade da família). A abordagem de busca intensiva por dados de ocorrência junto a utilização de ferramentas de georreferenciamento, modelagem e análises de nicho ecológico aplicadas às espécies de fisídeos sul-americanos, indicaram a possibilidade de erros de identificação de espécies e a necessidade de reavaliar a distribuição desses fisídeos usando outros critérios operacionais, incluindo abordagens moleculares, para acessar a diversidade e distribuição reais da família para o continente

    A Spiritual Call: Jeremiah’s Call to the Heart And the Stages of Spiritual Progression in Carmelite Spirituality

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    The aim of this study is first, to identify resonances between Jeremiah 1:10 and the three stages of the spiritual journey as defined by the Carmelites such as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila (i.e., the stages known as purgative, illuminative and unitive) and then, in light of an in depth understanding of the spiritual senses attributed to Jeremiah 1:10 in its reception history, to evaluate the impact of Jer 1:10 upon the Carmelite conception of the spiritual journey. A comprehensive Word Study is undertaken of six task verbs from Jer 1:10, presented as three pairs: to root out (נתש) and to pull down (נחץ), to destroy (אבד) and to throw down (הרס), to build (בנה) and to plant (נטע). This analysis offers support for the alignment and resonances of the task verbs with the three stages of the spiritual journey. The Word Study also suggests that for the spiritual sense, the Hebrew text may provide a typology of a three-stage progression, in which two stages of purification (described by two pairs of negative task verbs) are necessary before the holiest and whole-hearted stage of unification is effected (described by the positive pair of task verbs). In addition, the repeated proximate position of task verbs to the themes of “turning” and “the heart” suggest that the verbs may work to turn the heart to the Lord, who continues to love his people despite their spiritual adultery and other sins. The evidence reviewed in the Word Study is supported by the reception history and indicates that Jer 1:10 may offer a significant and early spiritual model. This verse directly impacts upon Paul and Origen in the early era of Christianity. Based on Origen’s interpretation, it is possible that Jer 1:10 offers a biblical model for the tri-partite spiritual journey which precedes the conception of spiritual stages by Pseudo-Dionysius, who is often considered the originator of the purgative, illuminative and unitive concepts. In a number of ways, Origen’s spiritual interpretation seems to be carried through Christian tradition and may challenge oft-assumed Platonic or Neoplatonic sources of the spiritual journey. However, the impact of Jer 1:10 upon the Carmelites Saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila is diffuse and indirect. No direct citation or echo of Jer 1:10 has been identified in their writings. Nonetheless, like Origen’s interpretation of Jer 1:10, John recognizes successive stages of spiritual “destruction” (purgation and illumination) designed to open space in the soul for God, allowing for a third phase of “construction” (i.e., union). Jer 1:10 may offer insight into the earliest theological seeds of the spiritual journey, with echoes and resonances throughout the ages

    Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe

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    In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as »pasticcios« since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles

    More Than Machines?

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    We know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing »a little bit alive« with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance

    The automatic processing of multiword expressions in Irish

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    It is well-documented that Multiword Expressions (MWEs) pose a unique challenge to a variety of NLP tasks such as machine translation, parsing, information retrieval, and more. For low-resource languages such as Irish, these challenges can be exacerbated by the scarcity of data, and a lack of research in this topic. In order to improve handling of MWEs in various NLP tasks for Irish, this thesis will address both the lack of resources specifically targeting MWEs in Irish, and examine how these resources can be applied to said NLP tasks. We report on the creation and analysis of a number of lexical resources as part of this PhD research. Ilfhocail, a lexicon of Irish MWEs, is created through extract- ing MWEs from other lexical resources such as dictionaries. A corpus annotated with verbal MWEs in Irish is created for the inclusion of Irish in the PARSEME Shared Task 1.2. Additionally, MWEs were tagged in a bilingual EN-GA corpus for inclusion in experiments in machine translation. For the purposes of annotation, a categorisation scheme for nine categories of MWEs in Irish is created, based on combining linguistic analysis on these types of constructions and cross-lingual frameworks for defining MWEs. A case study in applying MWEs to NLP tasks is undertaken, with the exploration of incorporating MWE information while training Neural Machine Translation systems. Finally, the topic of automatic identification of Irish MWEs is explored, documenting the training of a system capable of automatically identifying Irish MWEs from a variety of categories, and the challenges associated with developing such a system. This research contributes towards a greater understanding of Irish MWEs and their applications in NLP, and provides a foundation for future work in exploring other methods for the automatic discovery and identification of Irish MWEs, and further developing the MWE resources described above

    The European AI Liability Directives -- Critique of a Half-Hearted Approach and Lessons for the Future

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    As ChatGPT et al. conquer the world, the optimal liability framework for AI systems remains an unsolved problem across the globe. In a much-anticipated move, the European Commission advanced two proposals outlining the European approach to AI liability in September 2022: a novel AI Liability Directive and a revision of the Product Liability Directive. They constitute the final cornerstone of EU AI regulation. Crucially, the liability proposals and the EU AI Act are inherently intertwined: the latter does not contain any individual rights of affected persons, and the former lack specific, substantive rules on AI development and deployment. Taken together, these acts may well trigger a Brussels Effect in AI regulation, with significant consequences for the US and beyond. This paper makes three novel contributions. First, it examines in detail the Commission proposals and shows that, while making steps in the right direction, they ultimately represent a half-hearted approach: if enacted as foreseen, AI liability in the EU will primarily rest on disclosure of evidence mechanisms and a set of narrowly defined presumptions concerning fault, defectiveness and causality. Hence, second, the article suggests amendments, which are collected in an Annex at the end of the paper. Third, based on an analysis of the key risks AI poses, the final part of the paper maps out a road for the future of AI liability and regulation, in the EU and beyond. This includes: a comprehensive framework for AI liability; provisions to support innovation; an extension to non-discrimination/algorithmic fairness, as well as explainable AI; and sustainability. I propose to jump-start sustainable AI regulation via sustainability impact assessments in the AI Act and sustainable design defects in the liability regime. In this way, the law may help spur not only fair AI and XAI, but potentially also sustainable AI (SAI).Comment: under peer-review; contains 3 Table

    Meta-ontology fault detection

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    Ontology engineering is the field, within knowledge representation, concerned with using logic-based formalisms to represent knowledge, typically moderately sized knowledge bases called ontologies. How to best develop, use and maintain these ontologies has produced relatively large bodies of both formal, theoretical and methodological research. One subfield of ontology engineering is ontology debugging, and is concerned with preventing, detecting and repairing errors (or more generally pitfalls, bad practices or faults) in ontologies. Due to the logical nature of ontologies and, in particular, entailment, these faults are often both hard to prevent and detect and have far reaching consequences. This makes ontology debugging one of the principal challenges to more widespread adoption of ontologies in applications. Moreover, another important subfield in ontology engineering is that of ontology alignment: combining multiple ontologies to produce more powerful results than the simple sum of the parts. Ontology alignment further increases the issues, difficulties and challenges of ontology debugging by introducing, propagating and exacerbating faults in ontologies. A relevant aspect of the field of ontology debugging is that, due to the challenges and difficulties, research within it is usually notably constrained in its scope, focusing on particular aspects of the problem or on the application to only certain subdomains or under specific methodologies. Similarly, the approaches are often ad hoc and only related to other approaches at a conceptual level. There are no well established and widely used formalisms, definitions or benchmarks that form a foundation of the field of ontology debugging. In this thesis, I tackle the problem of ontology debugging from a more abstract than usual point of view, looking at existing literature in the field and attempting to extract common ideas and specially focussing on formulating them in a common language and under a common approach. Meta-ontology fault detection is a framework for detecting faults in ontologies that utilizes semantic fault patterns to express schematic entailments that typically indicate faults in a systematic way. The formalism that I developed to represent these patterns is called existential second-order query logic (abbreviated as ESQ logic). I further reformulated a large proportion of the ideas present in some of the existing research pieces into this framework and as patterns in ESQ logic, providing a pattern catalogue. Most of the work during my PhD has been spent in designing and implementing an algorithm to effectively automatically detect arbitrary ESQ patterns in arbitrary ontologies. The result is what we call minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic, an extension of first-order resolution, drawing on important ideas from higher-order unification and implementing a novel approach to unification problems using dependency graphs. I have proven important theoretical properties about this algorithm such as its soundness, its termination (in a certain sense and under certain conditions) and its fairness or completeness in the enumeration of infinite spaces of solutions. Moreover, I have produced an implementation of minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic in Haskell that has passed all unit tests and produces non-trivial results on small examples. However, attempts to apply this algorithm to examples of a more realistic size have proven unsuccessful, with computation times that exceed our tolerance levels. In this thesis, I have provided both details of the challenges faced in this regard, as well as other successful forms of qualitative evaluation of the meta-ontology fault detection approach, and discussions about both what I believe are the main causes of the computational feasibility problems, ideas on how to overcome them, and also ideas on other directions of future work that could use the results in the thesis to contribute to the production of foundational formalisms, ideas and approaches to ontology debugging that can properly combine existing constrained research. It is unclear to me whether minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic can, in its current shape, be implemented efficiently or not, but I believe that, at the very least, the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that I have presented in this thesis will be useful to produce more foundational results in the field

    Writing Facts

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    »Fact« is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering »writing facts« and »writing facts«, the volume shows why and how »facts« are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity
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