Towards Identifying Social Bias in Dialog Systems: Frame, Datasets, and Benchmarks

The research of open-domain dialog systems has been greatly prospered by neural models trained on large-scale corpora, however, such corpora often introduce various safety problems (e.g., offensive languages, biases, and toxic behaviors) that significantly hinder the deployment of dialog systems in practice. Among all these unsafe issues, addressing social bias is more complex as its negative impact on marginalized populations is usually expressed implicitly, thus requiring normative reasoning and rigorous analysis. In this paper, we focus our investigation on social bias detection of dialog safety problems. We first propose a novel Dial-Bias Frame for analyzing the social bias in conversations pragmatically, which considers more comprehensive bias-related analyses rather than simple dichotomy annotations. Based on the proposed framework, we further introduce CDail-Bias Dataset that, to our knowledge, is the first well-annotated Chinese social bias dialog dataset. In addition, we establish several dialog bias detection benchmarks at different label granularities and input types (utterance-level and context-level). We show that the proposed in-depth analyses together with these benchmarks in our Dial-Bias Frame are necessary and essential to bias detection tasks and can benefit building safe dialog systems in practice

Universal Discourse Representation Structure Parsing

We consider the task of crosslingual semantic parsing in the style of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) where knowledge from annotated corpora in a resource-rich language is transferred via bitext to guide learning in other languages. We introduce Universal Discourse Representation Theory (UDRT), a variant of DRT that explicitly anchors semantic representations to tokens in the linguistic input. We develop a semantic parsing framework based on the Transformer architecture and utilize it to obtain semantic resources in multiple languages following two learning schemes. The many-to-one approach translates non-English text to English, and then runs a relatively accurate English parser on the translated text, while the one-to-many approach translates gold standard English to non-English text and trains multiple parsers (one per language) on the translations. Experimental results on the Parallel Meaning Bank show that our proposal outperforms strong baselines by a wide margin and can be used to construct (silver-standard) meaning banks for 99 languages

Translating and literary agenting Anna Holmwood’s Legends of the Condor Heroes

The role of literary agents in translation is intriguing yet under-researched. The mechanism of literary agenting vis-à-vis the initiation, production, and promotion of translated literature is under-explored. How literary agenting affects translation epistemologically, aesthetically, and technically remains uncharted territory. This dissertation attempts to fill the gap by investigating how Anna Holmwood, a translator-cum-literary agent, conceives and conducts the English translation of Shediao Yingxiong Zhuan (“射雕英雄傳”), a wuxia (武俠) magnum opus by Jin Yong (金庸). It first employs an NVivo-based theme analysis to unearth how the translation has been received and perceived by general readers. Next, it develops the notion of professional habitus based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Capitalizing on first-hand materials such as email exchanges, speech transcriptions, interview records, agent reports, and unpublished essays, it then examines how Holmwood’s professional habitus as a literary agent empowers her to act as the initiator (as demonstrated in translation selection, contract-signing, and pitching), coordinator (as demonstrated in designating co-translators, and establishing and strengthening connections between various actors), and promoter (as demonstrated in coining the tagline “A Chinese Lord of the Rings”) of the translation project, and recounts the process in which this translation comes into being. Next, it conducts a textual analysis of the first two volumes of the translated book with various corpus tools (AntConc, L2SCA, MAT, etc.), showing how Holmwood’s literary agent identity shapes her approach to wuxia translation, and demonstrating her “fingerprints” on the “tone”, “pitch”, and “pace” of the translated texts. It is revealed that Holmwood’s translation is distinct from previous translations of Jin Yong’s novels on multiple linguistic levels, and that her translation style is imprinted on the translation by Gigi Chang, the co-translator. Finally, Holmwood has appropriated such cinematic techniques as undercranking, fast cutting, zoom in shot, and extreme long shot in her translation, making it reminiscent of Tsui Hark’s wuxia films. Thanks largely to her literary agenting experience, Holmwood produces a reader-oriented translation that is readable, dynamic, and fast-paced, and projects Jin Yong wuxia as entertaining, individualistic, apolitical, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. This mixed-method study not only refreshes our understanding of literary agenting of translation, but also contributes to the research methodology of translation reception and translation style

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 1: Change, Voices, Open

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 1 includes papers from Change, Voices and Open tracks of the conference

Chairs of Excellence Annual Report 2022

https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/govpubs-tn-higher-education-commission-academic-programs-workforce-reports/1018/thumbnail.jp

Loci Memoriae Hungaricae

Miklós Takács: Preface - 7 ; 1. Theoretical reflections ; Zsófia O. Réti: Memory of Networks, Networks of Memory - 10 ; Gábor Palkó: The Phenomenon of “Linked Data” from a Media Archaeological Perspective - 23 ; 2. Digital Memory in Everyday Life ; Norbert Krek: Lieux de Mémoire and Video Games: Mnemonic Representations of the Second World War in First Person Shooter Games of the Early Twenty-first Century - 32 ; Antti Vallius: Landscapes of Belonging: Visual Memories in the Digital Age - 43 ; László Z. Karvalics: Defining Two Types of Cultural “Micro-heritage”: Objects, Knowledge Dimensions and a Quest for Novel Memory Institutions - 58 ; 3. New Media for Old Ideologies Tuija Saresma: Circulating the Origin Myth of Western Civilization – The Racial Imagery of the ‘Men of the North’ as an Imaginary Heritage in White Supremacist Blogs - 68 ; Klára Sándor: Versions of Folk History Representing Group Identities: The Battle for the Masternarrative - 82 ; 4. Rethinking Hungarian Collective Memory Katalin Bódi: Image and Imagination: The Changing Role of Art from the Nineteenth Century to the Present in Hungarian National Memory - 92 ; Zsófia Fellegi: Digital Philology on the Semantic Web: Publishing Hungarian Avant-garde Magazines - 105 ; Norbert Baranyai: Cult, Gossip, Memory—Aspects of Mediating Culture in Krisztián Nyáry’s Portraits of Writers in Facebook Posts - 117 ; Notes on Contributors - 127 ; Index - 13