SU-RUG at the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2017 shared task: Morphological Inflection with Attentional Sequence-to-Sequence Models

This paper describes the Stockholm University/University of Groningen (SU-RUG) system for the SIGMORPHON 2017 shared task on morphological inflection. Our system is based on an attentional sequence-to-sequence neural network model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells, with joint training of morphological inflection and the inverse transformation, i.e. lemmatization and morphological analysis. Our system outperforms the baseline with a large margin, and our submission ranks as the 4th best team for the track we participate in (task 1, high-resource).Comment: 4 pages, to appear at CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 201

Organizational Structure as the Channeling of Boundedly Rational Pre-play Communication

We model organizational decision making as costless pre-play communication. Decision making is called authoritarian if only one player is allowed to speak and consensual if all players are allowed to speak. Players are assumed to have limited cognitive capacity and we characterize their behavior under each decision making regime for two different cognitive hierarchy models. Our results suggest that authoritarian decision making is optimal when players have conflicting preferences over the set of Nash equilibrium outcomes, whereas consensual decision making is optimal when players have congruent preferences over this set. The intuition is that authoritarian decision making avoids conflict, but sometimes creates insufficient mutual trust to implement socially optimal outcomes.Organizational decision making; coordination games; communication; cognitive hierarchy models

Identity and Redistribution

This paper models the interaction between individuals' identity choices and redistribution. Both redistributive policies and identity choices are endogenous, and there might be multiple equilibria. The model is applied to ethnicity and social class. In an equilibrium with high taxes, the poor identify as poor and favor high taxes. In an equilibrium with low taxes, at least some of the poor identify with their ethnic group and favor low taxes. The model has two main predictions. First, redistribution is highest when society is ethnically homogenous, but the effect of ethnic diversity on redistribution is not necessarily monotonic. Second, when income inequality is low, an increase in income inequality might induce the poor to identify with their ethnic group and therefore favor lower taxes.Redistribution; social identity; income inequality; ethnic fractionalization; ethnic diversity; social class

Optimal Trade-Off Between Economic Activity and Health During an Epidemic

This paper considers a simple model where a social planner can influence the spread-intensity of an infection wave, and, consequently, also the economic activity and population health, through a single parameter. Population health is assumed to only be negatively affected when the number of simultaneously infected exceeds health care capacity. The main finding is that if (i) the planner attaches a positive weight on economic activity and (ii) it is more harmful for the economy to be locked down for longer than shorter time periods, then the optimal policy is to (weakly) exceed health care capacity at some time.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech increases as a function of the age of the child even when surprisal is controlled for

In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-directed speech (ADS), ii) there is a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and surprisal (the negative log probability) in ADS, and iii) the increase in articulation rate in Swedish CDS as a function of the age of the child holds, even when surprisal along with utterance length and differences in articulation rate between speakers are controlled for. These results indicate that adults adjust their articulation rate to make it fit the linguistic capacity of the child.Comment: 5 pages, Interspeech 201

Stories from the Swedish forest debate in the light of the climate - and biodiversity crisis

The concept Closer-to-Nature in forestry is increasingly acknowledged in the forestry-debates in Europe and in Sweden. The concept is one of many that has evolved through the challenges of our time, where climate change and biodiversity crisis are at our doorstep. In Europe and in Sweden there is an ongoing process taking place that involves developing a definition of the concept Closer-to-Nature, while on the same time the concept is ambiguous, and actors are struggling to fill the concept with different meanings. Drawing on Hajer´s argumentative approach, this thesis aims to understand and illustrate how meaning is ascribed to Closer-to-Nature forestry and how that meaning (re)produces certain forest practices, as well as how storylines that are expressed in the debate about Closer-to-Nature in Sweden are mobilizing different actors. The study shows that Closer-to-Nature is filled with meaning through already existing practices and knowledge in Sweden, and what is emphasized in the debate is the power of decision-making by referring to who has the right to make decisions, who should be involved and on what level should decisions be taken, rather than the concept as such

‘The wrath of God on children of disobedience’: COVID-19 in the theology and ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church

The arrival of pandemic diseases (of which COVID-19 is the latest, but not likely to be the last) could be understood, along with impending ecological disaster and global warming, to be the major existential threats envisioned by, and facing, our contemporary culture. This article focuses on the use made of the theme of COVID-19 in the theology and ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church – a Calvinist and Primitive Baptist church founded in Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s by Fred Phelps Sr (1929–2014). While numerically small, the church has become infamous through its practice of picketing funerals, and has been characterized as a hate group espousing antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ positions. Through a reading and analysis of sermons and other published materials from the Westboro Baptist Church, the article maps the motif of COVID-19 as it is used by a church whose members perceive themselves as the heralds of an angry God

Representing Your Own Culture - Investigating authenticity in an indigenous museum

This project studies cultural representation in indigenous tourism. Indigenous theme and indigenous control are two important factors in indigenous tourism, and an indigenous museum controlled by indigenous people is a representative place for indigenous tourism. Therefore, this project focuses on a Swedish Sami museum. The aim of this project is to investigate different senses of authenticity in the cultural representation process in an indigenous museum. The two major research questions concerns how indigenous culture is represented in a museum, and in which sense cultural representation in an indigenous museum could be said to be authentic. After the study, it could be concluded that there are four main components in the cultural representation process, which reflects three senses of “authenticity”. Indigenous museum staff is the first component. Indigenous public, which is the second component as their main source of contemporary culture give feedback about researching and producing cultural representation to indigenous staff, so that indigenous self-identity, the third component, is reflected in different forms of cultural representation, which is the fourth component. Since non-indigenous public's feedback is seldom about cultural representation, it is not reflected in this process. Different forms of cultural representation reflects “object authenticity”, cultural expressions based on indigenous people's own feeling and identity reflects “existential authenticity”, while new indigenous behavior reflects “emergent authenticity”