The Determinants of Institutional Quality. More on the Debate

This paper provides new evidences about the determinants of institutional quality. Given the shortcomings of governance indicators, we first discuss the criteria employed to judge institutional quality. Then, we identify the factors that, according to these criteria, shape the quality of institutions. The results of this empirical research show that the main determinants of the quality of the institutions of a given country are its income per head and its income distribution, the efficiency of its tax system and the educational level of its population. Interestingly, some of the variables identified in previous literature (location, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, the origin of the legal system or colonial origin) either do not have any impact on institutional quality or they impact indirectly through the variables previously mentioned.Institutional Quality Development, Income Distribution, Tax System

The Determinants of Institutional Quality. More on the Debate

This paper provides new evidences about the determinants of institutional quality. Prior to implementing our empirical research, we discuss the criteria that should be used to judge the quality of institutions. Then, we identify the factors that, according to these criteria, determine institutional quality. The results obtained in the estimated model enable to draw some interesting conclusions. First of all, development level determines institutional quality: the highest the former, the highest the latter. Secondly, income distribution seems to condition institutional quality. A certain degree of social cohesion is needed to provide institutional predictability and legitimacy. Thirdly, a sound tax system is positively asso-ciated with institutional quality improvement. Taxes provide the necessary revenue to ge-nerate quality institutions, while creating a narrower and more demanding relation between State and citizens. Finally, education improves institutional quality. On the contrary, some of the variables identified in the literature either they do not seem to determine institutional quality or their effects are indirect, through the aforementioned variables.Institutional quality, income distribution, taxes, education.

Universal, Unsupervised (Rule-Based), Uncovered Sentiment Analysis

We present a novel unsupervised approach for multilingual sentiment analysis driven by compositional syntax-based rules. On the one hand, we exploit some of the main advantages of unsupervised algorithms: (1) the interpretability of their output, in contrast with most supervised models, which behave as a black box and (2) their robustness across different corpora and domains. On the other hand, by introducing the concept of compositional operations and exploiting syntactic information in the form of universal dependencies, we tackle one of their main drawbacks: their rigidity on data that are structured differently depending on the language concerned. Experiments show an improvement both over existing unsupervised methods, and over state-of-the-art supervised models when evaluating outside their corpus of origin. Experiments also show how the same compositional operations can be shared across languages. The system is available at http://www.grupolys.org/software/UUUSA/Comment: 19 pages, 5 Tables, 6 Figures. This is the authors version of a work that was accepted for publication in Knowledge-Based System

One model, two languages: training bilingual parsers with harmonized treebanks

We introduce an approach to train lexicalized parsers using bilingual corpora obtained by merging harmonized treebanks of different languages, producing parsers that can analyze sentences in either of the learned languages, or even sentences that mix both. We test the approach on the Universal Dependency Treebanks, training with MaltParser and MaltOptimizer. The results show that these bilingual parsers are more than competitive, as most combinations not only preserve accuracy, but some even achieve significant improvements over the corresponding monolingual parsers. Preliminary experiments also show the approach to be promising on texts with code-switching and when more languages are added.Comment: 7 pages, 4 tables, 1 figur

The Acoustics of the Choir in Spanish Cathedrals

One of the most significant enclosures in worship spaces is that of the choir. Generally, from a historical point of view, the choir is a semi-enclosed and privileged area reserved for the clergy, whose position and configuration gives it a private character. Regarding the generation and transformation of ecclesial interior spaces, the choir commands a role of the first magnitude. Its shape and location produce, on occasions, major modifications that significantly affect the acoustics of these indoor spaces. In the case of Spanish cathedrals, whose design responds to the so-called “Spanish type”, the central position of the choir, enclosed by high stonework walls on three of its sides and with numerous wooden stalls inside, breaks up the space in the main nave, thereby generating other new spaces, such as the trascoro. The aim of this work was to analyse the acoustic evolution of the choir as one of the main elements that configure the sound space of Spanish cathedrals. By means of in situ measurements and simulation models, the main acoustic parameters were evaluated, both in their current state and in their original configurations that have since disappeared. This analysis enabled the various acoustic conditions existing between the choir itself and the area of the faithful to be verified, and the significant improvement of the acoustic quality in the choir space to become apparent. The effect on the acoustic parameters is highly significant, with slight differences in the choir, where the values are appropriate for Gregorian chants, and suitable intelligibility of sung text. High values are also obtained in the area of the faithful, which lacked specific acoustic requirements at the time of construction

Towards Syntactic Iberian Polarity Classification

Lexicon-based methods using syntactic rules for polarity classification rely on parsers that are dependent on the language and on treebank guidelines. Thus, rules are also dependent and require adaptation, especially in multilingual scenarios. We tackle this challenge in the context of the Iberian Peninsula, releasing the first symbolic syntax-based Iberian system with rules shared across five official languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. The model is made available.Comment: 7 pages, 5 tables. Contribution to the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA-2017) at EMNLP 201