Induced Chern-Simons terms

We examine the claim that the effective action of four-dimensional SU(2)_L gauge theory at high and low temperature contains a three-dimensional Chern-Simons term with coefficient being the chemical potential for baryon number. We perform calculations in a two-dimensional toy model and find that the existence of the term is rather subtle.Comment: 12 pages, LaTe

Automatic annotation of the Penn-treebank with LFG f-structure information

Lexical-Functional Grammar f-structures are abstract syntactic representations approximating basic predicate-argument structure. Treebanks annotated with f-structure information are required as training resources for stochastic versions of unification and constraint-based grammars and for the automatic extraction of such resources. In a number of papers (Frank, 2000; Sadler, van Genabith and Way, 2000) have developed methods for automatically annotating treebank resources with f-structure information. However, to date, these methods have only been applied to treebank fragments of the order of a few hundred trees. In the present paper we present a new method that scales and has been applied to a complete treebank, in our case the WSJ section of Penn-II (Marcus et al, 1994), with more than 1,000,000 words in about 50,000 sentences

Treebank-based multilingual unification-grammar development

Broad-coverage, deep unification grammar development is time-consuming and costly. This problem can be exacerbated in multilingual grammar development scenarios. Recently (Cahill et al., 2002) presented a treebank-based methodology to semi-automatically create broadcoverage, deep, unification grammar resources for English. In this paper we present a project which adapts this model to a multilingual grammar development scenario to obtain robust, wide-coverage, probabilistic Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFGs) for English and German via automatic f-structure annotation algorithms based on the Penn-II and TIGER treebanks. We outline our method used to extract a probabilistic LFG from the TIGER treebank and report on the quality of the f-structures produced. We achieve an f-score of 66.23 on the evaluation of 100 random sentences against a manually constructed gold standard

Quasi-logical forms from f-structures for the Penn treebank

In this paper we show how the trees in the Penn treebank can be associated automatically with simple quasi-logical forms. Our approach is based on combining two independent strands of work: the first is the observation that there is a close correspondence between quasi-logical forms and LFG f-structures [van Genabith and Crouch, 1996]; the second is the development of an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm for the Penn treebank [Cahill et al, 2002a; Cahill et al, 2002b]. We compare our approach with that of [Liakata and Pulman, 2002]

Evaluating automatic F-structure annotation for the Penn-II treebank

Methodologies have been developed (van Genabith et al., 1999a,b; Sadler et al., 2000; Frank, 2000; van Genabith et al., 2001; Frank et al., 2002) for automatically annotating treebank resources with Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG: Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982) fstructure information. Until recently, however, most of this work on automatic annotation has been applied only to limited datasets, so while it may have shown 'proof of concept', it has not been demonstrated that the techniques developed scale up to much larger data sets (Liakata and Pulman, 2002). More recent work (Cahill et al., 2002a,b) has presented efforts in evolving and scaling techniques established in these previous papers to the full Penn-ll Treebank (Marcus et al., 1994). In this paper, we present and assess a number of quantitative and qualitative evaluation methodologies which provide insights into the effectiveness of the techniques developed to derive automatically a set of f-structures for the more than 1,000,000 words and 49,000 sentences of Penn-II

Parsing with PCFGs and automatic f-structure annotation

The development of large coverage, rich unification- (constraint-) based grammar resources is very time consuming, expensive and requires lots of linguistic expertise. In this paper we report initial results on a new methodology that attempts to partially automate the development of substantial parts of large coverage, rich unification- (constraint-) based grammar resources. The method is based on a treebank resource (in our case Penn-II) and an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm that annotates treebank trees with proto-f-structure information. Based on these, we present two parsing architectures: in our pipeline architecture we first extract a PCFG from the treebank following the method of (Charniak,1996), use the PCFG to parse new text, automatically annotate the resulting trees with our f-structure annotation algorithm and generate proto-f-structures. By contrast, in the integrated architecture we first automatically annotate the treebank trees with f-structure information and then extract an annotated PCFG (A-PCFG) from the treebank. We then use the A-PCFG to parse new text to generate proto-f-structures. Currently our best parsers achieve more than 81% f-score on the 2400 trees in section 23 of the Penn-II treebank and more than 60% f-score on gold-standard proto-f-structures for 105 randomly selected trees from section 23

The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction

Improving user experience is becoming something of a rallying call in human–computer interaction but experience is not a unitary thing. There are varieties of experiences, good and bad, and we need to characterise these varieties if we are to improve user experience. In this paper we argue that enchantment is a useful concept to facilitate closer relationships between people and technology. But enchantment is a complex concept in need of some clarification. So we explore how enchantment has been used in the discussions of technology and examine experiences of film and cell phones to see how enchantment with technology is possible. Based on these cases, we identify the sensibilities that help designers design for enchantment, including the specific sensuousness of a thing, senses of play, paradox and openness, and the potential for transformation. We use these to analyse digital jewellery in order to suggest how it can be made more enchanting. We conclude by relating enchantment to varieties of experience.</p

Large N and the Dine-Rajaraman problem

We compute the effective action for scattering of three well-separated extremal brane solutions, in 11d supergravity, with zero p_ transfer and small transverse velocities. Using an interpretation of the conjecture of Maldacena, following Hyun, this can be viewed as the large N limit of the Matrix theory description of three supergraviton scattering at leading order. The result is consistent with the perturbative supergravity calculation.Comment: 10 pages, tex (harvmac

Understanding Gender Equality Policy and Practice Gaps Through the Lens of Organisational Justice: Development of an Employee Alignment Model

Policies and actions to address gender inequalities are widespread across a range of institutional and organisational contexts. Concerns have been raised about the efficacy and impacts of such measures in the absence of sustained evaluation of these activities. It has been proposed that important contextual factors may propel or inhibit measures to promote gender equality, including a critical mass of women, role models, diverse leaders and inclusive organisational cultures. This paper explores relationships between organisational justice and equality interventions to better understand gaps between equality policies and practices using a comparative case study approach in a male-dominated sector. A combination of questionnaire and interview data analysis with employees in three case organisations in the construction sector are used to outline links between perceptions of gender equality initiatives and organisational justice, and the mechanisms used to reinforce in-group dominance. The findings culminate in the development of an Employee Alignment Model and a discussion of how this relates to the organisational climate for gender equality work. The findings suggest that the development of interactional organisational justice is an important precursor for successful gender equality interventions in organisations. These findings have implications for those looking to minimize unintentional harm of policies or interventions to improve gender equality