“What is the point of Parliamentary debate?” Deliberation, oratory, opposition and spectacle in the British House of Commons

This article seeks to open up debate about Parliamentary debate by exploring the history of ideas about Parliamentary debate and rhetoric through the lens of four core concepts: deliberation, oratory, opposition and spectacle. These are not the names of singular ideas let alone schools of thought; they are conceptual fields each of which gives a particular shape to ways of conceiving, criticizing and defending Commons debate. In mapping this topos – identifying historical debates and practices alongside contemporary arguments found in political theory, political science and Rhetoric – I show that our thinking and arguing about the Commons is part of a contested and ongoing history more complex than we acknowledge. I argue that Parliamentary Debate has a number of purposes and that our thinking about it, and evaluation of it, should not be contained within the frame of “deliberation” but should also take account of the political value and importance of oratory, opposition and spectacle

Too many facts and not enough theories: the rhetoric of the referendum campaign

The campaign over the UK’s referendum on our continued membership of the European Union is entering its final stretch, with numerous facts, figures, and assertions being thrown around with wilful abandon. Here, Alan Finlayson argues that both campaigns in are build on thin theories which utterly fail to understand each other

The Metaphysics of Brexit

In this article, I consider Brexit as the expression of a more general ideology – Brexitism – which I explore through commentary upon a series of quotations drawn from speeches, newspapers, propaganda material and social media. This method is appropriate because Brexitism is itself a kind of quotation – a repetition of half-remembered actual and fictional past political gestures – which allude to something deeper. Exploring fragments which illustrate three different elements of Brexitist ideology – Heroism, Time and Distinction – I suggest that these can be read as expressions of an underlying, dynamic and ‘productive’ conceptual field, similar to what Max Weber described as a ‘stand toward the world’. This is the ‘metaphysics of Brexit’ apart from which it cannot be fully understood

YouTube and political ideologies: Technology, populism and rhetorical form

Digital media are driving profound changes in contemporary politics, including, this article argues, to the production, reception and dissemination of political ideas and ideologies. Platforms increase the number and political range of ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ using distinct rhetorics through which ideas are articulated and experienced. Developing and justifying these claims I draw on the political theory of ideologies, digital media studies and rhetorical political analysis. I show how a populist ‘style’ and appeal to rhetorical ethos, linked to mediatisation, are intensified by digital media, affecting ideological form and content. Explaining in particular how YouTube constitutes political-ideological communication I examine in detail the British-based political YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. I show that his political ideology is a blend of conservatism and libertarianism, with a populist style and rhetorical ethos of ‘charismatic’ authority. Centred on the revelation of political truths, presented as of therapeutic benefit for individuals, it is characteristic of the medium

Report on the 2015 NSF Workshop on Unified Annotation Tooling

On March 30 & 31, 2015, an international group of twenty-three researchers with expertise in linguistic annotation convened in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida to discuss problems with and potential solutions for the state of linguistic annotation tooling. The participants comprised 14 researchers from the U.S. and 9 from outside the U.S., with 7 countries and 4 continents represented, and hailed from fields and specialties including computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, speech processing, multi-modal data processing, clinical & medical natural language processing, linguistics, documentary linguistics, sign-language linguistics, corpus linguistics, and the digital humanities. The motivating problem of the workshop was the balkanization of annotation tooling, namely, that even though linguistic annotation requires sophisticated tool support to efficiently generate high-quality data, the landscape of tools for the field is fractured, incompatible, inconsistent, and lacks key capabilities. The overall goal of the workshop was to chart the way forward, centering on five key questions: (1) What are the problems with current tool landscape? (2) What are the possible benefits of solving some or all of these problems? (3) What capabilities are most needed? (4) How should we go about implementing these capabilities? And, (5) How should we ensure longevity and sustainability of the solution? I surveyed the participants before their arrival, which provided significant raw material for ideas, and the workshop discussion itself resulted in identification of ten specific classes of problems, five sets of most-needed capabilities. Importantly, we identified annotation project managers in computational linguistics as the key recipients and users of any solution, thereby succinctly addressing questions about the scope and audience of potential solutions. We discussed management and sustainability of potential solutions at length. The participants agreed on sixteen recommendations for future work. This technical report contains a detailed discussion of all these topics, a point-by-point review of the discussion in the workshop as it unfolded, detailed information on the participants and their expertise, and the summarized data from the surveys

Annotation Guide for the UCM/MIT Indications, Referential Expressions, and Coreference Corpus (UMIREC Corpus)

This is the annotation guide given to the annotators who created the UCM/MIT Indications, Referring Expressions, and Coreference (UMIREC) Corpus version 1.0. The corpus comprises texts annotated for referring expressions, coreference relations between the referring expressions, and so-called "indication structures", which split referring expressions into constituents (nuclei and modifiers) and mark each constituent as either 'distinctive' or 'descriptive', which indicate whether or not the constituent contains information required for uniquely identifying the referent. The contents of this corpus, the annotation procedure, and the indication structures are described in more detail in a paper titled "The Prevalence of Descriptive Referring Expressions in News and Narrative" published in the proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in July 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden (ACL-2010)

Learning narrative structure from annotated folktales

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100).Narrative structure is an ubiquitous and intriguing phenomenon. By virtue of structure we recognize the presence of Villainy or Revenge in a story, even if that word is not actually present in the text. Narrative structure is an anvil for forging new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, and is a window into abstraction and conceptual learning as well as into culture and its in influence on cognition. I advance our understanding of narrative structure by describing Analogical Story Merging (ASM), a new machine learning algorithm that can extract culturally-relevant plot patterns from sets of folktales. I demonstrate that ASM can learn a substantive portion of Vladimir Propp's in influential theory of the structure of folktale plots. The challenge was to take descriptions at one semantic level, namely, an event timeline as described in folktales, and abstract to the next higher level: structures such as Villainy, Stuggle- Victory, and Reward. ASM is based on Bayesian Model Merging, a technique for learning regular grammars. I demonstrate that, despite ASM's large search space, a carefully-tuned prior allows the algorithm to converge, and furthermore it reproduces Propp's categories with a chance-adjusted Rand index of 0.511 to 0.714. Three important categories are identied with F-measures above 0.8. The data are 15 Russian folktales, comprising 18,862 words, a subset of Propp's original tales. This subset was annotated for 18 aspects of meaning by 12 annotators using the Story Workbench, a general text-annotation tool I developed for this work. Each aspect was doubly-annotated and adjudicated at inter-annotator F-measures that cluster around 0.7 to 0.8. It is the largest, most deeply-annotated narrative corpus assembled to date. The work has significance far beyond folktales. First, it points the way toward important applications in many domains, including information retrieval, persuasion and negotiation, natural language understanding and generation, and computational creativity. Second, abstraction from natural language semantics is a skill that underlies many cognitive tasks, and so this work provides insight into those processes. Finally, the work opens the door to a computational understanding of cultural in influences on cognition and understanding cultural differences as captured in stories.by Mark Alan Finlayson.Ph.D

Analogical Retrieval via Intermediate Features: The Goldilocks Hypothesis

Analogical reasoning has been implicated in many important cognitive processes, such as learning, categorization, planning, and understanding natural language. Therefore, to obtain a full understanding of these processes, we must come to a better understanding of how people reason by analogy. Analogical reasoning is thought to occur in at least three stages: retrieval of a source description from memory upon presentation of a target description, mapping of the source description to the target description, and transfer of relationships from source description to target description. Here we examine the first stage, the retrieval of relevant sources from long-term memory for their use in analogical reasoning. Specifically we ask: what can people retrieve from long-term memory, and how do they do it?Psychological experiments show that subjects display two sorts of retrieval patterns when reasoning by analogy: a novice pattern and an expert pattern. Novice-like subjects are more likely to recall superficiallysimilar descriptions that are not helpful for reasoning by analogy. Conversely, expert-like subjects are more likely to recall structurally-related descriptions that are useful for further analogical reasoning. Previous computational models of the retrieval stage have only attempted to model novice-like retrieval. We introduce a computational model that can demonstrate both novice-like and expert-like retrieval with the same mechanism. The parameter of the model that is varied to produce these two types of retrieval is the average size of the features used to identify matches in memory. We find that, in agreement with an intuition from the work of Ullman and co-workers regarding the use of features in visual classification (Ullman, Vidal-Naquet,& Sali, 2002), that features of an intermediate size are most useful for analogical retrieval.We conducted two computational experiments on our own dataset of fourteen formally described stories, which showed that our model gives the strongest analogical retrieval, and is most expert-like, when it uses features that are on average of intermediate size. We conducted a third computational experiment on the Karla the Hawk dataset which showed a modest effect consistent with our predictions. Because our model and Ullmans work both rely on intermediate-sized features to perform recognition-like tasks, we take both as supporting what we call the Goldilocks hypothesis: that on the average those features that are maximally useful for recognition are neither too small nor too large, neither too simple nor too complex, but rather are in the middle, of intermediate size and complexity

This is not a critique: Reactionary digital politics in the age of ideological entrepreneurship

On digital platforms a distinct form of reactionary politics has gathered, intensifying and focusing its political arguments. Composed of diverse strands of political ideology it is unified by opposition to any and all forms of politics concerned with claims for equality. Key avatars of this politics are ‘ideological entrepreneurs’, individuals untethered from modern political institutions and engaged in the business of manufacturing criticism not only of this or that form of politics but of modern politicsas such. While highly politically consequential these political forms are peculiar insofar as their goal is not primarily political consciousness raising and organising but the growth of an audience and the intensification of its parasocial attachment. Because they are not seeking to attain political legitimacy or win office, standard forms of counter-critique, which measure the distance of reactionary political claims from what is imagined to be universal and legitimate, are misdirected. In addition to such normative critique those who would defend politics must learn how to do it better, in ways which understand the digital political conjuncture and the opportunities it contains. The force and meaning of political critique is found only in its effects