How Documentary Poetry Imagines

As we face the end of the post-modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the preceding decades of postmodernity can be seen to have led to a widespread underappreciation of reading and writing poetry in general. If we want to say that poetry is necessary in the world, how should literary scholars and writers defend its value? The value of reading and writing poetry owes to its socio-political efficacy. This research will highlight how poetry can be political through exploring the works of three documentary poets: Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, and Claudia Rankine. The goal is to refute the popular denunciation of documentary poetry that it is simply the mimesis of the real world. This common rejection is derived from a reductive view of its characteristic reproduction of documents or statements not produced by the poet. Drawing upon the idea of the imagination that William Carlos Williams conceptualizes in Spring and All and his documentary poetics in Paterson, this thesis will argue that the three poets’ works are located in the tradition of his poetics. Exploring that tradition, this thesis will underline how poetry can be political and how it can collaborate with other media. Through showing how documents and lyrics provide poetic sources of imagination while collaborating with photography and film, this research highlights the socio-political impacts that documentary poetry has

Learning to Rank Question-Answer Pairs using Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder with Latent Topic Clustering

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural architecture for ranking candidate answers, that adapts a hierarchical recurrent neural network and a latent topic clustering module. With our proposed model, a text is encoded to a vector representation from an word-level to a chunk-level to effectively capture the entire meaning. In particular, by adapting the hierarchical structure, our model shows very small performance degradations in longer text comprehension while other state-of-the-art recurrent neural network models suffer from it. Additionally, the latent topic clustering module extracts semantic information from target samples. This clustering module is useful for any text related tasks by allowing each data sample to find its nearest topic cluster, thus helping the neural network model analyze the entire data. We evaluate our models on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus and consumer electronic domain question answering dataset, which is related to Samsung products. The proposed model shows state-of-the-art results for ranking question-answer pairs.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted as a conference paper at NAACL 201

On the enumeration of rooted trees with fixed size of maximal decreasing trees

Let \T_{n} be the set of rooted labeled trees on $\set{0,...,n}$. A maximal decreasing subtree of a rooted labeled tree is defined by the maximal subtree from the root with all edges being decreasing. In this paper, we study a new refinement \T_{n,k} of \T_n, which is the set of rooted labeled trees whose maximal decreasing subtree has $k+1$ vertices.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure

A Generalized Enumeration of Labeled Trees and Reverse Pr\"ufer Algorithm

A {\em leader} of a tree $T$ on $[n]$ is a vertex which has no smaller descendants in $T$. Gessel and Seo showed \sum_{T \in \mathcal{T}_n}u^\text{(# of leaders in $T$)} c^\text{(degree of 1 in $T$)}=u P_{n-1}(1,u,cu), which is a generalization of Cayley formula, where $\mathcal{T}_n$ is the set of trees on $[n]$ and $$P_n(a,b,c)=c\prod_{i=1}^{n-1}(ia+(n-i)b+c).$$ Using a variation of Pr\"ufer code which is called a {\em RP-code}, we give a simple bijective proof of Gessel and Seo's formula.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

How Postmodernist Poetry Imagines

The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that, in establishing themselves as public intellectuals, poets writing since the turn of the twenty-first century have restored the referentiality of language in poetry. Thus, the thesis challenges and complicates postmodernist treatments of language that insist on the infinite regression of meaning, as have, for example, the Language poets. As the Language poets, feminists, queer theorists, and other post-Derridean theorists began to challenge the meaning of language in the last third or so of the twentieth century, they devalued the referential relationship between words and the world. Taking the Kantian sense of productive imagination as a restorative method for the significance of language in poetry, the thesis will contest the postmodernist treatment of language by illustrating that contemporary poets share a vision of poetry as a medium for rejuvenating language and, subsequently, have been performing as public intellectuals in the twenty-first century. In order to make this argument, the thesis begins with postmodernist poetry’s debt to Derridean deconstruction and explains how we can reclaim the referentiality of language in poetry. The poets studied in the body of this thesis—Natasha Trethewey and Raúl Zurita—extend a strong tradition of poetry that refers directly and explicit to socio-economic realities, engaging with a globalized economy, and with culture and politics around the world. Furthermore, the thesis shows how such poets have recuperated rhetoric as central to contemporary poetry