Automatic detection and classification of head movements in face-to-face conversations

This paper presents an approach to automatic head movement detection and classification in data from a corpus of video-recorded face-toface conversations in Danish involving 12 different speakers. A number of classifiers were trained with different combinations of visual, acoustic and word features and tested in a leave-one-out cross validation scenario. The visual movement features were extracted from the raw video data using OpenPose, the acoustic ones from the sound files using Praat, and the word features from the transcriptions. The best results were obtained by a Multilayer Perceptron classifier, which reached an average 0.68 F1 score across the 12 speakers for head movement detection, and 0.40 for head movement classification given four different classes. In both cases, the classifier outperformed a simple most frequent class baseline, a more advanced baseline only relying on velocity features, and linear classifiers using different combinations of featurespeer-reviewe

Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising

This paper argues that there has been a significant shift in advertising representations of women in recent years, such that rather than being presented as passive objects of the male gaze, young women in adverts are now frequently depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful. This analysis examines contemporary constructions of female sexual agency in advertisements examining three recognizable ‘figures’: the young, heterosexually desiring ‘midriff’, the vengeful woman set on punishing her partner or ex partner for his transgressions, and the ‘hot lesbian’, almost always entwined with her beautiful Other or double. Using recent examples of adverts the paper asks how this apparent ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’ should be understood. Drawing on accounts of the incorporation or recuperation of feminist ideas in advertising the paper takes a critical approach to these representations, examining their exclusions, their constructions of gender relations and heteronormativity, and the way power is figured within them. A feminist poststructuralist approach is used to interrogate the way in which ‘sexual agency’ becomes a form of regulation in these adverts, that requires the re-moulding of feminine subjectivity to fit the current postfeminist, neoliberal moment in which young women should not only be beautiful but sexy, sexually knowledgeable/practised and always ‘up for it’. The paper makes an original contribution to debates about representations of gender in advertising, to poststructuralist analyses about the contemporary operation of power, and to writing about female ‘sexual agency’ by suggesting that ‘voice’ or ‘agency’ may not be the solution to the ‘missing discourse of female desire' but may in fact be a technology of discipline and regulation

How suitable are TED talks for academic listening?

To investigate the suitability of TED talks for academic listening in EAP contexts, this research paper compares Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) representation (Gardner & Davies, 2014), lexical density, and speech rate in a TED talk corpus and a lecture discourse corpus, which were both compiled for this study. 28 lecture series (727 lectures total) and 49 TED talks were analysed for AVL representation. TED talks were found to have lower AVL representation than the university lectures (t(75) = 4.95, p < 0.0001). 43 one-minute samples from the Lecture Discourse Corpus and 47 one-minute samples from the TED Talk Corpus were analysed for lexical density, where no differences were found; and speech rate, which was found to be significantly faster in TED talks, in terms of syllables per second (t(98) = 4.23, p < 0.0001) and words per minute (t(98) = 4.20, p < 0.0001). A negative correlation was found between lexical density and syllables per second in the lecture discourse corpus (r = −0.343, p < 0.05), where none was found in the TED talk corpus (r = −0.031, ns), perhaps due to TED talks being a scripted genre. It is concluded that TED talk variation enables a range of academic listening applications