On Multi-Relational Link Prediction with Bilinear Models

We study bilinear embedding models for the task of multi-relational link prediction and knowledge graph completion. Bilinear models belong to the most basic models for this task, they are comparably efficient to train and use, and they can provide good prediction performance. The main goal of this paper is to explore the expressiveness of and the connections between various bilinear models proposed in the literature. In particular, a substantial number of models can be represented as bilinear models with certain additional constraints enforced on the embeddings. We explore whether or not these constraints lead to universal models, which can in principle represent every set of relations, and whether or not there are subsumption relationships between various models. We report results of an independent experimental study that evaluates recent bilinear models in a common experimental setup. Finally, we provide evidence that relation-level ensembles of multiple bilinear models can achieve state-of-the art prediction performance

Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin

This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke\u27s film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek\u27s theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China\u27s post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country\u27s sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators of violence but as xia, knights-errant, who demonstrate a precious spirit of rebellion that the contemporary ethos tends to lack. Focusing on often overlooked emotional experiences, Jia offers a humanist insight into the depths of these people\u27s despair, isolation and humiliation. Jia, thereby, makes his film a poignant critique of the dominant ideology that pushes neoliberal development regardless of its human costs

Displaced in the Simulacrum: Migrant Workers and Urban Space in The World

The article examines the construction of the World Expo Garden in Shanghai in 2010, in relation to Jia Zhangke’s 2004 film The World. It argues that during the process of large-scale demolition and reconstruction involved in the creation of the World Expo Garden, one cannot ignore the numerous migrant workers who swarmed into the city and contributed tremendously to the completion of one project after another. This article argues that in spite of their pivotal role in providing cheap labor to rebuild the city, migrant workers have not been afforded any space in the spectacular tapestry of Shanghai. This article examines how Jia Zhangke’s film is of particular interest to the investigation of the crisscross of migrant workers and the cityscape, and argues that The World is not so much a showcase of the cosmopolitan city of Beijing than an internal perspective of the city beneath the veneer of its prosperity

Trauma, Migrant families, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Last Train Home

This paper examines the traumatic experience of migrant workers through a reading of Lixin Fan\u27s award-winning documentary film Last Train Home(2009). I am not primarily concerned, like most trauma-studies-based research, with grand, clearly recognizable catastrophes. I also avoid generalizing about human suffering in the age of global capitalism. I focus rather on post-Socialist China\u27s more hidden social violence and its traumatizing effect on the quotidian life of migrantworkers-a subaltern group on the periphery of society. I argue that the trauma of the marginalized population must be socially and politically contextualized. The first section of the essay investigates the traumatic sense of homelessness suffered by the film\u27s migrant family. I show how the family members\u27 loss of home is due to both the alienating capitalist mode of production and the cunning hukou system that turns migrant workers into a perpetually floating population. The second part concentrates on the painful intergenerational chasm. Here I argue that the father-daughter strife is a symptom, not just of the clash between modernity and tradition but of the falsehood maintained by neoliberal discourse. Neoliberalnarratives of education and consumption construct fantasies such as that of mobility and freedom, subsuming migrant laborers within the nation\u27s capitalist economy and trapping them in a prison of unrealizable hopes. The film ultimately exposes and critiques the state-capital alliance that controls and deprives migrant workers through its economic, political and epistemic strategies

Heterogeneous Time and Space: Han Shaogong’s Rethinking of Chinese Modernity

This article is set against the post-Mao official discourse on modernity, in which the conceptualization of a homogeneous, progressive time dominates the public consciousness. The focus is on Han Shaogong, one of the most important writers and cultural theorists in contemporary China, and on how he imagines a heterogeneous spatiotemporality away from the centralized and teleological paradigm. Han’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of time and space puts the homogenized, Hegelian-Marxist, developmentalist logic at the core of China’s modernization project into question. The article begins by examining how the linear and evolutionary concept of time has determined the perception of history and reality in modern China. It then moves to an exegesis of Han’s famous literary treatise “The Roots of Literature,” illustrating how Han’s insistence on tracing multiple roots rather than one singular Root challenges the monocultural, essentialized notion of Chineseness that prevails hegemonically in the discussion of Chinese modernity. The last section analyzes Han’s “Homecoming,” a story centered on an educated youth’s compulsive return to the village where he was rusticated. Moving beyond the conventional interpretation of identity crisis, the present study illuminates a different sense of time toward which Han gestures—a multi-directional and displaced temporality, to which the unconscious and the repressed both claim access

Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin

This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke\u27s film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek\u27s theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China\u27s post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country\u27s sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators of violence but as xia, knights-errant, who demonstrate a precious spirit of rebellion that the contemporary ethos tends to lack. Focusing on often overlooked emotional experiences, Jia offers a humanist insight into the depths of these people\u27s despair, isolation and humiliation. Jia, thereby, makes his film a poignant critique of the dominant ideology that pushes neoliberal development regardless of its human costs

Remapping Emotion and Desire: Same-Sex Romance in Ah Cheng\u27s The King of Chess

This article examines the representation of emotion and desire in Ah Cheng\u27s The King of Chess (Qi wang). The interpretation of The King of Chess has been oriented toward an allegorical reading that revolves around grand cultural concepts, such as aesthetics, Taoist tradition, cultural consciousness, and national identity. In this paradigm of reading, the literary text has largely become a footnote of the master narrative of China\u27s cultural reconstruction of the 1980s. Following the recent interpretative turn of this story from cultural to existential and from allegorical to corporeal, the article extends to yet another domain, that of emotion, intimacy, and desire, which is rarely addressed but crucial to further understanding the text. My analysis illuminates an account of same-sex romance in this novella. In analyzing the homoerotic narrative, this article explores how Ah Cheng\u27s writing constitutes a counter-narrative to some dominant ideas concerning the world of emotion and desire under Maoism. Transcending the overfamiliar double image of either the political passion of activists or the emotional distress of underdogs, Ah Cheng\u27s work calls for a rethinking of the domain of emotion and desire of that era in diverse forms, especially the nonconventional ones that may have existed but have been ruled out. The discourse of same-sex romance in Ah Cheng\u27s The King of Chess ultimately delivers a subtle criticism of the Cultural Revolution whose hyperbolically political grand narratives facilely dismissed human desire into subtraction, abstraction, and disposal