Flexicurity as a Policy Agenda

Arbeitsmarktpolitik, Arbeitsmarktflexibilisierung, Arbeitnehmerschutz, Ideologie, Wirtschaftspolitische Wirkungsanalyse, Welt, Flexicurity, Labour market policy, Labour market flexibility, Employment protection legislation, Ideology, Economic policy analysis, World

Learning Contextual Bandits in a Non-stationary Environment

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually assume a stationary reward distribution, which hardly holds in practice as users' preferences are dynamic. This inevitably costs a recommender system consistent suboptimal performance. In this paper, we consider the situation where the underlying distribution of reward remains unchanged over (possibly short) epochs and shifts at unknown time instants. In accordance, we propose a contextual bandit algorithm that detects possible changes of environment based on its reward estimation confidence and updates its arm selection strategy respectively. Rigorous upper regret bound analysis of the proposed algorithm demonstrates its learning effectiveness in such a non-trivial environment. Extensive empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets for recommendation confirm its practical utility in a changing environment.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, To appear on ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 201

From context to contextualization

It seems to be a cornmon-place enough statement to note that language depends on context. For example, under the notion of deixis, certain linguistic structures (i.e., deictics like I, here, or now) show a dependence on context that is thought to be essential. However, the relationship between language and context is far from clear and has been the centre of a debate which has gained mornenturn over the past ten years. The controversy begins with the question of how much in language and which parts of it are context-dependent, but it also, and perhaps more s~bstantiall~, includes the question of how the relationship between language and context should be conceptualized in more theoretical terms. In this paper, 1 will follow some lines of argument of this debate. 1 will start with the traditional notion of context-in-language and show that it is too restrictive by listing linguistic structures beyond deixis which must be interpreted with reference to context in order to be understood properly. 1 will also give a typology of contextual elements (Le., co-textual features, physical surroundings of the speech situation, social situation, participants common background knowledge and the channel or mediurn) which may play a role in understanding. In the second part of the paper, 1 will deal with the context-text link and 1 will try to show that the notion of contextualization is superior to that of context-Apendence to account in an adequate theoretical and empirical way for this link

Anmerkungen zum Salienzbegriff in der Soziolinguistik

In this paper I argue that the psychological notion of salience should be kept strictly apart from its causes and effects (on language change or language accommodation). I further argue that we should distinguish between physiological, cognitive and sociolinguistic factors contributing to salience. Finally, it is argued that salience based on social stereotyping is the best predictor of change and accommodation, but needs to be supported by the right evaluation of the salient feature in order to have an effect

Flexicurity as a Policy Agenda

International audienceThis paper looks at Flexicurity as a European policy agenda among others

Implikative Universalien, linguistische Prinzipien und Sprachtypologie / J.C.P. Auer, Wilfried Kuhn

Wir wollen in diesem Aufsatz die Möglichkeiten typologischer Forschung prüfen, die sich aus Greenbergs Aufsatz "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements" ergeben. Greenbergs primäres Interesse ist nicht typologisch, sondern an der Universalienforschung orientiert. Er ermittelt aus einem 'sample' von 30 Sprachen 45 implikative Universalien der allgemeinen Form V(x) [A(x) → B(x)], wobei A und B beliebige sprachliche Merkmale sind und über die Menge aller Sprachen x quantifiziert wird. Überdies versucht Greenberg die relativ große Zahl von implikativen Universalien unter eine kleine Zahl von sog. Prinzipien ('principles') zu subsummieren, die allgemeine Bauprinzipien von Sprachen darstellen sollen und so Erklärungscharakter für die empirisch gewonnenen Universalien haben. Typologie wird von Greenberg zunächst nur in einem klassifizierenden Sinn verstanden; die Verteilung der untersuchten Merkmale in der Stichprobe von 30 Sprachen klassifiziert diese in solche, in denen das Merkmal anzutreffen ist und solche, in denen es nicht anzutreffen ist. Im folgenden wird zu zeigen sein, daß darüber hinaus auch auf der Ebene der Universalien und der Ebene der Prinzipien typologische Ansätze möglich sind