Charities’ new non-financial reporting requirements: preparers’ insights

The purpose of this paper is to obtain insights from preparers on the new Performance Report requirements for New Zealand charities, in particular the non-financial information included in the ‘Entity Information’ section and the ‘Statement of Service Performance’ for Tier 3 and 4 charities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 interviewees, each involved with governance and reporting of one or more Tier 3 or Tier 4 charities. These interviews were analysed in terms of accountability and legitimacy objectives, which motivated the regulators to introduce the new reporting regime. Key findings are summarised under three themes. Manageability relates to perceptions and suggestions regarding implementation of the new requirements. Scepticism concerns some doubts raised by interviewees regarding the motivations for performance reports and the extent to which they will be used. Effects include concerns about potentially losing good charities and volunteers due to new requirements making their work ‘too hard’, although increased focus on outcomes creates the potential for continuous improvement. The subjectivity that is inherent in thematic analysis is acknowledged and also that multiple themes may sometimes be present in the sentences and paragraphs analysed. We acknowledge too that early viewpoints may change over time. Themes identified may assist regulators, professional bodies and support groups to respond to the views of preparers. Findings will also be of interest to parties in other jurisdictions who are considering the implementation of similar initiatives. This paper provides early insights on new reporting requirements entailing significant changes for New Zealand charities for financial periods beginning on or after April 2015. The focus is on small charities (97% of all New Zealand charities) and key aspects of the Performance Report: Entity information and the Statement of Service Performance.fals

Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue

One of the biggest challenges in the development and deployment of spoken dialogue systems is the design of the spoken language generation module. This challenge arises from the need for the generator to adapt to many features of the dialogue domain, user population, and dialogue context. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge that is automatically adapted to the features of interest, such as the application domain, individual user, or user group. In this paper we present and evaluate a trainable sentence planner for providing restaurant information in the MATCH dialogue system. We show that trainable sentence planning can produce complex information presentations whose quality is comparable to the output of a template-based generator tuned to this domain. We also show that our method easily supports adapting the sentence planner to individuals, and that the individualized sentence planners generally perform better than models trained and tested on a population of individuals. Previous work has documented and utilized individual preferences for content selection, but to our knowledge, these results provide the first demonstration of individual preferences for sentence planning operations, affecting the content order, discourse structure and sentence structure of system responses. Finally, we evaluate the contribution of different feature sets, and show that, in our application, n-gram features often do as well as features based on higher-level linguistic representations

Afghan Decision-Making in a Development Context

Numerous theories exist showing the relationship between stress and decision-making strategies. Conflict Theory, as expressed by Mann et al. (1997) explains that when facing a major decision, individuals will respond to the stress of that decision by using one of four decision-making strategies: vigilance, buckpassing, procrastination, and hypervigilance. In matching Conflict Theory with the cultural scales proposed by Hofstede (2001), the decision-making strategies of buckpassing and procrastination are preferred by individuals from collectivist cultures in contrast to people from individualistic cultures. The current study used Mann’s Melbourne Decision-Making Questionnaire in the context of Afghanistan. This research is pertinent given the significant amount of aid and development resources spent on Afghanistan in the last two decades. It was hypothesized that Afghan men would show greater decision-making self-confidence than Afghan women. It was also hypothesized that Afghans from the Pashtun tribal group would prefer to use more collectivist decision-making strategies when compared to Afghans who belong to other tribal groups. Afghan men and women were found to be equally confident in decision-making confidence, while Pashtuns were found to prefer collectivist decision-making strategies when compared to non-Pashtun Afghans. Keywords: Decision-making, Collectivist, Individualist, Afghanistan, Pashtun, Melbourne Decision-Making Questionnaire, Culture Theory, Conflict Theor

L’Australie : Le déclin relatif de l’agriculture depuis 1970

The present article begins by describing the institutionnal framework of Australian agriculture, recent aspects of evolution in agricultural production, exports, costs and in comes. Ii shows how since 1967 agricultural policy is becoming more and more selective, while at the same time its influence on economic policy is decreasing. This change is attributed to industrialization of the country and to the growing participation of agriculture in the international market. This new form of growth, even less than the old one, cannot solve the issue of rural poverty in Australia nor that of hunger in the world

Finding common ground: towards a surface realisation shared task

In many areas of NLP reuse of utility tools such as parsers and POS taggers is now common, but this is still rare in NLG. The subfield of surface realisation has perhaps come closest, but at present we still lack a basis on which different surface realisers could be compared, chiefly because of the wide variety of different input representations used by different realisers. This paper outlines an idea for a shared task in surface realisation, where inputs are provided in a common-ground representation formalism which participants map to the types of input required by their system. These inputs are derived from existing annotated corpora developed for language analysis (parsing etc.). Outputs (realisations) are evaluated by automatic comparison against the human-authored text in the corpora as well as by human assessors