1,720,976 research outputs found
MPG at DisCoTex. Predicting text coherence by treebased modelling of linguistic features
Full text linkAutomatic text coherence modelling plays a crucial role in natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, summarisation, and question answering. Moreover, text coherence is fundamental to reading comprehension and readers’ engagement, essential to a number of application domains. In this report, we report progress for the Assessing Discourse Coherence in Italian Texts task from EVALITA-23, whose goal is to address automatic coherence detection. The task was challenged by extracting linguistic features used to train a machine learning classifier, leading to minor improvement over the baseline. The feature importance analysis revealed semantic features’ relevance, providing indications for future feature engineering and modelling efforts
The supply and demand of news during COVID-19 and assessment of questionable sources production
Full text link: Misinformation threatens our societies, but little is known about how the production of news by unreliable sources relates to supply and demand dynamics. We exploit the burst of news production triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak through an Italian database partially annotated for questionable sources. We compare news supply with news demand, as captured by Google Trends data. We identify the Granger causal relationships between supply and demand for the most searched keywords, quantifying the inertial behaviour of the news supply. Focusing on COVID-19 news, we find that questionable sources are more sensitive than general news production to people's interests, especially when news supply and demand mismatched. We introduce an index assessing the level of questionable news production solely based on the available volumes of news and searches. We contend that these results can be a powerful asset in informing campaigns against disinformation and providing news outlets and institutions with potentially relevant strategies
Exploitation and exploration in text evolution. Quantifying planning and translation flows during writing
Full text linkWriting is a complex process at the center of much of modern human activity.
Despite it appears to be a linear process, writing conceals many highly
non-linear processes. Previous research has focused on three phases of writing:
planning, translation and transcription, and revision. While research has shown
these are non-linear, they are often treated linearly when measured. Here, we
introduce measures to detect and quantify subcycles of planning (exploration)
and translation (exploitation) during the writing process. We apply these to a
novel dataset that recorded the creation of a text in all its phases, from
early attempts to the finishing touches on a final version. This dataset comes
from a series of writing workshops in which, through innovative versioning
software, we were able to record all the steps in the construction of a text.
More than 60 junior researchers in science wrote a scientific essay intended
for a general readership. We recorded each essay as a writing cloud, defined as
a complex topological structure capturing the history of the essay itself.
Through this unique dataset of writing clouds, we expose a representation of
the writing process that quantifies its complexity and the writer's efforts
throughout the draft and through time. Interestingly, this representation
highlights the phases of "translation flow", where authors improve existing
ideas, and exploration, where creative deviations appear as the writer returns
to the planning phase. These turning points between translation and exploration
become rarer as the writing process progresses and the author approaches the
final version. Our results and the new measures introduced have the potential
to foster the discussion about the non-linear nature of writing and support the
development of tools that can support more creative and impactful writing
processes
Finding successful strategies in a complex urban sustainability game
No full textAbstract The adverse effects of unsustainable behaviors on human society are leading to an increasingly urgent and critical need to change policies and practices worldwide. This requires that citizens become informed and engaged in participatory governance and measures leading to sustainable futures. Citizens’ understanding of the inherent complexity of sustainable systems is a necessary (though generally not sufficient) ingredient for them to understand controversial public policies and maintain the core principles of democratic societies. In this work, we present a novel, open-ended experiment where individuals had the opportunity to solve model urban sustainability problems in a purposeful game. Participants were challenged to interact with familiar LEGO blocks representing elements in a complex generative urban economic indicators model. Players seeks to find a specific urban configuration satisfying particular sustainability requirements. We show that, despite the intrinsic complexity and non-linearity of the problems, participants’ ability to make counter-intuitive actions helps them find suitable solutions. Moreover, we show that through successive iterations of the experiment, participants can overcome the difficulties linked to non-linearity and increase the probability of finding the correct solution to the problem. We contend that this kind of what-if platforms could have a crucial role in future approaches to sustainable developments goals
On the Emergence of Syntactic Structures: Quantifying and Modeling Duality of Patterning
No full textThe complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is to address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered
Experimental tribe: a general platform for web-gamig and social computation
No full textIn the last few years the Web has been progressively acquiring the status of an in- frastructure for “social computing” that allows to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in online communities, and steer the collective user activity to- wards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web- games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. This paper introduces Experimental Tribe (ET), a novel general purpose web-based platform for social computation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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