Digital Commons Network^™

A Contribution To The Critique Of Irish Sociology., Chris O'Ralaigh

Articles

Irish society is situated within a period of epoch-defining social change. We are facing in to a short number of decades, which promise the significant re-shaping of the political and social contours of our nation. Irish sociology's disciplinary mandate is to analyse that change, yet a historical debate has found new expression – heightened by the 30th anniversary of the Irish Journal of Sociology (IJS) and the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) – as to whether the discipline is utilising the appropriate means to achieve its ends. The current sociological division of labour …

Stories To Challenge The Status Quo - Experiences Of Black Minority Ethnic Social Care Students In Ireland, Margaret Fingleton

Doctoral

This study examines Black Minority Ethnic social care students’ experiences in Ireland and is located within the parameters of a number of key global events that occurred in the last decade. It provides critical insights into the students lived experiences of migration, resettlement, employment, higher education and social care scholarship.

Theoretically the thesis is grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) drawing on the key tenets of race as a social construction, interest convergence, White privilege, storytelling and intersectionality. A participatory research methodology was adopted which informed all phases of the study. Using a combined semi-structured interview/storytelling method the experiences of …

Structured Dialogue State Management For Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems, Anh Duong Trinh

Doctoral

Human-machine conversational agents have developed at a rapid pace in recent years, bolstered through the application of advanced technologies such as deep learning. Today, dialogue systems are useful in assisting users in various activities, especially task-oriented dialogue systems in specific dialogue domains. However, they continue to be limited in many ways. Arguably the biggest challenge lies in the complexity of natural language and interpersonal communication, and the lack of human context and knowledge available to these systems. This leads to the question of whether dialogue systems, and in particular task-oriented dialogue systems, can be enhanced to leverage various language properties. …

Towards An Improved Understanding Of The Concept Of Style And Its Implications For Textual Style Transfer, Somayeh Jafaritazehjani

Doctoral

The concept of linguistic style denotes that many aspects of text can vary while maintaining a same source core semantic meaning. For example, a message may be written in a formal or informal style. The textual style transfer problem aims at generating a paraphrase of a given text by modifying its style while preserving its content. To the best of our knowledge, within the literature on textual style transfer, there is no standard widely accepted definition of the concept of style. Moreover, very few works have investigated the characteristics of language styles. Therefore, previous research, as far as our knowledge …

Working Paper Part 1 : The Very First Pilgrimage - An Inspired Trajectory Out Of Africa, Ian S. Mcintosh

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

One hundred thousand years ago, give or take, the forebears of some of Australia’s First Nations—by some accounts as few as 150 people—left Africa on an immense journey. After some 2,000 generations, the passage through new and unfamiliar territories of these first modern human beings terminated in a supercontinent that included Australia, Papua, and Tasmania. By some estimates, no more than 150 people—the same number that had originally left Africa—made the final sea crossing that separates Indonesia and Australia. Research on such ancient migrations emphasises population growth, the ‘selfish gene,’ and the territorial imperative, as key drivers of mobility. This …

A Semi-Autoethnographical Account Of The Order Of Malta’S Annual Pilgrimage To Lourdes, Dane Munro Km

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, has been a pilgrimage site since 1858. At present, about six million Roman Catholic pilgrims and others visit Lourdes every year. During the annual weeklong pilgrimage of the Order of St John, an average of about 7,500 participants from 45 countries, including 380 doctors, nurses and pharmacists, 250 priests and other volunteers, are nursing and caring for 1,500 malades (the sick and suffering). This semi-autoethnographical account is based on many years of visitation as a member of the Order of St John and describes the various changes of a political and societal nature, while the …

Emotions At The Border: Verbal Aspects Of The Attari-Wagah Patriotic Pilgrimage, Anna V. Bochkovskaya

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

For over sixty years the Attari-Wagah checkpoint at the border between India and Pakistan has been a site for the Beating Retreat, a colorful ceremony of lowering the national flags performed jointly by the Indian Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers. This emotional ritual is generally perceived as a demonstration of aggressive designs, on the one hand, and as a symbol of goodwill and possible cooperation between neighbouring countries, on the other.

In recent decades visiting/viewing the border (sīmā darśan) has become an essential part of tourist packages for travellers in North-West India, while the notion of ‘patriotic pilgrimage’ …

The Pilgrimage To The Grand Magal In Ṭūbā, Senegal, Tahar Abbou

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The Grand Magal in Ṭūbā, in Senegal is the third biggest religious event in the Muslim community after the pilgrimage to the mausoleum of Imam al-Hussayn in Karbala, Iraq and the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. This paper deals with the pilgrimage to Ṭūbā that celebrates the life and teachings of Shaykh Amadou Bamba, the founder of the Sufi Murīdiyya Brotherhood. The event takes place on the 18th of Safar, the second month in the Islamic lunar calendar. Murīds (novices committed to spiritual enlightenment), pilgrims, and visitors from over the world descend onto the city of Ṭūbā to visit the …

Transfer Of Personality Through Text Style, Michael O'Mahony, Robert Ross

Other resources

The style of generated text is how something is said rather than what is said. We hypothesize that changing the style of generated text can change the perceived personality of the text generation agent. Dialogue systems that aim to imitate a human agent can appear to have a consistent personality through a consistent, controllable style of conversation. Some recent work on the style of generated text [1] performs impressively in the small number of domains selected for their experiments using transformer and LSTM-based models. Lin et al. [1] used weak supervised learning as their data set lacks parallel data. The …

Identity Term Sampling For Measuring Gender Bias In Training Data, Nasim Sobhani, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference Papers

Predictions from machine learning models can reflect biases in the data on which they are trained. Gender bias has been identified in natural language processing systems such as those used for recruitment. The development of approaches to mitigate gender bias in training data typically need to be able to isolate the effect of gender on the output to see the impact of gender. While it is possible to isolate and identify gender for some types of training data, e.g. CVs in recruitment, for most textual corpora there is no obvious gender label. This paper proposes a general approach to measure …

Employer Collaboration In Developing Graduate Employability: A Pilot Study In Ireland, Miriam O'Regan, Aiden Carthy, Colm Mcguiness, Philip Owende

Articles

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact on student work readiness outcomes of collaboration with employers in developing and delivering tailored graduate employability workshops in socioemotional skills for work (SES4Work).

Design/methodology/approach – Framed by the CareerEDGE model of graduate employability, the authors piloted a five-session module for near graduates in five disciplines. The research included an online employer survey (n 5 128), employer interviews (n 5 21) and tailored workshops for near graduates, culminating in a mock competency-based interview. Using a pre/post-test design, participants (n 5 24) also completed the CareerEDGE Employability Development Profile (EDP) …

Pilgrimage Sites As Magnets Of Interfaith Tolerance: The Case Of Kemaliq Lingsar In Indonesia, Suhadah Suhadah, Deddy Mulyana, Pawit M. Yusup, Nuryah A. Sjafirah

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study aims to reveal the practices of tolerance between the adherents of Islam and Hinduism when they were engaged in worship at Kemaliq Lingsar, a sacred religious site which is used as a pilgrimage site where both parties pray and perform religious tourism and rituals. Drawing on the interpretive approach, this study found the wisdom of the two religious communities in Lingsar Village, West Lombok Regency, Indonesia. This area exhibits unique strategies for sharing the same pilgrimage site: two communities performing their respective rituals in turn and in unison in the same space with complete understanding. This tolerance practiced …

Masculinities And Affective Equality; The Case Of Professional Caring, Niall Hanlon

Articles

Critical studies of men and masculinities [CSMM] aim to advance gender equality by critiquing and deconstructing male hegemony and hegemonic masculinities. Although the implicit value of gender equality is clear in CSMM generally, the conceptualization of equality is frequently vague, implied, and lacks conceptual definition. The problem is compounded in caring masculinities studies which additionally often lack engagement with critical feminist and other socio-political perspectives on caring. These shortcomings hide the complex interrelation of different dimensions to inequality as they intersect with multiple relational identities. Caring practices are also complex having distinct phases that engage different forms of labour within …

Is Neuro-Symbolic Ai Meeting Its Promises In Natural Language Processing? A Structured Review, Kyle Hamilton, Kyle Hamilton, Aparna Nayak, Bojan Bozic, Luca Longo

Articles

Advocates for Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (NeSy) assert that combining deep learning with symbolic reasoning will lead to stronger AI than either paradigm on its own. As successful as deep learning has been, it is generally accepted that even our best deep learning systems are not very good at abstract reasoning. And since reasoning is inextricably linked to language, it makes intuitive sense that Natural Language Processing (NLP), would be a particularly well-suited candidate for NeSy. We conduct a structured review of studies implementing NeSy for NLP, with the aim of answering the question of whether NeSy is indeed meeting its …

An Overview Of Tour-Guide Training Literature In Türkiye, Nazım Çokişler

International Journal of Tour Guiding and Visitor Attraction Research

The discussion of tour-guide training, which started in the 1990s in Türkiye has been taken up in the associated literature more than in any other country. No studies were previously carried out, however, to place the nearly-30-year-prolonged discussions in a historical framework and evaluate them. Yet, understanding the evolution of such training-related discussions has the potential to lead to remarkably useful information for future analyses of the subject. The purpose of the present research is to provide an overall evaluation of the literature about tourguide training in Türkiye. To this end, the literature was reviewed, and the issues addressed as …

Evaluating Large Delay Estimation Techniques For Assisted Living Environments, Swarnadeep Bagchi, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

Abstract Phase wraparound due to large inter-sensor spacings in multi-channel demixing limits the range of relative delays that many time–frequency relative delay estimators can estimate. The performance of a large relative delay estimation method, called the elevatogram, is evaluated in the presence of significant phase wraparound. This paper compares the elevatogram with the popular relative delay estimator used in DUET and the brute-force approach in D-AdRess and analyses its computational efficiency. The elevatogram can accurately estimate relative delays of speech signals of up to 800 samples, whereas DUET and D-AdRess were limited to delays of 7 and 35 samples, given …

Changes In The Development Of Social Policy In A Small Island Economy: Malta, Rose Marie Azzopardi, Joseph Azzopardi Dr, Maximilian Bonnici

International Journal of Islands Research

This paper analyses the development of social policies in Malta, with a particular focus on events which have impacted on the country’s growth and subsequently on its social security system and policies involving housing, health, education migration and employment. In recent decades, with costs to sustain an ever-growing web of social services becoming more demanding, governments have tried to encourage more self-help and to lessen the heavy dependence on aid structures within the system, pushed at times by recommendations from regional and international institutions. The smaller the economy the more open it is likely to be. Consequently, it is impacted …

A Framework For Sexism Detection On Social Media Via Byt5 And Tabnet, Arjumand Younus, Muhammad Atif Qureshi

Articles

Hateful and offensive content on social media platforms particularly content directed towards a specific gender is a great impediment towards equality, diversity and inclusion. Social media platforms are facing increasing pressure to work towards regulation of such content; and this has directed researchers in text mining to work towards hate speech identification algorithms. One such attempt is sexism detection for which mostly transformer-based text methods have been proposed. We propose a combination of byte-level model ByT5 with tabular modeling via TabNet that has at its core an ability to take into account platform and language aspects of the challenging task …

Relational Justice And Relational Pedagogy In Professional Social Care Work, Niall Hanlon

Articles

The principle of social justice is central to the newly regulated profession of Social Care Worker [SCW] in Ireland and the language of social justice features in the Standards of Proficiency [SoP] and Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics [CPCE]. This is very welcome given the history of institutional neglect and abuse in Irish social care. However, social care work in Ireland lacks a tradition of social justice in theory and practice, and policy is generally couched in minimalist terms of individual civil and political rights, equality of opportunity, and non-discrimination and is heavily focused on protection and risk management. …

Acoustic Source Localization Using Straight Line Approximations, Swarnadeep Bagchi, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

The short paper extends an acoustic signal delay estimation method to general anechoic scenario using image processing techniques. The technique proposed in this paper localizes acoustic speech sources by creating a matrix of phase versus frequency histograms, where the same phases are stacked in appropriate bins. With larger delays and multiple sources coexisting in the same matrix, it becomes cluttered with activated bins. This results in high intensity spots on the spectrogram, making source discrimination difficult. In this paper, we have employed morphological filtering, chain-coding and straight line approximations to ignore noise and enhance the target signal features. Lastly, Hough …

Dialogue Policies For Confusion Mitigation In Situated Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

Articles

Confusion is a mental state triggered by cognitive disequilibrium that can occur in many types of task-oriented interaction, including Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). People may become confused while interacting with robots due to communicative or even task-centred challenges. To build a smooth and engaging HRI, it is insufficient for an agent to simply detect confusion; instead, the system should aim to mitigate the situation. In light of this, in this paper, we present our approach to a linguistic design of dialogue policies to build a dialogue framework to alleviate interlocutor confusion. We also outline our sketch and discuss challenges with respect …

Knowledge Management Intellectual Capital, Lidia Gabalova

Books

The aim of this monograph is to bring to the attention of the Bulgarian reader new knowledge crucial to the strategic management of organisations in the conditions of knowledge-based economy. The monograph summarises over a decade of experience and considerable research in this field undertaken in Bulgaria, Scotland and Finland.

The Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital book reviews the historical development of knowledge management and intellectual capital theory and presents fundamental concepts, models, tools and substantial body of knowledge in these parallel research fields to the reader. The monograph makes an in-depth comparative analysis of key concepts and research frameworks, …

Writing Problems And Student Retention: A Quantitative Study Into Contemplation Of Withdrawal Among Undergraduate University Students In Ireland, Irina Ruppo

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This paper examines the results of a quantitative study of the relationship between problems with academic writing and undergraduate student retention. In spite of the evidence that writing problems may affect student attrition, problems with academic writing are not listed as a separate factor in most retention models. Consequently, academic writing is not usually singled out in interventions designed to address student attrition. However, it is possible that the absence of writing issues in retention models is due to the predominant view of writing as a single element within academic studies as opposed to a complex and multi-modal process, involving …

Of Pails And Buckets, Boxes And Bags, Peter Hertzmann

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

During the Second Industrial Revolution in America, the population shifted from being mostly rural to slightly more than half urban. Along with rearrangement came the situation that non-farm workers could no longer return home at midday to eat their dinner. The average laborer needed to carry his dinner with him to his worksite. The dinner pail (or dinner bucket) made this possible. As time progressed, dinner supplanted supper as the evening meal. Lunch became the noon meal. Likewise, the lunch box (lunch pail, lunch bucket, or lunch bag) replaced the dinner pail as the means of conveyance for the meal. …

Food On The Move: Peristalsis In James Joyce’S Ulysses, Flicka Small

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

James Joyce had an exceptional interest in the physiological or normal functions of the body. This is a gastro-critical reading of the journey that food takes from tongue to gut and beyond in Ulysses, Joyce’s modernist novel written and published in Paris, 100 years ago this year, on February 2, 1922 (1998).

Olive Oil And Movement, Moving Olive Oil, Anne Meneley

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper addresses several themes in the movement of olive oil. Although it is not often discussed in medico-scientific terms like “peristalsis”, olive oil was and is consumed as a morning shot in many parts of the Mediterranean, to encourage swift and efficient digestive trajectories through the body. It is one of the stars of ancient agriculture, and is still revered as a product capable of capturing a “local” identity, so much so that every olive grower seems to claim their own olive oil is the best. While an icon of “traditional” food, lower grade olive oil was also used …

Is The Language Of Wine Broken?, Richie Brady

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

According to Esther Mobley, wine writer of the San Francisco Chronicle, and other speakers at the 2021 Professional Wine Writers Symposium, the language of wine is broken. Accusations of classism, Eurocentrism, colonialism, racism, sexism and being exclusionary are levelled against it. This paper will review the difficulties of describing wine in English, the movements between differing styles of describing wine since the early twentieth century and the above accusations. It will also consider whether the language of wine is, in fact, broken.

Relish, Condiment, “Kitchen”: Bastions Of Irish Food Practice For Fourteen Hundred Years, John D. Mulcahy

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

In his 2016 book “Early Irish Farming”, Kelly notes that we are blessed with a large amount of information about the food eaten by the early Irish and how it was cooked. He relies on that which resides in the Old Irish texts, especially the law-texts and sagas. Kelly’s sources make it clear that our core staple diet was bread and milk, supplemented by 'tarsunn' or “annlann” (Irish for relish, condiment), later known as “kitchen”. But what constituted a relish not only varied over the centuries but also according to who was doing the eating, so that in a rigorous …

Cé A Bhog Mo Cháis? The Celtic Origins Of Early Irish Cheese-Making, Anthony F. Buccini

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Irish cheese-making has a remarkable history. Before the current renaissance and the preceding disruption of tradition in the context of British imperialism and Atlantic World trade lay a long period during which Ireland possessed an exceptionally complex culture of dairy production which included multiple distinct cheese-types, as demonstrated by Ó Sé (1948) in his seminal article on the subject.The generic word for ‘cheese’ in Irish, cáis, so used already in Middle Irish, is derived from Latin caseus and this borrowing occurs also in Brittonic Celtic (Welsh caws) and all the West-Germanic languages (English cheese, Dutch kaas). There is strong evidence …

Uyghur Cuisine And Identity: An Historical Overview Of A Discreet Diaspora, G. Randall Mcnamara

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This work reviews aspects of the disappearing Uyghur foodways since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 due to migrations, modernization, and now, cultural genocide. Turkic interconnections of culture, trade, and resettlement through the centuries mesh tightly with the Symposium theme of food and movement. The article holds no pretense to exhaustively catalog Uyghur foods or dishes as they can vary greatly within China and even more so throughout the Uyghur communities abroad. The author spent countless time cooking in kitchens and courtyards along the Silk Road in Central Asia and much of the information in the …