Digital Commons Network^™

Generating Diverse And Meaningful Captions: Unsupervised Specificity Optimization For Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, Abhijit Mahalunkar, Giancarlo Salton, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Image Captioning is a task that requires models to acquire a multi-modal understanding of the world and to express this understanding in natural language text. While the state-of-the-art for this task has rapidly improved in terms of n-gram metrics, these models tend to output the same generic captions for similar images. In this work, we address this limitation and train a model that generates more diverse and specific captions through an unsupervised training approach that incorporates a learning signal from an Image Retrieval model. We summarize previous results and improve the state-of-the-art on caption diversity and novelty.

We make our …

Becoming A Decolonial Feminist Ethnographer: Addressing The Complexities Of Positionality And Representation, Jennifer Manning

Articles

Abstract Organisation and management scholars are often preoccupied with developing, refining and advancing knowledge, and in so doing, the empirical process through which knowledge is advanced can be ignored together with the impact this process can have on participants and scholars. This article draws attention to how management scholars might negotiate the complexities of positionality and representation through an illustrative case: my experience of becoming a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Drawing upon my doctoral research, I share the experience of my ethnographic journey to become a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Developing a decolonial feminist approach to ethnography enabled me to identify positionality …

The Link Between Spatial Skills And Engineering Problem-Solving, Gavin Duffy, Sheryl Sorby, Presentacion Rivera Reyes, Tom Delahunty, Lance Perez, Jayashri Ravishankar

Conference papers

Well-developed 3-D spatial skills are correlated with engineering success. However, most studies examining the link between spatial skills and engineering success have been conducted at the macro level, i.e., the link between spatial skills and course grades or between spatial skills and graduation rates. In this research, a more refined approach has been taken. Relationships between spatial skills and success in solving certain types of problems that engineering students commonly encounter are examined. It was found that high levels of spatial skills predict success in solving certain types of engineering problems but not in all types of problems. Data gathered …

A Wikipedia Powered State-Based Approach To Automatic Search Query Enhancement, Kyle Goslin, Markus Hofmann

Articles

This paper describes the development and testing of a novel Automatic Search Query Enhancement (ASQE) algorithm, the Wikipedia N Sub-state Algorithm (WNSSA), which utilises Wikipedia as the sole data source for prior knowledge. This algorithm is built upon the concept of iterative states and sub-states, harnessing the power of Wikipedia's data set and link information to identify and utilise reoccurring terms to aid term selection and weighting during enhancement. This algorithm is designed to prevent query drift by making callbacks to the user's original search intent by persisting the original query between internal states with additional selected enhancement terms. The …

Quantitative Fine-Grained Human Evaluation Of Machine Translation Systems: A Case Study On English To Croatian, Filip Klubicka, Antonio Toral, Victor Manuel Sanchez-Cartagena

Articles

This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to- Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different paradigms: pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural. First, we design an MQM-compliant error taxonomy tailored to the relevant …

Modular Mechanistic Networks: On Bridging Mechanistic And Phenomenological Models With Deep Neural Networks In Natural Language Processing, Simon Dobnik, John D. Kelleher

Books/Book chapters

Natural language processing (NLP) can be done using either top-down (theory driven) and bottom-up (data driven) approaches, which we call mechanistic and phenomenological respectively. The approaches are frequently considered to stand in opposition to each other. Examining some recent approaches in deep learning we argue that deep neural networks incorporate both perspectives and, furthermore, that leveraging this aspect of deep learning may help in solving complex problems within language technology, such as modelling language and perception in the domain of spatial cognition.

What Is Not Where: The Challenge Of Integrating Spatial Representations Into Deep Learning Architectures, John D. Kelleher, Simon Dobnik

Books/Book chapters

This paper examines to what degree current deep learning architectures for image caption generation capture spatial lan- guage. On the basis of the evaluation of examples of generated captions from the literature we argue that systems capture what objects are in the image data but not where these objects are located: the cap- tions generated by these systems are the output of a language model conditioned on the output of an object detector that cannot capture fine-grained location information. Although language models provide useful knowledge for image captions, we argue that deep learning image captioning architectures should also model geometric …

Writing In The Language Of Reality: Interwar Experiments In Language, Robin Fuller

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, Otto Neurath’s Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems. A non-arbitrary mode of communication was sought, one that represented reality directly without translation through a cultural code.

Patricide Or Mourning The Nation-State In Francis Leclerc’S Looking For Alexander, Sophie Boyer

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article examines two closely connected dimensions of Francis Leclerc’s 2004 film, Looking for Alexander: a psychoanalytical dimension and a political one. Freud’s theories on the murder of the primal violent father in his essay Totem and Taboo provide the framework for a psychoanalytical interpretation of the protagonist’s fate: Alexandre Tourneur, a veterinarian struck by amnesia, embarks on a quest for his lost identity. Facilitated by the totemic figure of the deer, the act of remembering gradually leads to a conscious awakening to the events of an abusive childhood and the crime of patricide he committed as a boy …

Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Kunst fürs Volk repositions genre painting in nineteenth-century Germany as a form of mass culture, rather than high art, to achieve new insight into the form and function of a rather tired pictorial format. Genre paintings were as commonplace at galleries and large-scale art exhibitions as they were in commercial art, and they were used to illustrate all manner of objects and ephemera. The reiteration of forms within genre paintings had become, in a sense, a ‘massification’ of artistic technique and expression, just as the images and figurative elements themselves were repeated endlessly within different media formats. To the extent …

Queer, Gender And Crime Fiction In French Studies: A Hazardous Scientific Endeavour, Andrea Hynynen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article focuses on the multifaceted challenge faced by academics doing queer and gender studies of French crime fiction. It argues that the French literary arena still entertains a sharp divide between literature and commercialist mass fiction, which hinders the establishment of popular fiction studies. It further discusses the reasons for and the effect of queer theory’s late arrival to France, arguing that France’s strong republican ideal entails a fear of ghettoization that has undermined the development of gender and queer analysis, especially of literature. These phenomena, in combination with France’s centralized, traditionalist academic institutions and linguistic franco-centrism, contribute to …

The Way We Read Now: Middlebrow Fiction In Twenty-First Century Europe, Diana Holmes

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The allocation of a novel to the category ‘middlebrow’ is partly a matter of marketing and shifting attitudes to literary value, but this article argues that it also designates certain stylistic and narrative qualities that are little esteemed by ‘serious’ critics, but appeal consistently to a wider reading public. The article focuses on one sub-category of contemporary middlebrow fiction, feminine crime, through a comparative analysis of novels by Fred Vargas (French) and Kate Atkinson (British). The argument addresses the relationship between popular and middlebrow within the genre of crime writing, and the ways in which a female perspective inflects generic …

Preface, Dominique Jeannerod, Federico Pagello, Michael Pierse

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This second issue of CALL Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language makes available a group of papers selected from the considerably larger body of work that was presented at The Cultures of Popular Culture conference, promoted by the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Modern Languages, Literary and Cultural Studies and held at Queen’s University Belfast on 13 and 14 December, 2013. The conference was the first one entirely devoted by the RIA to a subject that has become increasingly central in the field of Modern Languages as well in numerous other disciplines. If compared to the countless academic …

Reflections On A Language Planning Project In Context, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Cathy Kelleher

Articles

The aim of this paper is to reflect in broad terms on issues which arose in the context of an early years language planning project in Irish-medium preschools (naíonraí) in the Irish-speaking (Gaeltacht) areas of the west of Ireland. Borradh Language Planning Project was commissioned in 2009 to provide guidance and planning templates for early years educators to develop the Irish language competency of children in their early years groups. Due to the changing language ecology of the Gaeltacht areas, many families now raise their children through both Irish and English and children enter the early years services with differing …

Idiom Type Identification With Smoothed Lexical Features And A Maximum Margin Classifier, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In our work we address limitations in the state-of-the-art in idiom type identification. We investigate different approaches for a lexical fixedness metric, a component of the state-of-the-art model. We also show that our Machine Learning based approach to the idiom type identification task achieves an F1-score of 0.85, an improvement of 11 points over the state-of-the-art.

Spatial Thinking In The Engineering Curriculum: An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Problem Solving And Spatial Skills Among Engineering Students., Gavin Duffy

Doctoral

Long considered a primary factor of intelligence, spatial ability has been shown to correlate strongly with success in engineering education, yet is rarely included as a learning outcome in engineering programmes. A clearer understanding of how and why spatial ability impacts on performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects would allow educators to determine if spatial skills development merits greater priority in STEM curricula. The aim of this study is to help inform that debate by shedding new light on the role of spatial thinking in STEM learning and allow teaching practice and curriculum design to be informed …

Rating By Ranking: An Improved Scale For Judgement-Based Labels, Jack O'Neill, Sarah Jane Delany, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Labels representing value judgements are commonly elicited using an interval scale of absolute values. Data collected in such a manner is not always reliable. Psychologists have long recognized a number of biases to which many human raters are prone, and which result in disagreement among raters as to the true gold standard rating of any particular object. We hypothesize that the issues arising from rater bias may be mitigated by treating the data received as an ordered set of preferences rather than a collection of absolute values. We experiment on real-world and artificially generated data, finding that treating label ratings …

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Exploration Of A Crowdfunding Entrepreneurial Pitch., Victoria Doyle, Olivia Freeman, Brendan K. O`Rourke

Conference papers

This paper explores multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) as a methodology to address the research question: How are environmentally conscious entrepreneurial ventures constituted in online investment crowd-funding pitches and the communications that surround them? While discourse may be realised in many different ways (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001 p.5, Bezemer and Jewit, 2010), multimodal discourse analysis focuses on analysing and describing a repertoire of meaning making resources which individuals use in various contexts (visual, gestural, written, actional etc.). Broadband internet and associated technologies mean that these crowdfunding pitches and many other genres tend to be much richer …

Global Software Innovators Strengthening The Software Innovation Capacity Of Europe And Korea, Deirdre Lillis, Paul Doyle, Michael Collins, Brian Keegan, Luca Longo, William O'Mahony, Peter Manifold

Conference papers

Global entrepreneurial talent management is a key challenge for the software sector internationally where competition for high-end skills is intense. SMEs are at a significant disadvantage when competing with major multinationals to access these skills. The Information and Communications Technology sector accounts for 5% of all employment in the EU and there are 900,000 vacancies in this sector in 2017 [1], however over 50% of senior ICT managers believe graduates lack the necessary combination of technical, business and interpersonal skills [2]. In addition, only 4 in 1000 women work in the ICT sector [3].

To address these challenges, HubLinked, an …

Jacob’S Ladder: Sa‘Ī, Abdulla Galadari

International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conferences

This paper looks at the symbolism of the traversing between the hills of Ṣafa and Marwah (sa‘ī) from the traditional Muslim stories pertaining to it, and its intertextualities with the Bible. A linguistic method is used to understand how the Qur’an uses polysemy in its language to symbolize some of its rituals. It is shown that the term “sa‘ī” in the Qur’an is used to symbolize the traversing between death and life. This symbolism is compared with Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis, as Jacob sees the angels ascending and descending from heaven in a location that he …

Pilgrimage Upside-Down: Kabir Ulatbansi Pilgrim, Vinod Verma

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Cultures in India, like cultures in other parts of the world, continue to surprise by their topsy-turvey existence in time, space and practices. The Nijamuddin Dargah in Delhi is one such example of composite cultures. To illustrate it further the Bhakti movements, a wave of the Nirgun/Sagun saint traditions in Indian medieval histories of literary cultures, is an appropriate example which represents a strong case of pilgrimages, alternative pilgrimages and pilgrims without pilgrimages. The poetry of the Alvars, Kabir, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, Tulsidas, Nanak, Raidas, Surdas, Mirabai, Dadu Dayal, Malukdas, Kamal, Sunderdas, Raskhan, Dhruvdas, Namdev, Lal Ded, Avvayyar and Akkamahadevi …

Back To The Future: Logic And Machine Learning, Simon Dobnik, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we argue that since the beginning of the natural language processing or computational linguistics there has been a strong connection between logic and machine learning. First of all, there is something logical about language or linguistic about logic. Secondly, we argue that rather than distinguishing between logic and machine learning, a more useful distinction is between top-down approaches and data-driven approaches. Examining some recent approaches in deep learning we argue that they incorporate both properties and this is the reason for their very successful adoption to solve several problems within language technology.

Editorial, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

I am delighted to introduce the 11th issue of the ITB Journal, the academic journal of the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown. The aim and purpose of the journal is to provide a forum whereby the members of ITB, visitors and guest contributors from other third level colleges can publish an article on their research in a multidisciplinary journal and thereby share their work with the broader community at ITB and other academic institutions.

Directionals In Ngaanyatjarra, Conor Pyle

The ITB Journal

This paper looks at directional morphemes in Ngaanyatjarra, a language spoken in Western Australia. This is part of the suffixing subdivision of Australian languages with both nominals and verbs having rich sets of inflectional and derivational suffixes. Despite this typological categorisation, there are a small number of directional prefixes. Using a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account, we look at directional elements, both prefixes and local peripheral case marking suffixes. RRG posits two types of directional operator, at the nucleus and the core. We find that the prefixes are nuclear operators describing the direction of the verb itself; while the …

A Third Number: Discussing Duals In Lithuanian Language, Jone Bruno

The ITB Journal

Modern Lithuanian has two grammatical numbers: singular and plural, nevertheless literature sources note the existence of the dual number residue in Lithuanian. This phenomenon is prominent in Austronesian languages as stated by Schwartz (1989:237-238) and there are different types of duals. However, in European languages this phenomenon is not as widely spread. This paper overviews the constructions of such phenomenon and presents results of a small research which looked at the frequency of the usage of dual pronouns and demonstratives in the Lithuanian language. Data for the research was taken from the Corpus of Lithuanian Language compiled by Vytautas Magnus …

Computing The Lexicon Morphological-Phonological Interface For Irish Sign Language Sign Realisation, Irene Murtagh

The ITB Journal

The first modern linguistic analysis of a signed language was published in 1960 by William C. Stokoe, Jr., a professor of English at Gallaudet University, Washington DC, the only college for the deaf in the world. Nearly sixty years on, research in the area of sign language linguistics has established that signed languages are fully developed natural languages with their own syntax, morphology and phonology. The morphology and phonology of signed languages is concerned among with manual and non-manual features. These include handshapes, head, torso, eyebrow, eye, cheek, mouth, nose, chin and tongue movement and also movement of the shoulders. …

Editorial, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

I am very pleased to have to the opportunity to introduce the papers in the 27th edition of the ITB Journal.

Community Education And The Labour Activation Challenge, Liam Mcglynn

The ITB Journal

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession in Ireland and indeed across Europe, public discourse in politics, society, academia and media has focused on explaining the crisis as well as looking for solutions to the crisis. In the context of the Irish recession now in its fifth year, with unemployment at 13.6% or 435,357 (Central Statistics Office, 2013) there is understandable urgency across all sectors to find ways out of the crisis. It is against this backdrop of Ireland’s fall from the dizzying heights of the celtic tiger years to the depths of …

Equality Of Access To Higher Education: Discussion Of Emerging Issues Regarding The Performance Of Migrants At The Institute Of Technology Blanchardstown, Brid Ni Chonaill, Ruth Harris

The ITB Journal

This paper presents the findings of a small scale study of the impact of English language competency on the performance of migrants in higher education in Ireland. It is based on a case study of a group of first year Social Studies students at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB). First, relevant terminology will be outlined before focusing on the promotion of equality in higher education by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) – the framework within which the data will subsequently be critiqued. Next, the presence of migrants in the Institutes of Technology (IOTs) will be discussed, before presenting the …

Discussion, Cooperation, Collaboration: The Impact Of Task Structure On Student Interaction In A Web-Based Translation Exercise Module, Mary Ann Kenny

The ITB Journal

A major challenge facing the online translation instructor is to design learning opportunities that encourage communication and the sharing of ideas between students. This article asks how such group interaction may be facilitated and evaluates, in particular the impact of task structure on student interaction in an online translation exercise module. Drawing on an empirical study carried out at Dublin City University during the academic year 2003/14, the article compares levels of intermessage referencing, the number and size of message clusters, and extent and type of cognitive presence evident in messages posted by students given three different types of task …