Digital Commons Network^™

Robot Perception Errors And Human Resolution Strategies In Situated Human-Robot Dialogue, Niels Schütte, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Errors in visual perception may cause problems in situated dialogues. We investigated this problem through an experiment in which human participants interacted through a natural language dialogue interface with a simulated robot.We introduced errors into the robot’s perception, and observed the resulting problems in the dialogues and their resolutions.We then introduced different methods for the user to request information about the robot’s understanding of the environment. We quantify the impact of perception errors on the dialogues, and investigate resolution attempts by users at a structural level and at the level of referring expressions.

Review Of Trends In Health Social Media Analysis, Liliya Akhtyamova, Mikhail Alexandrov, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

This paper surveys recent publications (2008-2017) on using social media data to study public health. The survey describes the main topics being discussed in forums and presents short information about methods and tools used for analysis health social media. We put especial attention on adverse drug reaction detection problem (ADR).

Adverse Drug Extraction In Twitter Data Using Convolutional Neural Network, Liliya Akhtyamova, John Cardiff, Mikhail Alexandrov

Conference Papers

The study of health-related topics on social media has become a useful tool for the early detection of the different adverse medical conditions. In particular, it concerns cases related to the treatment of mental diseases, as the effects of medications here often prove to be unpredictable. In our research, we use convolutional neural networks (CNN) with word2vec embedding to classify user comments on Twitter. The aim of the classification is to reveal adverse drug reactions of users. The results obtained are highly promising, showing the overall usefulness of neural network algorithms in this kind of tasks.

Arts And Humanities Research, Redefining Public Benefit, And Research Prioritization In Ireland, Andrew Gibson, Ellen Hazelkorn

Articles

This article looks at the effects of a national policy of research prioritization in the years following Ireland’s economic crisis. A national research prioritization exercise initiated by policymakers redefined the purpose of higher education research, and designed policies in line with this approach. Placing research for enterprise to the fore, it emphasized the economic value that subjects could return on state investments. This article examines the post-crisis policy of prioritization, its relationship with and effects on arts and humanities research, and how the notion of the benefit of research can be broadened while still addressing economic needs. It draws on …

Comparison Of Two-Pass Algorithms For Dynamic Topic Modelling Based On Matrix Decompositions, John Cardiff, Gabriella Skitalinskaya, Mikhail Alexandrov

Conference Papers

In this paper we present a two-pass algorithm based on different matrix decompositions, such as LSI, PCA, ICA and NMF, which allows tracking of the evolution of topics over time. The proposed dynamic topic models as output give an easily interpreted overview of topics found in a sequentially organized set of documents that does not require further processing. Each topic is presented by a user-specified number of top-terms. Such an approach to topic modeling if applied to, for example, a news article data set, can be convenient and useful for economists, sociologists, political scientists. The proposed approach allows to achieve …

Internationalsation In The Classroom, Alberto Caimo, Deirdre Duffy, Patrick Mcevoy, Brian Murphy, Grainne Scanlon

Practitioner Research Projects

Multicultural societies require multicultural universities and internationalisation is a powerful influence within higher education. Conceptual understandings of internationalisation and practical activities have evolved significantly to prepare students for global workplaces, social cohesion and personal development (Higher Education Strategy Group, 2011). Internationalisation benefits the development of interculturally competent graduates who can participate in diverse, global labour markets, yet, international students require support while adjusting to new learning environments. A student-centred approach to learning is superseding traditional pedagogy in order to support the most diverse range of learning preferences that are characteristic of multicultural groups (Vita, 2001). Educators are encouraged to expand …

An Examination Of Concepts Of School Readiness Among Parents And Educators In Ireland, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Emer Ring, Noirin Hayes, Patsy Stafford, Siobhan Keegan, Cathy Kelleher, Martina Ozonyia, Mary Moloney, Deirdre Breathnach, Des Carswell, Des Mccafferty, Anne O'Keefe, Aisling Leavy, Ruth Madden

Reports

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs commissioned research through the Irish Research Council (IRC) to examine concepts of school readiness as they are understood by early years educators and managers, primary school principals, junior infant teachers and parents of children participating in the first Free Preschool Year in Ireland. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, involving interviews, an online survey and “draw and tell” sessions with children. Representative samples of FPSY settings and primary schools were selected and an online survey based on the findings of the qualitative phase was sent to 500 pre-primary settings and 500 primary schools. In …

Universal Design Across The Curriculum: Training For Students And Teachers, Trish Mackeogh, James Hubbard, Kieran O'Callaghan

Research and Innovation - Articles

Providing an inclusive educational setting for children with disabilities is essential if they are to truly benefit from mainstream education. Universal design (UD) provides a framework to develop our classrooms, materials and methods to accommodate diverse learners and students with special educational needs without the need to retrofit or remove the student from the classroom. This paper outlines the theory and the approach of two training courses on Universal Design developed for teachers and students.

Tensions In Aspirational Csr Communication—A Longitudinal Investigation Of Csr Reporting, Lisa Koep

Conference papers

A recent emergence of academic discourse within organisation and management scholarship is encouraging organisations to embrace the performative power of aspirational talk within corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. However, there has been no empirical study to date to investigate the appropriateness of such encouragement. This paper analyses CSR reporting and underlying sensemaking processes to trace how far this academic departure from the dominant discourse of verification and standardisation is reflected and accepted within this practice. The process-focused, longitudinal study is based on a discursive analysis of Nestlé CSR reports, revealing the struggles between forward and backward facing statements, and tracing …

The Meet Project: Engaging Students In Pre-Departure Socialisation And Learning For Study Abroad, Catherine Spencer, Susana Olmos

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This paper explores the aims, operation and outcomes of the MEET project (Maximise Erasmus Exchange Together), a project which commenced in the Department of Languages, DIT in the 2014/2015 academic year, and contributes to wider discussion on learning in study abroad (SA) contexts. The staff-led MEET initiative sought to engage students more effectively in their preparation for year abroad study and work placements. It brought together approximately twenty 20 students in second-year and fourth-year of BA (Hons) programmes in Languages and International Business or Tourism as well as Erasmus students from a variety of different programmes, who were studying at …

A Comparison Of The Progression Of International Students To First Year Undergraduate Studies By Entry Route In An Irish Higher Education Institution: Part One - A Quantitative Study, Fiona Faulkner, Deirdre Ryan, Anne Hurley, Qi Wang

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

Increasing international student numbers in higher education institutions has long been an educational priority internationally due to the cultural, educational and economic benefits it brings (Ireland’s International Education Strategy, 2010). Little research however has been conducted in the area of varying entry routes to higher education by international students and the potential benefits/disadvantages if any of pursuing one entry route over another (Terraschke & Wahid, 2011). This research examines the first year undergraduate progression rates of international students in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in Ireland to determine if students who complete a one year International Foundation Programme (IFP) …

Presenting A Labelled Dataset For Real-Time Detection Of Abusive User Posts, Hao Chen, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Social media sites facilitate users in posting their own personal comments online. Most support free format user posting, with close to real-time publishing speeds. However, online posts generated by a public user audience carry the risk of containing inappropriate, potentially abusive content. To detect such content, the straightforward approach is to filter against blacklists of profane terms. However, this lexicon filtering approach is prone to problems around word variations and lack of context. Although recent methods inspired by machine learning have boosted detection accuracies, the lack of gold standard labelled datasets limits the development of this approach. In this work, …

Extended List Of Stop Words: Does It Work For Keyphrase Extraction From Short Texts?, Svetlana Popova, Gabriella Skitalinskaya

Conference Papers

In this paper we study the problem of key phrase extraction from short texts written in Russian. As texts we consider messages posted on Internet car forums related to the purchase or repair of cars. The main assumption made is: the construction of lists of stop words for key phrase extraction can be effective if performed on the basis of a small, expert-marked collection. The results show that even a small number of texts marked by an expert can be enough to build an extended list of stop words. Extracted stop words allow to improve the quality of the key …

Holmpatrick Graveyard — A Description, Frank Prendergast

Other Resources

The term ‘graveyard’ describes a burial ground attached to a church, and ‘historic graveyard’ describes any graveyard or burial ground in use prior to the early twentieth-century. In such places, communities connect with their own history and ancestry, and identify with their place of origin. They have cultural and heritage significance too and, for these reasons, their conservation and interpretation are necessary.

Holmpatrick Graveyard is situated in the centre of Skerries, a small coastal town 27 km north of Dublin City. An archipelago of three small islands fringes the local coastline. One of these is locally known as Church Island …

Voyages Between France And Ireland: Culture, Tourism And Sport, Frank Healy, Brigitte Bastiat

Books

The voyage – the quest, the odyssey, the expedition – is one of the driving forces of civilisation. From ancient times to the present day, human beings have travelled through necessity (wars, persecutions, economic and political pressures), by vocation (religious and humanitarian) and for pleasure (tourism, culture and sport).

A voyage intensifies our perception of self, leading us to define and redefine our identity in the liminal space where we are confronted with the Other. This often leads to a change of perspective in our attitudes to culture, identity and politics.

The sea is an important feature of the geography …

“Church Trailblazer Rev Pat Storey On Weight Watchers, Caffeine And How She Named Her Dog After Former New York Mayor”: News Representations Of The First Female Anglican Bishop In The Uk And Ireland, Kate Power

Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies

The first female bishop in the Anglican Church of the UK and Ireland was consecrated on November 30, 2013. For many within the Anglican Communion, the appointment of Reverend Pat Storey as Bishop of Meath and Kildare represented the opening of a longawaited new chapter in the history of Anglicanism. It is also potentially an occasion of considerable interest for both Irish historians and discourse analysts. For, although questions of gender and language have been widely considered in recent years, relatively few studies address the intersections of gender, language and religion – and fewer still examine the nexus of gender, …

A Corporate Ethical Compass Tool To Measure Public Relations Decision Making, Lian Qing Luo

Masters

Corporate Public Relations (PR) Ethics is always a top research topic in theory and practice as PR practitioners often have numerous ethical choices to make when addressing controversial issues. However, how to quantify or measure the ethical alternatives of PR decision making and help public relations practitioners make more ethically correct decisions is an open problem. To address this problem, this thesis proposes the PR "Ethical Compass" as a measuring tool or technique to help corporations justify and evaluate the consequences of their ethical public relations decision making. To investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the Ethical Compass technique, qualitative …

Modeling Mortgage Assessment With Computational Argumentation Theory And Defeasible Reasoning, Henrik Szucs

Dissertations

In the mortgage lending business of a bank, a key focus area is risk analysis, which supports the mortgage awarding process and the prediction of the risk of defaulting (repayment issues). The standard risk assessment method at most banks is a scorecard calculation. A new way of predicting the defaulting is proposed using Defeasible Reasoning (DR) and computational Argumentation Theory (AT), areas of interdisciplinary research, in the discipline of Articial Intelligence (AI). Argumentation is formalised by reasoning models which are inspired by human reasoning. For a more realistic representation AT employs DR which is a non-monotonic reasoning process, meaning that …

The Evaluation Of Ensemble Sentiment Classification Approach On Airline Services Using Twitter, Zechen Wang

Dissertations

In the field of sentiment classification, much research has been done on reviews of topics such as movies, software and books. Little research has been done in the airline service domain. In the airline industry, the use of social media as a customer service tool has become a growing phenomenon. The research conducted by Wan and Gao (2015) has proposed an ensemble classification approach for airline service sentiment classification using Twitter data. In accordance, the objective of improving the performance of ensemble classification approach is the primary consideration. This research proposed new hybrid classification approach that uses the state-of-art approach …

Representations Of Idioms For Natural Language Processing: Idiom Type And Token Identification, Language Modelling And Neural Machine Translation, Giancarlo Salton

Doctoral

An idiom is a multiword expression (MWE) whose meaning is non- compositional, i.e., the meaning of the expression is different from the meaning of its individual components. Idioms are complex construc- tions of language used creatively across almost all text genres. Idioms pose problems to natural language processing (NLP) systems due to their non-compositional nature, and the correct processing of idioms can improve a wide range of NLP systems. Current approaches to idiom processing vary in terms of the amount of discourse history required to extract the features necessary to build representations for the expressions. These features are, in general, …

Assessment Of Mental Workload: A Comparison Of Machine Learning Methods And Subjective Assessment Techniques, Karim Moustafa, Saturnino Luz, Luca Longo

Articles

Mental workload (MWL) measurement is a complex multidisciplinary research field. In the last 50 years of research endeavour, MWL measurement has mainly produced theory-driven models. Some of the reasons for justifying this trend includes the omnipresent uncertainty about how to define the construct of MWL and the limited use of datadriven research methodologies. This work presents novel research focused on the investigation of the capability of a selection of supervised Machine Learning (ML) classification techniques to produce data-driven computational models of MWL for the prediction of objective performance. These are then compared to two state-of-the-art subjective techniques for the assessment …

Abusive Text Detection Using Neural Networks, Hao Chen, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Articles

Neurall network models have become increasingly popular for text classification in recent years. In particular, the emergence of word embeddings within deep learning architecture has recently attracted a high level of attention amongst researchers.

Representing And Inferring Mental Workload Via Defeasible Reasoning: A Comparison With The Nasa Task Load Index And The Workload Profile, Lucas Middeldorf Rizzo, Luca Longo

Conference papers

The NASA Task Load Index (NASA − TLX) and the Workload Profile (WP) are likely the most employed instruments for subjective mental workload (MWL) measurement. Numerous areas have made use of these methods for assessing human performance and thusly improving the design of systems and tasks. Unfortunately, MWL is still a vague concept, with different definitions and no universal measure. This research investigates the use of defeasible reasoning to represent and assess MWL. Reasoning is defeasible when a conclusion, supported by a set of premises, can be retracted in the light of new information. In this empirical study, this type …

The Influence Of Values On The Intention And Usage Of Mobile Phone Technology:A Case Of Tanzanian Smes, Renatus Mushi, Almar Ennis, Deirdre Lillis, Said Jafari

Conference papers

Mobile phone technology has been relied upon in performing a number of activities in the SMEs. In less developed regions, computing infrastructures are very poor thereby depending highly on mobile phones. The improvement of technology in the mobile phones has seen more applications and services being accessed through them. This gives SMEs, especially in developing countries, a preferable alternative to desktop computing technology. However, to maximise the usability of mobile phone technology in SMEs context, key factors which influence users’ perception on its acceptance need to be explained clearly. This study explains the factors influencing employees’ intentions and use of …

The Changing Role Of The University: A Discursive Analysis Of Good Teaching And Positioning Of Academics And Students In Improving The Quality Of Teaching And Learning In Europe’S Higher Education Institutions, Fiona Mcsweeney

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

Using the approach of critical discourse analysis this paper presents an examination of the notion of good teaching as constructed in the strategy document Improving the quality of teaching and learning in Europe’s higher education institutions. The aim is to draw attention to, and question how the language used in educational policy documents constructs particular meanings and purposes to concepts such as teaching and learning, as well as creating a particular version of the social relations within educational institutions. This in turn positions teachers and students in particular ways, constructing and limiting who they are and what they do. While …

Assessing The Usefulness Of Different Feature Sets For Predicting The Comprehension Difficulty Of Text, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher, Noel Fitzpatrick

Conference papers

Within English second language acquisition there is an enthusiasm for using authentic text as learning materials in classroom and online settings. This enthusiasm, however, is tempered by the difficulty in finding authentic texts at suitable levels of comprehension difficulty for specific groups of learners. An automated way to rate the comprehension difficulty of a text would make finding suitable texts a much more manageable task. While readability metrics have been in use for over 50 years now they only capture a small amount of what constitutes comprehension difficulty. In this paper we examine other features of texts that are related …

Abusive Text Detection Using Neural Networks, Hao Chen, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

eural network models have become increasingly popular for text classification in recent years. In particular, the emergence of word embeddings within deep learning architectures has recently attracted a high level of attention amongst researchers. In this paper, we focus on how neural network models have been applied in text classification. Secondly, we extend our previous work [4, 3] using a neural network strategy for the task of abusive text detection. We compare word embedding features to the traditional feature representations such as n-grams and handcrafted features. In addition, we use an off-the-shelf neural network classifier, FastText[16]. Based on our results, …

How Short Is A Piece Of String?: The Impact Of Text Length And Text Augmentation On Short-Text Classification Accuracy, Austin Mccartney, Svetlana Hensman, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Recent increases in the use and availability of short messages have created opportunities to harvest vast amounts of information through machine-based classification. However, traditional classification methods have failed to yield accuracies comparable to classification accuracies on longer texts. Several approaches have previously been employed to extend traditional methods to overcome this problem, including the enhancement of the original texts through the construction of associations with external data supplementation sources. Existing literature does not precisely describe the impact of text length on classification performance. This work quantitatively examines the changes in accuracy of a small selection of classifiers using a variety …

A Comparison Of Automatic Search Query Enhancement Algorithms That Utilise Wikipedia As A Source Of A Priori Knowledge, Kyle Goslin, Markus Hofmann

Conference papers

This paper describes the benchmarking and analysis of five Automatic Search Query Enhancement (ASQE) algorithms that utilise Wikipedia as the sole source for a priori knowledge. The contributions of this paper include: 1) A comprehensive review into current ASQE algorithms that utilise Wikipedia as the sole source for a priori knowledge; 2) benchmarking of five existing ASQE algorithms using the TREC-9 Web Topics on the ClueWeb12 data set and 3) analysis of the results from the benchmarking process to identify the strengths and weaknesses each algorithm. During the benchmarking process, 2,500 relevance assessments were performed. Results of these tests are …

The Question Of Fiction – Nonexistent Objects, A Possible World Response From Paul Ricoeur, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The question of fiction is omnipresent within the work of Paul Ricoeur throughout his prolific career. However, Ricoeur raises the questions of fiction in relation to other issues such the symbol, metaphor and narrative. This article sets out to foreground a traditional problem of fiction and logic, which is termed the existence of non-existent objects, in relation to the Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative. Ricoeur’s understanding of fiction takes place within his overall philosophical anthropology where the fictions and histories make up the very nature of identity both personal and collective. The existence of non-existent objects demonstrates a dichotomy between …