Digital Commons Network^™

A Case-Based Approach To Cross Domain Sentiment Classification, Bruno Ohana, Sarah Jane Delany, Brendan Tierney

Conference papers

This paper considers the task of sentiment classification of subjective text across many domains, in particular on scenarios where no in-domain data is available. Motivated by the more general applicability of such methods, we propose an extensible approach to sentiment classification that leverages sentiment lexicons and out-of-domain data to build a case-based system where solutions to past cases are reused to predict the sentiment of new documents from an unknown domain. In our approach the case representation uses a set of features based on document statistics, while the case solution stores sentiment lexicons employed on past predictions allowing for later …

Context Cues For Classification Of Competitive And Collaborative Overlaps, Catharine Oertel, Marcin Wlodarczak, Alexey Tarasov, Nick Campbell, Petra Wagner

Conference papers

Being able to respond appropriately to users’ overlaps should be seen as one of the core competencies of incremental dialogue systems. At the same time identifying whether an interlocutor wants to support or grab the turn is a task which comes naturally to humans, but has not yet been implemented in such systems. Motivated by this we first investigate whether prosodic characteristics of speech in the vicinity of overlaps are significantly different from prosodic characteristics in the vicinity of non-overlapping speech. We then test the suitability of different context sizes, both preceding and following but excluding features of the overlap, …

Targeting Cell Nuclei For The Automation Of Raman Spectroscopy In Cytology, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitri Dubovitskiy, Fiona Lyng

Conference papers

Biological cell analysis has, and is still, an important aspect in medical research and clinical diagnosis. Although cytologists routinely undertake a diagnosis using optical mi-croscopy, human factors make this routine unreliable especially when it involves many consecutive tasks that are monotonous, time consuming and focus on pattern matching tasks where the patterns concerned are not always entirely clear and/or do not necessarily belong to a well defined class. Raman Spectroscopy provides the potential to generate a fundamental representation on the status of cellular conditions through the characteristics of a Raman spectrum generated by the back-scatter of a laser pulse incident …

Distributed Formal Concept Analysis Algorithms Based On An Iterative Mapreduce Framework, Ruairí De Fréin, Biao Xu, Eric Robson, Mícheál Ó Fóghlú

Conference papers

While many existing formal concept analysis algorithms are efficient, they are typically unsuitable for distributed implementation. Taking the MapReduce (MR) framework as our inspiration we introduce a distributed approach for performing formal concept mining. Our method has its novelty in that we use a light-weight MapReduce runtime called Twister which is better suited to iterative algorithms than recent distributed approaches. First, we describe the theoretical foundations underpinning our distributed formal concept analysis approach. Second, we provide a representative exemplar of how a classic centralized algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion using our methodology: we modify Ganter’s classic algorithm …

Evaluating The Similarity Estimator Component Of The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow …

Improved Speech Intelligibility With A Chimaera Hearing Aid Algorithm, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

It is recognised that current hearing aid fitting algorithms can corrupt fine timing cues in speech. This paper presents a fitting algorithm that aims to improve speech intelligibility, while preserving the temporal fine structure. The algorithm combines the signal envelope amplification from a standard hearing aid fitting algorithm with the fine timing information available to unaided listeners. The proposed “chimaera aid” is evaluated with computer simulated listener tests to measure its speech intelligibility for 3 sample hearing losses. In addition, the experiment demonstrates the potential application of auditory nerve models in the development of new hearing aid algorithm designs using …

The Importance Of Human Mental Workload In Web Design, Luca Longo, Fabio Rusconi, Lucia Noce, Stephen Barrett

Conference papers

The focus of this study is the introduction of the construct of Human Mental Workload (HMW) in Web design, aimed at supporting current interaction design practices. An experiment has been conducted using the original Wikipedia and Google web-interfaces, and using two slightly different versions. Three subjective psychological mental workload assessment techniques (NASA-TLX, Workload Profile and SWAT) with a well-established assessments usability tool (SUS) have been adopted. T-tests have been performed to study the statistical significance of the original and modified web-pages, in terms of workload required by typical tasks and perceived usability. Preliminary results show that, in one ideal case, …

Stepping Stone Community Education – A Stepping Stone To Third Level Education., Lorraine Perkins

Dissertations

The focus of this research is to explore supports that facilitated participation and retention of learners on a community education course and additional supports needed to progress to third level education. This research was in partnership with Irish National Association of Adult Education (AONTAS) and supported by Community Links, Technological University Dublin. (DIT)

This research is qualitative in nature. For this purpose, a focus group of community learners and semi-structured interviews with community education professionals was conducted. The research gives in-depth insight into learners experiences of what supports facilitated participation in community education and additional supports needed to progress to …

Take Charge Of Change: Being Young And Irish 2012, Full Report, Kevin Lalor, Matt Bowden, Kevin Griffin, Rosaleen Mcelvaney, Bernadette Quinn, Cathy Kelleher

Reports

FOREWORD BY PRESIDENT MICHAEL D. HIGGINS

I initiated the ‘Being Young and Irish’ consultation with the young people of Ireland because of my belief that we are in a period of immense change. How that change is interpreted and how we as citizens respond is crucial to our present challenging circumstances. Our response will define our future.

In the change that takes place, the creativity, the imagination, the decencies, of young people must have an opportunity of being expressed. To be in charge of change is the challenge that faces all of us citizens in Ireland, in Europe, in our …

The Youngest Ages Can Turn Pages, Geraldine French

Reports

We think of literacy as reading and writing, something children learn at school. But literacy is much more basic than that and begins at birth. Children develop the ability to learn and communicate very early in life from their parents and carers. They learn to listen and to speak before they read and write. Not all parents and carers realise the important role they play in the future development of their children. By helping to develop a child’s literacy levels they can give them a really good start not just in school but in life. Simple things like engaging children …

Franco-Irish Connections In Space And Time: Peregrinations And Ruminations, Eamon Maher, Catherine Maignant

Books

Strong cultural, commercial, literary and intellectual links have existed for many centuries between the Celtic cousins France and Ireland and continue to flourish today. This book explores some of the connections that have been forged over space and time by groups and individuals travelling between the two countries.
Covering subjects as varied as travel literature, music, philosophy, wine production, photography and consumer culture, and spanning the seventeenth through to the twenty-first centuries, the collection draws attention to the rich tapestry of interconnections and associations which confirm this unique and mutually beneficial friendship. The book examines the role of figures such …

Sms Spam Filtering: Methods And Data, Sarah Jane Delany, Mark Buckley, Derek Greene

Articles

Mobile or SMS spam is a real and growing problem primarily due to the availability of very cheap bulk pre-pay SMS packages and the fact that SMS engenders higher response rates as it is a trusted and personal service. SMS spam filtering is a relatively new task which inherits many issues and solu- tions from email spam filtering. However it poses its own specific challenges. This paper motivates work on filtering SMS spam and reviews recent devel- opments in SMS spam filtering. The paper also discusses the issues with data collection and availability for furthering research in this area, analyses …

Speech Intelligibility Prediction Using A Neurogram Similarity Index Measure, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Articles

Performance Intensity functions can be used to provide additional information over measurement of speech reception threshold and maximum phoneme recognition by plotting a test subject's recognition probability over a range of sound intensities. A computational model of the auditory periphery was used to replace the human subject and develop a methodology that simulates a real listener test. The newly developed NSIM is used to evaluate the model outputs in response to Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) word lists and produce phoneme discrimination scores.

Mad Or Bad? The Portrayal Of Mentally Ill Offenders In The Irish Print Media, Karla Duffy

Dissertations

It has been argued (Pustilnik, 2005) that the majority of representations of mentally ill offenders falls into one of two models: the moral/punitive model, and the medical/therapeutic model. The moral/punitive model views mental illness as a personal failure rather than a medical condition, and any representations of offenders in this model will be unsympathetic. The medical/therapeutic model views mental illness as a medical condition, and views mentally ill offenders in a sympathetic manner. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether the representation of mentally ill offenders in the Irish print media conforms to one of these two models. …

Teachers And Language Learning In Primary Schools: The Acquisition Of Additional Languages In The Early Years, Anna Dillon

Doctoral

This study set out to explore teachers’ attitudes towards home language maintenance among children acquiring English and Irish as additional languages in the early years of primary school and to explore the experiences of mainstream teachers who are working with these children. The study includes a consideration of the pedagogical issues involved in teaching young English and Irish language learners and an examination of the support that the whole school community provides for the teachers and the children. Data were gathered using a mixed methods approach, bearing in mind the rights of children to use their home languages and learn …

Towards A Unified Definition Of Supply Chain Management, Edward Sweeney

Articles

A wide range of definitions of supply chain management (SCM) have been developed over the last three decades. The philosophy of SCM is based firmly on a recognition that it is only by working in a more integrated manner that competitive advantage can be maximised. However, for this to become a reality the development of common definitions and understandings between supply chain partners is a critical success factor. The corollary of this is that a lack of definitional consistency and a common understanding is an inhibitor to the successful adoption of SCM thinking in practice. This paper reviews a number …

The Potential Role Of Listening Modes In Auditory Interfaces For Location-Based Services, John Mcgee, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

The auditory modality offers several advantages as a means of communication for the purposes of location-based services (LBS), including fast response time [1], low processing and storage overheads [2], and hands/eyes-free mobility. However, with more and more sound-producing technology being used in day-to-day life, the battle for our acoustic attention has led to a steady rise in acoustic noise levels [3]. In an already noisy environment, it is tempting for the sound designer to simply use more volume as a means of gaining the listener’s attention but this creates a vicious circle of noise whereby every sound designer is merely …

Moletest: A Web-Based Skin Cancer Screening System, Jonathan Blackledge, Dymitiy A. Dubovitskiy

Conference papers

This paper reports on a research and development programme undertaken in the Bioengineering Research Group http://teapot.dit.ie/ at Dublin Institute of Technology which led to the launch, in September 2010, of a new SME called Moletest UK Limited. Based on an exclusive license awarded by Dublin Institute of Technology in 2010, we report of the development of the world’s first remote skin cancer screening system which is based on a customer uploading a good quality digital image of a suspect mole. A ‘background to the case’ is given and the concept of the approach discussed together with an overview of the …

Getting Exercised About Nothing, Dermot Campbell, Marty Meinardi, Charles Pritchard, Yi Wang

Conference papers

The Dynamic Speech Corpus (DSC) being developed at the Technological University Dublin aims at being a learning corpus as well as exemplifying natural, dialogic interaction recorded at industry-standard quality so as to avail of DIT’s slow-down technology. The availability of time-scaling means that materials can be developed which fulfil Richard Cauldwell’s ambition of ‘spending more time with the signal’. Literally. By slowing the signal down to 40% without tonal distortion, the learner has 2.5 times as long to study how an utterance was said, not just what was said. This makes it possible to create new types of listening exercises …

Using Hotspots As A Novel Method For Accessing Key Events In A Large Multi-Modal Corpus, Catherine Oertel, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Emer Gilmartin, Petra Wagner

Conference papers

n 2009 we created the D64 corpus, a multi-modal corpus which consists of roughly eight hours of natural, non-directed spontaneous interaction in an informal setting. Five participants feature in the recordings and their conversations were captured by microphones (room, body mounted and head mounted), video cameras and a motion capture system. The large amount of video, audio and motion capture material made it necessary to structure and make available the corpus in such a way that it is easy to browse and query for various types of data that we term primary, secondary and tertiary. While users are able to …

Intelligibility Of Electrolarynx Speech Using A Novel Hands-Free Actuator, Brian Madden, Mark Nolan, Ted Burke, James Condron, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

During voiced speech, the larynx provides quasi-periodic acoustic excitation of the vocal tract. In most electrolarynxes, mechanical vibrations are produced by a linear electromechanical actuator, the armature of which percusses against a metal or plastic plate at a frequency within the range of glottal excitation. In this paper, the intelligibility of speech produced using a novel hands-free actuator is compared to speech produced using a conventional electrolarynx. Two able-bodied speakers (one male, one female) performed a closed response test containing 28 monosyllabic words, once using a conventional electrolarynx and a second time using the novel design. The resulting audio recordings …

Cultural And Linguistic Capital In Early Years Education And Care, Maire Mhic Mhathuna

Conference papers

This paper discusses the concept of cultural and linguistic capital in relation to early years education and care (EECE) in Ireland. Bourdieu describes cultural capital as a form of symbolic capital or non-economic asset. Linguistic capital is a subset of cultural capital and refers to linguistic competence and control of linguistic resources. At a time of great change in ECCE it is appropriate to consider the cultural references on which early childhood education and care in Ireland is premised. What is distinctly Irish about ECEC in Ireland? How do we develop an inclusive viewpoint that values the totality of our …

Systemy Systemus, Anna Macleod

Exhibition Catalogues

No abstract provided.

Cross-National Comparative Analysis Of Community Radio Funding Schemes, Kenneth W. Murphy

Other resources

Community radio programming is distinguished by its production, its content and its purposes. It is made by the community, for the community and is primarily about the community. This report is a comparative assessment of the programme production support scheme available to the community radio sector in Ireland and those deployed in a number of comparative national settings. The research project provides a description of Irish and International (Austria, Canada, Denmark, France and New Zealand) models for supporting programme production by community radio broadcasters. It also evaluates how different aspects of the various models contribute to the capacities and sustainability …

Come Si Fa?: Can Virtual Worlds Help Us Promote Intercultural Awareness, Susanna Nocchi

Conference Papers

This paper describes the author’s experience with a pilot course of Italian in SL®2. The course is part of a PhD research on Exploring the potential of virtual worlds to promote Intercultural Awareness in students learning Italian as a Foreign Language. In the paper the author will justify her choice of virtual worlds for the development of language competence and Intercultural Awareness and will present some results of her activity theoretical analysis of the data. Problematic areas and potential moments for the development of Intercultural Awareness were highlighted during the analysis.

Crucial Connections: An Exploration Of Critical Thinking And Scholarly Writing, Roisin Donnelly, Marian Fitzmaurice

Books/Book Chapters

Academic writing in the context of producing quality research articles is something which all academics engage in and there is evidence of increased attention to supporting the development of the writing and subsequent output of academics and research students. However, while scholarly writing is learnt in complex ways, critical thinking is an intrinsic part of such writing, and is highly valued across all the academic disciplines and indeed is a high priority on both employability and citizenship agendas. However, in practice the teaching of critical thinking is difficult and there is a lack of discussion about what it means within …

Benchmarking Classification Models For Emotion Recognition In Natural Speech: A Multi-Corporal Study, Alexey Tarasov, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

A significant amount of the research on automatic emotion recognition from speech focuses on acted speech that is produced by professional actors. This approach often leads to overoptimistic results as the recognition of emotion in real-life conditions is more challenging due the propensity of mixed and less intense emotions in natural speech. The paper presents an empirical study of the most widely used classifiers in the domain of emotion recognition from speech, across multiple non-actedemotional speech corpora. The results indicate that Support Vector Machines have the best performance and that they along with Multi-Layer Perceptron networks and k-nearest neighbour classifiers …

'Race', Nation And Belonging In Ireland, Jonathan Mitchell

Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies

Despite consistent efforts to counteract those attitudes and practices that give rise to it, most putatively modern Western nations continue to experience the concrete effects of racial discrimination. This essay argues that nationality is all too easily conflated with ‘race’ or ethnicity, such that a seeming essence or givenness is manifested amongst all those within a particular geographic boundary. It is suggested that on the contrary, there is nothing natural about nationality as commonly understood; this being so, it must be continually shored up and reconstituted through social, linguistic and material practices. For modern nations in the West, this has …

A Quality Control System Using Texture Analysis In Metallurgy, Jonathan Blackledge, Dymitiy Dubovitskiy

Conference papers

Object detection, recognition and texture classification is an important aspect of many industrial quality control systems. In this paper, we report on a system designed for the inspection of surfaces which has a range of applications in the area of metallurgy. The approach considered is based on the application of Fractal Geometry and Fuzzy Logic for texture classification and, in this paper, focuses on the manufacture of rolled steel. The manufacture of high quality metals requires automatic surface inspection for the assessment of quality control. Quality control systems are required for several tasks such as screening defected products, monitoring the …

Voice, Listening And Social Justice: A Multimediated Engagement With New Immigrant Communities And Publics In Ireland, Alan Grossman

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.