Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ghana's Public Diplomacy Under Kwame Nkrumah, Isaac Antwi-Boasiako

Conference Papers

The concept of public diplomacy is one of the trending approaches in modern international relations and diplomacy. Communicating and engaging effectively with the foreign public in a particular nation by a government to achieve its foreign policy objective is every government’s goal. The field of public diplomacy as an academic discipline in Ghana in particular and Africa has not received much attention compared to the Western World. This article attempts to bridge this gap by opening Ghana’s public diplomacy to academic scrutiny that has, as yet, been underdeveloped. This paper’s principal objective is to bring to light the public diplomacy …

Destination Satisfaction In Senior Tourism: A Case Study, John Cardiff, María-José Gómez-Aguilella

Conference Papers

In this paper, we present a study which analyzes the experiences of elderly people, when travelling as tourists to specific destinations. With this specific profile we searched results that help us to determine their prospects in tourism. The research is also focused on a specific country, Ireland, although cross-cultural studies are being developed in Spain. The surveys are carried out in three touristic places chosen because of their popularity with our target audience. We conduct a survey in which we elicited the expectations that exist before visiting that destination regarding the perceived reputation of that tourist destination and of the …

Automatic Misogyny Detection In Social Media: A Survey, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich

Conference Papers

This article presents a survey of automated misogyny identification techniques in social media, especially in Twitter. This problem is urgent because of the high speed at which messages on social platforms grow and the widespread use of offensive language (including misogynistic language) in them. In this article we survey approaches proposed in the literature to solve the problem of misogynistic message recognition. These include classical machine learning models like Sup-port Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression and ensembles of different classical machine learning models and deep neural networks such as Long Short-term memory and Convolutional Neural Networks. We consider results …

Classification Of Schoolchildren On Professional Trajectories Using Experience Of Successful Specialists, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich, Svetoslav Zverev, Mikhail Alexandrov, Angels Catena, Dmitry Srefanovskiy

Conference Papers

In the paper, we propose a new approach to vocational guidance of schoolchildren based on classification of pupil wishes between given professional trajectories, which are presented by profiles of successful professionals. Both wishes and profiles are replies in free text form on a questionnaire proposed by skilled psychologists. Such an approach avoids the well-known deficiencies of traditional methods including binary questioning, talks about concrete professions, and interviews with school psychologists. We use the simple terms selection for preprocessing and the traditional method of voting for classification. The mentioned procedures are discussed and the proposed approach is preliminary checked on invited …

Opinion Mining On Small And Noisy Samples Of Health-Related Texts, John Cardiff, Liliya Akhtyamova, Mikhail Alexandrov, Oleksiy Koshulko

Conference Papers

The topic of people’s health has always attracted the attention of public and private structures, the patients themselves and, therefore, researchers.

Social networks provide an immense amount of data for analysis of health- related issues; however it is not always the case that researchers have enough

data to build sophisticated models. In the paper, we artificially create this lim- itation to test performance and stability of different popular algorithms on small

samples of texts. There are two specificities in this research apart from the size of a sample: (a) here, instead of usual 5-star classification, we use combined classes reflecting …

Extracting Drug-Drug Interactions With Character-Level And Dependency-Based Embeddings, John Cardiff, Liliya Akhtyamova

Conference Papers

The DDI track of TAC-2018 challenge addresses the problem of an information retrieval of drug-drug interactions on structured product labeling documents with discontinuous and overlapping entities. In this paper, we present our participation for event extraction subtask (Task 1). We used a supervised long-short-term memory (LSTM) network with conditional random fields decoding (LSTM-CRF) approach with an automatic exploring of words and characters features. Additional dependency-based information was integrated into word embeddings to allow better word representation. Our system performed with above median score.

Building Classifiers With Gmdh For Health Social Networks (Bd Askapatient), John Cardiff, Liliya Akhtyamova, Mikhail Alexandrov

Conference Papers

Health social media offer useful data for patients and doctors concerning both various medicines and treatments. Usually, these data are accompanied by their assessments in 5- star scale. But such a detail classification has small usefulness because patients and doctors, first of all, want to know about negative cases and to study in detail the extreme ones. In the paper we build classifiers of texts just for these cases using combined classes as negative, all others and worst, satisfactory, best. For this, we study possibilities of different GMDH-based algorithms and compare them with the results of other methods. The selection …

Classifying Misogynistic Tweets Using A Blended Model: The Ami Shared Task In Ibereval 2018, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich

Conference Papers

This article describes a possible solution for Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) Shared Task at IBEREVAL-2018. The proposed technique is based on combining several simpler classifiers into one more complex blended model, which classified the data taking into account the probabilities of belonging to classes calculated by simpler models. We used the Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, and SVM classifiers. The experimental results show that blended model works better than simpler models for all three type of classification, for both binomial classification (Misogyny Identifivation, Target Classification) and multinomial classification (Misogynistic Behavior).

Misogyny Detection And Classification In English Tweets: The Experience Of The Itt Team, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich

Conference Papers

The problem of online misogyny and women-based offending has become increasingly widespread, and the automatic detection of such messages is an urgent priority. In this paper, we present an approach based on an ensemble of Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Naïve Bayes models for the detection of misogyny in texts extracted from the Twitter platform. Our method has been presented in the framework of the participation in the Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) Shared Task in the EVALITA 2018 evaluation campaign.

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: 1950s Audiences And British Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

The first television broadcasts in Ireland were watched in the 1950s. These initial programmes were British. This history of these early viewers, however, has been ignored. A dominant narrative has addressed the history of television in Ireland as the history of the public broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Thus, the history of Irish television often begins in 1961, overlooking Irish people’s experience of the medium in the preceding decade. This paper breaks with traditional historiography by employing life history interviews to explore the uses, rituals and feelings attached to television in the years before RTÉ.

Irish people who watched television …

Television In Ireland: A History From The Mediated Centre, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies and critiques a dominant narrative in the history of Irish television, which is too often passed off for, or accepted as, the history of television in Ireland. The his- tory of television in Ireland has been written within an institutional framework and depends on the cultural binary of tradition and modernity, ‘old Ireland’ and ‘new Ireland’. This dom- inant narrative fails to interrogate television as a medium. It provides an account of the Irish broadcaster RTÉ rather than an account of the arrival of a new medium. Ironically this nar- rative which hinges on the role of …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This limitation may serve to ideologically reinforce the power of corporate elites. It may also hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

There has been a slew of entertainment productions since 2013 that represent AI and robotics. This work examines Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Interstellar (2014), Chappie (2015), …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference Papers

Being able to communicate efficiently has been acknowledged as a vital skill in many different domains. In particular, team communication skills are of key importance in the operation of complex machinery such as aircrafts, maritime vessels and such other, highly-specialized, civilian or military vehicles, as well as the performance of complex tasks in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to use prosodic accommodation and turn- taking organisation to provide objective metrics of communica- tion skills. To do this, human-factors evaluations, via a coordi- nation Demand Analysis (CDA), were used in conjunction with a dynamic model of prosodic accommodation …

Mobisurround: An Auditory User Interface For Geo-Service Delivery, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen, James Carswell

Conference Papers

This paper describes original research carried out in the area of Location-Based Services (LBS) with an emphasis on Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) for content delivery. Previous work in this area has focused on accurately determining spatial interactions and informing the user mainly by means of the visual modality. mobiSurround is new research that builds upon these principles with a focus on multimodal content delivery and navigation and in particular the development of an AUI. This AUI enables the delivery of rich media con- tent and natural directions using audio. This novel approach provides a hands free method for navigating a …

Manual Evaluation Of Synthesised Sign Language Avatars, Robert G. Smith Mr, Brian Nolan Dr.

Conference Papers

The evaluation discussed in this paper explores the role that underlying facial expressions might have regarding understandability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish Sign Language (ISL), we examine the Deaf community’s appetite for sign language avatars. The work presented explores the following hypothesis: Augmenting an existing avatar with various combinations of the 7 widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman [1] to achieve underlying facial expressions, will make that avatar more human-like and consequently improve usability and understandability for the ISL user. Using human evaluation methods [2] we compare an augmented set of avatar utterances against a baseline …

Children And E-Society: Identifying Barriers To Participation, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Children are widely seen as direct beneficiaries and indeed often as the primary targets of information society policies, particularly those geared towards enhancing learning opportunities, access to information and building inclusiveness and participation in society. The European Union’s Digital Agenda places a safer and better internet for children at the heart of its policy platform. And yet, more often than not, children’s e-society participation has been a cause of concern and anxiety for policy makers, particularly with ever-increasing early adoption of new internet technologies and services by children and young people. Such concerns have been motivated by the responsibilities held …

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 …

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: Nationalist Rhetoric And International Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

Typical of an international tendency, the history of television in Ireland has been framed by national boundaries. This paper argues that viewing the history of television solely through institutional sources and a nation state-bound perspective obscures transnational influences and homogenises diverse audience experiences. Moreover, such histories may serve to reproduce a limited range of types of nationalist rhetoric. The research presented here explores the history of television in Ireland through life story interviews. This reveals views of the nation, its global context and processes of social change quite different to those discussed in orthodox histories. Arguably, this shift in historical …

Growing Up Online: Some Myths And Facts About Children's Digital Lives In Ireland Today, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Digital technologies and the widespread adoption of the internet have given rise to an unprecedented social transformation that is having a profound impact on childhood today. While debate continues on the precise nature of its effects and the extent to which we can refer to a distinctly different ‘digital’ generation, there is growing consensus that the centrality of new modes of sociality and new ways of communicating online in children’s lives today are shaping new contours of risk and of opportunity. This paper examines some of the myths and the facts about children's use of the internet in Ireland today …

Trust, Safety, Security: Framing Eu Kids Online Policy Recommendations Within The Digital Agenda For Europe, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Since 2006, EU Kids Online – a thematic research network funded under the Safer Internet Programme - has sought to extend knowledge and inform policy regarding the opportunities that the internet affords children and young people, the risks they experience online, and the impact on children when they encounter difficulties. This paper seeks to locate EU Kids Online policy recommendations within the overarching European strategy and policy framework known as A Digital Agenda for Europe and to assess gaps in the current provision for internet safety. Originating with the Safer Internet Action Plan (1999-2004), the European Union has for over …

User Profile Construction In The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

The information overload experienced by peo- ple who use online services and read user- generated content (e.g. product reviews and ratings) to make their decisions has led to the development of the so-called recommender systems. We address the problem of the large increase in the user-generated reviews, which are added to each day and consequently make it difficult for the user to obtain a clear picture of the quality of the facility in which they are interested.

In this paper, we describe the TWIN (“Tell me What I Need”) personality-based recom- mender system, the aim of which is to select …

Journalism Educations And Child Rights: Exploring A New Model Of Collaboration In Rights-Based Journalism Education, Brian O'Neill, Michael Foley, Noirin Hayes

Conference Papers

This paper presents an overview and discussion of a unique approach to journalism education in the Central, East European and CIS region. In 2008, a group of universities initially in Turkey, and later joined by Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan joined with UNICEF to introduce a new child rights syllabus into their respective journalism programmes. For years, the approach to training journalists in children’s rights in the CEE/CIS region had been quantitative – 30 journalists here, 30 there. This has produced limited results in terms of the representation of children or children’s issues in the media. From point …

Motives For And Against Participating: A Hermeneutical Study Of Media Participation In Norway And Ireland, 2005-2006, Lars Nyre, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

There is a tension between consumer and citizen motives for participating in media and the internet. The first is oriented to personal gain and self-fulfillment, while the second is oriented to long-term collective goals of a political nature. People are in the process of adopting these motives to the social media and their participatory requirements, and tensions run high. This chapter discusses two forms of motivation; enjoyment and engagement, and we define them normatively to inform our empirical analysis of reasoning by consenting adults in Dublin, Ireland (2006) and Bergen, Norway (2005). We asked 64 people about their participation in …

New Trends In Automatic Assessment: Ontology Matching, Maria Mitina, Patricia Magee, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

Instant individual feedback represents a result of assessment which allows for considerable improvements in both teaching and learning. In this paper we present the application of ontology matching techniques in automatic correction of students’ answers for SQL tests, which will provide teachers with instant feedback to facilitate manual correction and marking and which they can pass to the students. Students experience many problems learning SQL due to the necessity to memorise database schemas, unclear feedback from the database engine on the execution of the query, etc. The program environment utilising the described approach is designed to solve the abovementioned problems …

Promoting Children’S Interests On The Internet: Regulation And The Emerging Evidence Base Of Risk And Harm, Brian O'Neill, Sonia Livingstone

Conference Papers

Advocacy for child protection online has tended to flow against the tide of a dominant liberal discourse concerning the internet which posits that either the internet should not be regulated or that it can’t actually be regulated at all. Regulatory trends in Great Britain, in Europe and in the wider international arena have promoted models of co- or self-regulation whereby industries themselves with varying degrees of partnership or oversight by relevant state agencies practice ‘light-touch’ regulation based on codes established within industry fora with minimalist prescriptions on content and with ultimate responsibility for risk exposure shifted to the end user. …

The Future Of Audience Research, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

ECREA roundtable The future of audience research IAMCR conference @ BRAGA July 21 14:30-16:00 Convenor: Nico Carpentier Institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation This contribution focuses on institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation, i.e., how audience experience is formally accounted for through institutional processes of research (media literacy indices for instance) or through representative bodies such as Audience Councils. In other words, an area of overlap between audience studies and public policy debates, advocating that researchers should try to make their findings more widely available and understood in professional media environments.

Personal Sense And Idiolect: Combining Authorship Attribution And Opinion Analysis, Polina Panicheva, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

Subjectivity analysis and authorship attribution are very popular areas of research. However, work in these two areas has been done separately. We believe that by combining information about subjectivity in texts and authorship, the performance of both tasks can be improved. In the paper a personalized approach to opinion mining is presented, in which the notions of personal sense and idiolect are introduced and used for polarity classification task. The results of applying the personalized approach to opinion mining are presented, confirming that the approach increases the performance of the opinion mining task. Automatic authorship attribution is further applied to …

Healthcare Professional Roles: The Ontology Model For E-Learning, Lorraine Carmody, Elizabeth Sherry, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

The paper aims to present the MEDeLEARN project, an ontology-driven virtual learning environment for Medical Information System training. The current training environment for healthcare professionals in the use of essential medical information systems in a large urban training hospital is based on conventional instructor-led training sessions. Problems arise due to the demanding nature of the hospital working environment, causing training to be cancelled or curtailed. This mode of training delivery is deemed to be inefficient and ineffective, with the danger of serious errors occurring as a consequence.

The project investigates whether a virtual learning environment can address the competency gap …

Communication Rights, Digital Literacy And Ethical Individualism In The New Media Environment, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Recent developments in European media policy have given priority to the notion that all citizens need to be digitally literate to fully participate in the emerging Information Society. Media literacy or digital literacy, it is argued, will be required to able to exercise informed choices, understand the nature of content and services and take advantage of the full range of opportunities offered by new communications technologies. Further, being media literate, citizens will be better able to protect themselves and their families from harmful or offensive material. The inclusion of media literacy within the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Commission of the …

Developing Digital Radio For Ireland: Emerging Approaches And Strategies, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Ireland’s experience of the transition from public service broadcasting to public service media has gathered pace within the last year with new legislative arrangements for media regulation, the awarding of digital terrestrial television licences and renewed attempts to introduce digital radio broadcasting on the DAB platform. The national public broadcaster, RTE, has played a central role in these developments as it attempts to manage a range of technology platforms and to provide media services for an increasingly diverse and complex market. This paper addresses the case of digital radio in Ireland and the prospects for a successful launch of DAB …