28 results on '"Willis, Alistair"'
Search Results
2. An efficient treatment of quantification in unspecified semantic representations
- Author
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Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
621.3 ,Computational semantics - Published
- 2000
3. Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements
- Author
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Yang, Hui, de Roeck, Anne, Gervasi, Vincenzo, Willis, Alistair, and Nuseibeh, Bashar
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
4. Automatic Identification of Nocuous Ambiguity
- Author
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Willis, Alistair, Chantree, Francis, and De Roeck, Anne
- Published
- 2008
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Towards a Cross-article Narrative Comparison of News
- Author
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Mensio, Martino, Alani, Harith, Willis, Alistair, Campos, Ricardo, Jorge, Alípio, Jatowt, Adam, and Bhatia, Sumit
- Abstract
In the world of public misinformation, there are many cases where the information is not false or fabricated, but rather has been manipulated using more subtle techniques such as word replacements, selection of details, omissions and argument distortion. These techniques can have the effect of influencing the reader’s frame of mind towards the events reported. We currently lack the necessary tools to uncover such manipulations automatically. In this position paper, we propose an integrated analysis framework and pipeline to identify various narrative signals in news articles; such as structural roles, framing, and subjectivity. By comparing these at the document level and sentence level, it will be possible to highlight differences of narrative techniques used to report the same news events.
- Published
- 2020
6. Automatically calculating tonal tension
- Author
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Ruiz-Marcos, Germán, Willis, Alistair, Laney, Robin, Sturm, Bob, and Elmsley, Andy
- Abstract
Since the early years of the past century, many scholars have focused their efforts towards designing models to better understand the way listeners perceive musical tension. From the existing models, Lerdahl's has shown strong correlations against tension judgements provided by human listeners and has been used to make accurate predictions of musical tension. However, a full automation of Lerdahl's model of tension has not yet been made available. This paper presents a computational approach to automatically calculate musical tension according to Lerdahl's model, with a publicly available implementation.
- Published
- 2020
7. 'Russia isn't a country of Putins!': How RT bridged the credibility gap in Russian public diplomacy during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
- Author
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Crilley, Rhys, Gillespie, Marie, Kazakov, Vitaly, and Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
PROPAGANDA ,SOFT power (Social sciences) ,AUDIENCES ,SPORTSCASTERS ,FOCUS groups ,SPECIAL events - Abstract
In the context of deteriorating relations with 'Western' states, Russia's state-funded international broadcasters are often understood as malign propaganda rather than as agents of soft power. Subsequently, there is a major credibility gap between how Russian state media represents itself to the world and how it is actually perceived by overseas publics. However, based on the study of RT's coverage of the Russian hosted FIFA 2018 World Cup and the audience reactions this prompted, we find that this credibility gap was partially bridged. By analysing over 700 articles published by RT, alongside social media and focus group research, we find that RT's World Cup coverage created an unusually positive vision of Russia that appealed to international audiences. Our study demonstrates how state-funded international broadcaster coverage of sports mega-events can generate a soft power effect with audiences, even when the host state – such as Russia – has a poor international reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
8. Understanding RT's Audiences: Exposure Not Endorsement for Twitter Followers of Russian State-Sponsored Media.
- Author
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Crilley, Rhys, Gillespie, Marie, Vidgen, Bertie, and Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
NEWS websites ,PROPAGANDA - Abstract
The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has attracted much attention as a purveyor of Russian propaganda. To date, most studies of RT have focused on its broadcast, website, and social media content, with little research on its audiences. Through a data-driven application of network science and other computational methods, we address this gap to provide insight into the demographics and interests of RT's Twitter followers, as well as how they engage with RT. Building upon recent studies of Russian state-sponsored media, we report three main results. First, we find that most of RT's Twitter followers only very rarely engage with its content and tend to be exposed to RT's content alongside other mainstream news channels. This indicates that RT is not a central part of their online news media environment. Second, using probabilistic computational methods, we show that followers of RT are slightly more likely to be older and male than average Twitter users, and they are far more likely to be bots. Third, we identify thirty-five distinct audience segments, which vary in terms of their nationality, languages, and interests. This audience segmentation reveals the considerable heterogeneity of RT's Twitter followers. Accordingly, we conclude that generalizations about RT's audience based on analyses of RT's media content, or on vocal minorities among its wider audiences, are unhelpful and limit our understanding of RT and its appeal to international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. Tweeting the Russian revolution: RT's #1917LIVE and social media re-enactments as public diplomacy.
- Author
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Crilley, Rhys, Gillespie, Marie, and Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
DIPLOMACY ,PRESS ,SOCIAL revolution ,FOCUS groups ,POWER resources ,SOCIAL media - Abstract
Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discussions with its followers. We argue that a cultural studies perspective can shed important light on the political significance of RT's social media re-enactment in ways that current studies of public diplomacy as a soft power resource often fail to do. It can advance soft power theory by offering a more nuanced, dynamic analysis of how state media mobilise, and how audiences engage with, social media re-enactments as commemorative events. We find that rather than promoting a unitary propagandistic narrative about Russia, 1917LIVE served instead to soften attitudes towards RT itself – encouraging audiences to view RT as an educator and entertainer as well as a news broadcaster – normalising its presence as a Russian public diplomacy resource in the international news media landscape. Our analysis of audience interactions with and interpretations of 1917LIVE affords insights into how the 1917 re-enactment worked as didactic entertainment eliciting affective identification with the characters of the revolution. Such public diplomacy projects contribute in the short term to a strengthening of the engagement required to create longer-term soft power effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
10. Mapping networks of influence: tracking Twitter conversations through time and space
- Author
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Willis, Alistair, Fisher, Ali, and Lvov, Ilia
- Abstract
The increasing use of social media around global news events, such as the London Olympics in 2012, raises questions for international broadcasters about how to engage with users via social media in order to best achieve their individual missions. Twitter is a highly diverse social network whose conversations are multi-directional involving individual users, political and cultural actors, athletes and a range of media professionals. In so doing, users form networks of influence via their interactions affecting the ways that information is shared about specific global events.\ud \ud This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organisations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events. We build an analysis around a set of tweets collected during the 2012 London Olympics. To understand how different users influence the conversations across Twitter, we compare three types of accounts: those belonging to a number of well-known athletes, those belonging to some well-known commentators employed by the BBC, and a number of corporate accounts belonging to the BBC World Service and the official London Twitter account. We look at the data from two perspectives. First, to understand the structure of the social groupings formed among Twitter users, we use a network analysis to model social groupings in the Twittersphere across time and space. Second, to assess the influence of individual tweets, we investigate the ageing factor of tweets, which measures how long users continue to interact with a particular tweet after it is originally posted.\ud \ud We consider what the profile of particular tweets from corporate and athletes’ accounts can tell us about how networks of influence are forged and maintained. We use these analyses to answer the questions: How do different types of accounts help shape the social networks? and, What determines the level and type of influence of a particular account?
- Published
- 2015
11. Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart.
- Author
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Rose, Gillian and Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
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SMART cities , *COLOR , *DIGITAL images , *URBAN life , *SOCIAL media , *ONLINE social networks - Abstract
This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming 'smart'. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
12. Algorithmic music as intelligent game music
- Author
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Prechtl, Anthony, Laney, Robin, Willis, Alistair, and Samuels, Robert
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ComputingMilieux_PERSONALCOMPUTING - Abstract
Current game music systems typically involve the playback of prerecorded audio tracks which are crossfaded in response to game events such as level changes. However, crossfading can limit the expressive power of musical transitions, and can make fine grained structural variations difficult to achieve. We therefore describe an alternative approach in which music is algorithmically generated based on a set of high-level musical features that can be controlled in real-time according to a player’s progression through a game narrative. We outline an implementation of the approach in an actual game, focusing primarily on how the music system traces the game’s emotional narrative by periodically querying certain narrative parameters and adjusting the musical features of its output accordingly.
- Published
- 2014
13. ComTax: community-driven curation for taxonomic databases
- Author
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Morse, David, Yang, Hui, Willis, Alistair, De Roeck, Anne, and King, David
- Abstract
This poster presents the work of the ComTax project to develop a community-driven curation process among practicing scientists and citizen scientists. The project provides tools to help scientists identify and validate appropriate taxonomic names from the scanned historical literature. The system operates on scanned documents, typically taken from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, although documents sourced from other repositories could be used.\ud \ud The system is intended to be used on uncorrected text after optical character recognition (OCR) on the scanned images. The key stages are:\ud \ud 1. Identify possible taxonomic names in the scanned text using machine learning techniques.\ud \ud 2. Verify the extracted names against existing databases. If present, the source scanned text can be automatically marked-up with the name.\ud \ud 3. Unverified names might mean they are not currently recorded in the verification databases, typically because the old name in the literature has been reclassified, or because erroneous OCR means that the name is incorrectly transcribed in the scanned text. In either case:\ud \ud 3.1. Present the proposed name to domain experts or citizen scientists for validation or correction, potentially through a voting mechanism to collect expert judgments on the putative taxonomic name.\ud \ud 3.2. Mark-up the scanned text with the corrected spelling of the name and offer validated taxonomic names for further use by the community.\ud \ud This poster will describe the technical challenges facing the ComTax project, and highlight potential extensions of the work to the curation of other entities of interest in the legacy literature or of different disciplines.
- Published
- 2013
14. Literature-driven Curation for Taxonomic Name Databases
- Author
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Yang, Hui, Willis, Alistair, Morse, David, and De Roeck, Anne
- Abstract
Digitized biodiversity literature provides a wealth of content for using biodiversity knowledge by machines. However, identifying taxonomic names and the associated semantic metadata is a difficult and labour intensive process. We present a system to support human assisted creation of semantic metadata. Information extraction techniques auto-matically identify taxonomic names from scanned documents. They are then presented to users for manual correction or verification. The tools that support the curation process include taxonomic name identification and mapping, and community-driven taxonomic name verification. Our research shows the potential for these information extrac-tion techniques to support research and curation in disciplines dependent upon scanned documents
- Published
- 2013
15. Curation tools for taxonomic databases
- Author
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Morse, David, De Roeck, Anne, Willis, Alistair, and Yang, Hui
- Abstract
Biological taxonomy is the classification of living and fossil organisms. Taxonomists have identified and named some 1.8 million species of animals, plants, and microorganisms, a fraction of Earth's estimated 5‐30 million species. Part of the effort of taxonomy lies in developing and curating taxonomic databases, which support access to the taxonomy literature, and provide basic knowledge needed for management and conservation of biodiversity.\ud \ud A major difficulty facing this task is incorporating knowledge that is currently contained only in the historical literature. Extracting this knowledge is a difficult and labour‐intensive process, as scanning errors and other variations in nomenclature mean that particular names must be manually verified as part of the process. For example, Actinobacillus actionomy, Actinobacillus actionomyce, and Actinobacillus actionomycetam could all be variants of the same name. ComTax is an ongoing project to develop a community‐driven curation process among taxonomists, by providing tools to help them identify and validate taxonomic names from the scanned historical literature. The system operates on scanned documents following optical character recognition (OCR). The key stages are:\ud \ud 1. Identify possible taxonomic names from scanned text. Names might be new either because they do not appear in existing databases, or because they have been incorrectly identified by OCR.\ud \ud 2. Present the proposed name to a domain expert for validation or correction.\ud \ud 3. Present validated taxonomic names for curation. Organizations like Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) manage the curation of taxonomic databases. This poster describes the technical challenges facing the ComTax project, and will discuss our work with the Natural History Museum to integrate the curation process into taxonomists' workflow. We also demonstrate the relevance of this work within the wider context of biological taxonomy curation.
- Published
- 2013
16. Speculative requirements: automatic detection of uncertainty in natural language requirement
- Author
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Yang, Hui, De Roeck, Anne, Gervasi, Vincenzo, Willis, Alistair, Nuseibeh, Bashar, EPSRC, SFI, and ERC
- Subjects
speculative requirements ,machine learning ,uncertainty scopes ,natural language requirements ,rule-based approach ,uncertainty cues ,uncertainty - Abstract
peer-reviewed Stakeholders frequently use speculative language when they need to convey their requirements with some degree of uncertainty. Due to the intrinsic vagueness of speculative language, speculative requirements risk being misunderstood, and related uncertainty overlooked, and may benefit from careful treatment in the requirements engineering process. In this paper, we present a linguistically-oriented approach to automatic detection of uncertainty in natural language (NL) requirements. Our approach comprises two stages. First we identify speculative sentences by applying a machine learning algorithm called Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to identify uncertainty cues. The algorithm exploits a rich set of lexical and syntactic features extracted from requirements sentences. Second, we try to determine the scope of uncertainty. We use a rule-based approach that draws on a set of hand-crafted linguistic heuristics to determine the uncertainty scope with the help of dependency structures present in the sentence parse tree. We report on a series of experiments we conducted to evaluate the performance and usefulness of our system.
- Published
- 2012
17. From XML to XML: The why and how of making the biodiversity literature accessible to researchers
- Author
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Willis, Alistair, King, David, Morse, David, Dil, Anton, Lyal, Chris, and Roberts, David
- Subjects
ComputingMethodologies_DOCUMENTANDTEXTPROCESSING - Abstract
We present the ABLE document collection, which consists of a set of annotated volumes of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). These follow our work on automating the markup of scanned copies of the biodiversity literature, for the purpose of supporting working taxonomists. We consider an enhanced TEI XML markup language, which is used as an intermediate stage in translating from the initial XML obtained from Optical Character Recognition to the target taXMLit. The intermediate representation allows additional information from external sources such as a taxonomic thesaurus to be incorporated before the final translation into taXMLit.
- Published
- 2010
18. Improving search in scanned documents: Looking for OCR mismatches
- Author
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Willis, Alistair, Morse, David, Dil, Anton, King, David, Roberts, Dave, and Lyal, Chris
- Published
- 2009
19. NP coordination in underspecified scope representations
- Author
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Willis, Alistair
- Subjects
TheoryofComputation_LOGICSANDMEANINGSOFPROGRAMS - Abstract
Accurately capturing the quantifier scope behaviour of coordinated NPs can be problematic for underspecification systems that define constraints over semantic constructors. We present an extension to a hole-semantics like language that allows a natural representation of coordinated NPs, and a translation from partial scope requirements into constraints on the constructors. We conclude that the efficient decision procedures developed for constraints on semantic constructors enable the possible meanings of sentences containing coordinated NPs to be fully underspecified.
- Published
- 2007
20. Detecting dangerous coordination ambiguities using word distribution
- Author
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Chantree, Francis, Willis, Alistair, Kilgarriff, Adam, De Roeck, Anne, Nicolov, Nicolas, Bontcheva, Kalina, Anjelova, Galia, and Mitkov, Ruslan
- Abstract
In this paper we present heuristics for resolving coordination ambiguities. We test the hypothesis that the most likely reading of a coordination can be predicted using word distribution information from a generic corpus. Our heuristics are based upon the relative frequency of the coordination in the corpus, the distributional similarity of the coordinated words, and the collocation frequency between the coordinated words and their modifiers. These heuristics have varying but useful predictive power. They also take into account our view that many ambiguities cannot be effectively disambiguated, since human perceptions vary widely.
- Published
- 2007
21. Temporal Latent Topic User Profiles for Search Personalisation.
- Author
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Vu, Thanh, Willis, Alistair, Tran, Son N., and Song, Dawei
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
22. Developing and evaluating computational models of musical style.
- Author
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Collins, Tom, Laney, Robin, Willis, Alistair, and Garthwaite, Paul H.
- Subjects
MUSICAL style ,MUSICAL composition ,MORAL judgment ,ANALOGY ,COMPOSERS - Abstract
Stylistic composition is a creative musical activity, in which students as well as renowned composers write according to the style of another composer or period. We describe and evaluate two computational models of stylistic composition, called Racchman-Oct2010 (random constrained chain of Markovian nodes, October 2010) and Racchmaninof-Oct2010 (Racchman with inheritance of form). The former is a constrained Markov model, and the latter embeds this model in an analogy-based design system. Racchmaninof-Oct2010 applies a pattern discovery algorithm called SIACT and a perceptually validated formula for rating pattern importance, to guide the generation of a new target design from an existing source design. A listening study is reported concerning human judgments of music excerpts that are, to varying degrees, in the style of mazurkas by Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849). The listening study acts as an evaluation of the two computational models and a third, benchmark system, called Experiments in Musical Intelligence. Judges' responses indicate that some aspects of musical style, such as phrasing and rhythm, are being modeled effectively by our algorithms. Judgments are also used to identify areas for future improvements. We discuss the broader implications of this work for the fields of engineering and design, where there is potential to make use of our models of hierarchical repetitive structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
23. Improving search personalisation with dynamic group formation.
- Author
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Vu, Thanh Tien, Song, Dawei, Willis, Alistair, Tran, Son Ngoc, and Li, Jingfei
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
24. Automatic detection of nocuous coordination ambiguities in natural language requirements.
- Author
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Yang, Hui, Willis, Alistair, De Roeck, Anne, and Nuseibeh, Bashar
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
25. Towards the bibliography of life.
- Author
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King, David, Morse, David R., Willis, Alistair, and Dil, Anton
- Subjects
BIBLIOGRAPHY ,TAXONOMISTS ,TAXONOMY ,METADATA ,BIBLIOGRAPHICAL citations - Abstract
This paper discusses how we intend to take forward the vision of a Bibliography of Life in the ViBRANT project. The underlying principle of the Bibliography is to provide taxonomists and others with a freely accessible bibliography covering the whole of life. Such a bibliography has been achieved for specific study areas within taxonomy, but not for "life" as a whole. The creation of such a comprehensive tool has been hindered by various social and technical issues. The social concerns focus on the willingness of users to contribute to the Bibliography. The technical concerns relate to the architecture required to deliver the Bibliography. These issues are discussed in the paper and approaches to addressing them within the ViBRANT project are described, to demonstrate how we can now seriously consider building a Bibliography of Life. We are particularly interested in the potential of the resulting tool to improve the quality of bibliographic references. Through analysing the large number of references in the Bibliography we will be able to add metadata by resolving known issues such as geographical name variations. This should result in a tool that will assist taxonomists in two ways. Firstly, it will be easier for them to discover relevant literature, especially pre-digital literature; and secondly, it will be easier for them to identify the canonical form for a citation. The paper also covers related issues relevant to building the tool in ViBRANT, including implementation and copyright, with suggestions as to how we could address them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
26. Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements.
- Author
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Hui Yang, de Roeck, Anne, Gervasi, Vincenzo, Willis, Alistair, and Nuseibeh, Bashar
- Subjects
REQUIREMENTS engineering ,ANAPHORA (Linguistics) ,NATURAL language processing ,AMBIGUITY ,HEURISTIC programming ,MACHINE learning ,SEMANTICS - Abstract
Many requirements documents are written in natural language (NL). However, with the flexibility of NL comes the risk of introducing unwanted ambiguities in the requirements and misunderstandings between stakeholders. In this paper, we describe an automated approach to identify potentially nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted differently by different readers. We concentrate on anaphoric ambiguity, which occurs when readers may disagree on how pronouns should be interpreted. We describe a number of heuristics, each of which captures information that may lead a reader to favor a particular interpretation of the text. We use these heuristics to build a classifier, which in turn predicts the degree to which particular interpretations are preferred. We collected multiple human judgements on the interpretation of requirements exhibiting anaphoric ambiguity and showed how the distribution of these judgements can be used to assess whether a particular instance of ambiguity is nocuous. Given a requirements document written in natural language, our approach can identify sentences that contain anaphoric ambiguity, and use the classifier to alert the requirements writer of text that runs the risk of misinterpretation. We report on a series of experiments that we conducted to evaluate the performance of the automated system we developed to support our approach. The results show that the system achieves high recall with a consistent improvement on baseline precision subject to some ambiguity tolerance levels, allowing us to explore and highlight realistic and potentially problematic ambiguities in actual requirements documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
27. Chopin, mazurkas and Markov.
- Author
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Collins, Tom, Laney, Robin, Willis, Alistair, and Garthwaite, Paul H.
- Subjects
MUSICAL composition ,STATISTICS ,COMPOSERS ,MUSIC ,MATHEMATICS - Abstract
How do people compose music? Can computers, with statistics, create a mazurka that cannot be distinguished from a Chopin original? Tom Collins, Robin Laney, Alistair Willis and Paul H. Garthwaite make music with Markov models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
28. A hybrid model for automatic emotion recognition in suicide notes.
- Author
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Yang H, Willis A, de Roeck A, and Nuseibeh B
- Abstract
We describe the Open University team's submission to the 2011 i2b2/VA/Cincinnati Medical Natural Language Processing Challenge, Track 2 Shared Task for sentiment analysis in suicide notes. This Shared Task focused on the development of automatic systems that identify, at the sentence level, affective text of 15 specific emotions from suicide notes. We propose a hybrid model that incorporates a number of natural language processing techniques, including lexicon-based keyword spotting, CRF-based emotion cue identification, and machine learning-based emotion classification. The results generated by different techniques are integrated using different vote-based merging strategies. The automated system performed well against the manually-annotated gold standard, and achieved encouraging results with a micro-averaged F-measure score of 61.39% in textual emotion recognition, which was ranked 1st place out of 24 participant teams in this challenge. The results demonstrate that effective emotion recognition by an automated system is possible when a large annotated corpus is available.
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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