Relevance

Topic detection with large and noisy data collections such as social media must address both scalability and accuracy challenges. KeyGraph is an efficient method that improves on current solutions by considering keyword cooccurrence. We show that KeyGraph has similar accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art approaches on small, well-annotated collections, and it can successfully filter irrelevant documents and identify events in large and noisy social media collections. An extensive evaluation using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk demonstrated the increased accuracy and high precision of KeyGraph, as well as superior runtime performance compared to other solutions.

Recommender Systems have emerged to guide users in the task of efficiently browsing/exploring a large product space, helping users to quickly identify interesting products. However, suggestions generated with traditional Recommender Systems usually do not produce diverse results, though it has been argued that diversity is a desirable feature. The study of diversity aware Recommender Systems has become an important research challenge in recent years, drawing inspiration from diversification solutions for Information Retrieval. However, we argue it is not enough to adapt Information Retrieval techniques towards Recommender Systems, as they do not place the necessary importance to factors such as serendipity, novelty and discovery which are imperative to Recommender Systems. In this report, we propose a diversification technique for Recommender Systems that generates a diversified list of results which not only balances the trade-off between quality (in terms of accuracy) and diversit...

Relevance and irrelevance, it is argued, is constitutive to our access to “information objects” on three interconnected levels: (1) access to the information object itself, (2) the information gained from it, (3) the use of that information. Relevance selectively shapes our experience and action, but the “irrelevance” of what is left out is not simply the opposite or absence of relevance. The complex relation between relevance and irrelevance expresses itself in different shades of knowledge and ignorance, and in a fuzzy border between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. This implies both chances and risks for communication as a process of producing and exchanging information objects. In a second step, previous research on relevance and irrelevance is sketched with respect to different traditions and approaches: (1) Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch; (2) Paul Grice, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson; (3) library and information science; (4) signs and language; and (5) epistemology and logic. Finally, the role of the word “relevance”, which is not found in all languages, is briefly considered after distinguishing the explicit reflection of relevance from the constitutive role of relevance, which often remains implicit.

Theories in Communication are widely discussed in the research arena; how Media exposure influence on audiences’ behavior and perception about TV program, movie, talk show or any reported news story. More importantly, theories are used in internet, social media, new media and mobile news consumptions. Past research studies revealed that there are numbers of theories has been used in reach studies related to mass media and online media but mostly, “Limited and selective effect theory” and “Uses and Gratification theory” have much relevance to exposure of and consumption of Space Journalism, Time Journalism, and Online Journalism. It has been concluded on the basis of reviewed studies on uses and gratification theory and limited and selective effect theory. Thus, media theories have significant effect on cognitive, social, political and entertainment behaviors.

L’approche réflexive de l’étude des jeux de rôle en ligne massivement multi-joueurs demande au chercheur d’adopter un regard critique, non seulement sur le parcours qui l’a amené à entreprendre ses recherches, mais aussi sur l’approche qu’il a de son objet d’étude. La question de la pratique est centrale car elle articule les problèmes de manque de légitimité institutionnelle avec ceux liés à l’engagement envers son terrain et les autres joueurs. À la fois chercheur et joueur, il lui faut distinguer les horizons de pertinence dans deux systèmes de référence dont les finalités ne sont pas les mêmes, le jeu et la recherche. Le chercheur s’engage alors sur plusieurs niveaux, chacun nécessitant de dégager des perspectives et des enjeux propres.

This paper aims to contribute to the burgeoning area of investigation into cinematic discourse with special attention devoted to the discrepancies in the comprehension process which is consequent upon the level of perception of humorous intention by different TV recipients. To accomplish the ultimate objective, the division of television discourse into the two communicative layers, viz. characters’ and recipients’, is taken as a starting point. More specifically, the meaning gleaned by the viewers is based on verbal and visual communication established between fictional characters. It is argued that three types of recipients, namely a regular viewer, metarecipient and fanrecipient, may construct different interpretations, with the regular recipient sometimes being oblivious to humorous intention. The study is pivoted on the claim that the production crew devises dialogues and monologues in such
a way to enable the audience find funniness.

The present paper draws upon Sperber and Wilson's ([1986] 1995) Relevance Theory to undertake a pragmatic analysis of situation comedy (sitcom) discourse. More specifi cally, special attention is paid to the cognitive interpretative paths the viewer needs to take in order to fi nd a dialogue or monologue humorous. The analysis is premised upon the participation framework, which accounts for the bi-partite division of communication in fi ctional discourse: the character's (fi ctional) layer and the recipient's layer, the latter being in the centre of attention.

The increasing involvement of government in enticing higher education out of its ivory tower is indisputably part of a global trend. According to the 1997 White Paper on Higher Education (DoE, 1997), higher education is expected to increase its responsiveness to societal interests and needs. It must therefore be restructured to meet the needs of an increasingly technologically oriented economy, and its institutions must deliver the requisite research, the highly trained people and the knowledge to equip a developing society to address national needs and participate in a rapidly changing and competitive global context.
The need for globally equivalent skills raises the debate about curriculum relevance. Productivity and competitiveness depend on the ability to produce highly skilled and adaptive knowledge workers who can manage and manipulate knowledge and information and adjust to volatile and unpredictable global markets. Such knowledge workers need to have well-developed problem-solving skills and be able to
continually adjust their repertoire of knowledge and skills to changing environments. In such a context, it is frequently argued that the role of higher education shifts from an induction into the specialised knowledge of specific disciplines to the development of broad, generic and transferable skills. In essence, higher education institutions
worldwide are being called upon to become more responsive to the needs of the knowledge economy. As South Africa attempts to meet pressing national needs in a global context, curriculum responsiveness has become central to policy, and the higher education
system is grappling with this as it rethinks the curriculum. While efforts to restructure curricula show evidence of institutions attempting to become responsive, the outcomes are sometimes incompatible may respond to immediate market needs, they may not produce the ‘self-programmable labour’ that is required for the new
knowledge economy. This raises the question of how higher education curricula should respond to the new knowledge economy and how curriculum responsiveness should be conceptualised. This paper explores the various dimensions of curriculum responsiveness and analyses strategies for addressing several of the opportunities, challenges and tensions involved.

Introduction The purpose of this book is to provide a theoretical and practical foundation for mastering some specific analytical skills relating to the construction and criticism of arguments about disputed questions of fact. It is not a book about the law of evidence, but a central theme has been that the principles of proof and the law of evidence are intimately related. Like Wigmore, we believe that understanding the principles of proof is a valuable, perhaps a necessary, foundation both for understanding the rules and learning how to use them in practice. At several points this interdependence has been made explicit. Chapters 1 and 2 illustrate the extent to which the two subjects share the same basic concepts: for example, relevance, materiality, weight/probative force, admissibility, inference, credibility, corroboration, prejudicial effect, and so on. In Chapter 3, we saw how nearly all secondary writers on evidence, including all the leading treatise writers, have worked within a framework of shared assumptions, which we called “The Rationalist Tradition.” Those assumptions are common to the principles of proof and the basic principles of the law of evidence in common law countries. We also saw how relevance and weight are governed by “logic and general experience” rather than formal rules and that relevance is the main test of admissibility of evidence. As questions of admissibility are increasingly determined by exercise of judicial discretion and application of balancing tests in the circumstances of a particular case (for example the weighing of prejudicial effect against probative value), so too the logic of proof and the practical operation of rulings on admissibility have increasingly converged.

This review article explores the Higher Vocational education Reform: Matching Skills to Markets in China, and to propose plausibly and concrete steps policymakers and educational leaders can take to address those challenges to ensure the TVET system in preparing human capital, which is necessary for the construction of a knowledge economy as well as tackle poverty and unemployment. The study utilized a desk review research approach targeted review of literature from a variety of references such as studies, research journals, online newspapers, books, articles, and electronic databases, such as ERIC, ProQuest etc. were reviewed, summarized and documented. The study revealed that following the former leader Deng Xiaoping inspiration said, "Education should be oriented towards modernization, the world and the future" and the booming industry and growing factory system puts great pressure on the vocational education system in China to produce high skillful workers, the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) frequently a wide range of reforms have been introduced and implemented a radical expansion of higher vocational education [HVE] from 1980 in response to the substantial increase in the demand for high-skill labour. Despite these positive indications, still, there is a shortage of highly skilled talents and skills mismatch in China due to the imperfection of curriculum, shortage of qualified teachers, weak monitoring & evaluation, and poor connections with industry. As a result of this, many college graduates are having trouble finding jobs; the increase in college graduates has outpaced the growth in jobs requiring college degrees. A failure to link the skills taught in TVET to those required in the labour market has long-term implications, not only for learners' transitions but also for the country's economic competitiveness and many employers report difficulties in finding suitably skilled workers. Therefore, these issues highlight that the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) should consider implementing in response to the challenges identified in this paper.

Information retrieval systems centrally build upon the concept of relevance in order to rank documents in response to a user's query. Assessing relevance is a non-trivial operation that can be influenced by a multitude of factors that go beyond mere topical overlap with the query. This thesis argues that relevance depends on personal (Chapter 2) and situational (Chapter 3) context. In many use cases, there is no single interpretation of the concept that would optimally satisfy all users in all possible situations.

We postulate that relevance should be explicitly modelled as a composite notion comprised of individual relevance dimensions. To this end, we show how automatic inference schemes based on document content and user activity can be used in order to estimate such constituents of relevance (Chapter 4). Alternatively, we can employ human expertise, harnessed, for example, via commercial crowdsourcing or serious games to judge the degree to which a document satisfies a given set of relevance dimensions (Chapter 5).

Finally, we need a model that allows us to estimate the joint distribution of relevance across all previously obtained dimensions. In this thesis, we propose using copulas, a model family originating from the field of quantitative finances that decouples observations and dependency structure and which can account for complex non-linear dependencies among relevance dimensions (Chapter 6).

This paper advances an approach to relevance grounded on patterns of material inference called argumentation schemes, which can account for the reconstruction and the evaluation of relevance relations. In order to account for relevance in different types of dialogical contexts, pursuing also non-cognitive goals, and measuring the scalar strength of relevance, communicative acts are conceived as dialogue moves, whose coherence with the previous ones or the context is represented as the conclusion of steps of material inferences. Such inferences are described using argumentation schemes and are evaluated by considering (1) their defeasibility, and (2) the acceptability of the implicit premises on which they are based. The assessment of both the relevance of an utterance and the strength thereof depends on the evaluation of three interrelated factors: (1) number of inferential steps required; (2) the types of argumentation schemes involved; and (3) the implicit premises required.

This article introduces the concept of relevance as viewed and applied in the context of IR evaluation, by presenting an overview of the multidimensional and dynamic nature of the concept. The literature on relevance reveals how the relevance concept, especially in regard to the multidimensionality of relevance, is many faceted, and does not just refer to the various relevance criteria users may apply in the process of judging relevance of retrieved information objects. From our point of view, the multidimensionality of relevance explains why some will argue that no consensus has been reached on the relevance concept. Thus, the objective of this article is to present an overview of the many different views and ways by which the concept of relevance is used—leading to a consistent and compatible understanding of the concept. In addition, special attention is paid to the type of situational relevance. Many researchers perceive situational relevance as the most realistic type of user relevance, and therefore situational relevance is discussed with reference to its potential dynamic nature, and as a requirement for interactive information retrieval (IIR) evaluation.

Over almost thirty years, relevance theorists have sought to answer many intriguing questions regarding human ostensive communication and have analysed an incredibly overwhelming number of linguistic and communicative phenomena with the psychologically-based apparatus of the framework put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995). As a result, they have offered new insights into pragmatic properties of utterances, how the mind processes them and how humans understand them. The works gathered in this book attest to the impetus of research in this cognitive branch of pragmatics and the vigour wherewith researchers have sought to better explain communication and, more specifically, how specific elements of linguistic systems and types of utterances and their characteristics are exploited by the pragmatic module so as to arrive at the speaker's informative intention. Some of these works, in addition, show how relevance theory can be combined with or applied to other linguistic disciplines in order to look for more complete and encompassing answers to diverse problems. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, applications of relevance theory include those to fields such as translation, stylistics and literary communication, pragmatic development and first or second language acquisition, or media communication, to name but a few. In his recent manual on relevance theory, Clark (2013) also reviews developments in areas like pragmatics and the mind, modularity and mental architecture, mind-reading, metarepresentation and theory of mind, phatic communication or politeness, although these do not obviously exhaust the potentialities of the theory. The fields to which some of the works in this book apply relevance theory comprise morphology, syntax, linguistic description, translation, argumentation, pragmatic development and second language acquisition. However, in spite of the vast and impressive amount of research done thus far, there still lies

Strategy is about making winning choices and sustainably implementing them with both efficiency and effectiveness in the long run. Some research findings suggest that this might be successfully achieved by people having a situational awareness as clear as possible. Hopefully, numerous analysis tools are available in the marketplace which can allow such achievement. Strategists generally recommend to combine some of them in order to deepen insight into a given organization and its environment. This paper firstly investigates benefits and limitations of one of the most used methods in most business sectors and activities, the so-called SWOT analysis, whose acronym SWOT stands in one hand for two internal factors, strengths and weaknesses, and on the hand for two external factors,  opportunities and threats. Researchers have abundantly commented the outcomes of this framework proposing either to complete it with other techniques or simply scratching it due to its limitations. This paper secondly develops a case study with reference to a local company, Chanas Insurance plc, currently battling to reverse the course of its declining activities.

ABSTRACT Metaphorical meaning can be analyzed as triggered by an apparent communicative breach, an incongruity that leads to a default of the presumptive interpretation of a vehicle. This breach can be solved through contextual renegotiations of meaning guided by the communicative intention, or rather the presumed purpose of the metaphorical utterance. This paper addresses the problem of analyzing the complex process of reasoning underlying the reconstruction of metaphorical meaning. This process will be described as a type of abductive argument, aimed at explaining how the vehicle can best contribute to the purpose of the utterance. This type of reasoning involves the analysis of the possible predicates that can be and usually are attributed to the vehicle, and the selection of the one (or ones) that can support the implicit conclusion constituting the communicative goal of the metaphorical utterance. Metaphorical meaning, in this perspective, becomes the outcome of a complex process of meaning reconstruction aimed at providing the best explanation of the function of the vehicle within a discourse move.

Una característica de los argumentos suposicionales es que presentan como razón para aceptar su conclusión, no solo aserciones o enunciados, sino argumentos. Para dar cuenta de los argumentos suposicionales diversos autores (Freeman, Fisher, Hitchcock) proponen extender el concepto de premisa, de manera que se aplique no solo a enunciados sino también a argumentos. En este artículo se exploran algunas de las consecuencias de esa propuesta para la teoría de los argumentos.

The paramount objective of the present work is to analyse selected types of jokes in the light of Relevance Theory. The point of departure for the empirical investigation is Yus’ (2008) taxonomy of canned jokes. The work is divided into three main parts. The first two chapters constitute the theoretical introduction to the analysis undertaken in Chapter 3.
Chapter 1 sets out to present the theoretical assumptions of Relevance Theory (RT), originated and developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986 [1995]) in their book entitled Relevance: Communication and Cognition and a wealth of articles. The theory of relevance assumes that human cognition and communication are geared towards the maximization of relevance. Chapter 2 characterises two accounts grounded in RT, which have been offered by Francisco Yus (2003, 2008, 2010) and Maria Jodłowiec (1991ab, 2008). Chapter 3 centres on the practical applicability of Yus’ (2008) categorisation of jokes into my data culled from collections of jokes and Internet sources.