Multi-Label Feature Selection Combining Three Types of Conditional Relevance

With the rapid growth of the Internet, the curse of dimensionality caused by massive multi-label data has attracted extensive attention. Feature selection plays an indispensable role in dimensionality reduction processing. Many researchers have focused on this subject based on information theory. Here, to evaluate feature relevance, a novel feature relevance term (FR) that employs three incremental information terms to comprehensively consider three key aspects (candidate features, selected features, and label correlations) is designed. A thorough examination of the three key aspects of FR outlined above is more favorable to capturing the optimal features. Moreover, we employ label-related feature redundancy as the label-related feature redundancy term (LR) to reduce unnecessary redundancy. Therefore, a designed multi-label feature selection method that integrates FR with LR is proposed, namely, Feature Selection combining three types of Conditional Relevance (TCRFS). Numerous experiments indicate that TCRFS outperforms the other 6 state-of-the-art multi-label approaches on 13 multi-label benchmark data sets from 4 domains.

Framing in interactive academic talk

Framing involves how language users conceptualize what is happening in interaction for situated interpretation of roles, purposes, expectations, and sequences of action, thus show significant conceptual relevance to the analysis of routinized institutional communication. Having established a working definition of framing based on an intensive review of previous research, this study investigates university students’ and tutors’ framing behaviors in interactive small group talk. Two types of framing-in-interaction, -alternate framing of a single situation and co-framing within/beyond speaker role boundary-, are identified, examined, and characterized from a conversation-analytic perspective. The findings suggest that alternate framings co-occur with traceable interactional devices for sequential organization when the single situation at talk takes on divergent meaning potentials to be accessed. Co-framings happen when at least one (group) of participants is highly goal-oriented, showing conditional relevance to the prior courses of action and more explicit negotiation of epistemic stances. Framing, therefore, can be arguably taken as a global organization resource to characterize contextualization in institutional communication.

Conditional relevance of controls: A simultaneous test of the influences of self-control and deterrence on criminal behaviour in the context of Situational Action Theory

Situational Action Theory includes a series of propositions on the interaction between the moral filter and internal and external controls. These reflections are condensed into the principle of the conditional relevance of controls and the principle of moral correspondence. In this study, the interplay of controls and moral forces is tested within the framework of structural equation modelling. Survey data from two cohorts of students in the German cities of Dortmund (North-Rhine Westphalia) and Nuremberg (Bavaria) serve as the empirical base. By using multiple group comparisons, the influences of self-control and deterrence on self-reported delinquency are examined simultaneously for four different subgroups of respondents formed on the basis of their levels of crime propensity and criminogenic exposure. The analyses provide support for a conditional relevance of controls, but produce only mixed evidence for the principle of moral correspondence. Controls are more important when the moral filter is weak, but fail to lose their explanatory power among adolescents characterized by both high propensity and strong exposure. Our findings furthermore suggest that self-control appears to matter particularly when the moral context encourages crime and deterrence seems to be influential especially when personal morality encourages crime.

Expressing an alternative view from second position: Reversed polarity questions in everyday Japanese conversation

This conversation-analytic study examines a type of action accomplished through a reversed polarity question (RPQ) responding to initial assessments in everyday Japanese conversation. This study demonstrates that RPQs deployed in this specific position express alternative views to initial assessments by appealing to participants’ common sense or knowledge and index participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable. These RPQs do not simply convey the speakers’ disagreement with initial assessments, however, but are designed to be situated as ‘new’ first assessments by triggering the conditional relevance of the question–answer adjacency pair, thereby inviting agreement from the prior speaker. This study also reveals two commonly observable practices by which the speaker secures the participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable and thereby creates the basis for producing RPQs. It is further shown that these two practices can affect the strength of disaffiliation expressed by the RPQ.

On the Truth-Conditional Relevance of Modes of Presentation

Anne Bezuidenhout 1996 presents an argument for the claim that modes of presentation associated with referential terms are truth-conditionally relevant. I argue that her argument is flawed in light of the very same view on the interplay between reference and pragmatics she endorses.

Negotiating meaning in narratives

In this article we focus on the negotiation of meaning in narratives. One crucial place for the negotiation of meaning in narratives is its punchline and the sequence it precedes, the post punchline sequence. We will study in detail the interactional construction of the punchline and of the post punchline in institutional talk and private everyday conversation. In our material these activities are systematically examined in a two-step procedure: Firstly, the participants address the modality of the story in their construction of the punchline. Here, the recipient claims a preliminary understanding of the story, and the teller of the story can acknowledge this claim. Secondly, the participants evaluate the story by explicitly negotiating the understanding of the reported experience and by relating the story to a wider context. The first step of this procedure seems to have conditional relevance for step two; therefore we consider the post punchline sequence as part of the narrative. We regard the participants' joint construction of meaning as a central activity, and we approach this topic by investigating how the aspects of modality and negotiation of understanding are constructed and how they contribute to the display of alignment or disalignment in talk.