Progress in Science and its Enemies: the Case of Academic Bullshit

The paper discusses the phenomenon of bullshit in the academia as an ob­stacle for progress in natural sciences and the humanities and as a problem of episte­mology and philosophy of science. The authors criticize a popular approach according to which bullshit is defined in terms of the goals or motivations of the bullshitter as a subjectivist and inadequate. Focusing on the phenomenon of bullshit in academic practices, the authors define it in terms of the relevance of the content of a corre­sponding discourse to the topical issues of a given academic discipline and the extent to which the justification proposed in the discourse meets the standard justification criteria in the given discipline. An important component of the proposed definition is the contextual parameter of the judge the perspective of which is represented by a relevant research community. The authors show how the proposed account captures the well-known cases of bullshit as well as solves some of the current problems in social epistemology, such as the nature of group bullshit. The authors argue that the problem of group bullshit arises only when bullshit is understood in terms of indi­vidual intentions or motives. In that case, it is challenging to define group bullshit in a case when no representative of a given group individually supports the bullshit argument put forward by the whole group. For an approach that defines bullshit without appeal to such subjective factors as individual intentions, this problem does not arise because bullshit is independent of the goals of the bullshitter. The authors acknowledge the importance of the motivations of the bullshiter and her strategies. However, they argue that this matter is irrelevant for the definition of bullshit.

The Cohesion of the Prologue on the Hunger Games Trilogy: A Discourse Analysis

Cohesion is designed to deal with words and phrases that generate a pattern of relations between lexical elements and structures to build an integral and logical text. The analysis of cohesion aims to connect central concepts to the context of writing intended to pursue standards of communication, writing styles, textuality, and a practice of discourse. Accordingly, this study analyzes the cohesion found in the Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The method of this research is a discourse analysis focusing on Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) developed by M.A.K. Halliday. Based on the analysis, the prologue of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire novels can be described in the terms of field, tenor, and mode creating the contextual parameter. The text of the novels is written and is clearly detached, explicit, planned and integrated. While links were observed as characters and places were repeatedly written. The conclusion can be drawn that the two novels aim to tell a story. Furthermore, the texts do not instruct the reader on what to do but rather, it tells what the characters of the story did, are doing, or will do. The novels also implore the reader to read further beyond the prologue and to the main story.

Contextual Parameter Generation for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

We consider the task of knowledge graph link prediction. Given a question consisting of a source entity and a relation (e.g., Shakespeare and BornIn), the objective is to predict the most likely answer entity (e.g., England). Recent approaches tackle this problem by learning entity and relation embeddings. However, they often constrain the relationship between these embeddings to be additive (i.e., the embeddings are concatenated and then processed by a sequence of linear functions and element-wise non-linearities). We show that this type of interaction significantly limits representational power. For example, such models cannot handle cases where a different projection of the source entity is used for each relation. We propose to use contextual parameter generation to address this limitation. More specifically, we treat relations as the context in which source entities are processed to produce predictions, by using relation embeddings to generate the parameters of a model operating over source entity embeddings. This allows models to represent more complex interactions between entities and relations. We apply our method on two existing link prediction methods, including the current state-of-the-art, resulting in significant performance gains and establishing a new state-of-the-art for this task. These gains are achieved while also reducing convergence time by up to 28 times.

DISCURSIVE TYPES OF RHYMES

The article raises the problem of the rhyme classification, in particular, in the matter of supplementing it with actual parameters. Interpretation of the rhymed text as a creative process determines its analysis in two diametrically opposite aspects: individualauthorial and general-cultural. In the discourse of author’s creativity, the rhyme is analyzed in terms of the stability of the component composition, the compliance with the completed text, the mandatory employment. In the discourse of national and world culture, rhymes are analyzed on the basis of intertextuality. The rhyme transformation is described in the direction from the original rhyming compound to the result of its development in the new text. Intertextual rhymes are analyzed according to their perceptual potential, the accuracy of the reproduction of the original rhyme, as well as the contextual parameter.

The Prefiltering Techniques in Emotion Based Place Recommendation Derived by User Reviews

Context-aware recommendation systems attempt to address the challenge of identifying products or items that have the greatest chance of meeting user requirements by adapting to current contextual information. Many such systems have been developed in domains such as movies, books, and music, and emotion is a contextual parameter that has already been used in those fields. This paper focuses on the use of emotion as a contextual parameter in a tourist destination recommendation system. We developed a new corpus that incorporates the emotion parameter by employing semantic analysis techniques for destination recommendation. We review the effectiveness of incorporating emotion in a recommendation process using prefiltering techniques and show that the use of emotion as a contextual parameter for location recommendation in conjunction with collaborative filtering increases user satisfaction.

Answers without questions: The emergence of fragments in child language

Non-sentential utterances (NSUs), utterances that lack an overt verbal (more generally predicative) constituent, are common in adult speech. This paper presents the results of a corpus study of the emergence of certain classes of NSUs in child language, based primarily on data from the Manchester Corpus from CHILDES. Our principal finding is the late short query effect: the main classes of non-sentential queries (NSQs) are acquired much later than non-sentential answers (NSAs). At a stage when the child has productive use of sentential queries, and has mastered elliptical declaratives and the polar lexemes ‘yes’ and ‘no’, non-sentential questions are virtually absent. This happens despite the fact that such questions are common in the speech of the child's caregivers and that the contexts are ones which should facilitate the production of such NSUs. We argue that these results are intrinsically problematic for analyses of NSUs in terms of a single, generalized mechanism of phonological reduction, as standard in generative grammar. We show how to model this effect within an approach of dialogue-oriented constructionism, wherein NSUs are grammatical words or constructions whose main predicate is a contextual parameter resolved in a manner akin to indexical terms, the relevant aspect of context being the discourse topic. We sketch an explanation for the order of acquisition of NSUs, based on a notion which combines accessibility of contextual parameters and complexity of content construction.