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Textbook Question Answering is a complex task in the intersection of Machine Comprehension and Visual Question Answering that requires reasoning with multimodal information from text and diagrams. For the first time, this paper taps on the potential of transformer language models and bottom-up and top-down attention to tackle the language and visual understanding challenges this task entails. Rather than training a language-visual transformer from scratch we rely on pre-trained transformers, fine-tuning and ensembling. We add bottom-up and top-down attention to identify regions of interest corresponding to diagram constituents and their relationships, improving the selection of relevant visual information for each question and answer options. Our system ISAAQ reports unprecedented success in all TQA question types, with accuracies of 81.36%, 71.11% and 55.12% on true/false, text-only and diagram multiple choice questions. ISAAQ also demonstrates its broad applicability, obtaining state-of-the-art results in other demanding datasets. Accepted for publication as a long paper in EMNLP2020

The articles presented in this issue constitute the second part of the special issue devoted to analyzing the links between culture, crisis, and renewal as part of the research project “Cultural Na...

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In visual word identification, readers automatically access word internal information: they recognize orthographically embedded words (e.g., HAT in THAT) and are sensitive to morphological structure (DEAL-ER, BASKET-BALL). The exact mechanisms that govern these processes, however, are not well established yet - how is this information used? What is the role of affixes in this process? To address these questions, we tested the activation of meaning of embedded word stems in the presence or absence of a morphological structure using two semantic categorization tasks in Italian. Participants made category decisions on words (e.g., is CARROT a type of food?). Some no-answers (is CORNER a type of food?) contained category-congruent embedded word stems (i.e., CORN-). Moreover, the embedded stems could be accompanied by a pseudo-suffix (-er in CORNER) or a non-morphological ending (-ce in PEACE) - this allowed gauging the role of pseudo-suffixes in stem activation. The analyses of accuracy and response times revealed that words were harder to reject as members of a category when they contained an embedded word stem that was indeed category-congruent. Critically, this was the case regardless of the presence or absence of a pseudo-suffix. These findings provide evidence that the lexical identification system activates the meaning of embedded word stems when the task requires semantic information. This study brings together research on orthographic neighbors and morphological processing, yielding results that have important implications for models of visual word processing.

Rather than being seen as citizens, the children of immigrants are portrayed as a population to be controlled and contained across Europe. In Italy today, debates about cultural ‘authenticity’ and renewed nationalism accompany waves of moral panic that depict a country under siege by illegal and unwanted immigrants. Specifically in cities, immigrants and their children are imagined and portrayed as alien and out of place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Turin, Italy, with children of immigrants aged between 16 and 21, De Martini Ugolotti and Moyer illustrate how these youth make use of their bodies through capoeira and parkour practices to contest and reappropriate public spaces, thereby challenging dominant visions about what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. They analyse the ‘body in place’ to understand how the children of immigrants navigate unequal spatial relations and challenge dominant regimes of representation, while also attempting to improve their life conditions and reach their personal goals.

In the last decade, macro religious institutions have undergone a process of digitalization that enabled them to incorporate Internet Communication Technologies in their organizational infrastructure. Stemming from digital religion scholarship, the research presented in this paper relate to a study of the philosophy and functioning of an innovative Catholic media enterprise called Christian Media Center (CMC). Based in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the CMC was established through the cooperation between the long-standing Franciscan Order and the technology-savvy Brazilian community of Canção Nova. Accordingly, this paper asks: which forms of interdenominational negotiation are involved in the functioning of the CMC? Drawing on interviews conducted during three years, this research will outline the process of internal negotiation required by the development of this Catholic new media project and propose possible directions for future research. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837727

This article analyses the migration control narrative in Italy and Hungary at the nexus of humanitarianism and securitisation. We concentrate on how the humanitarian discourse is undervalued as the EU border states emphasise either full securitisation or else securitisation as a condition for humanitarianism when it comes to border management and refugee protection measures. We trace, first, how politicians conceptualise humanitarianism for the self and for the extension of the self; and, second, how they conditionalize humanitarianism for the other. Reflecting on the institutional and discursive nexus of humanitarianism and securitization in effect to migration controls, our aim is also to contextualise political narratives of Europe and how politicians use them to affect the public. We elaborate on this nexus considering how it foregrounds human rights for the self but challenges humanitarianism as it undervalues human rights for the other. In order to see how migration politics is framed for everyday consumption, we are referring to tropes emerging in major political speeches in Italy and Hungary, and develop two conceptual terms suggesting conditionalised humanitarianism and domesticised humanitarianism.

Automated Essay Scoring has gained a wider applicability and usage with the integration of advanced Natural Language Processing techniques which enabled in-depth analyses of discourse in order capture the specificities of written texts. In this paper, we introduce a novel Automatic Essay Scoring method for Dutch language, built within the Readerbench framework, which encompasses a wide range of textual complexity indices, as well as an automated segmentation approach. Our method was evaluated on a corpus of 173 technical reports automatically split into sections and subsections, thus forming a hierarchical structure on which textual complexity indices were subsequently applied. The stepwise regression model explained 30.5% of the variance in students’ scores, while a Discriminant Function Analysis predicted with substantial accuracy (75.1%) whether they are high or low performance students.

Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers treated the compounds as single prosodic units, indistinguishable from simple words, with RT data statistically different than that of the adjective-noun phrases. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that compounds are also treated as single prosodic units in utterances containing clitics (e.g., dishcloths are clean) as they incorporate the verb into a single phonological word (i.e. dishcloths-are). Taken together, these results suggest that English compounds are planned as single recursive prosodic units. Our data require an adaptation of the classic model of phonological encoding to incorporate a distinction between lexical and postlexical prosodic processes, such that lexical boundaries have consequences for post-lexical phonological encoding.

In this compelling collection of articles, authors engage the work of Simone de Beauvoir, arguably one of the most original philosophers of the twentieth century, by focusing on her largely neglect...