Entity ranking in Wikipedia: utilising categories,links and topic difficulty prediction

Entity ranking has recently emerged as a research field that aims at retrieving entities as answers to a query. Unlike entity extraction where the goal is to tag names of entities in documents, entity ranking is primarily focused on returning a ranked list of relevant entity names for the query. Many approaches to entity ranking have been proposed, and most of them were evaluated on the INEX Wikipedia test collection. In this paper, we describe a system we developed for ranking Wikipedia entities in answer to a query. The entity ranking approach implemented in our system utilises the known categories, the link structure of Wikipedia, as well as the link co-occurrences with the entity examples (when provided) to retrieve relevant entities as answers to the query. We also extend our entity ranking approach by utilising the knowledge of predicted classes of topic difficulty. To predict the topic difficulty, we generate a classifier that uses features extracted from an INEX topic definition to classify the topic into an experimentally pre-determined class. This knowledge is then utilised to dynamically set the optimal values for the retrieval parameters of our entity ranking system. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia can significantly improve entity ranking effectiveness, and that topic difficulty prediction is a promising approach that could also be exploited to further improve the entity ranking performance.     

A Look at Global Expansion for e-Books

Forecasts indicate a growing demand for digital content around the world. Converting to digital content can open up countless new revenue possibilities. Adding alternate channels may be worth consideration, but what are the options and what does it take to utilize them effectively? This article explores the opportunities that potentially exist for publishers with content that may be digitized and distributed to global markets. A brief review of the current marketplace is also incorporated, including current players and trends. Finally, an analysis of some of the potential issues, challenges and pitfalls is presented in context of delving into a new international digital content distribution strategy.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

Exploring the effects of a 14 week person-centred counselling intervention with learning disabled children

Abstract

This study evaluates the effects of a person-centred counselling intervention on the learning disabled child's self-concept. The participants are children who attend a London borough school for moderate learning difficulties. The study is qualitative and incorporates two parts: (1) practitioner research via a 14 week person-centred counselling intervention; (2) exploration of teachers’ views of the child's self-concept via a pre- and post-intervention questionnaire. The study used person-centred art therapy as an adjunct to counselling. A projective technique was used to measure the child's self-concept.Three out of four child participants indicated an improved self-concept. However, only one out of four teachers’ questionnaires indicated a positive movement within the child. This article explores the difficulties encountered as well as highlighting positive paths, and supposes that the results support carrying out this research project over an extended period and with a larger research group.     

Event-Konzepte

In view of processes of individualization and pluralization, the requirements for living in modern societies result in significantly increased complexity of social constructions of reality. Especially for individualized juvenile people new forms of communities are a constitutive feature of social lifestyle progression and rearrangement. Within events a specific type of these juvenile communalities emerges. Based on two different cases, a music festival and an improvisational theater performance, this paper emphasizes a crucial similarity of events: the use of (physical) staging as a social mechanism for integration and distinction. The process of ‘eventization’ (i.e., spectacularization) provides a framework for action, in which emotional as well as mental affiliations constitute.     

Editorial: Kompetenzmodelle zur Erfassung individueller Lernergebnisse und zur Bilanzierung von Bildungsprozessen

This special issue comprises eleven articles from the DFG priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes”. The special issue aims at showing the priority program’s present state of discussion concerning essential concepts and questions related to the modeling of competencies. The first article describes the structure and research areas of the program and gives an overview on the current state of research. The short articles two to eleven discuss questions and problems which proved to be of particular importance during the work of the priority program in the last years. These articles constitute the result of a workshop of the participating scientists of the priority program in terms of position papers.     

Transferwirkungen künstlerischer Tätigkeiten. Ihre kritische Kommentierung durch eine umfassende Theorie ästhetischer Bildung

Transfer research examines how artistic activities can have an impact outside of the realm of art itself. The article concludes that this research can be carried out in a meaningful way, only within the framework of a comprehensive theory of aesthetic education. This theory would encompass the structural analysis of artistic activity, as well as biographical reports about artistic experiences. The elucidation of the concepts or themes relevant to the theory would include the notion of aesthetic experience, the understanding of immediate, aesthetic experiences, the analysis of artistic processes, and the outcomes of scientifically evaluated applications of aesthetic education.     

Wann kann Kompetenzdiagnostik negative Auswirkungen haben?

This paper addresses potential negative effects of systematic external competence assessment on different levels of the education system. We discuss possible sources of misinterpretations of competence assessment feedback, potential consequences of feedback and assessment for different education stakeholders (teachers, students, and educational administration) as well as negative effects of systematic competence assessment on the culture of teaching and learning. The paper concludes with some reflections on possibilities to prevent or reduce the discussed negative effects.     

Wie können Ergebnisse der Kompetenzdiagnostik in Forschungsprojekten sinnvoll zurückgemeldet werden?

Reporting on research results to students, teachers and institutions is a big challenge within competence assessment research: students individually have to be given feedback about how they performed, teachers have to be provided with information about their classes, education authorities are interested in actual research results. For feedback being helpful for students, teachers and institutions, the following questions have to be thought of: (1) Who is the feedback given to? What is the aim of the feedback? (2) Which results shall be reported? (3) How should feedback theoretically look like? And (4) how does feedback depend on the given general framework? The given article discusses these questions and offers a “checklist” to research projects with a focus on competence assessment.     

Skizze zur Historiographie der Ästhetischen Bildung

This article is focussing on a historical approach to the term of aesthetic education from three different angles: as history of ideas, biographies and images. Aesthetic education is thereby understood as performative and reflective involvement with aesthetics and the fine arts such as arts, theatre and literature etc. A first approach is defining the history of ideas as a theoretical reconstruction of aesthetic concepts and their educational relevance; this history is also discussing educational theories and their aesthetic implications. It is more or less an implicit and compensatory history because the important contexts are not visible at first sight; and the aesthetic and pedagogical theories often need a reciprocal addition. A biographical perspective is hereby concentrated on the biography of artists. Thereby the educational science of biographies are highlighting the situation of the arts and the artists, the development of becoming an artist, the progression as an artist and the artistic institutions in a educational-aesthetic nexus. Such a perspective is supplementing the history of ideas concerning cultural and socio-historical dimensions as well as institutional and biographic aspects. Finally, the history of images is focusing on the thesis that every picture also includes a programme of aesthetic education. In pictures the process of productive and reflective visualisation is expressed: paintings refer to their production and their understanding. For the method of the historical-educational iconography of aesthetic education a historicizing matrix from production aesthetics, work aesthetics and reception aesthetics is suggested. This matrix is combined with a theory of education as transformation of self-relation, of relations to other individuals and the world. The three approaches just mentioned are exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci and his famous picture “Vitruvian Man” from 1492.