[ES] En esta tesis abordamos el problema de la detección de las opiniones (stance detection, SD) en las redes sociales, centrándose en los debates políticos polarizados en Twitter. La SD consiste en determinar automáticamente si el autor de una publicación está a favor o en contra de un objetivo de interés, o si no se puede inferir la opinión. Nos ocupamos de temas políticos como las elecciones políticas y los referendos y, como resultado, los objetivos son tanto personas como referendos. También exploramos las comunicaciones que tienen lugar en estos debates polarizados, arrojando luz sobre las dinámicas de comunicación entre personas que tienen opiniones en acuerdo o en conflicto, enfocándonos en particular en la observación del cambio de opiniones (opinion shifting). Proponemos modelos de aprendizaje automático para la SD como si fuera un problema de clasificación binaria. Exploramos características basadas en el contenido del texto del tweet, además usamos características basadas en información contextual que no emerge directamente del texto. Utilizando el corpus de benchmark propuesto para la tarea compartida sobre la SD realizado para SemEval 2016, exploramos la contribución que el estudio de las relaciones entre el objetivo de interés y las otras entidades involucradas en el debate proporciona a la SD. Al participar en la tarea ``Stance and Gender Detection in Tweets on Catalan Independence'' organizado para IberEval 2017, hemos propuesto otras características textuales y contextuales para la SD en tweets en español y en catalán. Explorando la SD desde una perspectiva multilingüe, hemos creado un corpus de tweets en francés y uno en italiano. La extensión multilingüe de nuestro modelo (multiTACOS) muestra que la SD está influenciada más por los diferentes estilos utilizados por los usuarios para comunicar la opinión sobre objetivos de diferentes tipos (personas o referendos) en lugar del idioma utilizado. Con el objetivo de recuperar información contextual sobre la red social de los usuarios de Twitter (generalmente las tareas compartidas solo consisten en el contenido del tweet, dejando de lado la información sobre el usuario), hemos creado otros dos conjuntos de datos, uno en inglés y uno en italiano, respectivamente, sobre el Brexit (TW-BREXIT) y sobre el referéndum constitucional italiano (ConRef-STANCE-ita). En ambos casos de estudio, mostramos que los usuarios tienden a agruparse en grupos con ideas similares. Por este motivo, el modelo que explota el conocimiento de la comunidad social a la que el autor del tweet pertenece, supera los resultados obtenidos utilizando solo las funciones basadas en el contenido de la publicación. Además, la evidencia muestra que los usuarios utilizan diferentes tipos de comunicación según el nivel de acuerdo con la opinión del interlocutor, por ejemplo, las relaciones de amistad, los retweets y las citas (quote) son más comunes entre los usuarios relacionados, mientras que las respuestas (replies) se utilizan a menudo para interactuar con usuarios que tienen diferentes posiciones. Al abordar la SD desde una perspectiva diacrónica, también observamos tanto el cambio de opinión como la mitigación del debate hacia posiciones neutrales después del resultado de la votación. Además, hemos observado que tener contacto con una variedad más amplia de opiniones puede influir en la propensión a cambiar de opinión. Finalmente, mostramos que las características basadas en una representación gráfica de un dominio de interés no se limitan a la SD, sino que se puede aplicar a diferentes escenarios. Al proponer otra tarea de clasificación que realiza la identificación del talento en el deporte, especialmente en el estudio de caso del tenis de mesa, mostramos que las métricas de redes basadas en la centralidad son una señal fuerte para el talento y pueden usarse para entrenar un modelo de algoritmo de aprendizaje automático para enfrentar esta / [CAT] En aquesta tesi doctoral abordem el problema de la detecció de posició (stance detection, SD) en els mitjans de comunicació social, especialment centrat en els debats polítics polaritzats a Twitter. La SD consisteix a determinar automàticament si l'autor d'una publicació està a favor o en contra d'un objectiu o tema d'interès, o si l'opinió envers d'aquest objectiu o tema determinat no es pot inferir. Ens ocupem de temes polítics com ara esdeveniments electorals i, en conseqüència, els temes d'interès són, en concret, la SD en vers dirigents polítics i referèndums. També explorem les comunicacions que es duen a terme en aquests debats polaritzats, que posen de manifest la dinàmica de les comunicacions entre les persones que tenen opinions concordants o contrastades, especialment centrant-nos en l'observació del canvi de les opinions. Proposem models d'aprenentatge automàtic per abordar la SD com un problema de classificació. Explorem les funcions basades en el contingut textual del tweet, però també les funcions basades en la informació contextual que no afloren directament del text. Utilitzem el conjunt de dades de referència en anglès proposat per a les tasques compartides sobre SD celebrades a SemEval 2016, per explorar la contribució a la SD d'investigar les relacions entre l'objectiu d'interès i les altres entitats implicades en el debat. En la participació a la tasca compartida de ``Stance and Gender Detection in Tweets on Catalan Independence'' celebrada a IberEval 2017, es van proposar altres trets textuals i contextuals per detectar la posició dels autors dels tweets, escrits en espanyol i en català, envers la independència de Catalunya. L'extensió multilingüe del model de SD (multiTACOS) mostra que la SD es veu afectada pels diferents estils que utilitzen els usuaris per comunicar la posició envers objectius de diferents tipus (persones o referèndum) més que la llengua utilitzada. Amb l'objectiu de recuperar informació contextual sobre la xarxa social dels usuaris de Twitter (les tasques compartides solen publicar només el contingut del tweet i deixen de banda, en canvi, la informació sobre la persona que escriu el tweet), vam crear dos conjunts més de dades, un en anglès i un en italià, el corpus Brexit (TW-BREXIT) i el corpus del referèndum constitucional italià (ConRef-STANCE-ita) respectivament. En els dos casos, demostrem que els usuaris tendeixen a agrupar-se en grups d'opinió o creences similars. Per aquest motiu, el model aprofita el coneixement de la comunitat social en línia al qual pertany el tweeter i supera els resultats obtinguts utilitzant només funcions basades en el contingut de la publicació. És més, els experiments també mostren que els usuaris fan servir diferents tipus de comunicació en funció del nivell d'acord amb l'opinió del seu interlocutor, és a dir, les relacions d'amistat (friendship), retweets i cotitzacions (quotes) són més freqüents entre els usuaris amb idees afins, mentre que les respostes (replies) s'utilitzen sovint per interactuar amb els usuaris que tenen posicions o opinions diferents. A l'hora d'abordar la SD des d'una perspectiva diacrònica, també observem el canvi d'opinió i la mitigació del debat cap a una posició no alineament després del resultat de la votació. A continuació, observem que l'accés a una major diversitat de punts de vista pot influir en la propensió a canviar l'opinió personal. Finalment, mostrem que la utilitat de les funcions basades en una representació gràfica d'un domini d'interès no es limita a la SD, sinó que es pot aplicar a diferents escenaris. Proposar una altra tasca de classificació que realitzi la identificació de talent en l'esport, especialment centrada en l'estudi de cas del tennis de taula, mostrem que les xarxes mètriques basades en la centralitat són un fort senyal per a detectar el talent i també es pot utilitzar per a l'entrenament d'un model d'algorisme d'ap / [EN] In this thesis, we address the problem of stance detection (SD) in social media focusing on polarized political debates in Twitter. SD consists in automatically determine whether the author of a post is in favor or against a target of interest, or whether the opinion toward the given target can not be inferred. We deal with political topics such as electoral events and consequently the targets of interest are both politicians and referendums. We also explore the communications which take place in these polarized debates shedding some light on dynamics of communications among people having concordant or contrasting opinions, particularly focusing on observing opinions' shifting. We propose machine learning models for addressing SD as a classification problem. We explore features based on the textual content of the tweet, but also features based on contextual information that do no emerge directly from the text. Using the English benchmark dataset proposed for the shared tasks on SD held at SemEval 2016, we explore the contribution on SD of investigating the relations among the target of interest and the other entities involved in the debate. Participating to the ``Stance and Gender Detection in Tweets on Catalan Independence'' shared task held at IberEval 2017, we proposed other textual and contextual based features for detecting stance on Spanish and Catalan tweets. With the main aim of facing SD in a multilingual perspective and having an homogeneous setting for multi-language comparisons, we collected tweets in French and Italian also. The multilingual extension of our SD model (multiTACOS) shows that SD is affected by the different styles used by users for communicating stance towards target of different types (persons or referendum) more than the used language. With the aim of retrieving contextual information about the social network of Twitter's users, we created other two datasets, one in English and one in Italian, respectively about the Brexit (TW-BREXIT) and the Italian Constitutional referendum (ConRef-STANCE-ita). In both the case studies, we show that users tend to aggregate themselves in like-minded groups. For this reason, the model takes advantage of knowing the online social community the tweeter belongs to and outperforms the results obtained by using only features based on the content of the post. Furthermore, experiments show that users use different type of communication depending on the level of agreement with the interlocutor's opinion, i.e., friendship, retweets, and quote relations are more common among like-minded users, while replies are often used for interacting with users having different stances. Addressing SD in a diachronic perspective, we also observe both opinion shifting and a mitigation of the debate towards an unaligned position after the outcome of the vote. Then, we observe that accessing to a larger diversity of point of views can influence the propensity to change the personal opinion. We finally show that the usefulness of features based on a graph representation of a domain of interest is not limited to SD, but can be applied to different scenarios. Proposing another classification task that performs talent identification in sport, particularly focusing on the case study of table tennis, we show that networks metrics based on centrality are strong signal for talent and can be used for training a machine learning algorithm model for this task too. / Lai, M. (2019). On Language and Structure in Polarized Communities [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/119116 / TESIS

This research seeks to study the peacebuilding strategies used in South Sudan. It is interested in the interaction between the liberal peacebuilding framework and the “local turn” as manifested in the strategy adopted by peacebuilding organisations in Africa. The local turn and local ownership only enjoy rhetorical acceptance and prove to be challenging to operationalise. This research critically analyses the ideological policies and implementation impact of strategies used, especially relating to the inclusion as well as the exclusion of “the local”. As local ownership in peace processes is essential in ensuring sustainability, the research is interested in the position that the “local” voices and “local” peace actors occupy in post-independence peace strategies and policies employed mainly through the liberal framework in South Sudan. It is in the light of the top-down liberal peacebuilding framework that this research provides an analysis of the bottom-up strategies that can be identified in the case of South Sudan. The research will thus identify types of discourses, beliefs, practices and ideologies that have been adopted in South Sudan’s peacebuilding interventions by both the local and external actors and their implications. Using the different strategies employed by the external and internal peace actors as a unit of analysis, the research will aim to find out how the peace strategies employed in South Sudan include “the local” approach, how local and external actors interact and the implications of this relationship for peace in South Sudan. This research employs a critical theory approach to analyse the inclusion of “the local” in peacebuilding and the existing relationship between the liberal peacebuilding framework and the local turn. This will be done using a qualitative approach and a phenomenological design. Since the current strategies do not exist in a vacuum, historical process tracing will be conducted to understand and evaluate the effect and the change of strategies employed by external and internal actors in the past and possible current implications. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Political Sciences / PhD / Unrestricted

This thesis puts the European Union’s (EU) normative power in a historical context and combines it with EU’s development of social goals and measures surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century. This provides social normative power to be central phenomenon. The development of EU’s social normative power is analyzed through its founding Treaties. It shows how this development leads to the construction of the European Constitution in the beginning of the twenty-first century. This treaty got rejected by the Netherlands through a national referendum, but was reused almost in its entirety in the Lisbon Treaty only a few years later. Since the development of social normative power and these controversial events have taken place in the same period, the connection between the two is examined. This is done by focusing on the national debate in the Netherlands during the period of the European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty through newspaper articles that were published at that time. It is researched how social normative power influenced Dutch national debate during the indicated period. This research will show that EU’s social normative power made the lack of democratic capacity of the EU more visible for Dutch citizens and that it contributed to a negative attitude towards the EU.

This study compares the frequency and types of hedging devices used in the presidential debate of 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Many studies have investigated hedging in political discourse, which has been shown to function as a rhetorical strategy in contexts such as political press interviews and political debates. The current study applied corpus linguistic methodology by creating a corpus of transcripts of the two presidential debates of 2020. To establish what types of hedges were used, a theoretical framework from Fraser (2010a) was used to classify the hedges into two main categories: Propositional hedges and Illocutionary hedges. A manual search showed that hedges did occur in the presidential debate and were used by both candidates to some extent. Based on the results, it could be argued that the hedging appearing in the debates was mainly used to create vagueness, express caution, evade taking responsibility for the validity of a statement, and show a lack of commitment to an utterance. The results further showed that Trump used hedges more frequently than Biden did. However, the scope of this study is not suited to make any reliable assumptions regarding whether frequent use of hedging is negative or positive.

Skills such as identifying evidence, evaluating the credibility of information sources, analyzing complex historical and geopolitical issues from multiple perspectives, asking good questions, and forming and articulating a point of view are useful for succeeding in school and in life. Speech and debate training can help students learn and practice these skills and is widely available in many independent elementary and middle schools, yet it is generally not available in public elementary and middle schools. There has been virtually no research on this topic. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to explore the perceptions of speech and debate professionals with respect to benefits, curriculum and pedagogy, feasibility, and acceptability concerning speech and debate programs in public primary schools. Using the snowball sampling technique, 25 speech and debate professionals in different parts of the speech and debate ecosystem and in different parts of the United States were identified and interviewed using a semi-structured qualitative approach. The findings indicated that speech and debate training supports health literacy and social-emotional development in students as early as elementary school by contributing to multiple aspects of “whole child” wellness, including through the promotion of identity development, mental health, psychological strengths, and life skills at essential periods of development. The findings underscored the importance of a culturally relevant pedagogical approach wherein students critically respond to, analyze, and interrogate larger social structural issues through the lens of their own cultural experiences and identities. Despite the consensus that nearly any educator can facilitate speech and debate instruction with limited training, there are several impediments to adoption and implementation, including time and school-community support. Speech and debate training requires many hours across multiple days to implement effectively. Gaining support across the curriculum from teachers and administrators was facilitated by these stakeholders having first-hand experience and observing positive outcomes for students. Policy and practice implications are proposed along with recommendations for future research relevant to increasing speech and debate programming in public elementary schools.

National parliaments (NPs) are vital to the European Union’s (EU’s) democratic legitimacy. They are tasked with controlling their governments through oversight and scrutiny while providing a deliberative forum by offering policy alternatives, informing, and connecting citizens to the EU. NPs can only provide public accountability if they adequately meet these challenges, ensuring a well-informed citizenry that is able to form and vote according to their preferences on European integration. To do this, Members of Parliament (MPs) need to publicly communicate EU issues and important developments concerning the EU project. Yet, the use of the communicative function of NPs in EU affairs remains underexplored and questions of public accountability unanswered. Against this background, this study aims to shed light on the general salience of the EU in the plenary by adopting a principal-agent framework to analyze the factors that co-vary with the willingness of MPs to discuss the EU. Employing regression analysis on a novel dataset with observations from 17 European NPsincluding over 20,000 plenary protocols from 2006-2019, this study notes a general upwards trend of the emphasis MPs put on the EU over time, driven by critical junctures, most notably, the Lisbon treaty and the Eurozone crisis. The results of this study also indicate that MPs are most consistently responsive to elections and other key EU events. Besides, factors related to authority transfers and EU legislation as well as strategic party incentives determine how much MPs use their communicative function in the plenary. Nevertheless, this study unveils some challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

This thesis explores the growing phenomenon of climate refugees and their right to protection. The aim is to investigate from the Human Security Approach developed by UNDP, if the human insecurities highlighted covers the situation of climate refugees making them eligible for protection. Thus, the purpose is to examine if insecurities caused by climate change are reason enough to be granted asylum in Sweden and if not, what the debate on extending asylum to climate refugees looks like. The research questions for this thesis are: What insecurities do the Swedish legislation consider grounds for granting asylum that could include the protection of climate refugees? and How do the debates in the Swedish Riksdag and the European Parliament discuss climate refugees and their legal status in Sweden's and the EU's asylum regulations? A qualitative content analysis of the Swedish Aliens Act and the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) revealed that even though all insecurities listed by the Human Security Approach are considered grounds for granting asylum, protection for climate refugees is not guaranteed. Consequently, debates in the Swedish and European Parliaments were examined to explore the intentions of extending the right to protection for climate refugees by including them in the legal framework. While the debates in the Swedish Parliament showed no indication of changing the legislation to include climate refugees, the European Parliament both debated and voted on proposals which sought to extend protection to climate refugees. Nonetheless, it is still not decided whether or not the EU will include climate refugees as a legal status in its asylum system.

En el entorno escolar se manifiesta una deficiencia en las habilidades comunicativas y de manera específica en la expresión oral repercutiendo en el aprendizaje del estudiante. El estudio se propuso diseñar el debate como estrategia para fortalecer la expresión oral en la enseñanza primaria en un distrito de Chiclayo. Se asumió metodología de enfoque cualitativo con diseño no experimental, descriptivo propositivo, evaluando a una muestra de 36 estudiantes. Como resultado, se obtuvo que la mayoría se encuentran en nivel bajo de expresión oral presentando dificultades de manera más notoria en la subcategoría pronunciación. Se llegó a la conclusión que el programa de talleres mediante la estrategia del debate fortalecería la expresión oral en los estudiantes teniendo como base del desarrollo didáctico, los elementos del currículo nacional y rutas de aprendizaje. El impacto que trae esta investigación es educativo porque la contribución dinamiza la comunicación interactiva para la expresión oral, y social, porque favorece genuinos espacios de interacción entre escolares; quienes presentarían mejoras en el desarrollo, integrado y sostenido, evidenciándolo incluso, en etapas posteriores a su escolaridad y futura inserción en el mundo social-laboral.

Most rhetorical studies of evolution/religion debates have addressed the media version of the debates that pits fundamentalist religion against science. Yet, most of the rhetorical studies in this area have not been nuanced enough to appreciate the complexity of the rhetoric resulting from this rich area of discourse. This study provides a rhetorical analysis of the evolution rhetoric in one particular religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and focuses on the discourse of two prominent leaders in the LDS Church, B.H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith. In the LDS Church there is a clear distinction among members (Mormons) between official and unofficial discourse, and discerning the distinction between official and unofficial discourse revolves around the rhetorical concept of ethos. The ethos of a Mormon rhetor in intra-Mormon evolution discourse depends on an audience's perception of the concordance between written or canonized revelation, the words of living oracles, and priesthood position. However, citing more scriptures and prophets, or possessing a higher priesthood position does not automatically make a rhetor's argument supreme in the LDS Church. A rhetorical analysis of the Roberts/Smith debate demonstrates that rhetoric in the LDS Church is not judged solely by the rhetor's position of authority or by the rhetor's citation of authority (e.g., canonized scripture or modern prophets); rather, the rhetor's rhetoric is judged, at least to a degree, on its own merits. Ethos provides one approach or window into the rhetoric of evolution discourse, but uncovers many other possible approaches. More rhetorical studies of the evolution debates taking place in the LDS Church and in other specific religious settings will likely reveal much more about the way that ethos and other elements of rhetoric inform the seemingly endless evolution/religion discussion.

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