This thesis contributes to the debate on hate speech by arguing for a compromise solution. It breaks with the absolutist solutions under which either all hate speech should be banned or all should be protected. The prohibition of some hateful expressions is assumed to be legitimate. This follows the European constitutional tradition. However, the prohibitionist norm should be reconciled with the right to political speech. This flows from the normative importance of free political expression that is widely endorsed. The research relies on three theoretical pillars. First, it defines the strongest democratic justificatory case for political speech in liberal democracies. Then, it argues for a richer understanding of what should count as political speech. The proposed approach assigns more weight to the political circumstances than to the sheer content of speech. The argument then proceeds through investigating the strongest objections against protecting hate speech. These prohibitionist arguments assert that hate speech incites against, silences or vilifies vulnerable groups, moreover that hate speech harms democracy. The thesis disputes these objections as applied to political hate speech. The conclusion is that political hate speech narrowly defined should be an exception from the otherwise legitimate ban on hate speech. In the final two chapters, the theoretical findings are applied to the case law of the ECtHR and to the United Kingdom's statutory hate speech regulation. The critical evaluation of hate speech judgments and statutes is coupled with suggestions how to reform the broadly prohibitionist position that these jurisdictions had come to endorse.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:22:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Jae Keum Oh.pdf: 6453251 bytes, checksum: 44935e77974596a4e82a9c7b7c032ce6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-10-29 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This project explores the issues of expressivity in speech by analyzing the nature of phonetic-acoustic and perceptive. The goal is to investigate the effects of pauses in the interpretation of four poems from the four main heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa by an announcer-actor. The object of this investigation is the relationship established between sound and meaning in this interpretation. The corpora are composed of a poem by each of the four main heteronyms Fernando Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Fernando Pessoa by himself, recorded on CD. Acoustic Phonetic analysis includes the measurement of the pause using the software Praat. The results show the use of pauses by the speaker-actor according to the poetic text or backronym. The pauses in poetry reading have a role as developer of the architecture of oral interpretation or expression of meaning effects / Este projeto explora a temática da Expressividade na fala por meio de análise de natureza fonético-acústica e perceptiva. O objetivo é investigar os efeitos das pausas na interpretação de quatro poemas dentre os quatro principais heterônimos de Fernando Pessoa por um locutor-ator. O objeto desta investigação é a relação que se estabelece entre som e sentido nessa interpretação. Os corpora são compostos por um poema de cada um dos quatro principais heterônimos de Fernando Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos e Fernando Pessoa por ele mesmo, gravados em CD. A análise Fonético Acústica compreende a medição da pausa por meio do software Praat. Os resultados mostram o uso das pausas pelo locutor-ator em função do texto poético ou heteronímico. As pausas, em leitura de poesia, têm o papel de colaborador da arquitetura da interpretação oral ou de expressão dos efeitos de sentidos

Emotion influences our actions, and this means that emotion has subjective decision value. Emotions, properly interpreted and understood, of those affected by decisions provide feedback to actions and, as such, serve as a basis for decisions. Accordingly, "affective computing" represents a wide range of technological opportunities toward the implementation of emotions to improve human-computer interaction, which also includes insights across a range of contexts of computational sciences into how we can design computer systems to communicate and recognize the emotional states provided by humans. Today, emotional systems such as software-only agents and embodied robots seem to improve every day at managing large volumes of information, and they remain emotionally incapable to read our feelings and react according to them. From a computational viewpoint, technology has made significant steps in determining how an emotional behavior model could be built; such a model is intended to be used for the purpose of intelligent assistance and support to humans. Human emotions are engines that allow people to generate useful responses to the current situation, taking into account the emotional states of others. Recovering the emotional cues emanating from the natural behavior of humans such as facial expressions and bodily kinetics could help to develop systems that allow recognition, interpretation, processing, simulation, and basing decisions on human emotions. Currently, there is a need to create emotional systems able to develop an emotional bond with users, reacting emotionally to encountered situations with the ability to help, assisting users to make their daily life easier. Handling emotions and their influence on decisions can improve the human-machine communication with a wider vision. The present thesis strives to provide an emotional architecture applicable for an agent, based on a group of decision-making models influenced by external emotional information provided by humans, acquired through a group of classification techniques from machine learning algorithms. The system can form positive bonds with the people it encounters when proceeding according to their emotional behavior. The agent embodied in the emotional architecture will interact with a user, facilitating their adoption in application areas such as caregiving to provide emotional support to the elderly. The agent's architecture uses an adversarial structure based on an Adversarial Risk Analysis framework with a decision analytic flavor that includes models forecasting a human's behavior and their impact on the surrounding environment. The agent perceives its environment and the actions performed by an individual, which constitute the resources needed to execute the agent's decision during the interaction. The agent's decision that is carried out from the adversarial structure is also affected by the information of emotional states provided by a classifiers-ensemble system, giving rise to a "decision with emotional connotation" included in the group of affective decisions. The performance of different well-known classifiers was compared in order to select the best result and build the ensemble system, based on feature selection methods that were introduced to predict the emotion. These methods are based on facial expression, bodily gestures, and speech, with satisfactory accuracy long before the final system. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 8: Accepted.</p>

This master's thesis deals with the development of a coherent expression and understanding of read out text by pre-school age children. Theoretical part is focused on a speech development, coherent expression, reading pre-literacy, fairytales and a topic of asking questions. This work also includes the characteristics of a pre-school education and environmental care issues. Furthermore this work defines important knowledge from the General educational programme for preschool education, from which was a practical part preparation based on. Its goal was to design a development of coherent expression and understanding of read out text project, connected with the "What happens under the ground" topic, design particular lessons, implement them in a general kindergarten, reflect its realization and suggest recommendation for practice. Importance of a kindergarten teacher role was confirmed, because he or she is for children speaking idol. Involvement of parents into the project seems as very beneficial - for family relationship, reading pre-literacy and coherent expression children development. Moreover children during the project realization improved their ability to answer higher cognitive difficulty questions.