Many news outlets allow users to contribute comments on topics about daily world events. News articles are the seeds that spring users' interest to contribute content, i.e., comments. An article may attract an apathetic user engagement (several tens of comments) or a spontaneous fervent user engagement (thousands of comments). This environment creates a social dynamic that is little studied. The social dynamics around articles have the potential to reveal interesting facets of the user population at a news outlet. We report some salient finding about these social media based on data collected from 17 news outlets. Analysis of the data reveals interesting insights such as there is an uneven relationship between news outlets and their user populations across outlets. Such observations and others have not been revealed, to our knowledge. Besides, we also study the problem of predicting the total number of user comments a news article will receive. Our main insight is that the early dynamics of user comments contribute the most to an accurate prediction, while news article specific factors have surprisingly little influence. We show that the early arrival rate of comments is the best indicator of the eventual number of comments. We conduct an in-depth analysis of this feature across several dimensions, such as news outlets and news article categories. Online comments submitted by readers of news articles can provide valuable feedback and critique, personal views and perspectives, and opportunities for discussion. Previously, we manually collect user comments from 17 news outlets for data analysis. However, this kind of manual solution is very limited and cannot work for variety of websites. Therefore, we need to have an automatic solution for thousands of news outlets. We find that most new websites employ third party commenting systems to create and manage their comment sections. One can crawl the comments by sending URL requests to those commenting system servers. We propose an approach of crawling user comments by instantiating URL templates supported by these web servers. We propose a hybrid framework that combines the advantages of labeling functions, in the form of regular expressions, and deep learning. We conduct extensive experiments with thousands of web pages to show that we can crawl comments from many websites with our approach. / Computer and Information Science

Children's learning of language-universal and language-specific principles of argument representation was the topic under investigation in the three studies comprising this thesis. Another objective was to investigate whether a discourse-pragmatic approach could be employed to explain children's patterns of argument omission and production, developmentally and crosslinguistically. To answer these questions, referential choice in the spontaneous language of monolingual English-speaking and monolingual Japanese-speaking children and their mothers was developmentally investigated whereby a sentence argument's morphological form (null, pronominal, lexical), referential status (given, new), and syntactic location (transitive subject, transitive object, intransitive subject) were systematically analysed. The first and second studies revealed that neither the English-speaking nor the Japanese-speaking children showed sensitivity to the referential distinction between given and new information early on in development (at 21 months of age). The English-speaking children mastered English-specific referential conventions between MLU 2.00 and 3.99 (between 24 and 32 months) and employed non-linguistic pragmatic correlates to supplement unconventional argument use from as early as MLU 1.00 (between 21 and 23 months). By contrast, the Japanese-speaking children showed unconventional referential choices as late as MLU 4.00 (between 33 and 36 months), as well as inconsistent use of non-linguistic pragmatic correlates. The third study revealed that, although language-specific differences were observed, neither group of children violated any of the four Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) constraints: The children avoided using more than one new or lexical argument per transitive clause and avoided casting new or lexical arguments as transitive subjects. However, evidence of sensitivity to PAS strategies from early on in development was inconclusive because the children omitted most sentence arguments at the beginning of speech production. Finally, all three studies revealed that children's referential choices that were inconsistent with expected discourse-pragmatic principles reflected similar patterns observed in parental input. Altogether, this set of studies led to the following general conclusions regarding the learning of argument representation and distribution in syntax: (1) a discourse-pragmatic approach can explain language-universal features of argument omission and production in child language and (2) language-specific strategies are learned via parental input.

No description available.

This report examines the dynamic mood alternation attested in fear emotive clauses, i.e. (Me) temo que mi hija sea/es anoréxica, 'I fear/am afraid my daughter (SUBJ/IND) is anorexic'. It does so by using data gathered in electronic sources, implementing two model analyses from the vast literature on the topic and presenting and analyzing the results. It then concludes which of the two chosen models better predicts and clarifies the mood alternation usage for this phrase. The two models come from Terrel and Hooper (1974; Model A) and Lunn (1989 and 1995; Model B). It is expected that one of the two analyses will better explain mood choice patterns for temer(se) expressions and, in future research, it may become a validated tool to explain mood variation in other comment clauses as well. / text

No / Despite the United Kingdom College of Radiographers aspiration that first line reporting or commenting by radiographers be normal practice, radiographers have not as yet embraced these opportunities in clinical practice and the number of radiographer commenting (initial reporting) schemes in operation is currently limited. This study explores radiographer opinion with regard to commenting with the aim of establishing the perceived opportunities and barriers to operating a commenting scheme with respect to trauma radiography. Method A survey of 79 radiographers working within a single multi-centre Trust in the north of England was undertaken using a questionnaire. Attitudinal statements were used to elicit information on perceived opportunities and barriers to the implementation of radiographer commenting. Results Fifty three questionnaires were returned within the specified time frame (n-53/79; 67.1%). A number of barriers to implementing a commenting scheme were identified including time, technology, anatomical confidence and training. Opportunities included improving professional profile and increased professional contribution to decision making within the patient pathway. No correlation was demonstrated between respondent demographic and responses suggesting that opinions expressed were not influenced by hospital site, radiographer grade or years experience. Conclusion Radiographers generally had a positive attitude towards the implementation of radiographer commenting and felt that their operation was both beneficial to patient care and the professional profile of radiographers. However, a number of barriers were identified and while concerns regarding training may be increasingly addressed by the Department of Health’s e-learning image interpretation package, the impact of changes in technology and subsequent service operation have not yet been fully evaluated.

Human manual action exhibits a differential use of a non-dominant (typically, left) and a dominant (typically, right) hand. Human communication exhibits a pervasive structuring of utterances into topic and comment. I will point out striking similarities between the coordination of hands in bimanual actions, and the structuring of utterances in topics and comments. I will also show how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure in sign languages and in gestures accompanying spoken language, and suggest that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of information structure in human communication.

Studien tar avstamp i den diskussion som förts kring nyhetssajternas kommentarsfält. Diskussionen kulminerade under sommaren 2011 då flera nyhetssajter ändrade sina förhållningsregler och vissa fall även de tekniska lösningar som användes. Denna studie ämnade undersöka om valet av kommentars-teknik påverkar användares vilja till kommunikation på nyhetssajter, men även att belysa eventuella bakomliggande faktorer till detta. Detta har genomförts genom en kvalitativ observations- och intervju-studie. Resultatetav studien påvisar att kommunikationen påverkas av valet av teknisk lösning, och att bristen av kontroll är en av de avgörande faktorerna bakom huruvida en användare är villig att kommentera en artikel. / This study builds on the discussion of the comment field that is related to news sites articles. The debate culminated in the summer of 2011 when several news sites changed their conduct and in some cases also the technologies used. This study intended to investigate whether the choice of technology for annotation affects users' willingness to communication on newssites, but also to elucidate possible underlying factors for this. This has been carried out by obseravtions and interview studys. The results of this study indicate that communication is affected by the choice of technical solution. And that lack of control is one of the determining factors of whether the user is willing to comment on an article.

Code comments improve software maintainability, programming productivity, and software reliability. To address the comment scarcity issue in many projects and save developers’ time in writing comments, we propose a new, general automatic comment generation approach, which mines comments from a large programming Question and Answer (Q&A) site. Q&A sites allow programmers to post questions and receive solutions, which contain code segments together with their descriptions, referred to as code-description mappings. We develop AutoComment to extract such mappings, and leverage them to generate description comments automatically for similar code segments matched in open source projects. We apply AutoComment to analyze 92,140 Java and Android tagged Q&A posts to extract 132,767 code-description mappings, which help AutoComment generate 102 comments automatically for 23 Java and Android projects. The number of generated comments is still low, but the user study results show that the majority of the participants consider the generated comments accurate, adequate, concise, and useful in helping them understand the code. One of the advantages from mining Q&A sites for automatic comment generation is that human written comments can provide information that is not explicitly in the code. In the future, we would like to focus on improving both the yield and quality of the generated comments. To improve the yield, we can replace the token-based clone detection tool with one that can detect addition and reordering of lines to increase the number of code matches. To improve the quality, we can apply advanced natural language processing techniques such as semantic role labeling to analyze the semantics of the sentences, or typed dependencies to analyze the grammatical structure of the sentences.

No description available.

This thesis describes the implementation of a Controlled English Commenting (CEC) system that aids a VHDL modeler in entering controlled English comments. The CEC system developed includes a graphical user interface (GUI). The interface permits a modeler to submit comments for insertion at user selected points in a text file containing the model. A submitted comment is analyzed for vocabulary and syntax, and is then inserted if it is controlled English. If it is not, the CEC system extracts all possible controlled English comments that can be formed from the original comment and presents them to the user for selection and entry into the model. The interface then queries the user to complete any residual portions of the original comment until the user is satisfied. Until the user becomes familiar with the constraints of the controlled language, significant interaction is needed, particularly on complex comments. Preliminary experiments indicate that users rapidly learn the language's constraints and the need for interactive help declines. / Master of Science