Recent TACL article. Abstract: "n this paper we argue that crime drama exemplified in television programs such as CSI:Crime Scene Investigation is an ideal testbed for approximating real-world natural language understanding and the complex inferences associated with it. We propose to treat crime drama as a new inference task, capitalizing on the fact that each episode poses the same basic question (i.e., who committed the crime) and naturally provides the answer when the perpetrator is revealed. We develop a new dataset based on CSI episodes, formalize perpetrator identification as a sequence labeling problem, and develop an LSTM-based model which learns from multi-modal data. Experimental results show that an incremental inference strategy is key to making accurate guesses as well as learning from representations fusing textual, visual, and acoustic input."

"A new EU study looks at the remuneration paid to authors in the print sector in ten EU countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary and Denmark). The study was conducted to support policy-making in the area of copyright. The Commission is looking for evidence on whether, and to what extent, the differences that exist amongst the Member States' legislative frameworks affect levels of remuneration and the functioning of the internal market."

Protecting your domain name from various threats (e.g., domain hijacking) certainly involves a lot of work. Surely there's a better way. Seems like the recovery method involves manual intervention by ICANN.

On Jack Goody and book spine text orientation

Aggregator of (selected) published book reviews. Focuses on new books. Seems to tilt towards Big 4 and prominent indies.

"card_file_box Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more... " ~10k stars on GitHub.

ISI NLP course taught by Jonathan May.

ABC episode on Intellectual property. Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy, interviewed.

> Following Abba Lerner’s influential formulation, this component is often referred to as functional finance (Lerner 1943). Our goal here is not to make an assessment of MMT as a whole, but to ask what is the relationship between the functional finance approach to government budgets and conventional economic analysis. Because we are interested in the logic of the functional-finance position rather than in MMT as a body of thought, we make only limited references to MMT literature here. Our primary interest is in the merits of the functional finance position in the abstract. On the mainstream side, we are focused on what might be called “orthodox policy macroeconomics”—the practical heuristics that guide policy makers and are reflected in undergraduate textbooks, as opposed to DSGE and related models of intertemporal optimization that are the basis of most current macroeconomic theory. The relevant question is not whether MMT is consistent with models of this type, but whether it is consistent with the simpler, more reduced form models that are (explicitly or implicitly) drawn on by public officials and public and private-sector forecasters, as well as by academic economists when engaged in public discussions.

fasttext paper

Careful identification of missing data (now corrected) in the Baumgartner reddit corpus.

Some kind of reddit alternative. Seems to have survived for some time.

"Students taking this module will read novels from all around the world, from the 19th century to the present, within the framework of recent debates over world-literature, modernity, and the still unfolding process of globalisation. We will consider how widening our comparative and international perspective enables us to read and interpret novels (even the most seemingly ‘local’ or ‘national’ productions) as irresistibly ‘global’. The module analyses how certain novelistic forms, themes and issues ‘travel’. Students will discover ways in which certain works contain traces, adaptations and importations of ‘core’ (or global) issues, and adapt, remodel or reject them in accordance with local/national forms and expressions. Issues such as work/war/resources/imperialism/climate/finance/disaster/modernisation and others will be traced as we work to establish each novel's 'globality'. We will consider a number of elements in form and subgenre - magic realism/blog novels/graphic novels/speculative fiction/annalistic wiritng, but we will also look at each work's mediation, its commercial and cultural production and its geopolitical conditioning. You'll also pick up a solid understanding of the crucial issues and debates in globalisation. The module will read novels from Scotland to China, Saudi Arabia to Colombia, England to the U.S, and demonstrate why a global perspective is a necessary requisite for literary studies in the 21st century."