Review of Childhood

Almost 10 years after Childhood and Society (Palgrave, 2nd edn, 2011), Michael Wyness, an associate professor of childhood studies at the University of Warwick, now brings to print a short yet broad introduction to the study of childhood. In particular, this book discusses multiple views about childhood, a concept that for the past two decades has been contested within social sciences’ critical theorizing. On the back cover of the book, William A Corsaro and Alan Prout, well-known scholars from the field, are unanimous in recognizing the value of this new contribution in childhood studies. The interested and attentive reader should not be indifferent to their words and judgment; Wyness’s Childhood is a ‘gem,’ according to Corsaro.

Using a Dialogue Manager to Improve Semantic Web Search

Question Answering systems that resort to the Semantic Web as a knowledge base can go well beyond the usual matching words in documents and, preferably, find a precise answer, without requiring user help to interpret the documents returned. In this paper, the authors introduce a Dialogue Manager that, through the analysis of the question and the type of expected answer, provides accurate answers to the questions posed in Natural Language. The Dialogue Manager not only represents the semantics of the questions, but also represents the structure of the discourse, including the user intentions and the questions context, adding the ability to deal with multiple answers and providing justified answers. The authors’ system performance is evaluated by comparing with similar question answering systems. Although the test suite is slight dimension, the results obtained are very promising.