A text mining approach to materiality assessment

Worldwide companies currently make a significant effort in performing the materiality analysis, whose aim is to explain corporate sustainability in an annual report. Materiality reflects what are the most important social, economic and environmental issues for a company and its stakeholders. Many studies and standards have been proposed to establish what are the main steps to follow to identify the specific topics to be included in a sustainability report. However, few existing quantitative and structured approaches help understanding how to deal with the identified topics and how to prioritise them to effectively show the most valuable ones. Moreover, the use of traditional approaches involves a long-lasting and complex procedure where a lot of people have to be reached and interviewed and several companies' reports have to be read to extrapolate the material topics to be discussed in the sustainability report. This dissertation aims to propose an automated mechanism to gather stakeholders and the company's opinions identifying relevant issues. To accomplish this purpose, text mining techniques are exploited to analyse textual documents written by either a stakeholder or the reporting company. It is then extracted a measure of how much a document deals with some defined topics. This kind of information is finally manipulated to prioritise topics based on how the author's opinion matters. The entire work is based upon a real case study in the domain of telecommunications.

Quality and Aspect based Argument Generation

Natural Language Processing has always been one of the most popular topics in Artificial Intelligence. Argument-related research in NLP, such as argument detection, argument mining and argument generation, has been popular, especially in recent years. In our daily lives, we use arguments to express ourselves. The quality of arguments heavily impacts the effectiveness of our communications with others. In professional fields, such as legislation and academic areas, arguments of good quality play an even more critical role. Therefore, argument generation with good quality is a challenging research task that is also of great importance in NLP. The aim of this work is to investigate the automatic generation of arguments with good quality, according to the given topic, stance and aspect (control codes). To achieve this goal, a module based on BERT [17] which could judge an argument's quality is constructed. This module is used to assess the quality of the generated arguments. Another module based on GPT-2 [19] is implemented to generate arguments. Stances and aspects are also used as guidance when generating arguments. After combining all these models and techniques, the ranks of the generated arguments could be acquired to evaluate the final performance. This dissertation describes the architecture and experimental setup, analyzes the results of our experimentation, and discusses future directions.

Videogame localization. A case study: Final Fantasy XII

Globalization has influenced all economic sectors and the demand for translation services has increased like never before. The videogame industry has become a worldwide phenomenon worth billions. Many people around the globe, male and female, children and adults alike, choose this leisure activity and enjoy it like reading or watching a film. It is a global phenomenon capable of producing as much revenue and anticipation as the film industry. Most games are developed in Japanese or English and the new global market requires this product to be translated into many other languages. The scenario has brought about a new field of specialization in translation studies, commonly known as videogame localization. The emergence of this new field calls not only for a review of translation studies, but also a shift in the role that some translators and translated products are expected to play within a globalized world. The aim of this dissertation is to provide an overview of videogame localization and its challenges under the guidance of a professional translator such as Alexander O. Smith, who agreed to provide counsel through several Skype interviews. This provided a first-hand insight into how translation decisions are carried out by game translators. Alexander O. Smith was a former translator for Square Enix, one of the biggest Japanese videogame developer, publisher and distribution company in the market. He now works as an independent translator and in 2003 he founded the localization agency called Kajiya Productions with his friend and fellow translator Joseph Reeder. Together with Alexander O. Smith, the twelfth installment of the Final Fantasy series by Square Enix has been chosen as a very good example of the issues and challenges brought on by videogame localization. The game which revealed itself to be one of the most fun, challenging and rewarding professional experiences of Alexander O. Smith.