Presbyterian Religion, Historiography and Ulster Scots Identity, c. 1800 to 1914

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

Flexible Natural Language Generation in Multiple Contexts

We present a practical approach to Natural Language Generation (NLG) for spoken dialogue systems. The approach is based on small template fragments (mini-templates). The system’s object architecture facilitates generation of phrases across pre-defined business domains and registers, as well as into different languages. The architecture simplifies NLG in well-understood application contexts, while providing the flexibility for a developer and for the system, to vary linguistic output according to dialogue context, including any intended affective impact. Mini-templates are used with a suite of domain term objects, resulting in an NLG system (MINTGEN – MINi-Template GENerator) whose extensibility and ease of maintenance is enhanced by the sparsity of information devoted to individual domains. The system also avoids the need for specialist linguistic competence on the part of the system maintainer.

Development of a Java-based Unified and Flexible Natural Language Discourse System

This paper outlines the design and development of a Java-based, unified and flexible natural language dialogue system that enables users to interact using natural language, e.g. speech. A number of software development issues are considered with the aim of designing an architecture that enables different discourse components to be readily and flexibly combined in a manner that permits information to be easily shared. Use of XML schemas assists this component interaction. The paper describes how a range of Java language features were employed to support the development of the architecture, providing an illustration of how a modern programming language makes tractable the development of a complex dialogue system.