An exploration of female leadership language:case studies of senior women in Bahrain

This is a multiple case study of the leadership language of three senior women working in a large corporation in Bahrain. The study’s main aim is to explore the linguistic practices the women leaders use with their colleagues and subordinates in corporate meetings. Adopting a Foucauldian (1972) notion of ‘discourses’ as social practices and a view of gender as socially constructed and discursively performed (Butler 1990), this research aims to unveil the competing discourses which may shape the leadership language of senior women in their communities of practice. The research is situated within the broader field of Sociolinguistics and the specific field of Language and Gender. To address the research aim, a case study approach incorporating multiple methods of qualitative data collection (observation, interviews, and shadowing) was utilised to gather information about the three women leaders and produce a rich description of their use of language in and out of meeting contexts. For analysis, principles of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) were used to organise and sort the large amount of data. Also, Feminist Post- Structuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) was adopted to produce a multi-faceted analysis of the subjects, their language leadership, power relations, and competing discourses in the context. It was found that the three senior women enact leadership differently making variable use of a repertoire of conventionally masculine and feminine linguistic practices. However, they all appear to have limited language resources and even more limiting subject positions; and they all have to exercise considerable linguistic expertise to police and modify their language in order to avoid the ‘double bind’. Yet, the extent of this limitation and constraints depends on the community of practice with its prevailing discourses, which appear to have their roots in Islamic and cultural practices as well as some Western influences acquired throughout the company’s history. It is concluded that it may be particularly challenging for Middle Eastern women to achieve any degree of equality with men in the workplace because discourses of Gender difference lie at the core of Islamic teaching and ideology.

Goal detection from natural language queries

This paper aims to identify the communication goal(s) of a user's information-seeking query out of a finite set of within-domain goals in natural language queries. It proposes using Tree-Augmented Naive Bayes networks (TANs) for goal detection. The problem is formulated as N binary decisions, and each is performed by a TAN. Comparative study has been carried out to compare the performance with Naive Bayes, fully-connected TANs, and multi-layer neural networks. Experimental results show that TANs consistently give better results when tested on the ATIS and DARPA Communicator corpora.

An information foraging theory based user study of an adaptive user interaction framework for content-based image retrieval

This paper presents the design and results of a task-based user study, based on Information Foraging Theory, on a novel user interaction framework - uInteract - for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The framework includes a four-factor user interaction model and an interactive interface. The user study involves three focused evaluations, 12 simulated real life search tasks with different complexity levels, 12 comparative systems and 50 subjects. Information Foraging Theory is applied to the user study design and the quantitative data analysis. The systematic findings have not only shown how effective and easy to use the uInteract framework is, but also illustrate the value of Information Foraging Theory for interpreting user interaction with CBIR. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Enabling effective user interactions in content-based image retrieval

This paper presents an interactive content-based image retrieval framework—uInteract, for delivering a novel four-factor user interaction model visually. The four-factor user interaction model is an interactive relevance feedback mechanism that we proposed, aiming to improve the interaction between users and the CBIR system and in turn users overall search experience. In this paper, we present how the framework is developed to deliver the four-factor user interaction model, and how the visual interface is designed to support user interaction activities. From our preliminary user evaluation result on the ease of use and usefulness of the proposed framework, we have learnt what the users like about the framework and the aspects we could improve in future studies. Whilst the framework is developed for our research purposes, we believe the functionalities could be adapted to any content-based image search framework.

Sensemaking tools for understanding research literatures:design, implementation and user evaluation

This paper describes the work undertaken in the Scholarly Ontologies Project. The aim of the project has been to develop a computational approach to support scholarly sensemaking, through interpretation and argumentation, enabling researchers to make claims: to describe and debate their view of a document's key contributions and relationships to the literature. The project has investigated the technicalities and practicalities of capturing conceptual relations, within and between conventional documents in terms of abstract ontological structures. In this way, we have developed a new kind of index to distributed digital library systems. This paper reports a case study undertaken to test the sensemaking tools developed by the Scholarly Ontologies project. The tools used were ClaiMapper, which allows the user to sketch argument maps of individual papers and their connections, ClaiMaker, a server on which such models can be stored and saved, which provides interpretative services to assist the querying of argument maps across multiple papers and ClaimFinder, a novice interface to the search services in ClaiMaker.

Building and applying a concept hierarchy representation of a user profile

Term dependence is a natural consequence of language use. Its successful representation has been a long standing goal for Information Retrieval research. We present a methodology for the construction of a concept hierarchy that takes into account the three basic dimensions of term dependence. We also introduce a document evaluation function that allows the use of the concept hierarchy as a user profile for Information Filtering. Initial experimental results indicate that this is a promising approach for incorporating term dependence in the way documents are filtered.

Language as chunks, not words

Many people think of language as words. Words are small, convenient units, especially in written English, where they are separated by spaces. Dictionaries seem to reinforce this idea, because entries are arranged as a list of alphabetically-ordered words. Traditionally, linguists and teachers focused on grammar and treated words as self-contained units of meaning, which fill the available grammatical slots in a sentence. More recently, attention has shifted from grammar to lexis, and from words to chunks. Dictionary headwords are convenient points of access for the user, but modern dictionary entries usually deal with chunks, because meanings often do not arise from individual words, but from the chunks in which the words occur. Corpus research confirms that native speakers of a language actually work with larger “chunks” of language. This paper will show that teachers and learners will benefit from treating language as chunks rather than words.

Connection of Network Sensors to Distributed Information Measurement and Control System for Education and Research

The development of the distributed information measurement and control system for optical spectral research of particle beam and plasma objects and the execution of laboratory works on Physics and Engineering Department of Petrozavodsk State University are described. At the hardware level the system is represented by a complex of the automated workplaces joined into computer network. The key element of the system is the communication server, which supports the multi-user mode and distributes resources among clients, monitors the system and provides secure access. Other system components are formed by equipment servers (CАМАC and GPIB servers, a server for the access to microcontrollers MCS-196 and others) and the client programs that carry out data acquisition, accumulation and processing and management of the course of the experiment as well. In this work the designed by the authors network interface is discussed. The interface provides the connection of measuring and executive devices to the distributed information measurement and control system via Ethernet. This interface allows controlling of experimental parameters by use of digital devices, monitoring of experiment parameters by polling of analog and digital sensors. The device firmware is written in assembler language and includes libraries for Ethernet-, IP-, TCP- и UDP-packets forming.

Semantic Description of Web Services and Possibilities of BPEL4WS

The using of the upsurge of semantics web technologies gives a possibility for an increasing of the flexibility, extensibility and consistency of the existent industrial standards for modeling of web services. In the paper the types of semantic description of web services and the degree of their realization in BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) respectively on the abstract and executable level are treated. The methods for using of BPEL4WS for the purposes of semantic web services in the direction of their semi-automatic integration are suggested.