Henry S. Thompson’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

We report here on the results of two studies using two and four monthly web crawls respectively from the Common Crawl (CC) initiative between 2014 and 2017, whose initial goal was to provide empirical evidence for the changing patterns of use of so-called persistent identifiers. This paper focusses on the tooling needed for dealing with CC data, and the problems we found with it. The first study is based on over 10^12 URIs from over 5 x 10^9 pages crawled in April 2014 and April 2017, the second study adds a further 3 x 10^9 pages from the April 2015 and April 2016 crawls. We conclude with suggestions on specific actions needed to enable studies based on CC to give reliable longitudinal information.

We report here on the results of two studies using two and four monthly web crawls respectively from the Common Crawl (CC) initiative between 2014 and 2017, whose initial goal was to provide empirical evidence for the changing patterns of use of so-called persistent identifiers. This paper focusses on the tooling needed for dealing with CC data, and the problems we found with it. The first study is based on over $10^{12}$ URIs from over $5 * 10^9$ pages crawled in April 2014 and April 2017, the second study adds a further $3 * 10^9$ pages from the April 2015 and April 2016 crawls. We conclude with suggestions on specific actions needed to enable studies based on CC to give reliable longitudinal information.

Agreement on exactly how to understand the use of URIs in data to provide information has been hard to come by. As no consensus seems likely to emerge, we propose instead to improve interoperability by standardizing metadocumentation, without taking a position on any of the underlying debates about standards or terminology.

In 2004 the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published The Architecture of the World Wide Web (AWWW) [1]. This document was the result of a careful after-the-fact analysis of the distinctive properties of the distributed information system known as the Web. By describing these properties, the TAG was able to define a number of ‘principles’, ‘constraints’ and ‘best practices’ which users and authors of and for the Web should observe in order to preserve and enhance its value to everyone.

We can identify three areas of interaction between our understanding of computer systems and moral and spiritual issues: (a) the moral and technical issues involved in empowering computer systems in contexts with significant impact, direct or indirect, on human well-being; (b) the scientific/technical questions in the way of introducing an explicit moral sensibility into computer systems; (c) the theological insights to be gained from a consideration of decision-making in existing and envisagable computers. In this article we make this concrete by reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, if we imagine the innkeeper fetched a barefoot doctor for the injured man who consulted a medical expert system via a satellite up-link, that the robbers were caught and brought before an automated justice machine, that the Samaritan was in fact a robot and finally that Paul himself rethought the significance of the parable on the basis of this reformulation. We also use examples from Isaac Asimov's stories about his “Three Laws of Robotics” to tease out pre-existing understanding of computational morality and the insights its consideration may offer into our own moral self-understanding.

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An overview is given of work on the creation, collection, preparation, and publication of electronic corpora of written and spoken language undertaken at the Human Communication Research Centre at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Four major efforts are described: the HCRC Map Task Corpus, the ECI/MC1, the MLCC project and work on document architectures and processing regimes for SGML-encoded corpora.

The HCRC Map Task corpus has been collected and transcribed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and recently published on CD-ROM. This effort was made possible by funding from the British Economic and Social Research Council. The corpus is composed of 128 two-person conver-sations in both high-quality digital audio and orthographic transcriptions, amounting to 18 hours and 150,000 words respectively. The experimental design is quite detailed and complex, allowing a number of different phone-mic, syntactico-semantic and pragmatic con-trasts to be explored in a controlled way. The corpus is a uniquely valuable resource for speech recognition research in particular, as we move from developing systems intended for con-trolled use by familiar users to systems intended for less constrained circumstances and naive or occasional users. Examples supporting this claim are given, including preliminary evi-dence of the phonetic consequences of second mention and the impact of different styles of ref-erent negotiation on communicative efficacy.

This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants’ maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.