SOAS, University of London

About: SOAS, University of London is a education organization based out in London, Camden, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 2095 authors who have published 5297 publications receiving 93546 citations.

Encountering Development: The Making and the Unmaking of the Third World

Abstract: Drawing on Foucaultian critical discourse analysis and Said’s concept of Orientalism (Foucault, 1980; Said, 2003), the fi rst edition of the book – published in 1995 – presented a groundbreaking and innovative way of studying the relationship between the processes of discourse formation and power relations embedded within the fi eld of development, which, in his view, had constructed an ethnocentric apparatus for the “West” to continue dominating the “Third World” through discourses and practices analogous to their colonialist and imperialist historic counterparts. In this new edition, Escobar affi rms that “development continues to play a role in strategies of cultural and social domination”, yet acknowledges that “[his] own views on the subject have changed in important respects” (p. vii). These changes, according to Escobar (pp. vii-xii) are consequence of simultaneous and intertwined processes of global restructuring: the rise of China – and, to a lesser degree, India –; the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the so-called Washington Consensus that paved way to the advent of neoliberalism in the international politico-economic arena; the various effects of the 2008 (and ongoing) global fi nancial crisis; and the birth of the “transition studies”, which analyse the emergence of alternative discourses on development.

An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution

Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm for identifying the noun phrase antecedents of third person pronouns and lexical anaphors (reflexives and reciprocals). The algorithm applies to the syntactic representations generated by McCord's Slot Grammar parser and relies on salience measures derived from syntactic structure and a simple dynamic model of attentional state. Like the parser, the algorithm is implemented in Prolog. The authors have tested it extensively on computer manual texts and conducted a blind test on manual text containing 360 pronoun occurrences. The algorithm successfully identifies the antecedent of the pronoun for 86% of these pronoun occurrences. The relative contributions of the algorithm's components to its overall success rate in this blind test are examined. Experiments were conducted with an enhancement of the algorithm that contributes statistically modelled information concerning semantic and real-world relations to the algorithm's decision procedure. Interestingly, this enhancement only marginally improves the algorithm's performance (by 2%). The algorithm is compared with other approaches to anaphora resolution that have been proposed in the literature. In particular, the search procedure of Hobbs' algorithm was implemented in the Slot Grammar framework and applied to the sentences in teh blind test set. The authors' algorithm achieves a higher rate of success (4%) than Hobbs' algorithm. The relation of the algorithm to the centering approach is discussed, as well as to models of anaphora resolution that invoke a variety of informational factors in ranking antecedent candidates.