Converse Question Research Articles

Taking Children’s Moral Lives Seriously: Creativity as Ethical Response Offline and Online

Core Christian ethics concepts are affected by assumptions related to the primary subject or moral agent and the social context in which moral encounters take place. This article asks: Are children full moral agents? If so, what can Christian ethics, which predominantly focuses on adult subjects, learn from a focus on children? A small group of Christian ethicists has asked this very question in conversation with psychologists, child development theorists, educators, theologians, and philosophers. Centering children requires attention to age and ability differences and inclusion of their voices. Children as ethical subjects focus attention on issues of particularity, a decentering of rational individualism, and debunking linear moral developmental assumptions. The research on children’s moral lives points toward ethics as creativity in forms of play or improvisation. Given children’s digitally saturated lives, their creative use of critical digital literacies also helps Christian ethics begin to map a response to the impact of digital technologies.

Analysis of Amount and Style of Oral Interaction Related to Language Outcomes in Children With Hearing Loss: A Systematic Review (2006-2016).

Purpose This systematic review summarizes the evidence for differences in the amount of language input between children with and without hearing loss (HL). Of interest to this review is evaluating the associations between language input and language outcomes (receptive and expressive) in children with HL in order to enhance insight regarding what oral language input is associated with good communication outcomes. Method A systematic review was conducted using keywords in 3 electronic databases: Scopus, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Keywords were related to language input, language outcomes, and HL. Titles and abstracts were screened independently, and full-text manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria were extracted. An appraisal checklist was used to evaluate the methodological quality of studies as poor, good, or excellent. Results After removing duplicates, 1,545 study results were extracted, with 27 eligible for full-text review. After the appraisal, 8 studies were included in this systematic review. Differences in the amount of language input between children with and without HL were noted. Conversational exchanges, open-ended questions, expansions, recast, and parallel talk were positively associated with stronger receptive and expressive language scores. The quality of evidence was not assessed as excellent for any of the included studies. Conclusions This systematic review reveals low-level evidence from 8 studies that specific language inputs (amount and style) are optimal for oral language outcomes in children with HL. Limitations were identified as sample selection bias, lack of information on control of confounders and assessment protocols, and limited duration of observation/recordings. Future research should address these limitations.

Generalised versions of separable decompositions applicable to bipartite entangled quantum states

The investigation of separable states in quantum theory has been driven by the notion that they are highly classical, in that they do not demonstrate nonlocality, and are in some contexts unable to support non-classical computation. The converse question, the extent to which entangled states do or do not support non-classical information processing, is less well understood. Motivated by this question we extend the notion of quantum separability into the entangled quantum states, by constructing separable decompositions that describe them with the ‘smallest’ possible sets of non-physical local operators. We consider a few ways to define the word ‘smallest’ and present techniques for obtaining them. The methods involve calculating certain forms of cross norm. The results generalise significantly the results obtained in our previous work on this topic (2015 New J. Phys. 17 093047), and can be be used to construct classical simulation methods and local hidden variable models for subsets of local measurements on entangled quantum states.

Repetitive mild concussion in subjects with a vulnerable cholinergic system: Lasting cholinergic-attentional impairments in CHT+/- mice.

Previous research emphasized the impact of traumatic brain injury on cholinergic systems and associated cognitive functions. Here we addressed the converse question: Because of the available evidence indicating cognitive and neuronal vulnerabilities in humans expressing low-capacity cholinergic systems or with declining cholinergic systems, do injuries cause more severe cognitive decline in such subjects, and what cholinergic mechanisms contribute to such vulnerability? Using mice heterozygous for the choline transporter (CHT+/- mice) as a model for a limited cholinergic capacity, we investigated the cognitive and neuronal consequences of repeated, mild concussion injuries (rmCc). After five rmCc, and compared with wild type (WT) mice, CHT+/- mice exhibited severe and lasting impairments in sustained attention performance, consistent with effects of cholinergic losses on attention. However, rmCc did not affect the integrity of neuronal cell bodies and did not alter the density of cortical synapses. As a cellular mechanism potentially responsible for the attentional impairment in CHT+/- mice, we found that rmCc nearly completely attenuated performance-associated, CHT-mediated choline transport. These results predict that subjects with an already vulnerable cholinergic system will experience severe and lasting cognitive-cholinergic effects after even relatively mild injuries. If confirmed in humans, such subjects may be excluded from, or receive special protection against, activities involving injury risk. Moreover, the treatment and long-term outcome of traumatic brain injuries may benefit from determining the status of cholinergic systems and associated cognitive functions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning to Align Question and Answer Utterances in Customer Service Conversation with Recurrent Pointer Networks

Customers ask questions, and customer service staffs answer those questions. It is the basic service manner of customer service (CS). The progress of CS is a typical multi-round conversation. However, there are no explicit corresponding relations among conversational utterances. This paper focuses on obtaining explicit alignments of question and answer utterances in CS. It not only is an important task of dialogue analysis, but also able to obtain lots of valuable train data for learning dialogue systems. In this work, we propose end-to-end models for aligning question (Q) and answer (A) utterances in CS conversation with recurrent pointer networks (RPN). On the one hand, RPN-based alignment models are able to model the conversational contexts and the mutual influence of different Q-A alignments. On the other hand, they are able to address the issue of empty and multiple alignments for some utterances in a unified manner. We construct a dataset from an in-house online CS. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models are effective to learn the alignments of question and answer utterances.

An Adaptive Framework for Conversational Question Answering

In Conversational Question Answering (CoQA), humans propose a series of questions to satisfy their information needs. Based on our preliminary analysis, there are two major types of questions, namely verification questions and knowledgeseeking questions. The first one is to verify some existing facts, while the latter is to obtain new knowledge about some specific object. These two types of questions differ significantly in their answering ways. However, existing methods usually treat them uniformly, which may easily be biased by the dominant type of questions and obtain inferior overall performance. In this work, we propose an adaptive framework to handle these two types of questions in different ways based on their own characteristics. We conduct experiments on the recently released CoQA benchmark dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Open manifolds with non-homeomorphic positively curved souls

AbstractWe extend two known existence results to simply connected manifolds with positive sectional curvature: we show that there exist pairs of simply connected positively-curved manifolds that are tangentially homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic, and we deduce that an open manifold may admit a pair of non-homeomorphic simply connected and positively-curved souls. Examples of such pairs are given by explicit pairs of Eschenburg spaces. To deduce the second statement from the first, we extend our earlier work on the stable converse soul question and show that it has a positive answer for a class of spaces that includes all Eschenburg spaces.

Emigration and Rising Wages in Myanmar: Evidence from Mon State

Whether and how immigration affects labour markets is a hotly-debated and widely-studied topic. By contrast, the converse question of how emigration impacts labour markets in the source economy has remained largely understudied. In particular, whether outflows of labourers lead to higher wages in their home countries has only been addressed in a handful of studies. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap using data from Myanmar. We collected primary household data from rural Mon State, a southern state neighbouring Thailand. Analysis shows that over a quarter of the labour force is currently migrating for work. Relying on variation in local wages at the village level, regression estimates reveal a significant relationship between migration and wages of unskilled agricultural workers. We use measures of past migration as instrumental variables to further show that this relationship is likely causal. Rapidly rising wages in Myanmar carry deep consequences for the development trajectory of the country.

Evolving Consumption Patterns in the U.S. Alcohol Market: Disaggregated Spatial Analysis

Global consumption patterns for beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages are evolving, with some convergence in per capita consumption among nations as traditionally beer-drinking nations increase their consumption of wine and, conversely, wine-consuming nations shift towards beer. This paper explores regional patterns of alcoholic beverage consumption within the United States. One purpose is to see if similar patterns of convergence in consumption patterns can be observed at a finer (sub-national) spatial scale as have been documented in international comparisons. A more fundamental purpose is to explore the converse question and seek to better understand the persistent differences in alcoholic beverage consumption among groups, whether within or among countries. These issues are addressed using annual U.S. national and state-level data over four decades and, for the more recent period, supermarket scanner data at finer scales of geopolitical aggregation.

Can We Talk a Bit More? Appreciative Questions in Response to Paul and the Gift

John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift represents a significant advance in pauline studies. By focusing on the variable ways in which Paul and his contemporaries thought about grace and gift, Barclay is able to point scholars in several promising directions. This review both appreciates these advances and offers some questions for further conversation.

Declarative questions in Polish student conversations

This paper focuses on the contextual factors influencing the status of declarative polar (information seeking) questions in Polish. The study is based on the two tailor-made corpora of Polish student conversations, specially collected in Kraków and Krosno from 2015 to 2017, out of which 28 examples of declaratives are analysed (out of 200 identified in the corpora). Polish question research tradition, contrary to English, does not recognize the notion of a declarative question, but it does recognize the issue in other terms. Declarative questions in Polish conversation corpora are here defined as statements requesting or demanding some information from the hearer (B-events in Labov's terminology), who actually responds or reacts to them, usually cued by rising intonation (with notable exceptions of e.g. ironic declaratives), and some emotive “bias” (rhetoric, irony, humour etc.); they are analysed in the article in accordance to the cognitive linguistic methodology, involving language-thought-communication continuum, advanced by Gerard Steen, broadly applied throughout this special issue. Major conventional markers (such as a/i and ale) occurring with declaratives are identified and analysed, followed by more extended, contextual usages (referred to here, as in the whole special issue, as ‘deliberate’, following Steen's approach to metaphors). Among the markers attention is also paid to various combinations of forms, including particle sequences and question clusters, all characteristic of Polish conversational declaratives. The analysis draws attention to the functions of declaratives, including the broad repair function established in other languages, as well rhetorical usages of declaratives (esp. repetitive, emphatic or ironic), which tend to be the non-canonical A, AB or D-events, typical of Polish communication style.

Tag questions in conversation: A typology of their interactional and stance meanings

Review of Ditte Kimps. Tag questions in conversation: A typology of their interactional and stance meanings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018, 250 pp

Implicit dimension identification in user-generated text with LSTM networks

In the process of online storytelling, individual users create and consume highly diverse content that contains a great deal of implicit beliefs and not plainly expressed narrative. It is hard to manually detect these implicit beliefs, intentions and moral foundations of the writers.We study and investigate two different tasks, each of which reflect the difficulty of detecting an implicit user’s knowledge, intent or belief that may be based on writer’s moral foundation: (1) political perspective detection in news articles (2) identification of informational vs. conversational questions in community question answering (CQA) archives. In both tasks we first describe new interesting annotated datasets and make the datasets publicly available. Second, we compare various classification algorithms, and show the differences in their performance on both tasks. Third, in political perspective detection task we utilize a narrative representation language of local press to identify perspective differences between presumably neutral American and British press.

Barthes’s Return to Michelet and the Question of New Life

In this essay I investigate the role played by the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet in the late lectures of Roland Barthes. While it is well known that one of Barthes’s first books was devoted to Michelet (1954), the presence of Michelet in the late works of Barthes has yet to receive due attention. This neglect is especially surprising, since Michelet is explicitly evoked repeatedly as a key model for Barthes’s elusive novelistic project, his so-called Vita Nova. Firstly, I undertake a reading of Barthes’s claims about Michelet’s vita n[u]ova in his late lectures and seminars. Secondly, I look at Michelet’s own use of the term vita n[u]ova, and propose that there is often a gap between Barthes’s Michelet and Michelet par lui-même. Thirdly, I reflect more broadly on the implications of these inconsistencies and discrepancies for the question of conversion which is at the heart of the concept of “new life”.

Converse theorem on a global contraction metric for a periodic orbit

Contraction analysis uses a local criterion to prove the long-term behaviour of a dynamical system. A contraction metric is a Riemannian metric with respect to which the distance between adjacent solutions contracts. If adjacent solutions in all directions perpendicular to the flow are contracted, then there exists a unique periodic orbit, which is exponentially stable and we obtain an upper bound on the rate of exponential attraction. In this paper we study the converse question and show that, given an exponentially stable periodic orbit, a contraction metric exists on its basin of attraction and we can recover the upper bound on the rate of exponential attraction.

Selections of the Best and Near-Best Approximation Operators and Solarity

In a finite-dimensional Banach space, a closed set with lower semicontinuous metric projection is shown to have a continuous selection of the near-best approximation operator. Such a set is known to be a sun. In the converse question of the stability of best approximation by suns, it is proved that a strict sun in a finite-dimensional Banach space of dimension at most 3 is a P-sun, has a contractible set of nearest points, and admits a continuous e-selection from the operator of near-best approximation for any e > 0. A number of approximative and geometric properties of sets with lower semicontinuous metric projection are obtained.

Polar answers

How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such asuh-huh(or equivalentsyes,mm, head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preference for interjection-type answers. We propose that this preference is motivated by the fact that the two options are not equivalent in meaning. We argue that interjection-type answers are intrinsically suited to be the pragmatically unmarked, and thus more frequent, strategy for confirming polar questions, regardless of the language spoken. Our analysis is based on the semantic-pragmatic profile of the interjection-type and repetition-type answer strategies, in the context of certain asymmetries inherent to the dialogic speech act structure of question–answer sequences, including sequential agency and thematic agency. This allows us to see possible explanations for the outlier distributions found in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom and Tzeltal.

Fragile Topology and Wannier Obstructions.

Topological phases, such as Chern insulators, are defined in terms of additive indices that are stable against the addition of trivial degrees of freedom. Such topology presents an obstruction to any Wannier representation, namely, the representation of the electronic states in terms of symmetric, exponentially localized Wannier functions. Here, we address the converse question: Do obstructions to Wannier representation imply stable band topology? We answer this in the negative, pointing out that some bands can also display a distinct type of "fragile topology." Bands with fragile topology do not admit any Wannier representation by themselves, but such a representation becomes possible once certain additional trivial degrees of freedom are supplied. We construct a physical model of fragile topology on the honeycomb lattice that also helps resolve a recent puzzle in band theory. This model provides a counterexample to the assumption that splitting of an "elementary band representation" introduced in [B. Bradlyn et al., Topological quantum chemistry, Nature (London) 547, 298 (2017)] leads to bands that are individually topological. Instead, half of the split bands of our model realize a trivial band with exponentially localized symmetric Wannier functions, whereas the second half possess fragile topology. Our work highlights an important and previously overlooked connection between band structure and Wannier functions, and is expected to have far-reaching consequences given the central role played by Wannier functions in the modeling of real materials.

Qsymm: algorithmic symmetry finding and symmetric Hamiltonian generation

Symmetry is a guiding principle in physics that allows us to generalize conclusions between many physical systems. In the ongoing search for new topological phases of matter, symmetry plays a crucial role by protecting topological phases. We address two converse questions relevant to the symmetry classification of systems: is it possible to generate all possible single-body Hamiltonians compatible with a given symmetry group? Is it possible to find all the symmetries of a given family of Hamiltonians? We present numerically stable, deterministic polynomial time algorithms to solve both of these problems. Our treatment extends to all continuous or discrete symmetries of non-interacting lattice or continuum Hamiltonians. We implement the algorithms in the Qsymm Python package, and demonstrate their usefulness through applications in active research areas of condensed matter physics, including Majorana wires and Kekule graphene.

Exploring an intelligent tutoring system as a conversation-based assessment tool for reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is often assessed by having students read passages and administering a test that assesses their understanding of the text. Shorter assessments may fail to give a full picture of comprehension ability while more thorough ones can be time consuming and costly. This study used data from a conversational intelligent tutoring system (AutoTutor) to assess reading comprehension ability in 52 low-literacy adults who interacted with the system. We analyzed participants’ accuracy and time spent answering questions in conversations in lessons that targeted four theoretical components of comprehension: Word, Textbase, Situation Model, and Rhetorical Structure. Accuracy and answer response time were analyzed to track adults’ proficiency for comprehension components, and we analyzed whether the four components predicted reading grade level. We discuss the results with respect to the advantages that a conversational intelligent tutoring system assessment may provide over traditional assessment tools and the linking of theory to practice in adult literacy.