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Final CfP: The 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse
by Abercrombie, Gavin 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

Final Call for Papers The 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse: A workshop for creating, investigating and improving tools for producing and evaluating counter speech. Hate speech and abusive and toxic language are prevalent in online spaces. For example, a 2019 survey shows that in the UK 30-40% of people have experienced online abuse, and platforms like Facebook bring down millions of harmful posts every year, with the help of AI tools. While removal of such content can immediately reduce the quantity of harmful messages, it can bring about accusations of censorship and may not be effective at curbing hate in the long term. An alternative approach is to reply with counter speech, i.e. targeted responses aimed at refuting the hateful language using thoughtful and cogent reasons, and fact-bound arguments. This has been shown to be effective in influencing the behaviour of both the perpetrators of abuse and bystanders that witness the interactions, as well as providing support to victims. The sheer amount of social media data shared online on a daily basis means that hate mitigation, using counter speech, requires reliable, efficient and scalable tools. Recently, efforts have been made to curate hate countering datasets and automate the production of counter speech. However, this research field is still in its infancy, and many questions remain open regarding the most effective approaches and methods to take, as well as how to evaluate them. This first multidisciplinary workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds such as computer science and the social sciences, as well as policy makers and other stakeholders to attempt to understand how counter speech is currently used to tackle abuse by individuals, activists and organisations, how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generation (NLG) can be applied to produce counter narratives, and the implications of using large language models for this task. It will also address, but not be limited to, the questions of how to evaluate and measure the impacts of counter speech, the importance of expert knowledge from civil society in the development of counter speech datasets and taxonomies, and how to ensure fairness and mitigate the biases present in language models when generating counter speech. Topics We invite papers (long and short) on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: • Models and methods for generating counter speech; • Dialogue agents employing counter speech to address hateful inputs, directed towards other people or the AI itself; • Human and automatic evaluation methods of counter speech tools; • Multidisciplinary studies including different perspectives on the topic such as from computer science, social science, NGOs and stakeholders; • Development of datasets and taxonomy for counter speech; • Potentials and limitations (e.g., fairness, biases) of using large language models for generating counter speech; • Social impact and empirical studies of counter speech on social media, including investigating the effectiveness and consequences on users of employing counter speech to fight online hate; • Proposals for future research on counter speech, and/or preliminary results of studies in this field We accept three types of submissions: * Regular research papers – long (8 pages) or short (4 pages); * Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be included in the proceedings; * Research communications: 2-4 page abstracts summarising relevant research published elsewhere. Submission link: https://softconf.com/n/cs4oa2023 Location: co-located with SIGdialxINLG, Prague, Czechia Important dates All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12) * Submission deadline: Jun 26, 2023 * Notification of acceptance Jul 17, 2023 * Camera-ready deadline Aug 11, 2023 * Workshop date: September 11/12 2023 Format and Styling Submissions should follow ACL Author Guidelines<https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines> and policies for submission, review and citation, and be anonymised for double blind reviewing. Please use ACL 2023 style files; LaTeX style files and Microsoft Word templates are available at https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/style_and_formatting/<https://2021.aclweb.org/downloads/acl-ijcnlp2021-templates.zip>. Organising Committee: * Yi-Ling Chung, The Alan Turing Institute * Gavin Abercrombie, Heriot-Watt University * Helena Bonaldi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler * Marco Guerini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Contact If you have any questions, please let us know at cs4oa(a)googlegroups.com Website: https://sites.google.com/view/cs4oa Twitter: @cs4oa_workshop<https://twitter.com/cs4oa_workshop> ________________________________ Founded in 1821, Heriot-Watt is a leader in ideas and solutions. With campuses and students across the entire globe we span the world, delivering innovation and educational excellence in business, engineering, design and the physical, social and life sciences. This email is generated from the Heriot-Watt University Group, which includes: 1. Heriot-Watt University, a Scottish charity registered under number SC000278 2. Heriot- Watt Services Limited (Oriam), Scotland's national performance centre for sport. Heriot-Watt Services Limited is a private limited company registered is Scotland with registered number SC271030 and registered office at Research & Enterprise Services Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS. The contents (including any attachments) are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of its contents is strictly prohibited, and you should please notify the sender immediately and then delete it (including any attachments) from your system.

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Call for Book Chapters: Computational Intelligence based Hyperspectral Image Analysis, Springer (Scopus Indexed)
by Anu Bajaj 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

Dear Colleagues We cordially invite researchers and scientists working in hyperspectral image analysis all around the globe to participate and submit their research work to contribute to our book titled "Computational Intelligence based Hyperspectral Image Analysis". It would help if you could let us know the tentative title of your contribution within 10 days of receiving this mail so that we can plan / structure the table of contents of the book. Submission link: https://forms.gle/owMZQys1yd6zXtkMA Scope of the Book: -------------------- Computational Intelligence (CI) based hyperspectral image analysis has gained significant importance in recent years due to its ability to extract valuable information from hyperspectral images and make predictions. Hyperspectral images provide a rich source of information about the composition and properties of objects in the environment. However, the vast amount of data generated by hyperspectral images can be overwhelming and hard to analyze. With their ability to provide valuable insights and improve decision-making, Computational Intelligence techniques act as a powerful tool that aids in automatic analysis and improves accuracy. Recent advances in the field have provided new and exciting ways to employ CI-based hyperspectral image analysis in many diverse applications. The book aims to showcase these latest achievements and novel approaches in this field, focusing on their wide applications in agriculture, the environment, defense, medical diagnostics, food and product inspection, and mineral exploration. It will be an essential resource for those seeking to deepen their understanding of how hyperspectral image analysis can combine with computational intelligence techniques to solve specific tasks in different application fields from a multidisciplinary perspective. The topics include, but are not limited to: --------------------------------------------- Hyperspectral Image Acquisition Hyperspectral Image Enhancement Hyperspectral Image Clustering Hyperspectral Image Representation Hyperspectral Image Restoration Hyperspectral Image Filtering Hyperspectral Image Classification Hyperspectral Image Segmentation Hyperspectral Image Retrieval and Indexing Hyperspectral Image Compression Spatial/Spectral Super-Resolution Computational Imaging Object Detection Applications in Remote Sensing Multispectral/Hyperspectral Image Processing: Band Selection, Dimensionality Reduction, Compressive Sensing, Sparse Representation, Image Registration/Matching, Image Denoising/Destriping, Image Fusion/Pansharpening Unsupervised Learning, Semi-supervised Learning, Transfer Learning, Deep Learning on Hyperspectral Images Real time Monitoring and applications Important Dates: --------------------- Full Chapter Submission Deadline August 30, 2023 Final Notification of Acceptance October 15, 2023 Final Chapter Submission Deadline November 15, 2023 Publisher Details: ---------------------- This book will be published in the Springer Series "Intelligent Systems Reference Library" (Electronic ISSN: 1868-4408, Print ISSN: 1868-4394) Indexed by: SCOPUS, SCImago, DBLP, zbMATH, Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals and Series Submission Guidelines: ---------------------- The length of a book chapter should be between 20 and 30 pages. Chapters must be formatted according to Springer format (Latex or Word). The manuscript should be submitted in Word or Latex files. The plagiarism rate should be less than 15%. The figure should not have any copyright issues; either it can be redrawn or a copyright certificate should be obtained. There is no processing or publication charge for this book. More details on https://sites.google.com/view/cihia2023/home ----- Best Regards Editors: Ajith Abraham, Flame University, Pune, India; Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), USA Anu Bajaj, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, Punjab, India Jyoti Maggu, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala, Punjab, India Information contact: Anu Bajaj (er.anubajaj(a)gmail.com)

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19th IEEE eScience Conference (eScience 2023): Last Mile for Paper Submission
by georgeangelos60＠gmail.com 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

*** Last Mile for Paper Submission *** 19th IEEE eScience Conference (eScience 2023) October 9-13, 2023, St. Raphael Resort, Limassol, Cyprus https://www.escience-conference.org/2023/ (*** Submission Deadline Extension: June 19, 2023, AoE, FIRM!) eScience 2023 provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, developers, and users of eScience applications and enabling IT technologies. Its objective is to promote and encourage all aspects of eScience and its associated technologies, applications, algorithms, and tools, with a strong focus on practical solutions and open challenges. The conference welcomes conceptualization, implementation, and experience contributions enabling and driving innovation in data- and compute-intensive research across all disciplines, from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences, arts, and humanities; encompassing artificial intelligence and machine learning methods; and targeting a broad spectrum of architectures, including HPC, Cloud, and IoT. The overarching theme of the eScience 2023 conference is “open eScience”. This year, the conference is promoting four additional key topics: • Computational Science for sustainable development • FAIR • Research Infrastructures for eScience • Continuum Computing: Convergence between Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) The conference is soliciting two types of contributions: • Full papers (10 pages) presenting previously unpublished research achievements or eScience experiences and solutions • Posters (2 pages) showcasing early-stage results and innovations Submitted papers should use the IEEE 8.5×11 manuscript guidelines: double-column text using single-spaced 10-point font on 8.5×11-inch pages. Templates are available from http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html . Submissions should be made via the Easy Chair system using the submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=escience2023 . All submissions will be single-blind peer reviewed. Selected full papers will receive a slot for an oral presentation. Accepted posters will be presented during a poster reception. Accepted full papers and poster papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Rejected full papers can be re-submitted for a poster presentation. At least one author of each accepted paper or poster must register as an author at the full registration rate. Each author registration can be applied to only one accepted submission. AWARDS eScience 2023 will host the following awards, which will be announced at the conference. • Best Paper Award • Best Student Paper Award • Best Poster Award • Best Student Poster Award • Outstanding Early Career Contribution – this award is associated with poster submissions and short presentations of attendees in their early career phase (i.e., postdoctoral researchers and junior scientists). KEY DATES • Paper Submissions Due: June 19, 2023 (AoE) (FIRM!) • Notification of Paper Acceptance: July 10, 2023 • Poster Submissions due: July 7, 2023 (AoE) • Poster Acceptance Notification: July 24, 2023 • All Camera-ready Submissions due: August 14, 2023 • Author Registration Deadline: August 14, 2023 ORGANISATION General Chair • George Angelos Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus Technical Program Co-Chairs • Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA • Rosa Filgueira, University of St Andrews, UK Organisation Committee https://www.escience-conference.org/2023/organizers Steering Committee https://www.escience-conference.org/about/#steering-committee Email contact: Technical-Program(a)eScience-conference.org

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SemDial 2023 - MariLogue: Registration open!
by Andy Lücking 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

* Apologies for cross-posting * The registration for SemDial 2023 - MariLogue, the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue is now open! Got to: https://mezzanine.um.si/en/conference/semdial-2023-marilogue/ Note that the submission dateis close: June 16th, 2023 (Submissions website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semdial2023marilogue)

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PhD position on neural and cognitive basis of computational models of language at the University of Sheffield (UK)
by Aline Villavicencio 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

We are inviting applications for one fully funded PhD position (covering UK home tuition fees and stipend) in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (UK). Please forward this announcement to potentially interested candidates. The deadline is July 10, 2023, with a starting date for the Autumn of 2023 (from September on). More details below and on this link <https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/neural-and-cognitive-basis-of-computa…>. About the Project: neural and cognitive basis of computational models of language Advances in the design of computational models that learn directly from data has led to much progress in areas like natural language processing (NLP). We invite applications for a fully-funded PhD studentship on human- inspired computational models of language. This multidisciplinary project, at the intersection of machine learning, NLP and computational neuroscience, aims to develop computational models of language processing inspired by the neural and biological basis of human language. Candidate requirements: Applicants will need to meet general entry requirements, and ideally will have a Bachelor’s degree (or above) in Computer Science, Neuroscience, Physics, Cognitive Science, Psychology or related discipline (preferably a First Class or the equivalent from an overseas university). Experience on statistical machine learning, deep learning, or computational statistics, as well as programming experience would be desirable. Additional English language requirements can be found here: <https://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=153809&type=184&DID=1…>https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/english-language <https://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=153809&type=184&DID=1…>. How to apply Applications for the PhD studentship must be made directly to the University of Sheffield using the Postgraduate Online Application Form. Make sure you name Aline Villavicencio as proposed supervisor. Information on what documents are required and a link to the application form can be found here - <https://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=153809&type=184&DID=1…>https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd/apply/applying <https://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=153809&type=184&DID=1…> Funding Notes This position is funded by a studentship from the Department of Computer Science, covering the UK home tuition fee and providing a stipend at the standard UKRI rate. International students are eligible to apply if they can self-fund the difference between the home and overseas fee. More details on this link <https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/neural-and-cognitive-basis-of-computa…> ---------------------------------------------------- Prof. Aline Villavicencio <https://sites.google.com/view/alinev>(she/her) Chair in Natural Language Processing Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/dcs/people/academic/aline-villavicencio

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DGfS2024 workshop 'Towards Linguistically Motivated Computational Models of Framing' (dgfs2024-framing)
by Ines Rehbein 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

Call for Abstracts 'Towards Linguistically Motivated Computational Models of Framing' Date: Feb 28 - Mar 1, 2024 Location: Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany Organizers: Annette Hautli-Janisz (University of Passau), Gabriella Lapesa (University of Stuttgart), Ines Rehbein (University of Mannheim) Homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/dgfs2024-framing Call for Papers: Framing is a central notion in the study of language use to rhetorically package information strategically to achieve conversational goals (Entman, 1993) but also, more broadly, in the study of how we organize our experience (Goffman, 1974). In his seminal article, Entman (1993) defines framing as "to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described." This frame definition has recently been operationalized in NLP in terms of coarse-grained topic dimensions (Card et al., 2015), e.g., by modeling the framing of immigration in the media as a challenge to economy vs. a human rights issue. But there is more to frames than just topics. The breadth of the debate on what constitutes a frame and on its (formal and cognitive) definition naturally correlates to the interdisciplinary relevance of this phenomenon: a theoretically motivated (computational) model for framing is still needed, and this is precisely the goal of this workshop, which will bring together researchers from theoretical, applied and computational linguistics interested in framing analysis. Our main interest is in furthering our understanding of how different linguistic levels contribute to the framing of messages, and to pave the way for the development of linguistically-driven computational models of how people use framing to communicate their attitudes, preferences and opinions. We thus invite contributions that cover all levels of linguistic analysis and methods: from phonetics (e.g., euphony: the use of repetition, alliteration, rhymes and slogans to create persuasive messages) and syntax (e.g., topicalization, passivization) to semantics (lexical choices, such as Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice; the use of pronouns to create in- vs. out-groups; the use of metaphors; different types of implicit meaning) to pragmatics (e.g., pragmatic framing through the use of presupposition-triggering adverbs). We also invite work on experimental and computational studies on framing which employ linguistic structure to better understand instances of framing. The workshop is part of the 46th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2024), held from 28 Feb - 1 March 2024 at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Submission instructions: We invite the submission of anonymous abstracts for 30 min talks including discussion. Submissions should not exceed one page, 11pt single spaced (abstract + references), with an optional additional page for images. The reviewing process is double-blind; please ensure that the paper does not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …". Submissions open: June 1, 2023 - Aug. 18, 2023 Abstract review period: Aug. 21, 2023 - Sept. 5, 2023 Meeting email: dgfs2024-framing(a)fim.uni-passau.de -- Ines Rehbein Data and Web Science Group University of Mannheim, Germany

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? Odd posting ?
by Nick de Carlo 11 Jun '23

11 Jun '23

Hello, what is "the Princeton"? Why is the email not affiliated with an institution? Has this list been opened up to scams?

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Re: др
by Slava Mikhaylov 10 Jun '23

10 Jun '23

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CFP: Presentation at CIKM 2023 Industry Day
by jiyinhe＠gmail.com 10 Jun '23

10 Jun '23

The Industry Day of CIKM ’23 will be held on Sunday 22nd Oct 2023 in Birmingham, UK. As with the main conference, which will be held on-site, we anticipate that all presentations for the Industry Day will be delivered in person. Exceptions may be made in case of severe travelling restrictions. We call for technical talks which will cover how topics of interest relevant to the broader CIKM community, including but not limited to knowledge management, information retrieval, efficient data processing, neural and large language models, evaluation, recommender systems, data mining, and others found in the CIKM ‘23 Call for Papers are used in an industrial setting. For example, how machine learning is put to use in practical scenarios, how user behaviour can be observed and interpreted, how to improve systems in practice, how industrial pipelines can be optimised, and how scale is a challenge in more ways than the obvious. We also encourage talk proposals from small companies, such as startups or spin-offs from either a university project or a large company Talks may address challenges, solutions, and case studies of interesting and innovative systems in areas including but not limited to: * Innovative approaches used in deployed systems and product * System design from industry practitioners which identify best practices and design principles for machine learning systems and their scalability aspects * Metrics and measurement techniques used to understand performance of production systems * Practical challenges such as data, privacy, integrity, scale, regulation, etc. * Domain specific challenges and niche focuses * Connections with academia to solve interesting problems, including talk proposals from academics spending time in industry, or vice-versa, covering insights for other practitioners The authors of accepted proposals will be invited to submit an abstract to be published in the conference proceeding. Each presentation will be 15-20 minutes long including Q&A. Submissions should include: Title and abstract Speaker's bio Relevance to above themes and CIKM topics CIKM is a technical conference, so preference will be given to talks describing applied research and technical challenges rather than product presentations. Speakers will be asked to confirm their presence at the conference if their submission is accepted. Submission Instructions Proposals should be at most 2 pages and follow the ACM format. Formatting guidelines are available at the ACM Website (use the ˮsigconf” proceedings template). https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template Submissions are not anonymous and should contain speaker details. Proposals should be submitted electronically via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=cikm23 Important Dates: - All deadlines are at 11:59pm in the Anywhere on Earth time zone. - Submissions Due: July 14, 2023 - Notifications: August 11, 2023 - Camera ready for abstracts (no exceptions): August 18, 2023 Industry Day Chairs Jiyin He, Signal AI, UK Jeremy Pickens, Redgrave Data, USA Contact: cikm2023-industry(a)easychair.org

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Re: Visualizing graphs of words as nodes from text lines (not just adjacency pairs) ...
by Albretch Mueller 10 Jun '23

10 Jun '23

On 6/9/23, Serge Heiden <slh(a)ens-lyon.fr> wrote: > Hi Albretch, > > For some ideas, I made something related to that more than 20 years ago: > https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00151838v1/document (in French sorry, > just looking at the graphs at the end should be informative) > Not as interactive as it could, but UI technologies have evolved now. > > Best, > Serge > Nothing to apologize for, last time I checked (speaking or) writing a paper in French or any other language other than Russian wasn't illegal or wrong in any way (USG has made "radioactive" even the use of any English word starting with "Vlad" or "Put"). Also, one of my Ls is Spanish, I am fairly acquainted with Latin and know or can easily infer a good chuck of French words. translate.google.com does a relatively fine job of blunt translation of the general sense of texts. For some reason I had to download your paper and upload to google translate to be able to read it in English, since it has even taken over as my preferred curse language. I found your paper very interesting, so I gave it a first reading to think about it and reread it more carefully later when I found the time to do so. Furthermore (how do you say „darüberhinausgehend" in English? ;-)), those "face-à-faces" kinds of political debates, seen as forceful "conversations", -conversations nonetheless-, bring about a whole host of corpora research issues I am sure you/those studying such topics must have noticed. There are different kinds of "conversations". Friar Leo (Saint Francis' fioretti) and Evodius (Saint Augustine's "De libero arbitrio voluntatis") were both real persons but the conversation of sort was very one-sided with Friar Leo pretty much lending an ear to Saint Francis and Evodius who was more of an equal and Saint Augustine's personal friend. Plato, involved his teacher Socrates, Alcibiades (even a slave in his Meno which in those times was quite an affront to mock the establishment), but also the Egyptian god of writing (Thoth) in his dialogues. Shakespeare's and Dostoevsky's fictional characters have taken a voice and life of their own for many generations. However all those conversations have some aspects in common. Conversations/dialogues are peculiar in the sense that (kind of like with music) you have more than one text realizing more or less hopefully a certain train of thought (Gedankengang), yet all participating texts reflect explicitly/lexically or implicitly in more of a connotative way on one another into some sort of more orchestral narrative, which (as the poet in me sees it) can NOT be fully reduced in a syntactically operational way to just the participating texts. Think of how music is played (when we had such thing) each instrument (in accord with some shared harmonic and rhythmic) doing its own part, but also as part of a Hegelian whole. > “Words have no meaning; they only have uses”. Wittgenstein's quip could lead to meaning, if we knew for a term all of its uses. But this set does not exist. Actually, technically speaking and demonstrably, this is not quite the case. It hasn't been for at least two decades. A back of the envelope calculation will show that, as part of the societally-wide "monitoring" in the breath by breath surveilled societies we live in these days, recording, tracking ("every piece of tangible information" (tm) to "its source") and indexing in a cross-correlated way everything everyone says for good real time is not only feasible, but it is exactly what the NSAs of the world have been very cheaply doing with the happily willing cooperation of proles who (to George Orwell's dismay) can't take their head off from their cell phones' ass. > Because the words depend on the "situations" of use, causes and conditions of their enunciation, and we know well that these vary ad infinitum, ... I have no way of knowing if "ad infinitum" is meant in a metaphoric way. In actual texts, seeing words as nodes in DAGs, "ad infinitum" would mean what?, six (6) words? > ... in time as well as in space. The only solution consists in seizing one of these "situations" where the text is stated, precise, clearly circumscribed, dated, controllable in its essential aspects, then to make, about it, the sum of the words to be studied ... and this is what makes corpora research interesting. "These situations" don't exist ;-). The essentially locked inner- and outer-intersubjectivity of language makes impossible (and/or hopelessly senseless) to clearly circumscribe in controllable ways the essential aspects of what, when, where, how ... a text is stated, because texts don't have a life of their own, nor do they determine or are derived from "factual reality" as if they were just an object, like a piece of stone, in the physically empirical ways we have been conditioned to "rationally" think since the scientific revolution. In a Hegelian („im ,Allgemeinen' Sinne"), every one who listened to, thought about such debates and/or relates to them even in more or less indirect, marginal ways (as we do right now while we talk about it) would be part of "those situations". How could you "clearly circumscribe ..." that? Niggah isn't really into protagonism, but I could relate a (in an early sense the most) formative experience I have had with texts (for whatever reason I have always loved to read alternating more than one book during the same period of time since I was little). I was born into and raised in the Cuba of the 60's (during the most determining, "crazy" periods of "the revolution") as part of a family of high profile political dissidents (imprisoned before and after for political reasons), which taxed, busied the hell out of your mind. From teachers not speaking, not even looking at me during classes (which other kids, of course, noticed and protested/asked about even to their own parents (I myself could not understand it either)), "because" as my mother explained to me, "they had to then write down all I said during classes for the police to keep as part of my profile" (in those times they didn't have cameras, sensors everywhere; people didn't have cell phones); to my mother forcing her children to go to church "because she didn't like that idea of politicians telling people what/how to think" (I could not understand what "politicians" meant, nor could I why they would mess with my wanting to play with my friends)) I could not make sense of most of the hellish weirdness happening around me but I kept thinking and asking my mother about it who would then start telling me about "the banality of evil", ... which I couldn't quite understand either, forcibly turning me into some sort child philosopher. One day I found in a box on its way to the garbage a religious book ("Cien lecciones de historias sagradas") which included the story in "Saint Francis' fioretti" about "what 'perfect' joy consists in". The moral of that story conceptually paraphrased by yours truly as a philosophical statement with a consciousness studies slant to it would be: "the greatest of all gifts and graces that God grants us with is the capacity of overcoming oneself". That one liner overwhelmingly fascinated me (it has to this very day!, its truthfulness, its poetic import, its liberating hopefulness, …!). Later I understood Saint Francis was talking about that thing they used to call "virtue" (which, since you can’t can it and sell it it doesn’t matter much these days), ... and that the underlying aspect his true statement was based on had no explanation (kind of "pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps" not even using some sort of Archimedean lever, but one's own spirituality. How on earth is that even possible!?!) and how could something Saint Francis said to friar Leo during their wintry talk to Saint Mary's of the Angels in Perugia/Umbria/Central Italy in the XIV century as part of the medieval Zeitgeist, after going through such a long sequence of communicative realizations (from Fr. Ugolino authoring, discussions, reprints, moving the text to another continent, ...) impress so mightily a little boy in Havana some 500+ years later? > From this sum, this exploration and this exhaustive comparison of contexts, the statistical research of co-occurrences can draw an objective description. Does it put us on a track that leads to meaning? Yes, to some extent, but we shouldn't be illusive about that kind of "objective description". The interesting aspect would be: to which extent would claims about "objectivity" demonstrably be, in some sense factual and to which extent we would be, "quite naturally", reading whatever we want into those texts in order to "logically" justify whatever we want? We should keep it real because our work is part of the "AI"-based "social control" (as freedom lovers call -repression-) thoroughly employed these days in all levels of society and against individuals they target. Yet, there must be something to it, because we live and learn through our conscious communicative exchanges. Society at large is kind of a corpus, a hyper forest of decentralized texts (not only "texts" in the way we see them as sequences of characters consciously written on some permanent media from stone, to reed, to paper, to magnetic excitation on a hard drive, but our actions are functional "texts" through which we constantly interacting with one another ...) You buy some veggies paying with some money which you earned by functionally doing whatever with a social import, which doesn't mean the same to you as it does to the farmer growing it, the people who brought it to the store or selling it to you, ..., but it somehow all happens just fine. "Money", "texts", ... semiologically serving as multipurpose accommodating and balancing medium both outer- and inner-intersubjectively, indeed our mind-body link! lbrtchx

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