Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) remains a challenging task due to the requirement for deep semantic understanding in the absence of explicit discourse markers. A further limitation is that existing methods only predict relations without providing any supporting explanations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in both deep language understanding and natural language explanation generation. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach to distill the reasoning capabilities of LLMs into lightweight IDRR models to improve both performance and interpretability. Specifically, we first prompt an LLM to generate explanations for each training instance conditioned on its gold label. Then, we introduce a novel classification-generation framework that jointly performs relation prediction and explanation generation, and train it with the additional supervision of LLM-generated explanations. Our framework is plug-and-play, enabling easy integration with most existing IDRR models. Experimental results on PDTB demonstrate that our approach significantly improves IDRR performance, while human evaluation further confirms that the generated explanations enhance model interpretability. Furthermore, we validate the generality of our approach on sentiment classification and natural language inference
Matteo Gay, Coleman Haley, Mario Giulianelli
et al.
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers are subject to a communicative pressure to distribute information evenly within utterances, minimising surprisal variance. While this hypothesis has been tested empirically, prior studies are limited exclusively to text-only inputs, abstracting away from the perceptual context in which utterances are produced. In this work, we present the first computational study of UID in visually grounded settings. We estimate surprisal using multilingual vision-and-language models over image-caption data in 30 languages and visual storytelling data in 13 languages, together spanning 11 families. We find that grounding on perception consistently smooths the distribution of information, increasing both global and local uniformity across typologically diverse languages compared to text-only settings. In visual narratives, grounding in both image and discourse contexts has additional effects, with the strongest surprisal reductions occurring at the onset of discourse units. Overall, this study takes a first step towards modelling the temporal dynamics of information flow in ecologically plausible, multimodal language use, and finds that grounded language exhibits greater information uniformity, supporting a context-sensitive formulation of UID.
Linguistic uncertainty is a common feature of social media discourse, yet its relationship with user engagement remains underexplored, particularly in non-English contexts. Using a dataset of 16,695 Arabic-language tweets about Lebanon posted over a 35-day period, we examine whether tweets expressing linguistic uncertainty receive different levels and forms of engagement compared to certainty-marked tweets. We develop a lexicon-based, context-sensitive classifier to identify uncertainty markers and classify 29.9% of tweets as uncertain. Descriptive analyses indicate that uncertain tweets exhibit 51.5% higher mean total engagement (likes, retweets, and replies). Regression models controlling for tweet length, URL presence, and account verification status confirm a positive association between uncertainty and engagement (\b{eta} = 0.221, SE = 0.044, p < 0.001), corresponding to approximately 25% higher expected engagement. The association is strongest for replies, followed by retweets and likes, suggesting a shift toward more conversational forms of engagement. Results are robust to alternative model specifications and adjustments for within-account correlation. These findings suggest that linguistic uncertainty may function as an interactional cue that encourages participatory engagement in Arabic-language social media discourse. The study contributes computational approaches for modeling linguistic features in large-scale, non-English digital communication.
Text producers employ various linguistic strategies to create mental images of characters and construct specific beliefs about them. Previous research has explored how naming and describing contribute to meaning-making in discourse, particularly in humour. However, existing studies have primarily focused on Western contexts, overlooking the nuances of African humour. A significant knowledge gap exists in understanding Nigerian stand-up comedy’s (NSC) unique deployment of naming and describing. This research gap is addressed through an examination of how NSC artistes utilise nominal choices to construct and subvert societal meanings. The analysis employs Jeffries’ Critical Stylistics framework, examining ten selected humorous exchanges from NSC performances. The methodology combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, utilising content analysis. The findings reveal that NSC artistes strategically employ naming and describing to construct specific worldviews around the political elite, social archetypes, and race. Categories of names and descriptors are identified, including full names, first names, surnames, post-modified first names, pseudonyms, honorific titles, racial descriptors, and occupational demonyms. The research contributes to the understanding of language and power dynamics in NSC, shedding light on the ways comedians shape public discourse and cultural attitudes. The outcomes have implications for linguistics, cultural studies, and communication. In conclusion, the investigation demonstrates NSC’s significance as a platform for social commentary and critique, highlighting African humour’s creative challenge to dominant narratives.
Bambang Sugeng Ariadi Subagyono, Ermanto Fahamsyah, Hariyanto Sururi
et al.
The legal protection of guarantors declared bankrupt or suspended from debt payment obligations (PKPU), together with the principal debtor, remains a critical yet underexplored issue in Indonesian insolvency law. This study examines the scope and adequacy of such protections under contemporary Islamic economic law, providing comparative insights from selected common law and Asian jurisdictions. Employing a normative juridical approach combined with comparative legal analysis, the research analyses statutory provisions, judicial precedents, and doctrinal interpretations. The study highlights the imbalance of liability between guarantors and debtors, the absence of explicit safeguards under Law No. 37 of 2004 on Bankruptcy and PKPU, and the resulting implications for creditor rights and economic justice. Comparative analysis draws from the United Kingdom and United States (standard law systems) and Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia (Asian jurisdictions), revealing more structured protections for guarantors, including mechanisms such as independent liability, automatic stay, and negotiated debt restructuring. The findings indicate that Indonesia's current framework inadequately recognises the secondary and derivative nature of guarantor obligations, exposing them to disproportionate risk. This study contributes to the academic discourse by integrating contemporary Islamic economic principles into the analysis of insolvency law, providing a normative framework for reform and offering comparative insights that can inform both legislation and future research on guarantor protection. The study recommends legislative reform to explicitly regulate guarantor protection, integrating principles of proportionality, good faith, and balanced creditor–debtor relations, in line with contemporary Islamic economic law.
The escalating frequency and sophistication of cyber threats increased the need for their comprehensive understanding. This paper explores the intersection of geopolitical dynamics, cyber threat intelligence analysis, and advanced detection technologies, with a focus on the energy domain. We leverage generative artificial intelligence to extract and structure information from raw cyber threat descriptions, enabling enhanced analysis. By conducting a geopolitical comparison of threat actor origins and target regions across multiple databases, we provide insights into trends within the general threat landscape. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness of cybersecurity tools -- with particular emphasis on learning-based techniques -- in detecting indicators of compromise for energy-targeted attacks. This analysis yields new insights, providing actionable information to researchers, policy makers, and cybersecurity professionals.
This study presents a finite element and virtual element (FE-VE) coupled method for thermomechanical analysis in electronic packaging structures. The approach partitions computational domains strategically, employing FEM for regular geometries to maximize computational efficiency and VEM for complex shapes to enhance geometric flexibility. Interface compatibility is maintained through coincident nodal correspondence, ensuring solution continuity across domain boundaries while reducing meshing complexity and computational overhead. Validation through electronic packaging applications demonstrates reasonable agreement with reference solutions and acceptable convergence characteristics across varying mesh densities. The method effectively captures thermal distributions and stress concentrations in multi-material systems, establishing a practical computational framework for electronic packaging analysis involving complex geometries. Source codes are available at https://github.com/yanpeng-gong/FeVeCoupled-ElectronicPackaging.
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million Twitter messages from parliamentarians in 17 countries over five years, this paper systematically investigates whether politics internationally is becoming more uncivil, and what are the determinants of political incivility. Our analysis reveals a marked increase in toxic discourse among political elites, and that it is associated to radical-right parties and parties in opposition. Toxicity diminished markedly during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and, surprisingly, during election campaigns. Furthermore, our results indicate that posts relating to ``culture war'' topics, such as migration and LGBTQ+ rights, are substantially more toxic than debates focused on welfare or economic issues. These findings underscore a troubling shift in international democracies toward an erosion of constructive democratic dialogue.
Media representations of aging and older adults is an influential platform for shaping public discourse about aging related matters. Previous research has highlighted that the media’s depictions of older adults are often limited and biased. Such representations significantly influence society’s perceptions of the aging population. With population aging being currently a global social concern, such negative representations raise critical questions about media’s portrayal of aging related matters. Taking on the view that aging is a socially constructed phenomenon, we undertake a Discourse Analysis of 83 online news reports on aging from May 2022 to May 2023, from Malaysia’s high readership online newspaper, The Star. The results unveil several dominant discourses associated with aging, such as discourse of implications, positive aging and negative aging. The study provides valuable insights into the language used and the portrayal of aging populations in newspapers which play a vital role in shaping societal perceptions of aging, which can be either favourable or detrimental for the aging population’s self-worth and dignity. We advocate for more positive portrayals using inclusive language that is crucial for developing a cultural mindset that appreciates and honours the dignity of older members of society.
This review is devoted to the monograph «Lexical metonymy in linguistic and cognitive comprehension» by N.A. Ilyukhina, who examines the problems of using metonymic nomination of objects, processes and persons in various denotative and discursive spheres. The relevance of the issues raised in the monograph is determined by the important role of associative thinking in the process of understanding the reality and complexity of mental connections between referents, which become the objects of metonymic nomination. The review describes the issues that have become the focus of the researcher’s attention, in particular, the typologization of lexical metonymy, substantive and verbal metonymy, metonymic transfer of definitions, metonymy in various denotative and discursive spheres. The problem of the research lies in the complexity of the linguistic representation of the cognitive mechanisms of metonymic transfer, in understanding the mental connections between the part and the whole, due to which their names can replace each other in language and speech. During the research N.A. Ilyukhina used an up-to-date method of linguocognitive analysis. As a result of the conducted fundamental research, N.A. Ilyukhina comes to a number of important conclusions. The most significant and interesting conclusions are about the unified cognitive foundations of the main transfers in the system of language and speech; about the connection of the transfer vector with the structural type of a multi-faceted concept, which contains knowledge about the corresponding referent, nominated or defined by the word; about the most significant role of the cognitive metonymic mechanism in speech activity; about the «ubiquity», universality, versatility and expansion of linguistic metonymy due to its cognitive foundations; about the possibility of using metonymy as a basis for other tropes. The monograph is of considerable interest to researchers dealing with the problems of metonymy, cognitive linguistics, semasiology, and semantics of discourse.
This study investigates the challenges of disseminating feminist messages on social media, focusing on the film Barbie as an example. Feminism has gained significant academic attention, intersecting with various social, political, and economic domains. The study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct a comprehensive analysis of social media reactions and feedback horn platforms such as Twitter. Facebook, and Instagram. The findings reveal a complex landscape where Barbie is both praised for its progressive portrayal of female empowerment and criticized for superficial engagement with deeper feminist issues. Utilizing word clouds to identify dominant themes, the research provides a detailed understanding of public perceptions. The study highlights the evolving nature of feminist discourse in the digital age and underscores the critical role of media in shaping public perceptions of gender equality.
Poems composed by Hafez can be considered the most complex and enigmatic ones in the Persian language in terms of the use of artistic, rhetorical, and semantic capacities and functions of language. In this regard, Hafez goes to the point that it would be impossible to comprehend the intellectual world of his speech without reflection and hesitation. Hence, he has intelligently, fluently, and consciously used all the subtleties and capacities of the language to present his thoughts and draw his worldview taking advantage of them all with remarkable dexterity. It is because of the use of these clever linguistic tricks that his poetry has always been the subject of literary studies by scholars from different perspectives. On the other hand, since one of the most important stylistic and artistic features of his poems is the amazing use of amphibology and its different types, especially proportional amphibology, many researchers and poets have tried to examine the different layers of meanings and linguistic mystery of his art by extracting evidence of amphibologies and its various categories in his poetry in order to reveal the wonders of prismatic relations of words in his poetry. The present study has used the methods of description and analysis to examine the idea of new proportional amphibologies in the poetry of Hafez. These proportional amphibologies have not been considered in previous research and studies of the poetry of Hafez. Keywords: Hafez, Amphibology, Proportional Amphibology, Rhetoric Multi-layered. IntroductionThe most frequent and eloquent feature of the poetic style of Hafez is considered to be proportional amphibology. Basically, multi-facetedness and multi-meaning are the constituent elements of literary discourse. By using this feature, Hafez not only displays his literary eloquence but also conveys his intelligent thoughts beautifully and in the most artistic way. Amphibology means complexity of images, or in other words, multi-dimensional images that are created by combining words with multiple meanings at the level of a verse.One of the strengths of the poetry of Hafez compared to the poetry of many formalist poets or even poets who have created amphibology is that aside from making maximum use of multiple paralinguistic capacities of language, Hafez has also grown the semantic and intra-linguistic aspects of the language in various ways. This issue has made the audience draw different meanings and interpretations from the linguistic and semantic layers of words and their artistic relation with the content proportionate to the amount of their feelings, emotions, awareness, and knowledge in the face of his poetry to be satisfied and enjoy from this artistic pleasure.Undoubtedly, through his awareness and competence over linguistic delicacies, Hafez himself has played a role in the choice and combination of the lexicon based on their artistic and semantic relations. However, based on the theory of “death of the author”, the role of the reader of poetry in discovering and extracting the semantic and linguistic layers of words and their deliberate and stable musical connections is undeniable. Following the same line of research, the present study investigates some aspects of the artistic capabilities of Hafez and his awareness of the prismatic relations of the lexical items in light of the linguistic and rhetorical subtleties of his poetry. Materials and MethodsThe present study is conducted using a descriptive-analytical method through the use of library resources and extracting files from related sources. Many researchers and poetic scholars have tried to show the different layers of meaning and linguistic mysteries of his art by extracting the amphibologies and their different categories from his poetry in order to reveal the wonders of the prismatic relationships of the words in his poetry. However, by studying the language of Hafez, novel artistic and rhetorical relationships can be found among the words that other researchers have not noticed or discovered yet. In the present study, novel proportional amphibologies in the poetry of Hafez have been examined. These proportional amphibologies have not been considered in other studies and annotations written on the poetry of Hafez. Research FindingsOne of the obvious and at the same time effective components of Hafez's poetry is the multidimensionality of the verses and the layers of meaning embedded in them “in such a way that the audience, after reading it several times, still makes discoveries in the field of form and meaning, and this issue makes the text finished does not know and always has the motivation to return to it as a dynamic and generative text” (Azizi Habil, 2019, p. 8). The use of amphibology and more specifically proportional amphibologies in Hafez's poetry is usually made with awareness and a special style, and while Hafez tries to bring his words closer to the pure essence of poetry, he also tries to make his art reflect the social issues of his time. A time when hypocrisy and sanctimony of the people could not be described except via a multi-faceted and multi-layered language. Although from the perspective of "the death of the author", the issue is acceptable as the poem is a musical note that is performed by the singer and the author no longer has control over it. When words are written, they turn into an instrument that anyone can use based on their taste and the tools they have at their disposal; it is not guaranteed that the author can use them better than others. “Hafez's artistry in his special way of using language has caused his poetry to be a mirror so that everyone can see themselves in it and imagine that this is the true image of Hafez; Minds that are familiar with the words and meaning of Hafez's words, whenever they look at his words and reflect on them, they learn new things about form and meaning and discover new subtleties and points” (Agha Hosseini, 2004 p. 124).The present study investigates the use of proportional amphibologies in lexical items that have not been noticed by commentators and researchers and have been neglected in the annotations of the poetry of Hafez, as well as in previous linguistic and rhetorical studies regarding their lower layers of meaning and their harmony and compatibility with other words in which these lexical items are used. In examining the aesthetics of the poetry of Hafez, in many cases, neglecting the rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of a letter or a word can collapse the artistic structure and stunning beauty of the verse and sometimes destroy the value and the content and semantic position of the verse and even the whole sonnet. This attention and awareness to the multiple semantic layers of a word, as well as his unique awareness and knowledge of the coexistence and replacement of words, has turned the poetry of Hafez into the purest poem in the history of Persian literature and the most artistic poetic language. Discussion of Results and ConclusionsThe precision and obsession in choosing words is one of the distinctive and artistic features of the poetry of Hafez. The poetry of Hafez is like a mirror every time you look into its clarity and transparency, you can see more wonderful and different aesthetic aspects that lead to the artistic pleasure of the readers. That is why his collection of poems, which is a masterpiece of the artistic subtleties of Persian literature, refreshes as time passes and the mysteries hidden beyond its literary level reveal themselves upon each reading. The secret of the immortality of Hafez and his poetry should also be sought from this perspective. The present study was an attempt to shed light on some of the hidden proportional amphibologies in the verses and poems of Hafez which had so far escaped the keen eyes of scholars. To discover these amphibologies, one should pay attention to the sometimes obsolete and forgotten meanings of some lexical items as used by Hafez; synonyms that can sometimes only be searched and found in Persian dictionaries.The following are some of the lexical items whose forgotten meanings and synonyms have been examined in this study and it has been shown that paying attention to these meanings helps us discover the proportional amphibologies that have been neglected so far: ISHRAT (a type of tree), HASRAT (the name of a flower), AN (Wolf's nest), Bud (well), QAROON (a type of flower and herbal plant), JAN (wind), SHAHID (Friday), BI (butterfly), SHARAB (a type of flower), GOL (A musical note), HOOR (A tree), KHEJEL (A valley full of flowers and plants), TOBE (rainbow), FARAGH (Arrow and hot summer wind), PARVANE (leader and frontrunner), SU (An arrow), AREZ (leader of the corps), NAM (sleep), HOBAB (one of the names of the devil), BAD (pride), TALIB TA LAB HAD (looking at the corner of the eye). It is as if these words are like actors present on the stage, each wearing a different costume underneath their outer clothes, having them sit together with other actors (words) in the lower layer of the play (poetry). Undoubtedly, we should not suffice to what has been said so far about the art of Hafez by researchers and scholars, and by meditating and delving into this ocean of art and rhetoric, we can catch new and valuable oysters and reveal other mysteries of the magic of his speech.
Language and Literature, Indo-Iranian languages and literature
Societal change is often driven by shifts in public opinion. As citizens evolve in their norms, beliefs, and values, public policies change too. While traditional opinion polling and surveys can outline the broad strokes of whether public opinion on a particular topic is changing, they usually cannot capture the full multi-dimensional richness and diversity of opinion present in a large heterogeneous population. However, an increasing fraction of public discourse about public policy issues is now occurring on online platforms, which presents an opportunity to measure public opinion change at a qualitatively different scale of resolution and context. In this paper, we present a conceptual model of observed opinion change on online platforms and apply it to study public discourse on Universal Basic Income (UBI) on Reddit throughout its history. UBI is a periodic, no-strings-attached cash payment given to every citizen of a population. We study UBI as it is a clearly-defined policy proposal that has recently experienced a surge of interest through trends like automation and events like the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that overall stance towards UBI on Reddit significantly declined until mid-2019, when this historical trend suddenly reversed and Reddit became substantially more supportive. Using our model, we find the most significant drivers of this overall stance change were shifts within different user cohorts, within communities that represented similar affluence levels, and within communities that represented similar partisan leanings. Our method identifies nuanced social drivers of opinion change in the large-scale public discourse that now regularly occurs online, and could be applied to a broad set of other important issues and policies.
Charlie Sire, Didier Rullière, Rodolphe Le Riche
et al.
A central question in risk analysis is to identify the factors that drive the system toward a specific hazardous outcome, such as the exceedance of a given threshold. When relying on numerical simulators, we propose to study the distribution of the inputs, transformed into uniform variables via their cumulative distributions, conditionally on the occurrence of the hazardous event. To represent this multivariate conditional distribution for sensitivity analysis, we introduce an original quantization approach based on estimating a mixture of Dirac and local uniform distributions. For each marginal of this mixture, a Dirac component indicates a strong influence of the corresponding variable, whereas a uniform component with wide support reflects weak influence. A notable advantage of this method is its ability to identify the regions of the input space that most strongly influence the occurrence of the risk event, while also capturing the joint effects of multiple variables. However, learning mixture models typically relies on likelihood-based methods, which are not well suited to mixtures involving singular or Dirac components. To address this, we propose an \emph{Augmented Quantization} method, a reformulation of the classical quantization problem based on the p-Wasserstein distance, which can be computed in very general distribution spaces. The performance of Augmented Quantization in estimating such mixture models is first demonstrated on analytical toy problems, and then applied to sensitivity analysis of both an analytical function and a practical flooding case study on a section of the Loire River.
Mokhtar Ebrahimi, Nasrollah Emami, Ghodrat Ghasemipour
et al.
Aghraz Al-Seyasah Fi A'araz Al-Reyasah, authored by Zahiry Samarghandy has become one of the excellent and outstanding old prose texts, because of containing technical, political, social, philosophical, didactic, and ethical teachings and addressing governance practices. These practical and miscellaneous teachings have led to frequent transcriptions and insertion of significant distortions and falsifications into the text of the mentioned book. Jaafar Sheảr by having in hand four manuscripts of Aghraz Al-Seyasah but without benefitting all of them (specially Meshkảt᾿s transcript) has corrected and printed it in many cases mentioned the manuscript᾿s differences. Furthermore, negligence in trusteeship towards manuscripts, especially the base manuscript, hastiness in correction, and the weakness and indifference in typesetting have inserted some other distortions, falsifications, and errors in the aforesaid book. This study has tried to countercheck the printed copy of Aghraz Al-Seyasah with the base and Meshkảt᾿s manuscript, and then by comparing some phrases of it with the other works of Zahiry Samarghandy (Sandbadnameh and Ghorrat–al-Alfaz wa Nozhat-al-Alhaz) and writer᾿s stylistic norms analyze and correct some distortions falsifications and errors in the printed text of Aghraz Al-Seyasah.
This paper is in the field of natural language processing. It applied unsupervised machine learning approach to identifying the latent topics in Saudi newspapers using one of the most important unsupervised topic modeling algorithms. This algorithm is called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I built a corpus from Saudi newspapers, and it contained 4,781 texts after the preprocessing stage. It consisted of 649,734 tokens. The results of training 20 models with ten words showed that the optimal value for the number of topics in those texts is 7 topics. The 7-topics model got a good coherence degree of 0.6723. These topics were inferred through its ten words that had the highest probabilities on each topic. I interpreted the topics, respectively, according to the following topics: surveillance and awareness, development and improvement, sports, health, economics, domestic affairs, and international politics. The 7-topic model was evaluated qualitatively by manually reviewing the coherence of words in each topic. Also, I reviewed the first fifty texts on each topic to make sure that each of which belongs to the topic that LDA was assigned to it. The qualitative evaluation was supported by the algorithm being conducted again on the texts of each of the seven topics to access more details on each topic separately. Although there are some shortcomings in the results of the topic modeling, they can be optimized and then studied in discourse analysis instead of the traditional approaches.