Arts: Conference Contributions
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Item Open Access Should We Join or Not?: An Experimental Study of Conditions Affecting Small Parties in Coalition Formation(2010) Tan, Alex; Geva, N; Bragg, BThe study of how and why coalitions are formed has piqued the interest of scholars of parliamentary politics and a cottage industry of research has resulted. Despite the voluminous theories and hypotheses on the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of coalition formation, current work tends to focus on the role of the large formateur (lead party). In this research we turn our attention to the parties that are being ‘courted’ to join a coalition – the small parties. Why do the small parties join a coalition? Using an experimental cost-benefit model, we examine the factors that influence the decision of small parties to join or not to a join a governing coalition.Item Open Access Hyperpartisanship in Taiwan Media and Electorate(2022) Ho K; Clark C; Tan, AlexItem Open Access COVID-19 Pandemic and Political Change in New Zealand: Leadership, Public Opinion, and Party Politics(2021) Tan, Alex; Vanvari NThe COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020 continues to wreak havoc on the world. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, New Zealand is one of the few states that was able to keep the pandemic at bay with relatively low infection and death rates. The exemplary nature of New Zealand’s pandemic management propelled its young Prime Minister – Jacinda Ardern – to global political fame and led to a convincing electoral victory in the October 2020 general election. Indeed, since the NZ’s adoption of the MMP in 1996, no political party has ever won over 50% of the legislative seats in an election and coalition governments have become the norm. Yet, the Ardern-led Labour Party managed to be the first party to win an outright majority. In this paper, we examine the convergence of adept handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of public opinion, and the political leadership of Ardern and her cabinet members in political change in New Zealand during these uncertain times.Item Open Access Party Polarization in New Zealand and Taiwan: An Exploratory Study(2020) Tan, AlexSome scholars such as Crotty (2014, p.1) suggests that, “polarization is a term meant to describe the condition of hyper-partisanship/ideological extremism, policy representational imbalance, and institutional paralysis that combine to make contemporary governing so problematic.” While others such as Lupu (2015) contends that polarization have desirable outcomes such as increased voter turnout, more consistent ideological voting, and clear electoral options and choices for the citizens. This study examines why there is such a variation in sentiments regarding political polarization and offer some insights regarding this difference in sentiments by comparing two democracies with high levels of party system polarization – Taiwan and New Zealand. Viewing polarization from the placement of parties along ideological continuum, the fractionalization of the party system, legislative party cohesion, and voters’ position vis-à-vis the political parties, we are able to form some tentative inferences to explain why there is less concern in New Zealand for polarization vis-à-vis Taiwan.Item Open Access Item Open Access Dance in the language class(University of Canterbury, 2010) Escaip, VictoriaItem Open Access Variation and Instability in Dialect-Based Embedding Spaces(Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023) Dunn, JonathanThis paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish between similar varieties of a language, this paper experiments with two follow-up questions: First, does the variety represented in the training data systematically influence the resulting embedding space after training? This paper shows that differences in embeddings across varieties are significantly higher than baseline instability. Second, is such dialectbased variation spread equally throughout the lexicon? This paper shows that specific parts of the lexicon are particularly subject to variation. Taken together, these experiments confirm that embedding spaces are significantly influenced by the dialect represented in the training data. This finding implies that there is semantic variation across dialects, in addition to previously studied lexical and syntactic variation.Item Open Access Te whakaoho o te mōhiotanga huna(2022) Hay J; Keegan P; Mattingley W; Todd S; Panther F; King, JeanetteItem Open Access Item Open Access Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time(2022) Wong S; Dunn, JonathanThis paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification produces robust dialect models, we do not know what influence both changing grammars and changing populations have on dialect models. This paper constructs a test set for 12 dialects of English that spans three years at monthly intervals with a fixed spatial distribution across 1,120 cities. Syntactic representations are formulated within the usage-based Construction Grammar paradigm (CxG). The decay rate of classification performance for each dialect over time allows us to identify regions undergoing syntactic change. And the distribution of classification accuracy within dialect regions allows us to identify the degree to which the grammar of a dialect is internally heterogeneous. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a rigorous evaluation of dialect classification models can be used to find both variation over space and change over time.Item Open Access Towards a theory of motivation: describing commitment to the Māori language(2009) King, Jeanette; Gully, Nichol CatherineItem Open Access Cosmic Xerox Machines, Tattoo Removal, and Defining 'Physicalism'(2018) Campbell, DouglasItem Open Access Greenbeard Theory, Meet Simulation Theory(2020) Campbell, DouglasItem Open Access Robots in Nozickland(2020) Campbell, DouglasItem Open Access Beyond competence - Implications for WIL in inter-professional healthcare practice(2022) Borren J; Maidment J; Tudor, RaewynItem Open Access Unsupervised morphological segmentation in a language with reduplication(2022) Todd S; Huang A; Needle J; King J; Hay, JenniferWe present an extension of the Morfessor Base line model of unsupervised morphological seg mentation (Creutz and Lagus, 2007) that in corporates abstract templates for reduplication, a typologically common but computationally underaddressed process. Through a detailed in vestigation that applies the model to Maori, the ¯ Indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, we show that incorporating templates improves Morfessor’s ability to identify instances of redu plication, and does so most when there are multiple minimally-overlapping templates. We present an error analysis that reveals important factors to consider when applying the extended model and suggests useful future directions.Item Open Access Taiwan: Party system of a young consolidated democracy(2021) Tan, AlexItem Open Access Uninvited Campaign Rally: Effects of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement on Taiwan’s 2020 Election(American Political Science Association, 2021) Huang C; Tan, AlexParty, candidate, and issue are undoubtedly the most frequently cited elements in electoral studies. All three, especially party system and issue debates, often reflect and cut along the main social and political cleavages in a society. However, the classic Michigan model and social cleavage theory may overlook the influence of events beyond the country’s border. It is curious that recent literature began to recognize subtle foreign intervention through internet and social media, yet few pay enough attention to the possible effects of intensively reported external events on domestic politics and their interactions. This study fills this void by studying an Asian new democracy and examining how events hundreds of miles away can send shock waves to impact, if not to reverse, the domestic public mood. We examine the effects of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019 on Taiwan voters’ views of cross-strait relationship, especially the stands on Taiwan independence vs. unification with China. We utilize the unique face-to-face survey panel data collected by the Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR) at the National Chengchi University from 2018 to 2020 (TIGCR-PPS 2018, 2019 & 2020) to measure the stability and change of independence-unification views in Taiwan during the 2019 campaign period. We find that the shift of general public’s attitude in this long-existing political cleavage on cross-strait relations indeed accounts for Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election results.Item Open Access Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure(Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021) Tayyar Madabushi H; Dunn, JonathanThis paper measures the impact of increased exposure on whether learned construction grammars converge onto shared representations when trained on data from different registers. Register influences the frequency of constructions, with some structures common in formal but not informal usage. We expect that a grammar induction algorithm exposed to different registers will acquire different constructions. To what degree does increased exposure lead to the convergence of register-specific grammars? The experiments in this paper simulate language learning in 12 languages (half Germanic and half Romance) with corpora representing three registers (Twitter, Wikipedia, Web). These simulations are repeated with increasing amounts of exposure, from 100k to 2 million words, to measure the impact of exposure on the convergence of grammars. The results show that increased exposure does lead to converging grammars across all languages. In addition, a shared core of register-universal constructions remains constant across increasing amounts of exposure.Item Open Access Virtues, vices and place attachment(2021) Mason, CarolynThere is a virtue associated with forming and maintaining relationships to places. This virtue has not been recognised by philosophers, but it plays a role in indigenous cultures across the world. Hence, place attachment is one of many areas in which indigenous knowledge can contribute to the development of Western philosophy. After explaining what it means for a disposition to act in accordance with this virtue to be a Neo-Aristotelian virtue, examples from Māori culture are used to explain why the way that people form relationships to places can be a virtue in this neo-Aristotelian sense. Recognising this virtue reveals ways of interacting with the world that contribute to human and environmental flourishing, as well as revealing a new way in which indigenous people are harmed when dispossessed of their ancestral land.