Robert Dale

To some, they are the graduates grasping the first rung on the ladder to power, to others, the unsung heroes of the British parliamentary system. But whether your notion of parliamentary researchers is more The Thick of It than The West Wing, more Yes Minister than House of Cards, there is no doubt that these individuals play an essential role in keeping the giant (and, let's be honest, slightly creaky) machine that drives British politics from juddering to a halt. Branded bag-carriers while actually performing vital duties like drafting speeches and Parliamentary Questions, handling the media and engaging with constituents online, parliamentary researchers do the dirty work behind the scenes, allowing their bosses to focus on their main job - performing. With the help of case studies and guest writers, Robert Dale, himself a former parliamentary researcher, tells the fascinating story of how the MP's office has developed over recent decades, and combines practical advice with acute personal observations on how to get ahead as a researcher. If you're a graduate looking to take your first step into politics, or simply interested in the job around a third of our current Cabinet had before becoming an MP, How to Be a Parliamentary Researcher offers a compelling insight into how the British political system really operates.

How to Be a Parliamentary Researcher

To some, 'staffers' are the unsung heroes of the British Parliamentary system. In Westminster and back in the constituencies, they do the dirty work, allowing the MP to focus on his or her main job - performing. To others, there is a growing sense that staffers use their roles as the first rung on the ladder to becoming Members of Parliament themselves. Indeed, around 30% of the current Cabinet previously worked for an MP. This book tells the story of how the MP's office has developed over recent decades, to the point at which staff now account for 78% of the overall members' expenses budget, not to mention the army of unofficial and unpaid interns. It explains what staffers do, how they operate and to whom they are accountable, as well as why there has been an enormous increase in their numbers.

How to be a Parliamentary Researcher

Hermann Moisl

Harold Somers

This study explores the design and application of natural language text-based processing systems, based on generative linguistics, empirical copus analysis, and artificial neural networks. It emphasizes the practical tools to accommodate the selected system.

Handbook of Natural Language Processing

Oliviero Stock

Eduard Hovy

Dietmar Rösner

This volume presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Automated Natural Language Generation held in Castel Ivano, Trento, Italy, April 5-7, 1992. Besides an invited lecture by Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, a well-known researcher in computer animation, on creating and visualizing speech and emotion, the volume includes the 17 thouroughly reviewed papers accepted for presentation, selected out of the submissions to the Workshop, as well as 11 statements contributed to panels on multilinguality and generation or extending language generation to multiple media. The accepted papers by leading researchers from Japan, North America and Europe fall in sections on generator system architecture, issues in realisation, issues in discourse structure, and beyond traditional generation.

6th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation Trento, Italy, April 5-7, 1992. Proceedings

Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation

Robert Dale presents a detailed description of the development of algorithms for the generation of referring expressions, and of the underlying structures that motivate these algorithms, in a dynamic domain. He provides a number of novel results in both knowledge representation and natural language generation that should have straightforward applications in other domains. Dale describes EPICURE, a natural language generating system, and its capacity to create referring expressions in a domain embodying several interesting features: The entities in the domain consist of masses and sets as well as the more usual singular individuals; during the development of a discourse, the entities may take on new properties, existing entities may be destroyed, and new entities may be created; and the discourses within which the entities appear are hierarchically structured, allowing for the integration of discourse-structural constraints on the use of anaphoric expressions. EPICURE is designed to generate text from underlying plans. Dale uses cooking recipes as examples, showing how the system must determine what level of explanation is required and how the events in the plan must be modeled to ensure that the references generated are accurate. Robert Dale is Lecturer in the Centre for Cognitive Science and Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.

Constructing Descriptions in a Domain of Objects and Processes

Generating Referring Expressions

Kam-Fai Wong

Jian Su

Oi Yee Kwong

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2005, held in Jeju Island, Korea in October 2005. The 88 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 289 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval, corpus-based parsing, Web mining, rule-based parsing, disambiguation, text mining, document analysis, ontology and thesaurus, relation extraction, text classification, transliteration, machine translation, question answering, morphological analysis, text summarization, named entity recognition, linguistic resources and tools, discourse analysis, semantic analysis NLP applications, tagging, language models, spoken language, and terminology mining.

Second International Joint Conference, Jeju Island, Korea, October 11-13, 2005, Proceedings

Natural Language Processing – IJCNLP 2005

Every church leader knows the necessity and difficulty of maintaining and enhancing morale. Visions of service, excellent programs, and capable personnel are not enough to keep the ship of the church on course if spirit is lacking. In 'Keeping the Dream Alive', Robert D. Dale skillfully analyzes the various factors that determine congregational morale. Using the metaphor of weather, he discusses such subjects as steering currents, seeding the clouds, prevailing winds, and long-range forecasting. The result is a book characterized by depth and practicality. If you are struggling to keep your congregation on course in fulfilling its mission, this book will be an invaluable resource for 'Keeping the Dream Alive'.

Understanding and Building Congregational Morale

Keeping the Dream Alive

Church leaders want to know that their leadership strategies are informed by Christian teaching and made credible by the authority of Scripture. In addition, pastors have an unquenchable thirst for new and unique approaches to leadership. These needs and many more are met as Robert Dale takes the reader through four primary leadership strategies in the New Testament. Focus is a strategy that one learns through study of Jesus' mission and leadership influence. Flexibility is the strategy learned as the Church expands through the Acts of the Apostles. Future-Orientation is the strategy emphasized through the pastoral Epistles. Feasibility is the strategy developed in the Book of Revelation, when the churches are in crisis or in survival mode. Each strategy is illustrated with practical application for the life of congregations so that leaders can sharpen leadership skills with integrity and authority.

Leadership Strategies from the New Testament

Leading Edge

There are four ways to revitalize a church, organizationally speaking. The easiest change is policy change. You simply adjust the way you do things. A second strategy is to change personnel. Firing the minister or electing new lay leaders is a common approach. Another change tactic is to create new program structures. Reorganization plans are familiar in institutions of all kinds. Change policy. Change people. Change programs. Each of these approaches has its advocates. But the approach I suggest is the most basic of all--clarify purpose. The fourth way to revitalize a church is to define and act on its fundamental purpose. A new dream awakes a congregation. A poster motto challenges: ÒAim for the sun. You may not reach it, but you will fly higher that if you never aimed at all.Ó --from the Foreword

How to Help Your Church Come Alive

To Dream Again

There are four ways to revitalize a church, organizationally speaking. The easiest change is policy change. You simply adjust the way you do things. A second strategy is to change personnel. Firing the minister or electing new lay leaders is a common approach. Another change tactic is to create new program structures. Reorganization plans are familiar in institutions of all kinds. Change policy. Change people. Change programs. Each of these approaches has its advocates. But the approach I suggest is the most basic of all--clarify purpose. The fourth way to revitalize a church is to define and act on its fundamental purpose. A new dream awakes a congregation. A poster motto challenges: "Aim for the sun. You may not reach it, but you will fly higher that if you never aimed at all." --from the Foreword

Ehud Reiter

Explains how to build computer software systems which generate understandable texts in human languages.

Robert Dale

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