The paper focusses on the online political discourse of the Five Star Movement (5SM) and its strategic adaptability. The main goal of the analysis is to establish how salient several topics are over time in order to test the party’s ideological flexibility. Indeed, 5SM’s post-ideological approach and its emphasis on direct-democratic tools might constitute a winning formula for other populist parties willing to exploit the crisis of the mainstream parties and representation. The paper, through an automated content analysis, tracks the longitudinal evolution of the salience of the topics addressed by 5SM on the party’s blog. This allows us to establish which topics are at the core of the party’s message and which, on the other hand, have been raised strategically over time. Results show that 5SM’s discourse is very flexible and adaptable: it devotes a large space to the importance of direct democracy while flexibly addressing different topics depending on the political and social context.

This paper describes the details of our system submitted to the SemEval-2014 shared task about aspect-based sentiment analysis on review texts. We participated in subtask 2 (prediction of the polarity of aspect terms) and 4 (prediction of the polarity of aspect categories). Our approach to determine the sentiment of aspect terms and categories is based on linguistic preprocessing, including a compositional analysis and a verb resource, task-specific feature engineering and supervised machine learning techniques. We used a Logistic Regression classifier to make predictions, which were ranked above-average in the shared task.

Sowohl restriktivere Anforderungen an den Durchstanzwiderstand [5, 8, 9] als auch höhere Einwirkungen erfordern bei punktgestützten Flachdecken oft deren Verstärkungen. In diesem Beitrag wird eine Verstärkung mit Aufbeton und zusätzlicher Querkraftbewehrung diskutiert. Dazu wird ein an der Hochschule Luzern – Technik & Architektur durchgeführter Durchstanzversuch mit Aufbeton [4] vorgestellt. Bei diesem Versuch wurde eine unverstärkte Durchstanzplatte vorbelastet und nach einer teilweisen Entlastung mit einem bewehrten Aufbeton und nachträglich eingebauter Querkraftbewehrung verstärkt und bis zum Bruch belastet. Nach der Beschreibung des Bauteilversuchs werden die Messresultate dargestellt und die Bruchlast mit den Berechnungsergebnissen ausgewählter Theorien zur Berechnung des Durchstanzwiderstands verglichen. Dabei wird untersucht, wie sich die Wahl der statischen Nutzhöhe der verstärkten Platte auf das Last‐Verformungs‐Verhalten resp. den Durchstanzwiderstand der Platte auswirkt. Zum Abschluss wird aufgezeigt, in welchen Bereichen weiterer Forschungsbedarf besteht.Punching slab strengthened with an additional concrete layer – Test and recalculationsDue to more restrictive requirements for the punching resistance [5, 8, 9] as well as increased loads, point supported flat slabs often need strengthening. In this paper, a strengthening method consisting of an additional concrete layer and additional shear reinforcement is discussed. Thereto a punching test with an additional concrete layer [4] carried out at the Department of Engineering and Architecture of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts is presented. In this test a non‐strengthened punching slab is preloaded, partially unloaded, reinforced with an additional concrete layer and shear reinforcement and then loaded to failure. After a description of the structural member test, the measurements are presented and the failure load is compared to the punching resistances calculated with selected theoretical models. Within this context it is analysed how the chosen effective depth of the strengthened slab influences the load and deformation behaviour as well as the punching resistance of the slab. Finally, areas requiring further research are pointed out.

In this paper, we discuss how domainspecific noun polarity lexicons can be induced. We focus on the generation of good candidates and compare two machine learning scenarios in order to establish an approach that produces high precision. Candidates are generated on the basis of polarity preferences of adjectives derived from a large domain-independent corpus. The polarity preference of a word, here an adjective, reflects the distribution of positive, negative and neutral arguments the word takes (here: its nominal head). Given a noun modified by some adjectives, a vote among the polarity preferences of these adjectives establishes a good indicator of the polarity of the noun. In our experiments with five domains, we achieved f-measure of 59% up to 88% on the basis of two machine learning approaches carried out on top of the preference votes.

Abstract. In fine-grained sentiment analysis one has to deal with the composition of bi-polar phrases such as e.g. just punishment. Moreover, the top down prediction of phrase polarity as imposed by certain verbs on their direct objects sometimes is violated by the bottom up composed phrase polarity (e.g. 'to approve war'). We introduce a fine-grained polarity lexicon built along the lines of the Appraisal Theory and we investigate the composition of bi-polar phrases -both, from a phrase internal point of view and from a verb-centered perspective. We have specified a multi-lingual polarity resource (French, English, German) and a system pipeline that carries out sentiment composition for these languages. We discuss examples with reference to each of these languages.