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This paper proposes the concept of protocological governance, an account of the interplay in the enactment of protocols between sovereignty and entanglement. Protocols, understood as patterns that organize interactions among agents, are increasingly central to social and technical systems, ranging from digital networks and climate accords to Indigenous cultural practices. While protocols offer a means of sovereignty through decentralization and resistance to capture by external entities such as states or corporations, their entanglement with other systems introduces both vulnerabilities and conditions for their usefulness. The paper takes current developments in Web3 as a starting point, clarifies the distinctions between mere protocols and the protocological, and explores how protocols can assert sovereignty while being embedded in social life through a series of encounters in practice between protocols and other systems – in religious and anthropological history, Internet standards, and diplomatic agreements. Drawing on media philosophy, media anthropology, and performativity, the analysis shows how protocols can become tools for generative, relational governance through the tension between sovereignty and entanglement. The paper concludes by introducing the concept of protocological chiasm, which describes the dynamic tension between abstract patterns of protocol and their material instantiations, re-introducing the human body as a key element for resistance against capture. Protocological governance thus represents an emergent organizational form with the potential to reshape power structures. 

Open educational resources (OER) constitute a form of digital media that have received growing interest and adoption. Infrastructures are becoming more widely available to support OER authorship and adaptation. However, this article argues that infrastructures for the ongoing governance of OER have been lacking, despite the medium’s possibilities as “evolutionary media.” The article provides a review of existing literature on OER and their governance, in conversation with the governance of other kinds of software commons. It then offers an auto-ethnographic reflection on the authors’ experience with the challenges of OER maintenance in the context of a specific textbook on social media, and the resulting need for taking governance seriously. Finally, the article proposes strategies for improving support for OER governance through collaborative processes among their stakeholders. 

Abstract Although current CCG supertaggers achieve high accuracy on the standard WSJ test set, few systems make use of the categories’ internal structure that will drive the syntactic derivation during parsing. The tagset is traditionally truncated, discarding the many rare and complex category types in the long tail. However, supertags are themselves trees. Rather than give up on rare tags, we investigate constructive models that account for their internal structure, including novel methods for tree-structured prediction. Our best tagger is capable of recovering a sizeable fraction of the long-tail supertags and even generates CCG categories that have never been seen in training, while approximating the prior state of the art in overall tag accuracy with fewer parameters. We further investigate how well different approaches generalize to out-of-domain evaluation sets. 

Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP. 

Prepositional supersense annotation is time-consuming and requires expert training. Here, we present two sensible methods for obtaining prepositional supersense annotations indirectly by eliciting surface substitution and similarity judgments. Four pilot studies suggest that both methods have potential for producing prepositional supersense annotations that are comparable in quality to expert annotations. 

Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA; Abend and Rappoport, 2013) is a typologically-informed, broad-coverage semantic annotation scheme that describes coarse-grained predicate-argument structure but currently lacks semantic roles. We argue that lexicon-free annotation of the semantic roles marked by prepositions, as formulated by Schneider et al. (2018), is complementary and suitable for integration within UCCA. We show empirically for English that the schemes, though annotated independently, are compatible and can be combined in a single semantic graph. A comparison of several approaches to parsing the integrated representation lays the groundwork for future research on this task.