UVML Likelihood Syntax

Likelihood	Syntax
Definitely (100%)	%%%
Very Likely (>90+%)	%%
Likely (>75%)	%
Unlikely (<25%)	%-
Very Unlikely (<10%)	%--
Definitely Not (0%)	%---

4.3.4.6. Emphasis

UVML provides a means of emphasis to give voters freedom to emphasize the strength of their opinion, may be done by repeating the final symbol of the opinion. After all, three exclamation points are just not enough for some #topics!!!!!!

From a tabulation standpoint, these opinions do not carry more than the maximum consideration.

Ex. #life********* ;; life has never been better

Ex. #life$$$$$$ ;; never been more optimistic

4.4. Ranking

A ranking consists of a contest, and one or more selections.

A UVML contest vote is a indicated by a double-hash (##), followed by the contest name. Each selection takes the form of a hash tag, optionally followed by a valuation. Voter selections are listed in order, beginning with the voter's first selection, optionally followed by second, then third, etc., up to 25 selections.

Ex. ##president.us #Smith #Jones #Johnson

Ex. ##president.us #Smith+++ #Jones++ #Johnson

From a contest tabulation standpoint---both of the above examples are tabulated the same. Each candidate receives a 1/CHOICE score for the ballot, where CHOICE represents that candidates ordinal position, in this case Smith +1.0, Jones +0.5, and Johnson +0.33.

The second example shows that UVML rating votes can be used as UVML contest selections. In such cases, the rating votes as tabulated as well, in this case Smith (strongly support) and Jones (support).

4.5. Signature

UVML enables voters to provide a demographic signature, to help polling stations do voter segmentation. A UVML signature is prefixed by triple-hashes (###). The voter signature may appear before, after, or between votes within a ballot.

A UVML demographic signature is composed of three parts: age, gender, and location. Only gender is required. The location may be a country, country-state, or country-areacode. The country is optional, but recommended in cases where the polling station may not reliably supply a correct default.

Ex. ###F ;; female voter

Ex. ###M ;; male voter

Ex. ###29F212 ;; 29 year old female voter from New York City

Ex. ###M-CN ;; male voter from China

Ex. ###75F-USCA ;; 75 year old female voter from California

Votes are tabulated at each level where the information is provided or can be derived. In the case of ###M212, votes would be counted for the 212 area code, the state of New York, and the country of the Unites States.

5. UVML Implementation Standards

The following standards promote consistency in voter experience across polling stations.

5.1. No Vote Roll-up

For any UVML topic, contest, or selection which includes a subgroup delimiter (.), the polling station must roll up a specific topic to a more general one. For example, #drivers.ny**** must not imply #drivers****.

5.2. Multiple Votes

If multiple votes for the same topic and valuation type are included in a single ballot, then a polling station must count the first vote only.

5.3. Signature Location

Signatures may appear anywhere within a ballot, though the ABNF grammar for a ballot indicates that a signature follows after all votes.

5.4. Multiple Signatures

If multiple demographic signatures are present in a single ballot, then a polling station must reference the first signature only.

5.5. Forwarded Ballots

Ballots which are obviously forwarded should not be counted.

5.6. UVML Video Ballots

UVML in video is treated as UVML in text. Whether on one frame or all frames, multiple UVML votes for the same topic and opinion type are not counted more than once.

6. UVML Rhetorical Guide

A UVML vote can take two rhetorical forms: confirming and inline.

In the confirming form, UVML restates, clarifies, or quantifies an opinion expressed elsewhere in the text.

Ex. Came across this cool voting syntax called, UVML. #uvml*****.

In the inline form, UVML both embodies the full semantics of opinion and plays a grammatical role in the text.

Ex. Check out #uvml*****.

7. UVML Functional Specification

This section contains some more theoretical descriptions of the core motivations of the various components of UVML. Future changes to the UVML standard should be supported by these functional specifications.

Author's Note: While an effort has been made to inform UVML's design goals with concepts from elections systems theory, the field is highly complex and the treatment of related topics in this document should only be considered superficial.

The aim of UVML is to enable a high quality ubiquitous voting system capable of processing ballots authored in text, image, or video. The functional requirements for UVML are presented below. The framework for the below requirements benefits from [HospVora2010].

7.1. Usability

UVML must enable voters to express their opinions completely, clearly, and compactly, such that the voter can be confident that a vote cast using UVML accurately reflects his or her intentions.

7.1.1. Completeness

UVML must enable voters to express their opinions using the principle elements of opinion semantics (Section 8.2) and rank-order preference semantics (Section 8.3).

7.1.2. Clarity

UVML must enable voters to clearly communicate to readers the semantics of their opinions ( Completeness ) to both human and automated-agent readers.

The syntax for UVML votes and signatures must be defined using an ABNF grammar.

The syntax for UVML votes and signatures should be defined so as to minimize conflicts with established modes of textual or visual communications.

7.1.3. Compactness

UVML syntax must include only the minimum number of symbols required to meet semantic requirements. UVML must reconcile conflicts between compactness and clarity in favor of compactness.

7.1.4. Universality

UVML syntax must be a universal syntax, requiring no or only minimal localization.

7.2. Privacy

UVML must enable voters to sign their ballots with a demographic signature; however, "polling stations" must not require a signature for a ballot to be counted.

7.3. Integrity

UVML must provide inference-free voting tabulation, such that the vote cast is the vote recorded.

7.4. Verifiability

UVML must enable voters to query voting results and sample ballots.

7.5. Veracity

UVML syntax must be easy enough to process such that polling stations can render tabulated returns in near-real-time, so that voters can be assured that their votes and the votes of others are being reported as they are counted.

7.6. Robustness

UVML must enable a voter to vote again if a previous vote was cast incorrectly or the voter's opinion changes.

7.7. Intelligence

UVML must enable a closed-loop voting system, where voters can query the full content of the ballots of other voters and re-vote as they learn more about the things that are important to themselves and other voters.

8. Notes

This section includes remarks which didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

8.1. Accidental Vote Rates

Some work was done in the design of UVML to limit accidental voting. Accidental votes are votes which are valid UVML, but for which the author did not intend to vote using UVML---his or her text just happened to be valid UVML.

This author examined a blog corpus ([Spinn3r2009]) totaling 62M social media documents in . The accidental vote rate for unique targets was 33:1,000,000. The rate of accidental voting for meaningful targets is much lower, perhaps 3-5:1,000,000. Below are some examples of the false positives. Unicode characters in the below examples will appear as � in the ascii format of this specification.

Ex(s). #BWE08!, #ta!!!!!, #arriba-, #cbaaab+, ##BR#Showing, #top-, #user-, #Movies336-, #Caution!, #路况市区20%, #DSNYUK23789BNew!!, #er!, #YUWB7JLUQI%, #Ap+, #cutid1!, #leella!, ##BR#Great, #︿＄*, #FNT*, #Увольте!, #g4+, #￥……—*, #FF6021!, #trendanalysis-, #输出heapdump*, #KSCS25FVSS-, #уй!, #EL+, #tch!!!, #fwe%, #seoad-, #outros240-, #GOBAMA!, #NR%, #данутых!, #osleoperd-, #而对于c++, #DANUNO-, ##BR#Only, #vouvotar!, ##BR#Jacquelyn.

The language distribution of these accidental votes was more or less consistent with each language's representation in the corpus. Portuguese was a little higher than expected for some reason, and Chinese/Japanese/Korean accidental voting rates were a little lower than expected: U -> 382, my -> 1, de -> 89, fr -> 182, pl -> 6, hr -> 9, uk -> 7, ta -> 4, hi -> 2, io -> 11, ka -> 3, ru -> 178, ko -> 3, th -> 6, cjk -> 489, ar -> 18, no -> 9, nl -> 17, et -> 7, pt -> 317, ro -> 4, hu -> 1, ja -> 122, vi -> 8, da -> 3, sv -> 19, he -> 21, fa -> 4, it -> 20, zh -> 31, es -> 123, en -> 3006.

UVML's current syntax seems to strike a useful balance between compactness, differentiation from conventional text, and expressiveness power.

8.2. Opinion Semantics

UVML leverages the definition of opinion semantics provided by FrameNet: "topic", an "aspect", a "constancy" value, a "manner."

Topic

UVML must enable voters to define their own topics, using taxonomy if desired.

Aspect

UVML must enable voters to express the most common opinion types [Phillips2011]: quality, support (or agreement), importance, outlook, and likelihood.

Constancy

UVML must enable voters to make "provisional" votes, in cases where the voter is undecided.

Manner

UVML must enable voters to emphasize the strength of their opinions beyond the limits of a conventional Likert-type scale.

8.3. Election-Contest Semantics

For Election-Contest semantics, UVML uses the definition of rank-order semantics provided by FrameNet. Specifically, "the {perceived} state of occupying a certain {place} within a hierarchy."

8.4. Right to Left Language Support

At this time, the specification of UVML does not include a hash-right convention for right-to-left languages. To date, social media content of users of right-to-left languages have not worked to implement such a convention. If this changes, the UVML specification may follow.

9. Acknowledgements

This document was constructed using the xml2rfc project.

10. IANA Considerations

This memo includes no request to IANA.

11. Security Considerations

UVML does not pose a security threat.

12. References

12.1. Normative References

[RFC2119]

Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

12.2. Informative References

[RFC5234]	Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, January 2008.
[HospVora2010]	Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, "An information-theoretic model of voting systems", October 2008.
[Phillips2011]	, , "Multi-language Analysis of Sentiment Types in Blogs", May 2011.
[Spinn3r2009]	Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2009, "The icwsm 2009 spinn3r dataset", May 2009.

Appendix A. UVML Regular Expressions

The following basic regular expressions (from scala) express the above ABNF specification.

Basic regular expression for the capture of UVML rating votes.

(?:\x23(?:[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd](?:\x2e[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd])*|[Tt][Hh][Ii][Ss])\x3f?(?:\x2a{5,10}|\x2a{4}|\x2a{3}|\x2a{2}|\x2a|\x2a\x2d|\x2a\x2d{2,9}|!{3,10}|!{2}|!|!\x2d|!\x2d{2,9}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]{3,10}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]{2}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d{2}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d{3,9}|\x2b{3,10}|\x2b{2}|[\x2b\x2d]|\x2d{2}|\x2d{3,10}|%{3,10}|%{2}|%|%\x2d|%\x2d{2}|%\x2d{3,9}))(?=\Z|[.;:\s])

Basic regular expression for the capture of UVML ranking votes.

(?:\x23{2}[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd](?:\x2e[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd])*(?:[\t\x20]*(?:\d|1\d|2[0-5])?\x23[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd](?:\x2e[A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd][0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd]{0,70}[0-9A-Za-z\xc0-\ud7ff\ue000-\ufdcf\ufdf0-\ufffd])*(?:\x3f?(?:\x2a{5,10}|\x2a{4}|\x2a{3}|\x2a{2}|\x2a|\x2a\x2d|\x2a\x2d{2,9}|!{3,10}|!{2}|!|!\x2d|!\x2d{2,9}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]{3,10}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]{2}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d{2}|[\x24\x80\xa3\xa5]\x2d{3,9}|\x2b{3,10}|\x2b{2}|[\x2b\x2d]|\x2d{2}|\x2d{3,10}|%{3,10}|%{2}|%|%\x2d|%\x2d{2}|%\x2d{3,9}))?){1,25})(?=\Z|[.;:\s])

Basic regular expression for the capture of UVML signatures.

(?:\x23{3}(?:\d{1,3}\x2d?)?[FMfm](?:(?:\x2d?[A-Za-z]{2})?(?:\x2d?(?:\d{1,2}|[A-Za-z]{2,3}))?(?:\x2d?\d{3,4})?)?)(?=\Z|[.;:\s])

Author's Address