INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE AND MORAL : CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF TWO TIMELESS VIETNAMESE COLONIAL TEXTBOOKS

Indigenous Language and Moral are two series of textbooks implemented in Franco-Vietnamese elementary schools during the early twentieth century, when the territory of today’s Vietnam was in part a French colony and in part French protectorates. The historical, cultural, and educational conditions in which the books were created have long become obscure, yet the books themselves have not. Instead, they have left the classroom walls to enter the twenty-first century publishing industry as children’s literature, despite their textbook format. This study examines the publisher’s reasons for their repeated republications during the 2000s and 2010s and systematically categories their moral topics in an attempt to understand their educational and cultural relevance in modern Vietnamese society. Findings suggest that the books’ moral themes are in fact more compatible with the values upheld by the modern society than with the modern education program offered by the national curriculum. Although this thesis might be the first English-language study that took interest in the phenomenon of these books’ seemingly timeless survival, it is my hope that it will not be the last, but rather an inspiration for further, more comprehensive research into said phenomenon

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction

This dissertation addresses the need to world our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the authentic experience of the white, male American soldier-author, which inadequately accounts for total war\u27s impact on women, ethnic minorities, non-Americans, and non-combatants on all sides of the battle. The literary text, I contend, can restore a view to the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a model for recovering these overlooked perspectives: close-reading characters’ bodily gestures. I develop this method to resituate war as relational, always involving two or more participants who in the local encounter are differently vulnerable to operations of national power. In three sections of paired chapters, this method illuminates the transnational dimensions of canonical war fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien alongside fiction by authors not as fully associated with the genre: Susan O’Neill, Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These authors represent World War I through Vietnam; yet, in order to emphasize my reorientation of trauma theory, the chapters are organized around particular stages of war trauma: the event of war, homecoming from war, and war trauma across generations. By prioritizing war\u27s embodied interactions, this study moves away from trauma theory\u27s grounding in a universal view of the singular subject toward a conception of war trauma as intersubjective and inflected by uneven material realities. In doing so, Transnational Gestures contributes a new perspective to current scholarly debates about how American literary studies can intersect postcolonial, world, and empire studies in ways that better attend to complex legacies of global violence and inequality

Automatic Extraction and Assessment of Entities from the Web

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval

Cambodian National Education Policy: Global Wants and/or Local Needs?

This thesis is broadly concerned with the impact of globalization on education policy making in Cambodia, a post-conflict, developing country. Cambodia’s education system was almost entirely wiped out by the 1990’s because of various military and social conflicts that had plagued the country. As such, Cambodia provides an excellent case of post-conflict educational reconstruction. The thesis will explore how multinational financial organizations such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank are influencing the direction of national education policy in Cambodia, using a globalization theoretical perspective. The focus will be on a policy analysis of several key policy documents and directives from the multinational organizations and Cambodian government. Through this analysis three themes become apparent. These include the marketization of education, partnerships, and the purpose of education in Cambodia. These themes present a complex picture of an education system in transition under the influence of national and international needs and desires

Improving Neural Question Answering with Retrieval and Generation

Text-based Question Answering (QA) is a subject of interest both for its practical applications, and as a test-bed to measure the key Artificial Intelligence competencies of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the representation and application of knowledge. QA has progressed a great deal in recent years by adopting neural networks, the construction of large training datasets, and unsupervised pretraining. Despite these successes, QA models require large amounts of hand-annotated data, struggle to apply supplied knowledge effectively, and can be computationally ex- pensive to operate. In this thesis, we employ natural language generation and information retrieval techniques in order to explore and address these three issues. We first approach the task of Reading Comprehension (RC), with the aim of lifting the requirement for in-domain hand-annotated training data. We describe a method for inducing RC capabilities without requiring hand-annotated RC instances, and demonstrate performance on par with early supervised approaches. We then explore multi-lingual RC, and develop a dataset to evaluate methods which enable training RC models in one language, and testing them in another. Second, we explore open-domain QA (ODQA), and consider how to build mod- els which best leverage the knowledge contained in a Wikipedia text corpus. We demonstrate that retrieval-augmentation greatly improves the factual predictions of large pretrained language models in unsupervised settings. We then introduce a class of retrieval-augmented generator model, and demonstrate its strength and flexibility across a range of knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, including ODQA. Lastly, we study the relationship between memorisation and generalisation in ODQA, developing a behavioural framework based on memorisation to contextualise the performance of ODQA models. Based on these insights, we introduce a class of ODQA model based on the concept of representing knowledge as question- answer pairs, and demonstrate how, by using question generation, such models can achieve high accuracy, fast inference, and well-calibrated predictions

Otterbein Aegis Spring 2007

Contents: Editor’s Introduction; Interview with Dr. Henry Abelove; Articles: Facebook.com: Preparing Future Leaders with Ignorance—Colleen Deel; Jesus: Apocalyptic Mesiah or Counter Apocalyptic Social Prophet? An Alternate View of Jesus and Why the Church is Called to Serve the Oppressed—Nick Kiger; The Rise of Marxist Thought in Twentieth Century Vietnam—Halle Neiderman; Resurrecting Judith: Edith Summers Kelly, Weeds, and the Politics of Gender— Christi Amato; Social Movements and the Politics of Place: Transnational and Local Change—Sarah Prindle; The Drama and the Comedy of the Commons: Rethinking “The Tragedy of the Commons”—Sarah Prindle; The Material Language of Beuys and Antoni - Emily Starr; Is Trope Theory Viable?—Jason Thomas Craig; The Origins of Republican Womanhood—Shannon Bauchert; Leonard Bernstein: I Hate Music! A Cycle of Five Kid Songs and its Cultural Con­text—Danielle Hickey; Discovering Knoxville: A Biography, Analysis, and Study of Cultural Context— Alison Brooks; Book Reviews: America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy—Cassi Smith; Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South—Me­gan Hatfield; The Last American Man—Meghan Johnson; March—Larsa Ramsini; Memories of My Melancholy Whores—Shannon Bauchert; The Road—Jason Thomas Craig; The World is Flat—Jennifer Scarbrough; Contributors, etc.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/aegis_humanity/1007/thumbnail.jp

The Subject(s) of Human Rights

The field of Asian American studies grew out of mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles, anti-war protests, and third world liberation movements. As a result, human rights issues have always been part of Asian American studies, though they've been largely peripheral to the interdiscipline. This edited collection bring Asian American studies to the center of human rights critique by engaging with "the possibilities and the limits of the stories that have circulated and the knowledge that has been produced around the broad topic of 'human rights' understood primarily as a post-1945 discourse that has profoundly affected the movements of people and relations of power across the Pacific." The collection brings together scholars from North America and Asia in order to approach the issue of human rights from both sides of the Pacific

Text mining and natural language processing for the early stages of space mission design

Final thesis submitted December 2021 - degree awarded in 2022A considerable amount of data related to space mission design has been accumulated since artificial satellites started to venture into space in the 1950s. This data has today become an overwhelming volume of information, triggering a significant knowledge reuse bottleneck at the early stages of space mission design. Meanwhile, virtual assistants, text mining and Natural Language Processing techniques have become pervasive to our daily life. The work presented in this thesis is one of the first attempts to bridge the gap between the worlds of space systems engineering and text mining. Several novel models are thus developed and implemented here, targeting the structuring of accumulated data through an ontology, but also tasks commonly performed by systems engineers such as requirement management and heritage analysis. A first collection of documents related to space systems is gathered for the training of these methods. Eventually, this work aims to pave the way towards the development of a Design Engineering Assistant (DEA) for the early stages of space mission design. It is also hoped that this work will actively contribute to the integration of text mining and Natural Language Processing methods in the field of space mission design, enhancing current design processes.A considerable amount of data related to space mission design has been accumulated since artificial satellites started to venture into space in the 1950s. This data has today become an overwhelming volume of information, triggering a significant knowledge reuse bottleneck at the early stages of space mission design. Meanwhile, virtual assistants, text mining and Natural Language Processing techniques have become pervasive to our daily life. The work presented in this thesis is one of the first attempts to bridge the gap between the worlds of space systems engineering and text mining. Several novel models are thus developed and implemented here, targeting the structuring of accumulated data through an ontology, but also tasks commonly performed by systems engineers such as requirement management and heritage analysis. A first collection of documents related to space systems is gathered for the training of these methods. Eventually, this work aims to pave the way towards the development of a Design Engineering Assistant (DEA) for the early stages of space mission design. It is also hoped that this work will actively contribute to the integration of text mining and Natural Language Processing methods in the field of space mission design, enhancing current design processes