A News Chain Evaluation Methodology along with a Lattice-based Approach for News Chain Construction

Chain construction is an important requirement for understanding news and establishing the context. A news chain can be defined as a coherent set of articles that explains an event or a story. There's a lack of well-established methods in this area. In this work, we propose a methodology to evaluate the "goodness" of a given news chain and implement a concept lattice-based news chain construction method by Hossain et al.. The methodology part is vital as it directly affects the growth of research in this area. Our proposed methodology consists of collected news chains from different studies and two "goodness" metrics, minedge and dispersion coefficient respectively. We assess the utility of the lattice-based news chain construction method by our proposed methodology

Sentence Fusion for Multidocument News Summarization

The problem of organizing information for multidocument summarization so that the generated summary is coherent has received relatively little attention. While sentence ordering for single document summarization can be determined from the ordering of sentences in the input article, this is not the case for multidocument summarization where summary sentences may be drawn from different input articles. In this paper, we propose a methodology for studying the properties of ordering information in the news genre and describe experiments done on a corpus of multiple acceptable orderings we developed for the task. Based on these experiments, we implemented a strategy for ordering information that combines constraints from chronological order of events and topical relatedness. Evaluation of our augmented algorithm shows a significant improvement of the ordering over two baseline strategies

The Geopolitics of Rare Earth Elements: Emerging Challenge for U.S. National Security and Economics

Rare earth elements (REE) contain unique chemical and physical properties such as lanthanum, are found in small concentrations, need extensive precise processes to separate, and are critical components of modern technologies such as laser guidance systems, personal electronics such as IPhones, satellites, and military weapons systems as varied as Virginia-class fast attack submarines, DDG- 51 Aegis destroyers, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and precision guided munitions. The U.S. has some rare earth resources, but is heavily dependent on access to them from countries as varied as Afghanistan, Bolivia, and China. Losing access to these resources would have significant adverse economic, military, and political implications for the U.S. and its allies if their supply sources are restricted or eliminated. This article will examine the critical strategic importance of these resources, the historical origins and contemporary development of U.S. policy toward strategic minerals, and how multiple U.S. Government agencies are involved in this emerging policymaking arena. It features significant use of U.S. and foreign government statistics and analyses and scholarly journal literature. It will conclude by suggesting efforts to limit the severity of this problem to the U.S.’ economy and national security interests

Minimizing the Cost of Innovative Nuclear Technology Through Flexibility: The Case of a Demonstration Accelerator-Driven Subcritical Reactor Park

Presented is a methodology to analyze the expected Levelised Cost Of Electricity (LCOE) in the face of technology uncertainty for Accelerator-Driven Subcritical Reactors (ADSRs). It shows that flexibility in the design and deployment strategy of an ADSR park demonstrator significantly reduces its expected LCOE. The methodology recognizes in the conceptual design a range of possible technological outcomes for the ADSR accelerator system. It identifies flexibility “on” and “in” the design to modify the future development path in light of such uncertain scenarios. Uncertainty and flexibility are incorporated in the ADSR valuation. The resulting economic assessment is more realistic than typical discounted cash flow analysis that does not consider a range of development outcomes, or the flexibility to change development path