Pro-capitalism vs. Anti-americanism in 21st century Europe product in Romania

The topic of this article was inspired by a recent survey, carried out in several Western European countries, with the purpose of ascertaining the public’s expectations regarding the respective countries’ (and Europe’s) economic prospects for the first half of the 21st century. The questions were focused upon two chief issues: (1) Europe’s economic future within the context of contemporary global transformations; (2) the viability of the European economic systems. Concerning the former issue, one of the questions read: “Are you optimistic, pessimistic or neutral about the future of your country’s economy?” The French, Spaniards, Italians and even residents of the United States were rather skeptical at this point, the only optimistic being the Germans. To the question: “Do you think the European economy can compete effectively against other rising economies in Asia, such as China and India?”, distrust was even higher; over two thirds of the French interviewees gave a negative response. In the other countries, the skeptics’ share was lower but still higher than of those who answered affirmatively. If the above-mentioned answers could have, to a certain extent, been intuited, the questions regarding the latter issue yielded less predictable results. The subjects were asked to express a double option: between the capitalist economic system and other types of systems, on the one hand; between the European system of capitalism (admitting there is such a thing) and the American one, on the other hand. To the question: “Do you think a free-market, capitalist economy is the best economic system or not?”, the majority of the interviewees (48 percent of the Germans, 49 percent of the Spaniards …etc.) gave affirmative answers, whereas regarding the type of capitalism they wished, most of the questioned European citizens rejected the United States’ economic system. Why is Europe pro-capitalist? It is most likely because its prosperity owes much more to capitalism that to any other economic system. Of no less importance is the fact that all of the practical experiments of socialism have wound up in complete failure so far. In spite of that, the ideological dispute between capitalism and socialism has known a remarkable revival lately, a number of reputed scholars trying to demonstrate that both systems possess viable elements that is worth transmitting to the future. Why is Europe anti-American? Answering this question is a bit more difficult. In the following pages, I’ll try to find some possible explanations.

Visual Question Answering: A Survey of Methods and Datasets

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task that has received increasing attention from both the computer vision and the natural language processing communities. Given an image and a question in natural language, it requires reasoning over visual elements of the image and general knowledge to infer the correct answer. In the first part of this survey, we examine the state of the art by comparing modern approaches to the problem. We classify methods by their mechanism to connect the visual and textual modalities. In particular, we examine the common approach of combining convolutional and recurrent neural networks to map images and questions to a common feature space. We also discuss memory-augmented and modular architectures that interface with structured knowledge bases. In the second part of this survey, we review the datasets available for training and evaluating VQA systems. The various datatsets contain questions at different levels of complexity, which require different capabilities and types of reasoning. We examine in depth the question/answer pairs from the Visual Genome project, and evaluate the relevance of the structured annotations of images with scene graphs for VQA. Finally, we discuss promising future directions for the field, in particular the connection to structured knowledge bases and the use of natural language processing models.Comment: 25 page

Harnessing technology: local authorities

The report presents and analyses the findings from the 2007-08 survey of local authorities covering their provision and support for ICT in schools. The accompanying file contains the technical analysis and copies of the research instrument used in the survey

Finding Structured and Unstructured Features to Improve the Search Result of Complex Question

-Recently, search engine got challenge deal with such a natural language questions. Sometimes, these questions are complex questions. A complex question is a question that consists several clauses, several intentions or need long answer. In this work we proposed that finding structured features and unstructured features of questions and using structured data and unstructured data could improve the search result of complex questions. According to those, we will use two approaches, IR approach and structured retrieval, QA template. Our framework consists of three parts. Question analysis, Resource Discovery and Analysis The Relevant Answer. In Question Analysis we used a few assumptions, and tried to find structured and unstructured features of the questions. Structured feature refers to Structured data and unstructured feature refers to unstructured data. In the resource discovery we integrated structured data (relational database) and unstructured data (webpage) to take the advantaged of two kinds of data to improve and reach the relevant answer. We will find the best top fragments from context of the webpage In the Relevant Answer part, we made a score matching between the result from structured data and unstructured data, then finally used QA template to reformulate the question. In the experiment result, it shows that using structured feature and unstructured feature and using both structured and unstructured data, using approach IR and QA template could improve the search result of complex questions

Что и как спрашивают в социальных вопросно-ответных сервисах по-русски?

In our study we surveyed different approaches to the study of questions in traditional linguistics, question answering (QA), and, recently, in community question answering (CQA). We adapted a functional-semantic classification scheme for CQA data and manually labeled 2,000 questions in Russian originating from [email protected] CQA service. About half of them are purely conversational and do not aim at obtaining actual information. In the subset of meaningful questions the major classes are requests for recommendations, or how-questions, and fact-seeking questions. The data demonstrate a variety of interrogative sentences as well as a host of formally non-interrogative expressions with the meaning of questions and requests. The observations can be of interest both for linguistics and for practical applications