Global disease monitoring and forecasting with Wikipedia

Infectious disease is a leading threat to public health, economic stability, and other key social structures. Efforts to mitigate these impacts depend on accurate and timely monitoring to measure the risk and progress of disease. Traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow; in response, new techniques based on social internet data such as social media and search queries are emerging. These efforts are promising, but important challenges in the areas of scientific peer review, breadth of diseases and countries, and forecasting hamper their operational usefulness. We examine a freely available, open data source for this use: access logs from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Using linear models, language as a proxy for location, and a systematic yet simple article selection procedure, we tested 14 location-disease combinations and demonstrate that these data feasibly support an approach that overcomes these challenges. Specifically, our proof-of-concept yields models with $r^2$ up to 0.92, forecasting value up to the 28 days tested, and several pairs of models similar enough to suggest that transferring models from one location to another without re-training is feasible. Based on these preliminary results, we close with a research agenda designed to overcome these challenges and produce a disease monitoring and forecasting system that is significantly more effective, robust, and globally comprehensive than the current state of the art.Comment: 27 pages; 4 figures; 4 tables. Version 2: Cite McIver & Brownstein and adjust novelty claims accordingly; revise title; various revisions for clarit

English as the Language of Trade, Finance, and Technology in APEC: an East Asia Perspective

The use of English language for cross-border communications is important in many areas of trade ranging from tourism to trade in financial services. English will increase the capacity of people to communicate and exchange ideas and goods across borders. However, the increasing involvement in trade, tourism, and international relations among APEC member countries where English is not spoken as the first language poses some problems and barriers in achieving aspired regional cooperation. Efforts have been made by governments to encourage the internalization of English as a second language. This article documents ongoing efforts to adopt English as the official language of trade, finance, and technology in APEC member countries and to improve English fluency in selected East Asian countries. It is an interesting case study on the adoption of a common technology (i.e., English as the medium of communication) as an explicit policy to enhance both global integration and country competitiveness.capacity building, English language, language barrier, language skill, language education, English economy, trade language

English as the Language of Trade, Finance, and Technology in APEC: an East Asia Perspective

The use of English language for cross-border communications is important in many areas of trade ranging from tourism to trade in financial services. English will increase the capacity of people to communicate and exchange ideas and goods across borders. However, the increasing involvement in trade, tourism, and international relations among APEC member countries where English is not spoken as the first language poses some problems and barriers in achieving aspired regional cooperation. Efforts have been made by governments to encourage the internalization of English as a second language. This article documents ongoing efforts to adopt English as the official language of trade, finance, and technology in APEC member countries and to improve English fluency in selected East Asian countries. It is an interesting case study on the adoption of a common technology (i.e., English as the medium of communication) as an explicit policy to enhance both global integration and country competitiveness.capacity building, English language, language barrier, language skill, language education, English economy, trade language

Are you an effective teacher of reading?

Reading occurs in our lives on a constant basis. Nevertheless, defining reading is not easy. Different people use the term reading for different purposes, which can cause much confusion. For the context of the language classroom this article will concern itself with the notion of reading as the extraction of meaning from a written text . In other words, the text is viewed as a vehicle of communication from the writer to the reader; Aebersold and Field (1997) acknowledge this by stating that it is the interaction between the text and reader that constitutes actual reading. However, simply stating that this is what constitutes reading is to risk forgetting that, in the reading class, the most important thing is that both the teacher and the student should understand the reading process

Intention Detection Based on Siamese Neural Network With Triplet Loss

Understanding the user's intention is an essential task for the spoken language understanding (SLU) module in the dialogue system, which further illustrates vital information for managing and generating future action and response. In this paper, we propose a triplet training framework based on the multiclass classification approach to conduct the training for the intention detection task. Precisely, we utilize a Siamese neural network architecture with metric learning to construct a robust and discriminative utterance feature embedding model. We modified the RMCNN model and fine-tuned BERT model as Siamese encoders to train utterance triplets from different semantic aspects. The triplet loss can effectively distinguish the details of two input data by learning a mapping from sequence utterances to a compact Euclidean space. After generating the mapping, the intention detection task can be easily implemented using standard techniques with pre-trained embeddings as feature vectors. Besides, we use the fusion strategy to enhance utterance feature representation in the downstream of intention detection task. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets of intention detection task: Snips dataset, ATIS dataset, Facebook multilingual task-oriented datasets, Daily Dialogue dataset, and MRDA dataset. The results illustrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the recognition performance of these datasets and achieves new state-of-the-art results on single-turn task-oriented datasets (Snips dataset, Facebook dataset), and a multi-turn dataset (Daily Dialogue dataset)

Thai English Code Switching (Tecs) Within The Academic Context Of Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (Imt-Gt) Varsity Carnival

This study investigates the Thai English Code Switching (TECS) within the academic context of Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT) Varsity Carnival as a result of the spread of English and internationalization in Thai higher education. The study seeks to examine the linguistic features, and functions of motivations behind the discourse used by the Thai academic seminar participants in formal and informal academic activities in such an academic context. The study made use of a qualitative approach in examining the data which were taken from the audio recordings of the Thai academic seminar participants’ speeches, semistructured interviews, and field notes. The Markedness Model of Myers-Scotton (1993;1998), the Conversational Approach of Gumperz (1982) and World Englishes Approach proposed by Kachru (1993) were used to analyse the speech data. The findings revealed that the TECS features at the lexico-semantic and discourse levels appeared in several in-group discussions and they served as a lingua franca in addition to English in the out-group interactions