The Medieval Chinese Gāthā and Its Relationship to Poetry

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and pedagogical practices. By the late sixth century, it began to mean something like “Buddhist verse.” Over the course of the Tang, gāthās came to take on the formal features of poetry, eventually becoming all but indistinguishable from elite verse. However, the word gāthā was always seen as something inferior to real poetry, and, by the late Tang, we find poet-monks belittling other monks’ didactic verses so as to distinguish their own work and avoid the taint of the word gāthā. Résumé: Cet article explore l’évolution du sens du terme gāthā (ch. ji) sur une période s’étendant sur plus de huit cent ans, depuis les premières traductions des sūtra en chinois jusqu’au milieu du dixième siècle. Bien que ce terme désignât à l’origine les parties rimées des textes sacrés bouddhiques, les gāthās très tôt commencèrent à circuler indépendamment et à être employées dans les pratiques rituelles, contemplatives et pédagogiques. Vers la fin du sixième siècle, il devint synonyme de « poésie bouddhique ». Au cours de la dynastie des Tang, les gāthās adoptèrent les règles formelles de la poésie, si bien qu’ils devinrent quasiment identiques aux autres formes d’expression poétique des élites. Le mot gāthā cependant continua à évoquer un style inférieur à celui de la « vraie » poésie, et à la fin des Tang des moines-poètes moquèrent les vers didactiques composés par d’autres moines dans le but de distinguer leur propres compositions et de se démarquer des connotations peu flatteuses du terme gāthā

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples

Evidence of contacts between pharaonic Egypt and the State entities of Hittite and Post-Hittite Anatolia

Il progetto (tesi di dottorato in Storia, Università di Pavia), ha lo scopo di fornire un catalogo completo e commentato di tutte le fonti testuali e archeologiche egiziane e ittite che attestano i contatti tra l'Anatolia e la Valle del Nilo, durante il II e il I millennio a.C.The project (PhD thesis in History, University of Pavia, aims to provide a complete and commented catalogue of all the Egyptian and Hittite textual sources and archaeological artefacts, attesting contacts between Anatolia and the Nile Valley, during the 2nd and 1st millennium BC

An Urdu semantic tagger - lexicons, corpora, methods and tools

Extracting and analysing meaning-related information from natural language data has attracted the attention of researchers in various fields, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), corpus linguistics, data sciences, etc. An important aspect of such automatic information extraction and analysis is the semantic annotation of language data using semantic annotation tool (a.k.a semantic tagger). Generally, different semantic annotation tools have been designed to carry out various levels of semantic annotations, for instance, sentiment analysis, word sense disambiguation, content analysis, semantic role labelling, etc. These semantic annotation tools identify or tag partial core semantic information of language data, moreover, they tend to be applicable only for English and other European languages. A semantic annotation tool that can annotate semantic senses of all lexical units (words) is still desirable for the Urdu language based on USAS (the UCREL Semantic Analysis System) semantic taxonomy, in order to provide comprehensive semantic analysis of Urdu language text. This research work report on the development of an Urdu semantic tagging tool and discuss challenging issues which have been faced in this Ph.D. research work. Since standard NLP pipeline tools are not widely available for Urdu, alongside the Urdu semantic tagger a suite of newly developed tools have been created: sentence tokenizer, word tokenizer and part-of-speech tagger. Results for these proposed tools are as follows: word tokenizer reports $F_1$ of 94.01\%, and accuracy of 97.21\%, sentence tokenizer shows F$_1$ of 92.59\%, and accuracy of 93.15\%, whereas, POS tagger shows an accuracy of 95.14\%. The Urdu semantic tagger incorporates semantic resources (lexicon and corpora) as well as semantic field disambiguation methods. In terms of novelty, the NLP pre-processing tools are developed either using rule-based, statistical, or hybrid techniques. Furthermore, all semantic lexicons have been developed using a novel combination of automatic or semi-automatic approaches: mapping, crowdsourcing, statistical machine translation, GIZA++, word embeddings, and named entity. A large multi-target annotated corpus is also constructed using a semi-automatic approach to test accuracy of the Urdu semantic tagger, proposed corpus is also used to train and test supervised multi-target Machine Learning classifiers. The results show that Random k-labEL Disjoint Pruned Sets and Classifier Chain multi-target classifiers outperform all other classifiers on the proposed corpus with a Hamming Loss of 0.06\% and Accuracy of 0.94\%. The best lexical coverage of 88.59\%, 99.63\%, 96.71\% and 89.63\% are obtained on several test corpora. The developed Urdu semantic tagger shows encouraging precision on the proposed test corpus of 79.47\%

The Vernacular World Of Pu Songling

Pu Songling (1640-1715) is known to the world for his Liaozhai zhiyi, which has come to represent the epitome of the Chinese classical tale. Yet there is also a large and lesser-known body of ballads, plays and songs attributed to him, transmitted through local manuscript and oral culture in Pu’s native Zichuan, Shandong. Presenting these works in the context of the locality’s textual culture, this dissertation reveals them to be informed by both literary tradition and the sights and sounds of a village world. The first chapter introduces the vernacular oeuvre attributed to Pu Songling and the sources of this study, mainly from the Ryōsai Bunko at Keio University. It tells the early 20th century story of the collection and the discovery of Pu’s vernacular works in China at the time, and analyzes aspects of Zichuan’s textual culture as discernable from the collection. The second chapter focuses on Pu’s Riyong suzi (Popular characters for daily use), a rhymed educational text in local language on the vocabularies of everyday life, belonging to a vibrant literature of vernacular primers. Riyong suzi mediated not only between standard script and local speech, but also the spheres of textual and living knowledge. The third chapter employs filial piety as a lens into the world of popular entertainment, focusing on ballads and plays attributed to Pu on the subject of the family. Comparing vernacular ballad against classical tale, it calls into question elements of these works which ostensibly make them “elite” or “popular,” while bringing to attention the ballads’ skillful evocations of a village world alive with oral exchanges and verbal duels. The final chapter is devoted to depictions of history in the play Monan qu (Song of tribulations) attributed to Pu and in drum ballads from Shandong. These vernacular engagements with local and dynastic history reveal a range of literati experiments with popular performance genres. Colloquial song and narrative formed a common, informal literary medium in the region, tied intimately to the classical tradition while providing alternative channels for diversion, dissent, and innovation

The Indo-European (IE) Linguistic Spread and the ‘Homeland Problem’ Revisited

The nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectual claim to European ancestry stems from the ‘Aryan Myth’—the linguistic equating of Iranians as direct descendants of Aryans, or Indo-Europeans. The historical genesis of the word ‘Aryan’ was influenced by The First Persian Empire (550-330 B.C.E.) in reference to an Iranian homeland, and by nineteenth-century Western linguists’ associations with the ancestral Indo-Europeans (IE).1 Notable philologists examining the ‘homeland problem’ have shown a standard concern towards the accuracy of scholarship on Indo-European origins. Ara (2008) decodes Indo-European origins and spread that gradually led to affiliations between Indo-Iranians and the ‘Aryan’ label. The onomastics approach would suggest that the proto-language left identifiable clues in the landscape itself (Mallory & Adams, 2006, p. 447). Dyen’s (1956) linguistic migration and homeland theory cites a European homeland accepted since the nineteen hundreds. Nichols’ (1997) analysis of the Indo-European migrations from 4,000 to 3,500 B.C.E. points to a locus of language dispersal within western central Asia (p. 134). Mallory (1989) and Kuzmina (1994a) favor a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region from the fifth to fourth millennium B.C.E.2 (Lamberg-Karlovsky, 2004, p. 142). The accurate whereabouts of the Indo-European and daughter Indo-Iranian language group have been reviewed from various fields and by abundant methodologies, including the eschatological, anthropological, linguistic, and archaeological—all adding to the convoluted nature of scholarship on the Aryan question. The academic search for an Iranian homeland raises the inquiry of how ethnicity and region become tantamount to politicized and prejudiced topics on the account of misappropriations of a linguistic concept. An archaeological and lexicostatistic excavation of the conservative nature to review the genesis of Aryan homeland origins may help diverge from the aggrandized ethnological, ethnographic, and anthropometric evidence that has ramified an essentialist nomenclature of the Indo-Iranians in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds