Text Summarization Technique for Punjabi Language Using Neural Networks

In the contemporary world, utilization of digital content has risen exponentially. For example, newspaper and web articles, status updates, advertisements etc. have become an integral part of our daily routine. Thus, there is a need to build an automated system to summarize such large documents of text in order to save time and effort. Although, there are summarizers for languages such as English since the work has started in the 1950s and at present has led it up to a matured stage but there are several languages that still need special attention such as Punjabi language. The Punjabi language is highly rich in morphological structure as compared to English and other foreign languages. In this work, we provide three phase extractive summarization methodology using neural networks. It induces compendious summary of Punjabi single text document. The methodology incorporates pre-processing phase that cleans the text; processing phase that extracts statistical and linguistic features; and classification phase. The classification based neural network applies an activation function- sigmoid and weighted error reduction-gradient descent optimization to generate the resultant output summary. The proposed summarization system is applied over monolingual Punjabi text corpus from Indian languages corpora initiative phase-II. The precision, recall and F-measure are achieved as 90.0%, 89.28% an 89.65% respectively which is reasonably good in comparison to the performance of other existing Indian languages" summarizers.This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Spain (CSO2017-86747-R)

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

The text classification pipeline: Starting shallow, going deeper

An increasingly relevant and crucial subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), tackled in this PhD thesis from a computer science and engineering perspective, is the Text Classification (TC). Also in this field, the exceptional success of deep learning has sparked a boom over the past ten years. Text retrieval and categorization, information extraction and summarization all rely heavily on TC. The literature has presented numerous datasets, models, and evaluation criteria. Even if languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and others are employed in several works, from a computer science perspective the most used and referred language in the literature concerning TC is English. This is also the language mainly referenced in the rest of this PhD thesis. Even if numerous machine learning techniques have shown outstanding results, the classifier effectiveness depends on the capability to comprehend intricate relations and non-linear correlations in texts. In order to achieve this level of understanding, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the architecture of a model but also to other stages of the TC pipeline. In an NLP framework, a range of text representation techniques and model designs have emerged, including the large language models. These models are capable of turning massive amounts of text into useful vector representations that effectively capture semantically significant information. The fact that this field has been investigated by numerous communities, including data mining, linguistics, and information retrieval, is an aspect of crucial interest. These communities frequently have some overlap, but are mostly separate and do their research on their own. Bringing researchers from other groups together to improve the multidisciplinary comprehension of this field is one of the objectives of this dissertation. Additionally, this dissertation makes an effort to examine text mining from both a traditional and modern perspective. This thesis covers the whole TC pipeline in detail. However, the main contribution is to investigate the impact of every element in the TC pipeline to evaluate the impact on the final performance of a TC model. It is discussed the TC pipeline, including the traditional and the most recent deep learning-based models. This pipeline consists of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) datasets used in the literature as benchmark, text preprocessing, text representation, machine learning models for TC, evaluation metrics and current SOTA results. In each chapter of this dissertation, I go over each of these steps, covering both the technical advancements and my most significant and recent findings while performing experiments and introducing novel models. The advantages and disadvantages of various options are also listed, along with a thorough comparison of the various approaches. At the end of each chapter, there are my contributions with experimental evaluations and discussions on the results that I have obtained during my three years PhD course. The experiments and the analysis related to each chapter (i.e., each element of the TC pipeline) are the main contributions that I provide, extending the basic knowledge of a regular survey on the matter of TC.An increasingly relevant and crucial subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), tackled in this PhD thesis from a computer science and engineering perspective, is the Text Classification (TC). Also in this field, the exceptional success of deep learning has sparked a boom over the past ten years. Text retrieval and categorization, information extraction and summarization all rely heavily on TC. The literature has presented numerous datasets, models, and evaluation criteria. Even if languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and others are employed in several works, from a computer science perspective the most used and referred language in the literature concerning TC is English. This is also the language mainly referenced in the rest of this PhD thesis. Even if numerous machine learning techniques have shown outstanding results, the classifier effectiveness depends on the capability to comprehend intricate relations and non-linear correlations in texts. In order to achieve this level of understanding, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the architecture of a model but also to other stages of the TC pipeline. In an NLP framework, a range of text representation techniques and model designs have emerged, including the large language models. These models are capable of turning massive amounts of text into useful vector representations that effectively capture semantically significant information. The fact that this field has been investigated by numerous communities, including data mining, linguistics, and information retrieval, is an aspect of crucial interest. These communities frequently have some overlap, but are mostly separate and do their research on their own. Bringing researchers from other groups together to improve the multidisciplinary comprehension of this field is one of the objectives of this dissertation. Additionally, this dissertation makes an effort to examine text mining from both a traditional and modern perspective. This thesis covers the whole TC pipeline in detail. However, the main contribution is to investigate the impact of every element in the TC pipeline to evaluate the impact on the final performance of a TC model. It is discussed the TC pipeline, including the traditional and the most recent deep learning-based models. This pipeline consists of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) datasets used in the literature as benchmark, text preprocessing, text representation, machine learning models for TC, evaluation metrics and current SOTA results. In each chapter of this dissertation, I go over each of these steps, covering both the technical advancements and my most significant and recent findings while performing experiments and introducing novel models. The advantages and disadvantages of various options are also listed, along with a thorough comparison of the various approaches. At the end of each chapter, there are my contributions with experimental evaluations and discussions on the results that I have obtained during my three years PhD course. The experiments and the analysis related to each chapter (i.e., each element of the TC pipeline) are the main contributions that I provide, extending the basic knowledge of a regular survey on the matter of TC

Environmental Impact Assessment in developing countries.

This study was conducted to determine the status of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in developing countries; to review assessment methods developed for use in industrialized countries; and to identify methods or salient features of methodologies which are applicable to EIA in the third world. These objectives were achieved through correspondence, computerized database searches and a literature review, an international mail questionnaire, statistical testing and application of a selection procedure to compare methods. The questionnaire consisted of five parts: personal data, current status of EIA, environmental parameters, EIA methodologies, and miscellaneous. It was sent to 700 persons in 139 developing countries and 300 persons in 25 industrialized countries.Replies were received from more than 150 persons in 72 developing countries and more than 150 persons in 22 industrialized countries. These responses were analyzed and a series of conclusions and recommendations were made. First, EIA is recommended as a planning tool that should be used in developing countries. There was nothing mentioned in the responses which would preclude its use. Second, a conceptual framework for EIA in developing countries is proposed. The basic steps are preliminary activities, impact identification (scoping), baseline survey, impact evaluation, mitigation planning, comparison of alternatives, decision-making and post-auditing.In addition to these general results, there were several more specific findings, as follows: (a) The growth of EIA has been rapid in both developing and industrialized countries. (b) A majority of countries had laws requiring EIA, and an even larger majority had conducted EIAs. (c) The unavailability of data and expertise are among the problems hampering EIA in developing countries. (d) Checklists and matrices are among the most appropriate methodologies for identifying impacts and comparing project alternatives in developing countries at the present time. (e) When evaluating impacts, quantitative assessments are superior to descriptive ones. (f) The view that public involvement is not encouraged in the third world and that socio-economic factors are rated most important in developing areas were not supported