The Value of Everything: Ranking and Association with Encyclopedic Knowledge

This dissertation describes WikiRank, an unsupervised method of assigning relative values to elements of a broad coverage encyclopedic information source in order to identify those entries that may be relevant to a given piece of text. The valuation given to an entry is based not on textual similarity but instead on the links that associate entries, and an estimation of the expected frequency of visitation that would be given to each entry based on those associations in context. This estimation of relative frequency of visitation is embodied in modifications to the random walk interpretation of the PageRank algorithm. WikiRank is an effective algorithm to support natural language processing applications. It is shown to exceed the performance of previous machine learning algorithms for the task of automatic topic identification, providing results comparable to that of human annotators. Second, WikiRank is found useful for the task of recognizing text-based paraphrases on a semantic level, by comparing the distribution of attention generated by two pieces of text using the encyclopedic resource as a common reference. Finally, WikiRank is shown to have the ability to use its base of encyclopedic knowledge to recognize terms from different ontologies as describing the same thing, and thus allowing for the automatic generation of mapping links between ontologies. The conclusion of this thesis is that the "knowledge access heuristic" is valuable and that a ranking process based on a large encyclopedic resource can form the basis for an extendable general purpose mechanism capable of identifying relevant concepts by association, which in turn can be effectively utilized for enumeration and comparison at a semantic level

Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India

study of religion|indology|anthropology|history|tibetolog

Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India

study of religion|indology|anthropology|history|tibetolog

Sacred Songs of the Central Altar: Texts and Histories of the Ritual Master in the Religious World of Southern Taiwan

Ph.D

A cognitive linguistic analysis of conceptual metaphors in Hindu religious discourse with reference to Swami Vivekananda’s complete works

This thesis investigates the use of metaphorical language in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is one of the most influential modern-day Hindu scholars, and his interpretation of the ancient Hindu scriptural lore is very significant. Vivekananda’s influence was part of the motivation for choosing his Complete Works as the empirical domain for the current study. Vivekananda’s Complete Works were mined using AntConc, for water-related terms which seemed to have a predilection for metaphoricity. Which terms to search for specifically was determined after a manual reading of a sample from the Complete Works. The data was then tagged, using a convention inspired by the well-known MIPVU procedure for metaphor identification. Thereafter, a representative sample of the data was chosen, and the metaphors were mapped and analysed thematically. This study had as its main aim to investigate whether Hindu religious discourse uses metaphors to explain abstract religious concepts, and if so, whether this happens in the same way as in Judaeo-Christian traditions. Furthermore, following Jäkel (2002), a set of sub-hypotheses pertaining to ubiquity, domains, models, unidirectionality, invariance, necessity, creativity and focussing is assessed. Key findings in this study include a general confirmation of the above-mentioned hypotheses, with the exception of ‘invariance’, which proved to be somewhat contentious. The data allowed for the postulation of underlying conceptual metaphors, which differed somewhat from the metaphors used in traditional Judaeo-Christian philosophy.Linguistics and Modern LanguagesD. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics

Custom, law and John Company in Kumaon

The meeting of Indian custom and law with the emergent formal legal, revenue and administrative practice of the British East India Company has long been a central subject of South Asian historical studies. Overwhelmingly, this vast corpus of scholarship has been centred on and contextualized by the experience and conditions of the Indian heartlands. This thesis takes the study of the meeting of local custom with the Company’s formal governmental practices out of the Indian heartlands up into the peripheral Himalayan region of Kumaon. Kumaon is the little patch of the Himalaya tucked up where today India, Nepal and Tibet all meet in a tangle of green hills, plunging valleys and icy peaks to the northeast of Delhi. The contrast of the region’s mountainous landscape to the awesome flatness of the adjacent North Indian plains could not be more extreme. Within Kumaon’s very different landscape, the population had remained light and widely scattered, a monetized economy based on specialization of production focused on urban centres had only emerged to a limited degree, and the people had persisted with and developed cultural practices that were distant and distinct from the orthodoxies of India’s heartland. Crucially, the Indo-Islamic empires of the plains had never been able to conquer and hold territory in these hills and, as a consequence, the region had had no experience with the legal, revenue and administrative practices of the Mughal empire. The British East India Company invaded and held Kumaon in 1815. Here they found a matrix of economic, political and cultural conditions very different from everything they knew from the plains below. Aware that its regulations—the embodiment of its formal governmental practices—were a palimpsest written on the pre-existing conditions of the plains and the vestiges of late-Mughal machinery of government, the Company chose not to impose its regulations in Kumaon. Rather, Kumaon would be an Extra-Regulation province where much of the everyday practices of government were in the hands of the local Commissioner. Within this space beyond the regulations, the meeting of local custom and the Company’s formal governmental practices took on a trajectory that was distant and distinct to the trajectory of the meeting on the plains. This thesis brings to light the early years of Kumaon's meeting with the practices of the British India Company in the period 1815 to 1843

When Children Draw Gods

This open access book explores how children draw god. It looks at children’s drawings collected in a large variety of cultural and religious traditions. Coverage demonstrates the richness of drawing as a method for studying representations of the divine. In the process, it also contributes to our understanding of this concept, its origins, and its development. This intercultural work brings together scholars from different disciplines and countries, including Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Iran, Brazil, and the Netherlands. It does more than share the results of their research and analysis. The volume also critically examines the contributions and limitations of this methodology. In addition, it also reflects on the new empirical and theoretical perspectives within the broader framework of the study of this concept. The concept of god is one of the most difficult to grasp. This volume offers new insights by focusing on the many different ways children depict god throughout the world. Readers will discover the importance of spatial imagery and color choices in drawings of god. They will also learn about how the divine's emotional expression correlates to age, gender, and religiosity as well as strategies used by children who are prohibited from representing their god

Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music

Dāphā bhajan is a style of devotional song performance practised by Newar men in the towns of the Kathmandu Valley. Although it is now primarily the farming community who maintain it, it originated in the court culture of the Newar kings in the 17th and 18th centuries, and reflects the interests of aristocratic society at that time in devotional literature and music theory. Texts of dāphā songs include compositions attributed to the kings themselves, in old Newari and Maithili, and poetry by Indian authors including Vidyāpati, Nāmdev, Kabīr, Sūrdās and Jayadeva. Transmission to the farming community, among whom literacy and knowledge of the languages concerned were limited, has shifted the balance of attention away from the texts themselves towards the processes of musical performance. As in some other South Asian singing traditions, the generation of intensity through music overwhelms the text, which loses its centrality, its form and even its meaning. The manuscript songbook from which a group sings can no longer be regarded as the vehicle of a written tradition: it is but one element in an oral performance tradition

When Children Draw Gods

This open access book explores how children draw god. It looks at children’s drawings collected in a large variety of cultural and religious traditions. Coverage demonstrates the richness of drawing as a method for studying representations of the divine. In the process, it also contributes to our understanding of this concept, its origins, and its development. This intercultural work brings together scholars from different disciplines and countries, including Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Iran, Brazil, and the Netherlands. It does more than share the results of their research and analysis. The volume also critically examines the contributions and limitations of this methodology. In addition, it also reflects on the new empirical and theoretical perspectives within the broader framework of the study of this concept. The concept of god is one of the most difficult to grasp. This volume offers new insights by focusing on the many different ways children depict god throughout the world. Readers will discover the importance of spatial imagery and color choices in drawings of god. They will also learn about how the divine's emotional expression correlates to age, gender, and religiosity as well as strategies used by children who are prohibited from representing their god