Are ambiguous conjunctions problematic for machine translation?

The translation of ambiguous words still poses challenges for machine translation. In this work, we carry out a systematic quantitative analysis regarding the ability of different machine translation systems to disambiguate the source language conjunctions “but” and “and”. We evaluate specialised test sets focused on the translation of these two conjunctions. The test sets contain source languages that do not distinguish different variants of the given conjunction, whereas the target languages do. In total, we evaluate the conjunction “but” on 20 translation outputs, and the conjunction “and” on 10. All machine translation systems almost perfectly recognise one variant of the target conjunction, especially for the source conjunction “but”. The other target variant, however, represents a challenge for machine translation systems, with accuracy varying from 50% to 95% for “but” and from 20% to 57% for “and”. The major error for all systems is replacing the correct target variant with the opposite one

Who Are the Stakeholders in Environmental Risk Decisions - How Should They Be Involved

[Excerpt] In the United States, as in other countries, public participation in environmental policy decisions has come a long way. In its infancy, it was limited to public hearings concerning decisions that were, for all practical purposes, done deals. Overturning public agency decisions could be accomplished only through expensive, often protracted, usually futile court cases, and then only if the issue was justiciable and the plaintiff had the funds and standing to sue. In recent decades - especially since the 1960s - opportunities for public participation in the U.S. have been overhauled. Access to documents has been assured through federal and state freedom of information acts. The public may be asked to help - scope the issue at hand (i.e., determine its salient features) early in the decision-making process. Informal question and answer sessions often supplement the formal, one-way testimony of public hearings. No longer are decisions typically made behind closed doors. Public comments usually are documented and accompanied by written responses from the decision-making agency. Administrative reviews of decisions are often a first recourse, before bringing suit. And, standing to sue is more broadly interpreted. But public participation has two inherent deficiencies. First, it fails to differentiate among members of the public. Second, it preserves an us/them distinction between the decision-making agency and citizens. As a remedy, stakeholder involvement - which does differentiate among citizens and does help to lower us/them barriers - is an increasingly popular supplement to conventional public participation, especially on controversial issues involving environmental risks

Segmentation ART: A Neural Network for Word Recognition from Continuous Speech

The Segmentation ATIT (Adaptive Resonance Theory) network for word recognition from a continuous speech stream is introduced. An input sequeuce represents phonemes detected at a preproccesing stage. Segmentation ATIT is trained rapidly, and uses a fast-learning fuzzy ART modules, top-down expectation, and a spatial representation of temporal order. The network performs on-line identification of word boundaries, correcting an initial hypothesis if subsequent phonemes are incompatible with a previous partition. Simulations show that the system's segmentation perfonnance is comparable to that of TRACE, and the ability to segment a number of difficult phrases is also demonstrated.National Science Foundation (NSF-IRI-94-01659); Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0G57

SCOPE AMBIGUITY IN THE JAKARTA POST HEADLINE ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN MAY 2015

As an international language, English has an important role in many aspects of human life. The language has been practically utilized in mass media to provide current information for the people. Printed mass media, as one of the examples, is the topic of this study, newspaper in particular. This study has two purposes, i.e. to find out the scope ambiguity which appears in the articles of the headlines and to analyze the cause of the scope ambiguity. The data of this study are 65 articles taken from the online headlines of The Jakarta Post published in May 2015. The result shows that there are 6 scope ambiguities caused by quantification, 4 scope ambiguities caused by coordination, and 7 scope ambiguities caused by quantification and coordination. Overall, there are 17 scope ambiguities found in The Jakarta Posts headline articles.DOI: doi.org/10.24071/llt.2017.20020

A chart of certain skills in written communication for grades seven to twelve

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Time to Start Over on Deferred Compensation

Government regulators would do well to follow simple heuristics like that. Writing good regulations-- good in the sense of promoting the public interest--always presents challenges. Regulators must hit a small but important target where private conduct is brought within appropriate government control, but unnecessary compliance burdens and other deadweight costs are minimized. Even if they see the government\u27s objectives clearly, regulators often have only a limited understanding of the underlying private activities. Moreover, regulators may be unaware of how their rules disrupt or distort those activities in socially harmful ways. Regulators occasionally hit the target exactly. More often, they miss--though not by an intolerably wide margin (good enough for government work, as the saying goes). However, sometimes regulators miss the mark so badly that the only responsible next step is to acknowledge the failure. That is the case with the final regulations under Internal Revenue Code (Code) section 409A. Those regulations are irreparably flawed--so flawed that the best members of the practicing bar cannot make sense of them for basic transactions. When the government issues rules that even experts cannot understand, the government should start over