A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

An investigation of challenges in machine translation of literary texts : the case of the English–Chinese language pair

In the absence of a focus on literary text translation in studies of machine translation (MT), this study aims at investigating some challenges of this application of the technology. First, the most commonly used types of MT are reviewed in chronological order of their development, and, for the purpose of identifying challenges for MT in literary text translation, the challenges human translators face in literary text translation are linked to corresponding aspects of MT. In investigating the research questions of the challenges that MT systems face in literary text translation, and whether equivalence can be established by MT in literary text translation, a qualitative method is used. Areas such as the challenges for MT in the establishment of corpora, achieving equivalence, and realisation of creativity in literary texts are examined in order to reveal some of the potential contributing factors to the difficulties faced in literary text translation by MT. Through text analysis on chosen sample literary texts on three online MT platforms (Google Translate, DeepL and Youdao Translate), all based on highly advanced neural machine translation engines, this study offers a pragmatic view on some challenging areas in literary text translation using these widely acclaimed online platforms, and offers insights on potential research opportunities in studies of literary text translation using MT

Management strategies to improve the academic performance of previously disadvantaged secondary schools in the grade 12 examination.

The importance of secondary school education in moulding learners into responsible citizens of tomorrow cannot be ignored or undermined. Secondary school education is the stepping stone for unlimited opportunities for learners to explore the career choices that they have to pursue further in their lives. Every year the performance of secondary schools in the matric examination come under spotlight as soon as the results are published. Many schools in the previously disadvantaged communities perform poorly in the matric examination each year. This research aims at drawing up management strategies that could be used to improve the performance of learners in the matric examination in the poorly performing schools. The literature study reveals that effective management and leadership is an essential characteristic of a successful school. Managers of schools that are poorly performing in the matric examination have to set up proper systems in place to ensure effective teaching and learning. Effective participation of all stakeholders in the management of the education of the learners is essential to improve the academic performance of learners in the matric examination. Quality subject delivery by educators in the classroom is the most important and indispensable factor that can improve the academic performance of learners in the secondary schools. Active participation of parents in the education of their children is essential to improve the discipline of the school as well as the academic performance of the learners. The literature study also reveals that poor socio-economic conditions can negatively influence the academic performance of learners. Schools that are poorly performing require visionary and innovative managers to turn them around into centres of excellence. Managers of schools have to seek the assistance and cooperation of the community and the business people to improve the quality of education provided in schools. Availability of necessary physical facilities enhance the quality of teaching and learning and the academic performance of learners in the various subjects. A questionnaire was used to collect the data required for this research. Forty schools that are poorly performing and forty schools that are well performing in the matric examinations were selected for this research. All these schools exist in the previously disadvantaged communities. Based on the information gathered using the questionnaire, each item in the questionnaire is analysed and discussed. After the factor analysis, the significance of the difference between the factor means of the various groups for each of the factors were analysed and explained. The data obtained suggests that in many schools (66,5% of schools surveyed), there is a lack of effective management structures that are essential for the implementation of quality teaching and learning. Lack of support and active participation of the parents in the education of the learners can be noticed from the information gathered. Poor management of school resources for effective teaching and learning can be also observed from the data collected. Lack of physical facilities is still a major problem in many (54,5% of the schools surveyed) schools. Lack of shared vision and cooperation among the stakeholders of education for the provision of quality education is evident in many schools. Ill-disciplined and non-committed learner bodies are a major challenge to many schools in the previously disadvantaged communities. The research shows that, organisational support and individual support are crucial to the success and the improvement of the academic performance of a school. The management strategies to improve the academic performance of previously disadvantaged schools in the grade 12 examination has two components namely: organisational support and individual support. The SMTs of schools have to set up management systems in place to ensure effective teaching and learning at schools. It is the responsibility of the SMTs to provide a suitable atmosphere needed for effective curriculum delivery at schools. The human, physical and financial resources of a school should be managed most effectively for quality education for all. Management strategies that will provide opportunities for all stakeholders to participate effectively in the school development programmes should be organised by the SMTs of schools. Schools have to introduce and implement strategies to improve the learner attendance and discipline for quality education and to improve the academic performance. The SMTs of schools have to introduce programmes that will increase the participation and support of parents in the education of learners. The academic performance of schools cannot be improved without providing sufficient individual support to the learners and educators. Based on the needs of the educators and learners, schools have to organise various programmes to support them to improve the academic performance in the grade 12 examination. Workshops and in-house training for educators are some of the ways to support the educators to enhance the quality of curriculum delivery at schools. Additional academic support programmes like extra lessons during afternoons and holidays can assist learners to improve their performance. Schools should have necessary systems in place to address the socio-economic needs of learners. In chapter 6, the findings of the research as well as the recommendations of management strategies to improve the academic performance of previously disadvantaged schools in the grade 12 examination are also given.Prof. T.C. Bisschof

Language technologies for a multilingual Europe

This volume of the series “Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing” includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe”, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups “Text Technology” and “Machine Translation” (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu)

Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation

In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT