Multi-Granularity Prediction with Learnable Fusion for Scene Text Recognition

Due to the enormous technical challenges and wide range of applications, scene text recognition (STR) has been an active research topic in computer vision for years. To tackle this tough problem, numerous innovative methods have been successively proposed, and incorporating linguistic knowledge into STR models has recently become a prominent trend. In this work, we first draw inspiration from the recent progress in Vision Transformer (ViT) to construct a conceptually simple yet functionally powerful vision STR model, which is built upon ViT and a tailored Adaptive Addressing and Aggregation (A$^3$) module. It already outperforms most previous state-of-the-art models for scene text recognition, including both pure vision models and language-augmented methods. To integrate linguistic knowledge, we further propose a Multi-Granularity Prediction strategy to inject information from the language modality into the model in an implicit way, \ie, subword representations (BPE and WordPiece) widely used in NLP are introduced into the output space, in addition to the conventional character level representation, while no independent language model (LM) is adopted. To produce the final recognition results, two strategies for effectively fusing the multi-granularity predictions are devised. The resultant algorithm (termed MGP-STR) is able to push the performance envelope of STR to an even higher level. Specifically, MGP-STR achieves an average recognition accuracy of $94\%$ on standard benchmarks for scene text recognition. Moreover, it also achieves state-of-the-art results on widely-used handwritten benchmarks as well as more challenging scene text datasets, demonstrating the generality of the proposed MGP-STR algorithm. The source code and models will be available at: \url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/OCR/MGP-STR}.Comment: submitted to TPAMI; an extension to our previous ECCV 2022 paper arXiv:2209.0359

Seq-UPS: Sequential Uncertainty-aware Pseudo-label Selection for Semi-Supervised Text Recognition

This paper looks at semi-supervised learning (SSL) for image-based text recognition. One of the most popular SSL approaches is pseudo-labeling (PL). PL approaches assign labels to unlabeled data before re-training the model with a combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data. However, PL methods are severely degraded by noise and are prone to over-fitting to noisy labels, due to the inclusion of erroneous high confidence pseudo-labels generated from poorly calibrated models, thus, rendering threshold-based selection ineffective. Moreover, the combinatorial complexity of the hypothesis space and the error accumulation due to multiple incorrect autoregressive steps posit pseudo-labeling challenging for sequence models. To this end, we propose a pseudo-label generation and an uncertainty-based data selection framework for semi-supervised text recognition. We first use Beam-Search inference to yield highly probable hypotheses to assign pseudo-labels to the unlabelled examples. Then we adopt an ensemble of models, sampled by applying dropout, to obtain a robust estimate of the uncertainty associated with the prediction, considering both the character-level and word-level predictive distribution to select good quality pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on several benchmark handwriting and scene-text datasets show that our method outperforms the baseline approaches and the previous state-of-the-art semi-supervised text-recognition methods.Comment: Accepted at WACV 202

A Cultural History of Representational Shifts Toward Occidentalism

In 1978, Edward Said redefined Orientalism as a Western interpretation of the Middle East best characterized by an inherent cultural hostility. It’s essence, he declared, was the invariable distinction between Western superiority and Eastern inferiority. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, cultural critics Darrell Y. Hamamoto (2000), Vijay Prashad (2000), Jane Chi Hyun Park (2010), Jane Naomi Iwamura (2011), and David Weir (2011) have shed light on America’s long fascination with the Far East and more affirmative forms of Orientalism. Building on their work, I map developments of Far Orientalism on American screens at the turn of the century from an evolutionary perspective. In three case studies, I read audiovisual texts in their sociohistorical and media ecological contexts to trace representational shifts from the 1980s to the 2010s. Since the intersection of race and sex is significant for any discussion of Orientalism, I am mostly concerned with narratives featuring interracial romance. The first case study focuses on Michael Cimino’s crime thriller film Year of the Dragon (1985). My analysis is embedded in an examination of contemporary films related to the Vietnam War as well as the emergence of both the Model Minority myth and the redemption narrative. The next chapter is concerned largely with contextualizing Edward Zwick’s epic historical drama film The Last Samurai (2003) within the genre histories of both the American Western and the Japanese Eastern. These efforts culminate in investigations of the ways of how the film relates to the popularization of Buddhism and reworks the White Savior trope. The final case study offers an analysis of Ronald D. Moore’s science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica (2004-09) on the background of the rise of neoliberal economic policy and transhumanist philosophy as well as in relation to assimilation narratives and the genre history of cyberpunk. My research results demonstrate a trend from classic Orientalism to Techno-Orientalism, Spirito-Occidentalism, and outright Occidentalism. In the American imagination, I argue, East Asia has come to represent both the worst expression of modernity and the solution to its dehumanizing side. Neither have stereotypes been shattered nor has the geographical dualism been shed. Older fantasies merely have been complemented by more recent variations. I consider this study to be an extension of Said’s studies of Orientalism as well as a contribution to the fields of American cultural history, Asian American studies and, to a lesser extent, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and media studies

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

"At the Shores of the Sky"

Albert Hoffstädt, a classicist by training and polylingual humanist by disposition, has for 25 years been the editor chiefly responsible for the development and acquisition of manuscripts in Asian Studies for Brill. During that time he has shepherded over 700 books into print and has distinguished himself as a figure of exceptional discernment and insight in academic publishing. He has also become a personal friend to many of his authors. A subset of these authors here offers to him in tribute and gratitude 22 essays on various topics in Asian Studies. These include studies on premodern Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean literature, history, and religion, extending also into the modern and contemporary periods. They display the broad range of Mr. Hoffstädt's interests while presenting some of the most outstanding scholarship in Asian Studies today. Readership: All interested in Asian humanities, premodern or modern

Toward a Paradigm of Servant Leadership for Seventh-day Adventist Ministers in Korea

Problem Korean society retains a strong Confucian tradition, manifested by a strong devotion to family and an emphasis on hierarchy and vertical relationships. The Buddhist and Shamanist traditions provide a model of authoritarian leadership. These traditions have been modified to adapt to modem leadership concerns, but the hierarchal practice of power and authority-based leadership still prevails. The challenge facing Christianity is the prevalence of this existing leadership style. It is a barrier to the acceptance of the biblical model of servant-leadership. Effective leadership that is both biblically sound and culturally suitable is needed for the Seventh-day Adventist church in Korea. Method In order to better understand servant-leadership in the context of Korea, data were collected from the James White Library, Andrews University; the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame; and the McAlister Library, Fuller Theological Seminary. A questionnaire was used to survey the local church pastors in two of the five conferences and the language institutes governed by the Korean Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Results The research findings indicate that the Seventh-day Adventist pastors perceive themselves to be leaders who are incorporating the principles and practices of servant- leadership. However, the findings also reveal a variance in their ability to identify the unique qualities that characterize the biblical model of servant-leadership. A majority of pastors surveyed indicated a desire for a leadership development program. Conclusions The Seventh-day Adventist church in Korea needs to shift leadership paradigms in order to meet the needs of a rapidly changing society. The traditional hierarchal system of church governance is creating conflict. Studying the biblical model of servant- leadership is imperative. The servant-leadership model is feasible and implementing its principles within the Seventh-day Adventist church in Korea will ensure natural church growth

Latinx Shakespeares

Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language. The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism

Travel Writings on Asia

This open access book provides an analysis of human actors and their capacity to explore and conceptualise their own agency by being curious, gathering knowledge, and shaping identities in their travel reflections on Asia. Thus, the actors open windows across time to present a profound overview of diverse descriptions and constructions of Asia. It is demonstrated that international and transnational history contributes to and benefits from analyses of national and local contexts that in turn enrich our understanding of transcultural encounters and experiences across time. The book proposes an actor-centred contextual approach to travel writing to recount meaningful constructions of Asia’s physical, political and spiritual landscapes. It offers comparative reflections on the patterns of encounter across Eurasia, where from the late medieval period an idea of civilisation was transculturally shared yet also constantly questioned and reframed. Tailored for academic and public discussions alike, this volume will be invaluable for both scholars of Global History and interested audiences to stimulate further discussions on the nature of global encounters in Asia

Information-theoretic causal inference of lexical flow

This volume seeks to infer large phylogenetic networks from phonetically encoded lexical data and contribute in this way to the historical study of language varieties. The technical step that enables progress in this case is the use of causal inference algorithms. Sample sets of words from language varieties are preprocessed into automatically inferred cognate sets, and then modeled as information-theoretic variables based on an intuitive measure of cognate overlap. Causal inference is then applied to these variables in order to determine the existence and direction of influence among the varieties. The directed arcs in the resulting graph structures can be interpreted as reflecting the existence and directionality of lexical flow, a unified model which subsumes inheritance and borrowing as the two main ways of transmission that shape the basic lexicon of languages. A flow-based separation criterion and domain-specific directionality detection criteria are developed to make existing causal inference algorithms more robust against imperfect cognacy data, giving rise to two new algorithms. The Phylogenetic Lexical Flow Inference (PLFI) algorithm requires lexical features of proto-languages to be reconstructed in advance, but yields fully general phylogenetic networks, whereas the more complex Contact Lexical Flow Inference (CLFI) algorithm treats proto-languages as hidden common causes, and only returns hypotheses of historical contact situations between attested languages. The algorithms are evaluated both against a large lexical database of Northern Eurasia spanning many language families, and against simulated data generated by a new model of language contact that builds on the opening and closing of directional contact channels as primary evolutionary events. The algorithms are found to infer the existence of contacts very reliably, whereas the inference of directionality remains difficult. This currently limits the new algorithms to a role as exploratory tools for quickly detecting salient patterns in large lexical datasets, but it should soon be possible for the framework to be enhanced e.g. by confidence values for each directionality decision