Myanmar named entity corpus and its use in syllable-based neural named entity recognition

Myanmar language is a low-resource language and this is one of the main reasons why Myanmar Natural Language Processing lagged behind compared to other languages. Currently, there is no publicly available named entity corpus for Myanmar language. As part of this work, a very first manually annotated Named Entity tagged corpus for Myanmar language was developed and proposed to support the evaluation of named entity extraction. At present, our named entity corpus contains approximately 170,000 name entities and 60,000 sentences. This work also contributes the first evaluation of various deep neural network architectures on Myanmar Named Entity Recognition. Experimental results of the 10-fold cross validation revealed that syllable-based neural sequence models without additional feature engineering can give better results compared to baseline CRF model. This work also aims to discover the effectiveness of neural network approaches to textual processing for Myanmar language as well as to promote future research works on this understudied language

Representations of ethnic minorities in China's university media

This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to analyze ethnic representations. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to categorize and analyze text and photographs relevant to ethnicity. The study concludes that (1) different discursive practices are employed to construct 'images' of ethnic groups as 'Others' or 'Us'; (2) representations of ethnic minorities and the Han generate three discursive dichotomies between minority and majority: minority groups are distinctive, potentially separatistic, and visible; and the Han people are normative, patriotic, and invisible, respectively; (3) the university media reflects an ideology of 'state multiculturalism' that constructs a reflexive representation of the relationship between majority and minority. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.postprin

Postsotsialistliku Mongoolia taasärkavad vaimolendid: rahvapärased teooriad ja praktikad

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneMongoolia, „Igavese sinitaeva ja kuldse maa riik“, on Sise-Aasias eriline piirkond. Nii nimetatakse ka rahvusriiki, mis ametlikult esindab mongolitele iseloomulikku kultuuri – nende järeltulijaid, keda keskajal tunti võitmatute rändvallutajatena ja Tšingis-khaani rajatud suure Mongoolia impeeriumi valdajatena. Mongoolia impeeriumi peetakse suurimaks ühtseks riigiks Aasia ja Euroopa aladel. Mongoolia kultuur on olnud seotud paljude teiste, nende hulgas iidsete iraani, uiguuri, turgi, tiibeti ja Kesk-Aasia kultuuridega. Mongoolia ei ole paaril viimasel sajandil olnud maailmas riigina eriti nähtav ning enamik (vähemalt teadusekaugemaid lääne) inimesi on hakanud seda alles hiljuti taasavastama ja nüüd huvitutakse hoopis muust: seekord kui maast, mida iseloomustavad varjatud vabadusepüüded, metsik loodus, elavad traditsioonid ja kirglik vaimsus. Tõepoolest, tänapäeval esindab Mongoolia omapärast kultuuri, mis ühendab endas väga erinevaid väljendusvahendeid ja seisab silmitsi tänapäevaste probleemidega. See on kultuur, mis on surutud Venemaa ja Hiina vahele ning sunnitud toime tulema keerulises geopoliitiliste huvide võrgustikus, säilitades positsiooni ida- ja läänemaailma vahel, kohanedes üleilmastumise ja kiire linnastumisega, püüdes seejuures siiski säilitada oma traditsioonilisi väärtusi ja elustiili ning jäädes truuks oma rändkarjuste pärandile. Mongoolia pikk ajalugu kätkeb paljusid suuri ja dramaatilisi sündmusi, mis on Mongoolia kultuuri mõjutanud tasapisi, aga teinekord ka väga jõuliselt. Neist ajaloolistest protsessidest kõige märgatavam ja julmem oli sotsialism, mis kestis üle seitsmekümne aasta (1924–1991). Nii on tänapäevane Mongoolia näide sellest, kuidas selle keerulise ajaloolise katsumusega toime tulla, kuidas seda on kontseptualiseeritud ja ületatud, ja millel on nii üldisem tähtsus „nõukogulike ühiskondade“ mõistmiseks paljude sarnase minevikuga riikide seas. Rahvusluse esilekerkimises ja postsotsialistlikus Mongoolias on olnud suur roll üleloomulikul ja religioossusel – need olid ateistliku režiimi vaenlased ja ohvrid, mis olid olnud aastakümneid alla surutud ja mõistetud elama varjatud, hillitsetud elu. 1990. aastate alguses naasis üleloomulik element uuesti Mongoolia kultuuri, näidates selgelt oma suurt elujõudu ja makstes kätte hävinud ateistlikule ideoloogiale. Traditsioonilised üleloomulikud kujutluspildid ja motiivid hõlmasid erinevaid valdkondi ja kontekste, muutudes nii oluliseks osaks ühiskonnast: need olid Tšingis-khaani vaim, „rahva kaitsja ja isa“, riiklikult pühaks kuulutatud mägede jumalused, kohalikud loodusvaimud, erinevad deemonid, vaimud ja rahutud hinged jne. Neist said rahvusliku ärkamisaja ja uue riigi ideoloogilised sümbolid, milles väljendusid nii kollektiivne mälu ja sotsiaalsed suhted kui ka argielu mured, postsotsialistliku riigi lootused ja tänapäevased hirmud, pälvides üha suurema hulga rituaaliekspertide tähelepanu.Mongolia, the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky and Golden Earth”, is a special area of Inner Asia. It is also the name of a nation-state officially representing the distinctive culture of Mongols, descendants of those who in medieval times were famous as invincible nomadic conquerors, holders of the great Mongolian Empire founded by Genghis Khan and regarded as the largest contiguous state formation between Asia and Europe. Mongolian culture has ties to multiple cultural traditions including the ancient Iranian, Uyghur, Turkic, Tibetan and Central Asian cultures. Mongolia has not been as visible on the world stage over the last few centuries, and most people (at least, most western non-scholars) only began to rediscover it recently and in a new perspective: this time as a hidden land of freedom, wild nature, living traditions and flourishing spirituality. Indeed, nowadays Mongolia represents a peculiar culture, combining very different features and facing contemporary challenges. It is a culture that is sandwiched between Russia and China and must move in a complex web of geopolitical interests, maintaining a position between the eastern and western worlds, undergoing the processes of globalization and a rapid urbanization, while still attempting to preserve traditional values and lifestyle and remaining close to its pastoralist heritage. Between now and then, there has been a long road of great and dramatic events influencing Mongolian culture both gradually and harshly. The most significant and cruel of the recent ones was the experience of socialism which lasted for more than seventy years (1924–1991). Hence, nowadays Mongolia presents an example of handling, conceptualizing and overcoming this arduous experience, which has more general importance for understanding ‘Soviet-type societies’ in a number of such countries with a similar past. Significant roles in the ‘national revival’ and post-socialist Mongolian society were played by various categories of the supernatural and religious – the atheistic regime’s enemies and victims, suppressed and condemned for dozens of years to a hidden, ‘whispering’ form of existence. In the early 1990’s, the supernatural burst back into Mongolian culture, clearly demonstrating its superior vitality and taking its revenge on the ruined atheistic ideology. Traditional images and motifs of the supernatural occupied various realms and contexts, revealing their important social character: the spirit of Genghis Khan, the main patron of the nation, supernatural lords of the state worshiped mountains, local nature spirits, the lord of the fire, hearth, various demons, ghosts and restless souls, etc. They became symbols of the national revival and the new state ideology, expressions of collective memories and social relations, as well as of the sorrows of private life, the hopes and fears of post-socialist reconstruction and the present time, demanding (and receiving) the attention of an increasing number of specialists in ritual concerns. The Mongolian example of national and religious revivals has a number of peculiar features. One of these is that while the supernatural figures are the most active mouthpieces of independence and nationalism, the creators of post-socialist spiritual and public environment, they are not from ‘high’ pantheons or epic traditions as often would be the case when constructing national identities. On the contrary, Mongolian representatives of the supernatural belong to realm of vernacular beliefs very close to everyday life. This work tries to follow the clues and to reveal the grounds for vitality of some supernatural and religious concepts in contemporary Mongolia.https://www.ester.ee/record=b542310

Power Politics in the Xiongnu Empire

This thesis employs an integrated approach of the historical and archaeological evidence relevant to the study of the Xiongnu empire (3rd century BC – 1st century AD) in an attempt to construct new contexts of understanding the political strategies for securing and ensuring power, legitimacy, and authority in the steppes. I have relied upon the full corpus of Chinese records which address the Xiongnu entity, synthesized the entirety of excavated materials in China, South Siberia, and Mongolia which relate to the Xiongnu phenomenon, and incorporated new survey and excavation data from two regions of the Xiongnu empire. Through the course of the dissertation, I utilize a paradigm of imperial strategies, rather than typologies of imperial polities, in order to provide a less restrictive manner of reconstructing the power politics of the steppe empire. A diachronic consideration of the combined textual narratives and archaeological materials exhibits two distinct periods of the Xiongnu polity. This dissertation focuses on the shifts between these two periods and the resulting new traditions that sought to distinguish and elevate restricted ranks of the imperial élite and assert a cosmopolitan culture of steppe empire that together would ensure authority and control both within the empire and toward its neighbors

Vacaspati: A Diverse Corpus of Bangla Literature

Bangla (or Bengali) is the fifth most spoken language globally; yet, the state-of-the-art NLP in Bangla is lagging for even simple tasks such as lemmatization, POS tagging, etc. This is partly due to lack of a varied quality corpus. To alleviate this need, we build Vacaspati, a diverse corpus of Bangla literature. The literary works are collected from various websites; only those works that are publicly available without copyright violations or restrictions are collected. We believe that published literature captures the features of a language much better than newspapers, blogs or social media posts which tend to follow only a certain literary pattern and, therefore, miss out on language variety. Our corpus Vacaspati is varied from multiple aspects, including type of composition, topic, author, time, space, etc. It contains more than 11 million sentences and 115 million words. We also built a word embedding model, Vac-FT, using FastText from Vacaspati as well as trained an Electra model, Vac-BERT, using the corpus. Vac-BERT has far fewer parameters and requires only a fraction of resources compared to other state-of-the-art transformer models and yet performs either better or similar on various downstream tasks. On multiple downstream tasks, Vac-FT outperforms other FastText-based models. We also demonstrate the efficacy of Vacaspati as a corpus by showing that similar models built from other corpora are not as effective. The models are available at https://bangla.iitk.ac.in/