From feature to paradigm: deep learning in machine translation

In the last years, deep learning algorithms have highly revolutionized several areas including speech, image and natural language processing. The specific field of Machine Translation (MT) has not remained invariant. Integration of deep learning in MT varies from re-modeling existing features into standard statistical systems to the development of a new architecture. Among the different neural networks, research works use feed- forward neural networks, recurrent neural networks and the encoder-decoder schema. These architectures are able to tackle challenges as having low-resources or morphology variations. This manuscript focuses on describing how these neural networks have been integrated to enhance different aspects and models from statistical MT, including language modeling, word alignment, translation, reordering, and rescoring. Then, we report the new neural MT approach together with a description of the foundational related works and recent approaches on using subword, characters and training with multilingual languages, among others. Finally, we include an analysis of the corresponding challenges and future work in using deep learning in MTPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one

The Transformative Power of the Copy

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the copy and the practice of copying, two topics that, while the focus of much academic discussion in recent decades, have been underrepresented in the discourse on transculturality. Here, experts from a wide range of academic disciplines present their views on the copy from a transcultural perspective, seeking not to define the copy uniformly, but to reveal its dynamic and transformative power. The copy and the practice of copying are thus presented as constituents of transculturality via thought-provoking contributions on topics spanning time periods from antiquity to the present, and regions from Asia to Europe. In so doing, these contributions aim to create the basis for a novel, interdisciplinary discourse on the copy and its transcultural impact throughout history

The Transformative Power of the Copy

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the copy and the practice of copying, two topics that, while the focus of much academic discussion in recent decades, have been underrepresented in the discourse on transculturality. Here, experts from a wide range of academic disciplines present their views on the copy from a transcultural perspective, seeking not to define the copy uniformly, but to reveal its dynamic and transformative power. The copy and the practice of copying are thus presented as constituents of transculturality via thought-provoking contributions on topics spanning time periods from antiquity to the present, and regions from Asia to Europe. In so doing, these contributions aim to create the basis for a novel, interdisciplinary discourse on the copy and its transcultural impact throughout history

Silk and post-conflict Cambodia: Embodied practices and global and local dynamics of heritage and knowledge transference (1991-2018)

My thesis examines silk in terms of craft, heritage and use in contemporary Cambodia under the perspective of a history of trade, conflict, loss, and foreign influence. In Cambodia, silk weaving developed into a cottage activity since the twelfth century, producing ceremonial textiles for the domestic market and trade. The Khmer Rouge regime, which claimed close to two million lives between 1975 and 1979, heavily impacted this ancestral craft by impeding silk yarn production, weaving, and skills transmission. The country’s slow reconstruction boosted by the reopening of foreign investment in the 1990s has deeply modified its cultural landscape. How to sustain threads of knowledge and cultural identity in a postconflict context? In this thesis, the dynamics of rupture and revival of cultural practices and knowledge redefined under local and global tensions are investigated through the scope of silk. In doing so, the position of silk in Cambodia and its global diaspora since the fall of the destructive Khmer Rouge regime opens the way to a polyvocal exploration. Angles of analysis include looking at the enmeshment of silk in Cambodia’s history, geography and geopolitics and the structuration of the silk sector via its main foreign and domestic actors since the 1990s. Recentring on the weavers’ key role in skills transmission, the craft of Cambodian silk weaving and the meaning of textiles and dress are lenses through which this study explore themes of embodiment, tacit knowledge, cultural memory, identity, and empowerment. Through several periods of fieldwork in Cambodia and Long Beach, California, combining ethnographic methodologies, interviews and Action Research, this thesis produces its own base of primary oral and visual resources. This prime material on contemporary silk practices in post-conflict Cambodia are put in dialogue with archival and object-based studies to reveal an updated critical perspective on the multilayered nature of silk. Ultimately, the polyphony of the human geography forming the silk sector aims to delink monolithic narratives on Cambodian cultural identity and heritage