Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation

This paper explores deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation, where the missing target pair for unlabelled data is modelled as a latent paraphrase sequence. We present a novel unsupervised model named variational sequence auto-encoding reconstruction (VSAR), which performs latent sequence inference given an observed text. To leverage information from text pairs, we additionally introduce a novel supervised model we call dual directional learning (DDL), which is designed to integrate with our proposed VSAR model. Combining VSAR with DDL (DDL+VSAR) enables us to conduct semi-supervised learning. Still, the combined model suffers from a cold-start problem. To further combat this issue, we propose an improved weight initialisation solution, leading to a novel two-stage training scheme we call knowledge-reinforced-learning (KRL). Our empirical evaluations suggest that the combined model yields competitive performance against the state-of-the-art supervised baselines on complete data. Furthermore, in scenarios where only a fraction of the labelled pairs are available, our combined model consistently outperforms the strong supervised model baseline (DDL) by a significant margin ( ; Wilcoxon test). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jialin-yu/latent-sequence-paraphrase

Petroleum Arbitration: Applicable Law and Appropriate Arbitral Forum (A Study of Petroleum Disputes in Arab Countries)

PhDPetroleum maintains a primary role in the world energy market as well as in the daily life and livelihood of Arab petroleum countries, since these countries are highly dependent upon revenues from the exploitation and export of this resource. Therefore, the petroleum industry is fraught with conflicts of interests, primarily between developing petroleum exporting countries and petroleum companies sustained by their home states, most of which are developed countries. The majority of disputes have been settled by arbitration, most of which have been controversial. The question of the applicable law to the merits of a dispute is intimately related to the controversies surrounding arbitral tribunals. The prevailing perspective of western scholars during the 20`h century, and still to an extent today, was that host state law was inadequate, and host state courts were partial. Therefore, these scholars held any dispute arising between a host state and a petroleum company should be dealt with as an international dispute and should be settled far away from the host state's court and governed by laws or rules other than that of the host state. This thesis examines the past and present of petroleum arbitration, the perceptions and the practice, and aims to suggest a modified method of determining the applicable law to petroleum disputes. It argues that contrary to the previous allegations, the legal infrastructure of host states has developed over the years and today offers an adequate law to govern the merits of petroleum disputes. It further suggests a semi-localisation approach. The thesis focuses only on arbitration as a method of resolving such disputes, and limits itself to Arab petroleum countries. The thesis argues that petroleum contracts have their own characteristics and therefore should not automatically be subject to the ICSID Convention or to other principles of investment arbitration. The time is ripe for the establishment of a specialised institution to undertake the settlement of disputes arising out of petroleum transactions

Performance Analysis of Advanced Front Ends on the Aurora Large Vocabulary Evaluation

Over the past few years, speech recognition technology performance on tasks ranging from isolated digit recognition to conversational speech has dramatically improved. Performance on limited recognition tasks in noiseree environments is comparable to that achieved by human transcribers. This advancement in automatic speech recognition technology along with an increase in the compute power of mobile devices, standardization of communication protocols, and the explosion in the popularity of the mobile devices, has created an interest in flexible voice interfaces for mobile devices. However, speech recognition performance degrades dramatically in mobile environments which are inherently noisy. In the recent past, a great amount of effort has been spent on the development of front ends based on advanced noise robust approaches. The primary objective of this thesis was to analyze the performance of two advanced front ends, referred to as the QIO and MFA front ends, on a speech recognition task based on the Wall Street Journal database. Though the advanced front ends are shown to achieve a significant improvement over an industry-standard baseline front end, this improvement is not operationally significant. Further, we show that the results of this evaluation were not significantly impacted by suboptimal recognition system parameter settings. Without any front end-specific tuning, the MFA front end outperforms the QIO front end by 9.6% relative. With tuning, the relative performance gap increases to 15.8%. Finally, we also show that mismatched microphone and additive noise evaluation conditions resulted in a significant degradation in performance for both front ends

With an eye to the east : the China factor and the U.S.-India relationship, 1949-1979

textIn recent years, as China has continued to rise as an economic, political and military power, there has been increasing interest in the U.S. in developing a strategic relationship with India in response. Most have seen this as a relatively recent framework for building U.S.-India relations after five decades of viewing the bilateral relationship either through a U.S.-India-Pakistan lens, or through a Cold War lens with India seen as a leader of the non-aligned movement and subsequently a de facto ally and security partner of the Soviet Union. A much-debated question among academics and policymakers has been whether India and the U.S. will ally or partner against China in the future. One set of answers asserts that a China threat-driven U.S.-India partnership is inevitable; a second contends that a China-driven U.S.-India alignment or partnership is highly unlikely, if not impossible. This dissertation shows that China has played an important role in shaping U.S.-India relations since the People's Republic of China came into existence in 1949. It explores past US-Indian interactions vis-à-vis China between 1949-1979 and makes evident that a US-India partnership against China is neither inevitable nor impossible. India has partnered, one could argue even allied, with countries against China--with the US in 1962 and the USSR in 1971. On the other hand, at other times, even when Indian and US policymakers have considered China to be threat number one, the countries' partnership has not been sustainable. The two countries have come together against China, but only when certain conditions are in place. This dissertation shows that they have partnered against China when they have agreed on (a) the nature of the threat, (b) the urgency of the threat, and (c) how to deal with the threat. In laying out this argument, this dissertation offers insights related to the future of the China-India-U.S. strategic triangle. More broadly, it also emphasizes that in considering when countries ally or partner, it is insufficient just to focus on threat itself or even perceptions of threat; it is also necessary to consider means: how states best think a threat can be met.Public Polic

American Racial Justice on Trial-Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, and the War on Terror

The essay examines the ongoing and impending African American reparations suits and frames in larger terms what may well be at stake in this forthcoming epochal trial of American Racial Justice. In particular, the essay draws linkages among African American redress claims, the United States' approach to international human rights and America's moral authority to fight its preemptive "war on Terror." Drawing upon and extending Professor Derrick Bell's interest-convergence thesis and Professor Mary Dudziak's ensuing research into the international underpinnings of Brown v. Board of Education," the essay offers insights into what the future might be, here and in the eyes of worldwide communities, depending on what choices we in America make about African American justice claims and human rights

Annual Report, 2004-2005

Description based on: 1995-1996; title from captio

Moscow on the Potomac: The Soviet Embassy and Detente, 1969-1979

This dissertation examines the role of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., in conducting superpower diplomacy during détente, the period from 1969 to 1979 when the superpowers attempted to normalize the Cold War. This work revolves around four major themes. First, it explores the critical role played by Soviet diplomats on the ground in determining the nature of Soviet-American relations. Second, it analyzes the relationships of key diplomats, arguing that personal diplomacy bolstered détente in its initial years, but ultimately could not guarantee the long-term improvement of Soviet-American relations. Third, it complicates current understandings of Soviet foreign policy in this period, as it functioned not simply as an expression of the Kremlin's will, but as a complex bureaucratic process that frequently wreaked havoc on negotiations. In this sense, détente was not a monolithic policy undertaken by the Soviet government with a singular goal in mind, but rather a process negotiated by Soviet officials with different understandings of Soviet aims and strategies. Finally, by considering the expansion of cultural exchanges and trade negotiations during this period, it demonstrates the vital role played by economic and cultural interests in setting the parameters of détente. The first part of this dissertation focuses on the role played by Anatoly Dobrynin, who served as Soviet ambassador to the US from 1962 to 1986. It begins with a brief biography of Dobrynin and a study of the methods of diplomacy that made him an effective operator in Washington. In particular, it outlines the "Dobrynin school" of diplomacy, assessing the atmosphere promoted by Dobrynin at the embassy and his influence over a generation of young Soviet diplomats. Next, the dissertation explains the rise and fall of the backchannel, the site of secret negotiations for improved Soviet-American relations, and it describes the personal diplomacy established by Dobrynin and American National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The second part of the dissertation serves as a case study of the embassy's Cultural Department, showing how lower-level diplomats promoted the image of the USSR as a dependable great power with whom the US should develop friendlier ties.Doctor of Philosoph

The Trial of Harry Dexter White: Soviet Agent of Influence

The Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s was fueled by claims of governmental espionage from former members of the communist underground. Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury was accused of being a Soviet agent of influence. This paper will analyze the current issues in the discussion of Soviet espionage and focus on White\u27s activities in this regard. The evidence on White is clear enough to show that he did pass sensitive information to the Soviets. He also succeeded in subverting American policy to favor Soviet interests over U.S. interests. White\u27s activities in government service suggest that American government officials passed on vital government information to the Soviet Union and subversive activity went on in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s

Into the bargain : the triumph and tragedy of nuclear internationalism during the mid-Cold War, 1958-1970

The making of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) occupied the energy and attention of world powers, great and small, from the Irish Resolution’s proposal at the United Nations General Assembly in 1958 to the treaty’s entry into force in 1970. Accounts of why the international community fashioned a treaty whose articles and principles embody a tangle of self-contradictory rights, privileges, and obligations point to United States and Soviet hegemony, the rise of Soviet-American détente, or the intrinsic dangers of nuclear weapons. In contrast to these interpretations, this dissertation claims that the negotiation and achievement of the NPT was a contingent event whose course and content were shaped by a jumble of entangled causes: Cold War alliances, domestic politics, decolonization, the Vietnam War, and a schism in internationalist thought. The common impulse, however, was the perceived need to bring order to the Nuclear Age amid recurrent crises whose outbreak threatened global conflict if the spread of nuclear weapons continued unabated. In the contexts of the Cold War and decolonization, the establishment of a global nuclear order required Soviet-American cooperation in concert with the involvement of an international community then emerging from decolonization. Both were embodied in the cadre of arms control diplomats then working in Geneva and New York City. In the final analysis, the Cold War obstructed more than it abetted the treaty’s brokering and Soviet-American détente was more the result of international nuclear diplomacy than its cause. The Vietnam War both limited U.S. willingness to contemplate nuclear assurances requested by nuclear have-nots and the underlying reason that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson sacrificed a NATO multilateral nuclear force for the sake of an NPT in an effort to quiet antiwar dissent at home. Soviet-American cooperation was necessary but not sufficient to achieve the treaty. The failure of initial efforts, the international consensus required to legitimate the treaty, and concurrent talks for a Latin American nuclear-free zone allowed nuclear have-nots to inscribe their preferences on the NPT, whose fusion of a nuclear hierarchy and a grand bargain remains an open chapter in the history of nuclear internationalism.Histor