Simple is not easy

I review and challenge the views on simplicity and its role in linguistics put forward by Ludlow (2011). In particular, I criticize the claim that simplicity—in the sense pertinent to science—is nothing more than ease of use or “user-friendliness”, motivated by economy of (cognitive) labor. I argue that Ludlow’s discussion fails to do justice to the diversity of factors that are relevant to simplicity considerations. This, in turn, leads to the neglect of crucial cases in which the rationale for simplification is unmistakably epistemic, as well as instances where simplicity is part of the content of substantive, empirical hypotheses. I illustrate these points with examples from the history of generative linguistics, such as: (a) the shaping influence exerted by simplicity, via its involvement in the notion of “linguistically significant generalization”, (b) its methodological and substantive contribution to the goal of explanatory adequacy, and (c) its central role in the Minimalist Program’s search “beyond explanatory adequacy”

Simple is not Easy: A Simple Strong Baseline for TextVQA and TextCaps

Texts appearing in daily scenes that can be recognized by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools contain significant information, such as street name, product brand and prices. Two tasks -- text-based visual question answering and text-based image captioning, with a text extension from existing vision-language applications, are catching on rapidly. To address these problems, many sophisticated multi-modality encoding frameworks (such as heterogeneous graph structure) are being used. In this paper, we argue that a simple attention mechanism can do the same or even better job without any bells and whistles. Under this mechanism, we simply split OCR token features into separate visual- and linguistic-attention branches, and send them to a popular Transformer decoder to generate answers or captions. Surprisingly, we find this simple baseline model is rather strong -- it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on two popular benchmarks, TextVQA and all three tasks of ST-VQA, although these SOTA models use far more complex encoding mechanisms. Transferring it to text-based image captioning, we also surpass the TextCaps Challenge 2020 winner. We wish this work to set the new baseline for this two OCR text related applications and to inspire new thinking of multi-modality encoder design. Code is available at https://github.com/ZephyrZhuQi/ssbaselin

Bounds for the Nakamura number

The Nakamura number is an appropriate invariant of a simple game to study the existence of social equilibria and the possibility of cycles. For symmetric quota games its number can be obtained by an easy formula. For some subclasses of simple games the corresponding Nakamura number has also been characterized. However, in general, not much is known about lower and upper bounds depending of invariants on simple, complete or weighted games. Here, we survey such results and highlight connections with other game theoretic concepts.Comment: 23 pages, 3 tables; a few more references adde

A New Nonextensive Entropy

We propose a new way of defining entropy of a system, which gives a general form which may be nonextensive as Tsallis entropy, but is linearly dependent on component entropies, like Renyi entropy, which is extensive. This entropy has a conceptually novel but simple origin and is mathematically easy to define by a very simple expression, though the probability distribution resulting from optimizing it gives rather complex, which is compared numerically with the other entropies. It may, therefore, appear as the right candidate in a physical situation where the probability distribution does not suit any of the previously defined forms

It Is Simple, But Not Easy–Culturally Responsive Leadership and Social Capital: A Framework for Closing the Opportunity Gap

Instructional designers are not often found in a public school setting. However, the leadership an instructional designer can provide, especially as part of a professional learning community (PLC), could help achieve the transformational change for which many schools are looking. With the issues cited by Hoyle and Kutka (2008) in public education today, such as the drop out rate and increased necessity for remedial coursework at the college level, the need for effective instructional design practices being implemented by high school teachers is great. However, as Moallem (1998) notes, “Teachers’ use of instructional design practices is not encouraging (Driscoll, 1989; Martin, 1990). Research on teacher planning and decision-making processes (e.g., Brown, 1988; Kagan, 1992; Reynolds, 1992; Shavelson, 1983) revealed that teachers typically do not plan and provide instruction in accordance with [instructional design] procedures” (p. 38). Change is required if education is to meet the rapidly changing needs of society today. Evidence is building that change in instructive practice does not occur unless faculty become involved in leadership, including professional development and professional learning communities (Bezzina, 2006; Colbert, Brown, Choi, & Thomas, 2008; Pijanowski, 2010). The implementation of professional learning communities (PLCs) in a public school requires leadership from both administration and from faculty. While it may seem counterintuitive, guidance and direction from the faculty is more important than the management of the administration. Specifically, an instructional designer would have a vital role in the success of a professional learning community striving toward transformative instructional change, and should be part of the faculty team