SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are used daily by well over a billion people. They constitute the main writing system of China and Taiwan, form a major part of written Japanese, and are also used in South Korea. Anything more than a cursory glance at these characters will reveal a high degree of structure to them, but computing systems do not currently have a means to operate on this structure. Existing character databases and dictionaries treat them as numerical code points, and associate with them additional `hand-computed\u27 data, such as stroke count, stroke order, and other information to aid in specific searches. Searching by a character\u27s `shape\u27 is effectively impossible in these systems. I propose a new approach to representing these characters, through an XML-based language called SCML. This language, by encoding an abstract form of a character, allows the direct retrieval of important information such as stroke count and stroke order, and permits useful but previously impossible automated analysis of characters. In addition, the system allows the design of a view that takes abstract SCML representations as character models and outputs glyphs based on an aesthetic, facilitating the creation of `meta-fonts\u27 for Chinese characters. Finally, through the creation of a specialized database, SCML allows for efficient structural character queries to be performed against the body of inserted characters, thus allowing people to search by the most obvious of a character\u27s characteristics: its shape

New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing Through the Use of Character Structure

Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations. First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and calculate "most semantic subcharacter paths" for each character. Finally, adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18 million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of 89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, presented at CICLing 201

Empowering teamwork : a gender perspective

Treballs Finals del Màster en Oficial en Empresa Internacional / International Business, Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2022-2023. Tutor: Patricia ElgoibarThis paper comprehensively examines the current state of research on gender diversity and teamwork based on a systematic literature review. Taking a broader approach, it follows the premise of several researchers to explore the complex dynamics underlying this relationship. Thereby, the findings are outlined using a pillar model that encompasses decisive dimensions of teamwork, including psychological safety, satisfaction, collaboration, behavior, interaction, performance, leadership, and management. Drawing upon these findings, recommendations are derived for team composition and the creation of favorable conditions for gender-responsive teamwork in organizations. In team formation, it is key for companies to create a blend of gender specific qualities that complement each other to foster optimal team dynamics. Additionally, proactive action is needed to create an environment where both male and female employees can flourish. Thus, this paper contributes to deepening the understanding of the significance of gender diverse teams and offers a practical guide to organizations

The Impact Of Application Of Value Clarification Technique (Vct) Towards Ecoliteracy And Critical Thinking Skill Student Of Social Science In Primary School

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the application of Value Clarification Technique (VCT) to ecoliteracy and critical thinking skills of elementary school students in learning Social Science. The method used in this study is a quasi experimental design withnon-equivalent control group design, using the two study groups. Subjects in this study were students of class IVSDN Cijerah Indah, Bandung Kulon District Bandung City. The experimental group was given the treatment of learning Value Clarification Technique (VCT) and the controlgroup was given conventional learning. The results showed that in general there is a difference between learners ecoliteracy experimental class and control class and critical thinking skills among learners experimental class and control class after each class has been getting treatment that has been set. Keywords: value clarification technique (VCT), critical thinking skill, ecoliterac

Gender in Career Transitions from Corporate Management to Entrepreneurship

This dissertation aims to explore the gendered element in women’s career transitions from corporate management to entrepreneurship. Women’s organizational careers are frequently affected by boundaries that are commonly referred to as glass ceiling constraints. This study is rooted in the boundaryless career literature and uses a feminist perspective lens to analyse gendered entrepreneurial motivations and perceptions of entrepereneurship as a gendered activity. The research methodology includes semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus groups with a sample of 17 women from Germany who departed from a corporate career to entrepreneurship. The Kaleidoscope Career Model is used for adressing the gendered drivers in career decision making. For the purpose of data analysis, I use ‘interpretative repertoires’, an approach that is rooted in discursive psychology, to uncover the experiences of those women. Findings of this study suggest that the lack of alternatives in the labour market frequently pushes women towards entrepreneurship. This study indicates that despite the strong inclusive environment in Germany providing for equal treatment of women and men, gender discrimination is still plaguing working women. Their entrepreneurial motivations are largely influenced by gendered elements such as the sociocultural status of women and their roles as mothers and caretakers. Entrepreneurship is recognized by the participants in this study as a career that sits alongside the traditional mainstream careers; however, gendered dimensions similar to the ones experienced in organizational careers kept re-emerging. The findings of the study provide support for a redefinition of boundaryless careers by recognizing the important and partly enabling and mobilizing role of boundaries. The findings further indicate that the seeming boundarylessness is the outcome of a boundary-crossing process. This study has several practical implications for an institutional audience dealing with equality and gender diversity by exemplifying that law does not seem to determine behaviour

Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric

LuMing Mao offers an important discussion of the rhetoric of Chinese American speakers, which has wide implications for the teaching of writing in English and for our understanding of cross-cultural influences in discourse. Recent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity—an advance over the traditional deficit model. But Mao suggests that the hybridity approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches. Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1158/thumbnail.jp

Induction of the morphology of natural language : unsupervised morpheme segmentation with application to automatic speech recognition

In order to develop computer applications that successfully process natural language data (text and speech), one needs good models of the vocabulary and grammar of as many languages as possible. According to standard linguistic theory, words consist of morphemes, which are the smallest individually meaningful elements in a language. Since an immense number of word forms can be constructed by combining a limited set of morphemes, the capability of understanding and producing new word forms depends on knowing which morphemes are involved (e.g., "water, water+s, water+y, water+less, water+less+ness, sea+water"). Morpheme boundaries are not normally marked in text unless they coincide with word boundaries. The main objective of this thesis is to devise a method that discovers the likely locations of the morpheme boundaries in words of any language. The method proposed, called Morfessor, learns a simple model of concatenative morphology (word forming) in an unsupervised manner from plain text. Morfessor is formulated as a Bayesian, probabilistic model. That is, it does not rely on predefined grammatical rules of the language, but makes use of statistical properties of the input text. Morfessor situates itself between two types of existing unsupervised methods: morphology learning vs. word segmentation algorithms. In contrast to existing morphology learning algorithms, Morfessor can handle words consisting of a varying and possibly high number of morphemes. This is a requirement for coping with highly-inflecting and compounding languages, such as Finnish. In contrast to existing word segmentation methods, Morfessor learns a simple grammar that takes into account sequential dependencies, which improves the quality of the proposed segmentations. Morfessor is evaluated in two complementary ways in this work: directly by comparing to linguistic reference morpheme segmentations of Finnish and English words and indirectly as a component of a large (or virtually unlimited) vocabulary Finnish speech recognition system. In both cases, Morfessor is shown to outperform state-of-the-art solutions. The linguistic reference segmentations were produced as part of the current work, based on existing linguistic resources. This has resulted in a morphological gold standard, called Hutmegs, containing analyses of a large number of Finnish and English word forms.reviewe

What's Really Going On: Pure Process Realism in Science

I argue for a novel form of scientific realism, called “pure process realism,” that rejects orthodox ontologies of static objects and structures. The continuity between an experimenter and experimental systems requires that the processes of intervention and observation are the same ontic type as the observed and inferred features of experimental systems, on pain of ontological incoherence. Therefore, only processes can be inferred to exist within experiments from the epistemology of experiments alone. Additionally, every argument for the existence of a static object or structure within an experiment either fails or fails to rule out that the argument actually supports inferences to a more fundamental process. Firstly, this is because such arguments are either fallacious or inconclusive. Secondly, the history of scientific research, in chemistry and physics in particular, reveals that for each static object or structure posited in the history of science, research eventually redescribes it as a system of processes. For example, the history of the candle flame, the molecule, and the nucleus are explicit evidence of this conclusion, and these examples generalize. By induction, all static objects and structures we could posit are no more than systems of processes. Taken together, these arguments show that pure process realism is superior in scope, strength, and epistemic modesty to orthodox forms of realism in the epistemology, ontology, and history of science

Large space structures and systems in the space station era: A bibliography with indexes (supplement 04)

Bibliographies and abstracts are listed for 1211 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system between 1 Jul. and 30 Dec. 1991. Its purpose is to provide helpful information to the researcher, manager, and designer in technology development and mission design according to system, interactive analysis and design, structural concepts and control systems, electronics, advanced materials, assembly concepts, propulsion, and solar power satellite systems