BattRAE: Bidimensional Attention-Based Recursive Autoencoders for Learning Bilingual Phrase Embeddings

In this paper, we propose a bidimensional attention based recursive autoencoder (BattRAE) to integrate clues and sourcetarget interactions at multiple levels of granularity into bilingual phrase representations. We employ recursive autoencoders to generate tree structures of phrases with embeddings at different levels of granularity (e.g., words, sub-phrases and phrases). Over these embeddings on the source and target side, we introduce a bidimensional attention network to learn their interactions encoded in a bidimensional attention matrix, from which we extract two soft attention weight distributions simultaneously. These weight distributions enable BattRAE to generate compositive phrase representations via convolution. Based on the learned phrase representations, we further use a bilinear neural model, trained via a max-margin method, to measure bilingual semantic similarity. To evaluate the effectiveness of BattRAE, we incorporate this semantic similarity as an additional feature into a state-of-the-art SMT system. Extensive experiments on NIST Chinese-English test sets show that our model achieves a substantial improvement of up to 1.63 BLEU points on average over the baseline.Comment: 7 pages, accepted by AAAI 201

Secure service proxy : a CoAP(s) intermediary for a securer and smarter web of things

As the IoT continues to grow over the coming years, resource-constrained devices and networks will see an increase in traffic as everything is connected in an open Web of Things. The performance- and function-enhancing features are difficult to provide in resource-constrained environments, but will gain importance if the WoT is to be scaled up successfully. For example, scalable open standards-based authentication and authorization will be important to manage access to the limited resources of constrained devices and networks. Additionally, features such as caching and virtualization may help further reduce the load on these constrained systems. This work presents the Secure Service Proxy (SSP): a constrained-network edge proxy with the goal of improving the performance and functionality of constrained RESTful environments. Our evaluations show that the proposed design reaches its goal by reducing the load on constrained devices while implementing a wide range of features as different adapters. Specifically, the results show that the SSP leads to significant savings in processing, network traffic, network delay and packet loss rates for constrained devices. As a result, the SSP helps to guarantee the proper operation of constrained networks as these networks form an ever-expanding Web of Things

05411 Abstracts Collection -- Anonymous Communication and its Applications

From 09.10.05 to 14.10.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05411 ``Anonymous Communication and its Applications\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Efficient HTTP based I/O on very large datasets for high performance computing with the libdavix library

Remote data access for data analysis in high performance computing is commonly done with specialized data access protocols and storage systems. These protocols are highly optimized for high throughput on very large datasets, multi-streams, high availability, low latency and efficient parallel I/O. The purpose of this paper is to describe how we have adapted a generic protocol, the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to make it a competitive alternative for high performance I/O and data analysis applications in a global computing grid: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. In this work, we first analyze the design differences between the HTTP protocol and the most common high performance I/O protocols, pointing out the main performance weaknesses of HTTP. Then, we describe in detail how we solved these issues. Our solutions have been implemented in a toolkit called davix, available through several recent Linux distributions. Finally, we describe the results of our benchmarks where we compare the performance of davix against a HPC specific protocol for a data analysis use case.Comment: Presented at: Very large Data Bases (VLDB) 2014, Hangzho

African political speeches and pragmatic meanings: a study of president Goodluck Jonathan’s 50th independence speech

This study investigates the semantic and pragmatic meanings of modals in President Good-luck Jonathan’s speech during Nigeria’s 50th independence jubilee. It involves analyses of the sociolinguistic, semantic and pragmatic implications of the independence speech. We examine the social characteristics of bureaucratic and political communication in order to bring to fore a coherent and well-defined approach in analyzing political speeches. This paper studies President Jonathan’s speech during Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary using speech acts to identify the impact of the speech on the Nigerian populace, also to identify the meanings of the pragmatic clue(of modal auxiliaries) as used in the speech. We conclude that this is not an ordinary congratulatory speech to invite the Nigerian to vote for the ruling party as identified in the 46th anniversary independence speech of former Nigerian president, Obasanjo, but a tailored speech intended to remind Nigerians that our future and development as a nation depends on our unity and urge them to forget tribal and religious differences and foster unity among its diverse tribes. The President extolled the virtues and sacrifices of the founding fathers that made compromises in the midst of ethnic and religious differences in order to build a unified nation. He regretted the actions of certain individuals whose intensions have been geared towards destabilizing the foundation of our unity. The president used the modal auxiliaries: will (intention), must (obligation), can (ability) more in his speech to prove his good intentions for the wellbeing of Nigeria, the obligations before him and Nigerians to build a virile nation, and the ability of Nigerians to do things right. We therefore conclude that the President’s speech is not just a congratulatory message common during independence anniversaries, but one intended to encourage and stir up Nigerians to work together towards building a nation where future generations would live in peace and unityEste estudo investiga os significados semântico-pragmáticos do modal – intenção (quero), obrigação (devo), capacidade (posso) – no discurso do presidente Goodluck Jonathan durante o jubileu de 50 anos de independência da Nigéria, e faz uma análise das implicações sociolinguísticas. Levando em conta as características sociais da comunicação burocrático-política, traz à tona uma abordagem coerente e bem definida na análise de discursos políticos. Tendo em foco o discurso do presidente Jonathan durante o 50º aniversário da independência da Nigéria para identificar o impacto do discurso sobre a população nigeriana, também para identificar os significados da ideia pragmática. Conclui que este não é apenas um discurso de congratulações apenas, mas um discurso destinado a lembrar-nos (nigerianos) que o futuro e o desenvolvimento como nação depende da vontade e da união de todos e exorta-nos a esquecer as diferenças tribais e religiosas e promover a unidade entre as diversas tribos. Lamentou as ações dos que intencionam desestabilizar a unidade nigeriana. Concluímos, portanto, que o discurso do presidente é, antes de tudo, uma mensagem destinada a incentivar e despertar os nigerianos para o trabalho conjunto da construção de uma nação onde as futuras gerações viveriam em paz e unidad

Public survey instruments for business administration using social network analysis and big data

Purpose: The subject matter of this research is closely intertwined with the scientific discussion about the necessity of developing and implementing practice-oriented means of measuring social well-being taking into account the intensity of contacts between individuals. The aim of the research is to test the toolkit for analyzing social networks and to develop a research algorithm to identify sources of consolidation of public opinion and key agents of influence. The research methodology is based on postulates of sociology, graph theory, social network analysis and cluster analysis. Design/Methodology/Approach: The basis for the empirical research was provided by the data representing the reflection of social media users on the existing image of Russia and its activities in the Arctic, chosen as a model case. Findings: The algorithm allows to estimate the density and intensity of connections between actors, to trace the main channels of formation of public opinion and key agents of influence, to identify implicit patterns and trends, to relate information flows and events with current information causes and news stories for the subsequent formation of a "cleansed" image of the object under study and the key actors with whom this object is associated. Practical Implications: The work contributes to filling the existing gap in the scientific literature, caused by insufficient elaboration of the issues of applying the social network analysis to solve sociological problems. Originality/Value: The work contributes to filling the existing gap in the scientific literature formed as a result of insufficient development of practical issues of using analysis of social networks to solve sociological problems.peer-reviewe

Diverse Conventions for Human-AI Collaboration

Conventions are crucial for strong performance in cooperative multi-agent games, because they allow players to coordinate on a shared strategy without explicit communication. Unfortunately, standard multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques, such as self-play, converge to conventions that are arbitrary and non-diverse, leading to poor generalization when interacting with new partners. In this work, we present a technique for generating diverse conventions by (1) maximizing their rewards during self-play, while (2) minimizing their rewards when playing with previously discovered conventions (cross-play), stimulating conventions to be semantically different. To ensure that learned policies act in good faith despite the adversarial optimization of cross-play, we introduce \emph{mixed-play}, where an initial state is randomly generated by sampling self-play and cross-play transitions and the player learns to maximize the self-play reward from this initial state. We analyze the benefits of our technique on various multi-agent collaborative games, including Overcooked, and find that our technique can adapt to the conventions of humans, surpassing human-level performance when paired with real users.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023

Identifiers in e-Science platforms for the ecological sciences

In the emerging Web of Data, publishing stable and unique identifiers promises great potential in using the web as common platform to discover and enrich data in the ecologic sciences. With our collaborative e-Science platform “BEFdata”, we generated and published unique identifiers for the data repository of the Biodiversity – Ecosystem Functioning Research Unit of the German Research Foundation (BEF-China; DFG: FOR 891). We linked part of the identifiers to two external data providers, thus creating a virtual common platform including several ecological repositories. We used the Global Biodiversity Facility (GBIF) as well the International Plant Name Index (IPNI) to enrich the data from our own field observations. We conclude in discussing other potential providers for identifiers for the ecological research domain. We demonstrate the ease of making use of existing decentralized and unsupervised identifiers for a data repository, which opens new avenues to collaborative data discovery for learning, teaching, and research in ecology

Using Human Observer Eye Movements in Automatic Image Classifiers

We explore the way in which people look at images of different semantic categories (e.g., handshake, landscape), and directly relate those results to computational approaches for automatic image classification. Our hypothesis is that the eye movements of human observers differ for images of different semantic categories, and that this information can be effectively used in automatic content-based classifiers. First, we present eye tracking experiments that show the variations in eye movements (i.e., fixations and saccades) across different individuals for images of 5 different categories: handshakes (two people shaking hands), crowd (cluttered scenes with many people), landscapes (nature scenes without people), main object in uncluttered background (e.g., an airplane flying), and miscellaneous (people and still lives). The eye tracking results suggest that similar viewing patterns occur when different subjects view different images in the same semantic category. Using these results, we examine how empirical data obtained from eye tracking experiments across different semantic categories can be integrated with existing computational frameworks, or used to construct new ones. In particular, we examine the Visual Apprentice, a system in which image classifiers are learned (using machine learning) from user input as the user defines a multiple level object definition hierarchy based on an object and its parts (scene, object, object-part, perceptual area, region), and labels examples for specific classes (e.g., handshake). The resulting classifiers are applied to automatically classify new images (e.g., as handshake/non-handshake). Although many eye tracking experiments have been performed, to our knowledge, this is the first study that specifically compares eye movements across categories, and that links categoryspecific eye tracking results to automatic image classification techniques