PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

Predicting Health Impacts of the World Trade Center Disaster: 1. Halogenated hydrocarbons, symptom syndromes, secondary victimization, and the burdens of history

The recent attack on the World Trade Center, in addition to direct injury and psychological trauma, has exposed a vast population to dioxins, dibenzofurans, related endocrine disruptors, and a multitude of other physiologically active chemicals arising from the decomposition of the massive quantities of halogenated hydrocarbons and other plastics within the affected buildings. The impacts of these chemical species have been compounded by exposure to asbestos, fiberglass, crushed glass, concrete, plastic, and other irritating dusts. To address the manifold complexities of this incident we combine recent theoretical perspectives on immune, CNS, and sociocultural cognition with empirical studies on survivors of past large toxic fires, other community-scale chemical exposure incidents, and the aftereffects of war. Our analysis suggests the appearance of complex, but distinct and characteristic, spectra of synergistically linked social, psychosocial, psychological and physical symptoms among the 100,000 or so persons most directly affected by the WTC attack. The different 'eigenpatterns' should become increasingly comorbid as a function of exposure. The expected outcome greatly transcends a simple 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder' model, and may resemble a particularly acute form of Gulf War Syndrome. We explore the role of external social factors in subsequent exacerbation of the syndrome -- secondary victimization -- and study the path-dependent influence of individual and community-level historical patterns of stress. We suggest that workplace and other organizations can act as ameliorating intermediaries. Those without acess to such buffering structures appear to face a particularly bleak future

Some resonances between Eastern thought and Integral Biomathics in the framework of the WLIMES formalism for modelling living systems

Forty-two years ago, Capra published “The Tao of Physics” (Capra, 1975). In this book (page 17) he writes: “The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world in the twentieth century has …. necessitated a radical revision of many of our basic concepts” and that, unlike ‘classical’ physics, the sub-atomic and quantum “modern physics” shows resonances with Eastern thoughts and “leads us to a view of the world which is very similar to the views held by mystics of all ages and traditions.“ This article stresses an analogous situation in biology with respect to a new theoretical approach for studying living systems, Integral Biomathics (IB), which also exhibits some resonances with Eastern thought. Stepping on earlier research in cybernetics1 and theoretical biology,2 IB has been developed since 2011 by over 100 scientists from a number of disciplines who have been exploring a substantial set of theoretical frameworks. From that effort, the need for a robust core model utilizing advanced mathematics and computation adequate for understanding the behavior of organisms as dynamic wholes was identified. At this end, the authors of this article have proposed WLIMES (Ehresmann and Simeonov, 2012), a formal theory for modeling living systems integrating both the Memory Evolutive Systems (Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch, 2007) and the Wandering Logic Intelligence (Simeonov, 2002b). Its principles will be recalled here with respect to their resonances to Eastern thought

Planting Trees in the Desert: Delexicalized Tagging and Parsing Combined

Various unsupervised and semi-supervised methods have been proposed to tag and parse an unseen language. We explore delexicalized parsing, proposed by (Zeman and Resnik, 2008), and delexicalized tagging, proposed by (Yu et al., 2016). For both approaches we provide a detailed evaluation on Universal Dependencies data (Nivre et al., 2016), a de-facto standard for multi-lingual morphosyntactic processing (while the previous work used other datasets). Our results confirm that in separation, each of the two delexicalized techniques has some limited potential when no annotation of the target language is available. However, if used in combination, their errors multiply beyond acceptable limits. We demonstrate that even the tiniest bit of expert annotation in the target language may contain significant potential and should be used if available

The grammar of developable double corrugations (for formal architectural applications)

This paper investigates the geometrical basis of regular corrugations, with specific emphasis on Developable Double Corrugations (DDCs), which form a unique sub-branch of Origami Folding and Creasing Algorithms. The aim of the exercise is three fold – (1) To define and isolate a ‘single smallest starting block’ for a given set of distinct and divergent DDC patterns, such that this starting block becomes the generator of all DDCs when different generative rules are applied to it. (2) To delineate those generic parameters and generative rules which would apply to the starting block, such that different DDCs are created as a result (3) To use the knowledge from points (1) and (2) to create a complete family of architectural forms and shapes using DDCs. For this purpose, a matrix of 12 underlying geometry types are identified and used as archetypes. The objective is to mathematically explore DDCs for architectural form finding, using physical folding as a primary algorithmic tool. Some DDCs have more degrees of freedom than others and can fit varied geometries, while others cannot. The discussion and conclusions involve - (a) identifying why certain DDCs are ideal for certain forms and not others, when all of them are generated using the same/or similar starting block(s), (b) discussing the critical significance of flat-foldability in this specific context and (c) what we can do with this knowledge of DDCs in the field of architectural research and practice in the future