Neural Techniques for German Dependency Parsing

Syntactic parsing is the task of analyzing the structure of a sentence based on some predefined formal assumption. It is a key component in many natural language processing (NLP) pipelines and is of great benefit for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as information retrieval or sentiment analysis. Despite achieving very high results with neural network techniques, most syntactic parsing research pays attention to only a few prominent languages (such as English or Chinese) or language-agnostic settings. Thus, we still lack studies that focus on just one language and design specific parsing strategies for that language with regards to its linguistic properties. In this thesis, we take German as the language of interest and develop more accurate methods for German dependency parsing by combining state-of-the-art neural network methods with techniques that address the specific challenges posed by the language-specific properties of German. Compared to English, German has richer morphology, semi-free word order, and case syncretism. It is the combination of those characteristics that makes parsing German an interesting and challenging task. Because syntactic parsing is a task that requires many levels of language understanding, we propose to study and improve the knowledge of parsing models at each level in order to improve syntactic parsing for German. These levels are: (sub)word level, syntactic level, semantic level, and sentence level. At the (sub)word level, we look into a surge in out-of-vocabulary words in German data caused by compounding. We propose a new type of embeddings for compounds that is a compositional model of the embeddings of individual components. Our experiments show that character-based embeddings are superior to word and compound embeddings in dependency parsing, and compound embeddings only outperform word embeddings when the part-of-speech (POS) information is unavailable. Thus, we conclude that it is the morpho-syntactic information of unknown compounds, not the semantic one, that is crucial for parsing German. At the syntax level, we investigate challenges for local grammatical function labeler that are caused by case syncretism. In detail, we augment the grammatical function labeling component in a neural dependency parser that labels each head-dependent pair independently with a new labeler that includes a decision history, using Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs). All our proposed models significantly outperformed the baseline on three languages: English, German and Czech. However, the impact of the new models is not the same for all languages: the improvement for English is smaller than for the non-configurational languages (German and Czech). Our analysis suggests that the success of the history-based models is not due to better handling of long dependencies but that they are better in dealing with the uncertainty in head direction. We study the interaction of syntactic parsing with the semantic level via the problem of PP attachment disambiguation. Our motivation is to provide a realistic evaluation of the task where gold information is not available and compare the results of disambiguation systems against the output of a strong neural parser. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that PP attachment disambiguation is evaluated and compared against neural dependency parsing on predicted information. In addition, we present a novel approach for PP attachment disambiguation that uses biaffine attention and utilizes pre-trained contextualized word embeddings as semantic knowledge. Our end-to-end system outperformed the previous pipeline approach on German by a large margin simply by avoiding error propagation caused by predicted information. In the end, we show that parsing systems (with the same semantic knowledge) are in general superior to systems specialized for PP attachment disambiguation. Lastly, we improve dependency parsing at the sentence level using reranking techniques. So far, previous work on neural reranking has been evaluated on English and Chinese only, both languages with a configurational word order and poor morphology. We re-assess the potential of successful neural reranking models from the literature on English and on two morphologically rich(er) languages, German and Czech. In addition, we introduce a new variation of a discriminative reranker based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Our proposed reranker not only outperforms previous models on English but is the only model that is able to improve results over the baselines on German and Czech. Our analysis points out that the failure is due to the lower quality of the k-best lists, where the gold tree ratio and the diversity of the list play an important role

The influence of CEO characteristics on corporate environmental performance of SMEs: Evidence from Vietnamese SMEs

Drawing on upper echelon theory, this study investigates the impact of CEOs’ (chief executive officers) demographic characteristics on corporate environmental performance (CEP) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We hypothesized that CEO characteristics, including gender, age, basic educational level, professional educational level, political connection, and ethnicity, affect SMEs’ environmental performance. Using the cross-sectional data analysis of 810 Vietnamese SMEs, this study provides evidence that female CEOs and CEOs’ educational level (both basic and professional) are positively related to the probability of CEP. We also find that based on the role of institutional environment on CEP, political connections had a negative effect on CEP in the context of Vietnam. Another finding is that SMEs with chief executives from ethnic minority groups show a higher level of the probability of corporate environmental performance than companies operated by Kinh chief executives. Since CEP is an essential dimension of corporate social responsibility, a strategic decision for SMEs, it is crucial for the company to select appropriate CEOs based on their demographic characteristic

The Introduction of Eichhornia Crassipes into the High Rate Algal Pond to Remove Nitrogen from Wastewater

The treatment of wastewater using algal cultures has been researched and developed since 1950. The High Rate Algal Pond (HRAP) is the most efficient of this type of treatment, particularly for nitrogen removal. However, the main problem with the HRAP is the high level of organic suspended solids in the treated wastewater. Furthermore, nutrients released from the lysis of algal cells may give rise to eutrophication in the receiving water. A laboratory-scale experiment was carried out using the HRAP in the company of anaquatic plant, waterhyacinth Eichhornia crassipes, as an integrated system to remove nitrogen from wastewater. The dominant algal species used was Chlorella vulgaris. Twenty runs in t he bat ch mode were operated under the conventional HRAP and the HRAP - waterhyacinth combination system. Three runs were operated in the continuous mode using the HRAP - waterhyacinth system with 50% surface area coverage and 3 different retention times (3 days, 6 days, and 9 days). Comparison of the conventional HRAP and the HRAP waterhyacinth system for treating diluted raw wastewater from rubber latex concentrate processing revealed better nitrogen removal efficiency by the HRAP-waterhyacinth system. Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen in the treated wastewater was 23% lower in the HRAP with waterhyacinth than that in the normal HRAP. Significant reduction of suspended solids was also recorded. Total Suspended Solids of the effluent in the HRAP-waterhyacinth system was generally less than 50mg/L wherea sit was greater than 450mg/L in the conventional HRAP

The Relationship Between State Effectiveness And State Legitimacy: A Quantitative Test

Legitimacy is a contested concept in political science. The question of legitimacy has been addressed in various topics, including state formation, state building, and state failure. This research is an attempt to quantitatively test the relationship between state legitimacy and state effectiveness and development in the economy, politics, and society. By examining the literature on legitimacy and its sources, the research tests the following hypothesis: a state with better performance in macro issues, including economic performance, social welfare, and political participation, is more likely to enjoy a higher level of legitimacy. In other words, this study attempts to establish a replicable formula for an incumbent state to achieve and sustain its legitimacy

Modélisation des suspensions de particules actives : application à la motilité séminale

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions le comportement collectif de particules auto-propulsées. Ce travail comporte trois parties. Dans la première partie, nous considérons un modèle individu-centré pour les particules d'auto rotation interagissant par une règle d'alignement et étudions leurs limites macroscopiques. Deux cas de sealing ont été étudiés. Dans le cas de petite vitesse angulaire, le modèle obtenu est une légère modification du modèle " Hydrodynamique auto-organisé " qui avait été introduit précédemment par Degond et Mostch. Dans le cas de grande vitesse angulaire, le modèle obtenu est plus compliqué. Une étude préliminaire de la stabilité linéaire a été également proposée. Dans la deuxième partie, nous étudions un modèle macroscopique du système de particules auto-propulsées interagissant avec leurs voisins par une règle d'alignement et de répulsion. Nous fournissons une validation numérique de ce modèle en le comparant avec le modèle individu centré. L'existence de solutions du modèle macroscopique à deux dimensions est prouvée. La dernière partie est consacrée à l'étude expérimentale du comportement collectif de robots auto-propulsés dans une enceinte annulaire confinée.In this thesis wc study collective motions of self-propelled particles. This work consists of three parts. In the first part, we consider an lndividual-Based Model for self-rotating particles interacting through local alignment and investigate its macroscopic Iimit. We study the mean-field kinetic and hydrodynamic limits of this system within two different scalings. In the small angular velocity regime, the resulting model is a slight modification of the " Self-Organised Hydrodynamic " model which has been previously inltroduced by Degond and Motsch. In the large angular velocity Case, the macroscopic model obtained is more complex. A preliminary study of the linearized stability is proposed. In the second part, we study a macroscopic model for a system of self-propelled particles which interact with their neighbors via alignment and repulsion. We provide a numerical validation of the continuum model by comparison with the particle model. The existence of local solutions of this macroscopic model is also studied. The last part concerns experimental investigation of collective behavior of simple robots in a confined ring

“Anh Nam, the attach file is my report for trip to KL”: An investigation into the emergence of a new variety of English in written Vietnamese business communication

This study sought to examine whether distinct, localised features of English used in business communication are emerging in the Vietnamese socio-cultural context. Both content analysis and discourse analysis were applied to texts with regard to systemic functional characteristics. The findings of the study indicate that systematic features were exhibited across the data at lexico-grammatical level as well as contextual level, together demonstrating six major features and suggesting that many issues of World Englishes be revisited

Improving Gifted and Talented Education in Arkansas: Identification, Academic Benefits, and Local Norms

In the United States, education policies differ from state to state. Local research, therefore, is important to inform educators, policymakers, and researchers on the ground. This dissertation leverages ten years of administrative data to study three questions about gifted and talented (G/T) identification and education in Arkansas: does the current system identify the right students? Are gifted and talented programs beneficial for students? And, how can we improve diversity in gifted and talented education? Leveraging logistic regression, mixed-effects models, and descriptive statistics, I sought to provide answers to these three questions. First, are academically ready students from low-income families being missed in the current gifted and talented education system? Second, do gifted and talented services benefit high aptitude students academically? And finally, does using the local norm approach necessarily improve diversity in the G/T pool of students? This study has important implications for Arkansas’s G/T identification and education policies

The Impact of State Religious Policies on Christian Women’s Leadership Status in Vietnam: The Case of the Evangelical Church of Vietnam Since 1975

This paper contributes to a feminist critique of multiculturalism by presenting the complexity of the relationship among the state, religion and women in the context of Vietnam. By taking the Evangelical Church of Vietnam—South as a case study, and based on both primary and secondary data obtained from in-depth interviews with 38 Vietnamese female and male church leaders in 2014–2016, and four months of fieldwork in southern Vietnam between February and May 2016, the paper argues that the assumption of equal rights and citizenship status for all women in the wider society according to the liberal model of multiculturalism cannot be directly applied in Vietnam. State religious policies in this country play a significant role in the double reduction of Christian women’s and status in terms of leadership first in the wider society and second in the religious community itself despite the existence of national advanced gender law and the government’s tight control of religious groups. The failure of both this church and the government in upholding the governmental gender policies within this religious organization has complex causes rights embedded in the context of Vietnam. This paper looks into the government’s political concern rather than gender one in its management of religion and the ECVN’s theological, political and social stance as main causes of the gender problem

Collaborative practices in supplying standard parts for the shipbuilding industry - a case study of Brødrene Dahl Vietnam

Confidential until 12. May 202