Enhancing scarce-resource language translation through pivot combinations

Chinese and Spanish are the most spoken languages in the world. However, there is not much research done in machine translation for this language pair. We experiment with the parallel Chinese-Spanish corpus (United Nations) to explore alternatives of SMT strategies which consist on using a pivot language. Particularly, two well-known alternatives are shown for pivoting: the cascade system and the pseudo-corpus. As Pivot language we use English, Arabic and French. Results show that English is the best pivot language between Chinese and Spanish. As a new strategy, we propose to perform a combination of the pivot strategies which is capable to highly outperform the direct translation strategy.Postprint (published version

"Gender Inequalities in Allocating Time to Paid and Unpaid Work: Evidence from Bolivia"

This working paper analyzes paid and unpaid work-time inequalities among Bolivian urban adults using time use data from a 2001 household survey. We identified a gender-based division of labor characterized not so much by who does what type of work but by how much work of each type they do. There is a trade-off between paid and unpaid work, but this trade-off is only partial: women's entry into the labor market tends to result in a double shift of paid and unpaid work. We also find very high levels of within-group inequality in the distributions of paid and unpaid work-time for men and women, a sign that, beyond the sexual division of labor, subgroup differentiation is also important. Using decompositions of the inequality in the distribution of total time spent at work, we show that gender plays an important role in determining the proportion of paid to unpaid work done by individuals, but it plays a lesser role in determining the higher total workload of some individuals relative to others.

The Violent Aporia of Postcolonial Public Life: Environmental Politics and Indigenous Self-determination in the Amazon

Indigenous communities’ participation in environmental politics of dam projects in the Brazilian Amazon is marked by an ambivalent effect. On one hand, there is the local political economy regulated by traditional systems; on the other hand, there is the global political procedure addressed to ‘empower’ indigenous institutions in their interactions with corporate and governmental actors. Yet, when this second juridical instance is dominated by suspicion, due not only to the lack of execution of environmental compensating measures, but mainly to the lack of space where indigenous principles could be taken into account, official political systems are frequently undermined by local forms of representation, personified in the image of the ‘indigenous warrior’. This article seeks to reveal how the enactment of the warrior in Brazilian public life ends up redefining ethnic agency, not as a remaining cultural trait of a particular symbolic economy, but as crime.A participação de comunidades indígenas nas políticas ambientais de empreendimentos hidrelétricos na Amazônia brasileira é marcada por um efeito ambivalente. De um lado, há uma economia política local regulada por sistemas tradicionais; de outro, a configuração de um procedimento global que visa ‘empoderar’ as instituições indígenas na sua interlocução com atores corporativos e governamentais. No entanto, quando essa segunda instância é dominada pela desconfiança, devido à não execução de medidas de compensação ambiental, mas, sobretudo, à ausência de espaços onde princípios indígenas poderiam ser considerados, os sistemas políticos oficiais são constantemente minados por formas locais de representação, personificadas na imagem do ‘guerreiro indígena’. Este artigo busca revelar como a representação do guerreiro na vida pública brasileira acaba por redefinir a agência de grupos étnicos não mais com base na persistência de traços culturais de economias simbólicas particulares, mas como crime

Rates of convergence to scaling profiles in a submonolayer deposition model and the preservation of memory of the initial condition

We establish rates of convergence of solutions to scaling (or similarity) profiles in a coagulation type system modelling submonolayer deposition. We prove that, although all memory of the initial condition is lost in the similarity limit, information about the large cluster tail of the initial condition is preserved in the rate of approach to the similarity profile. The proof relies in a change of variables that allows for the decoupling of the original infinite system of ordinary differential equations into a closed two-dimensional nonlinear system for the monomer--bulk dynamics and a lower triangular infinite dimensional linear one for the cluster dynamics. The detailed knowledge of the long time monomer concentration, which was obtained earlier by Costin et al. in (O. Costin, M. Grinfeld, K.P. O'Neill and H. Park, Long-time behaviour of point islands under fixed rate deposition, Commun. Inf. Syst. 13, (2), (2013), pp.183-200) using asymptotic methods and is rederived here by center manifold arguments, is then used for the asymptotic evaluation of an integral representation formula for the concentration of $j$-clusters. The use of higher order expressions, both for the Stirling expansion and for the monomer evolution at large times allow us to obtain, not only the similarity limit, but also the rate at which it is approached.Comment: Revised according to referee's suggestions; to be published in SIAM J. Math. Ana

On the convergence to critical scaling profiles in submonolayer deposition models

In this work we study the rate of convergence to similarity profiles in a mean field model for the deposition of a submonolayer of atoms in a crystal facet, when there is a critical minimal size $n\geq 2$ for the stability of the formed clusters. The work complements recently published related results by the same authors in which the rate of convergence was studied outside of a critical direction $x=\tau$ in the cluster size $x$ vs. time $\tau$ plane. In this paper we consider a different similarity variable, $\xi := (x-\tau)/\sqrt{\tau}$, corresponding to an inner expansion of that critical direction, and prove the convergence of solutions to a similarity profile $\Phi_{2,n}(\xi)$ when $x, \tau\to +\infty$ with $\xi$ fixed, as well as the rate at which the limit is approached.Comment: Dedicated to the memory of Jack Car

Gender Inequalities in Allocating Time to Paid and Unpaid Work: Evidence from Bolivia

This Working Paper analyzes paid and unpaid work-time inequalities among Bolivian urban adults using time use data from a 2001 household survey. We identified a gender-based division of labor characterized not so much by who does which type of work but by how much work of each type they do. There is a partial trade-off between paid and unpaid work, but such a substitution is only partial: women?s entry into the labor market tends to result in a double work shift of paid and unpaid work. We also find very high levels of within-group inequality in the distributions of paid and unpaid work-time for men and women, a sign that beyond the sexual division of labor, subgroup differentiation is also important. Using decompositions of the inequality in the distribution of total time spent at work, we show that gender is an important variable to explain how much paid and unpaid work is done by individuals, but not so important to explain why some people have a higher total workload than others.Gender, Inequalities, poor, Bolivia

A Client mobile application for Chinese-Spanish statistical machine translation

This show and tell paper describes a client mobile application for Chinese-Spanish machine translation. The system combines a standard server-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system, which requires online operation, with different input modalities including text, optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). It also includes an index-based search engine for supporting off-line translation.Postprint (published version

Plagiarism detection using information retrieval and similarity measures based on image processing techniques

This paper describes the Barcelona Media Innovation Center participation in the 2nd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. Particularly, our system focused on the external plagiarism detection task, which assumes the source documents are available. We present a two-step a approach. In the first step of our method, we build an information retrieval system based on Solr/Lucene, segmenting both suspicious and source documents into smaller texts.We perform a search based on bag-of-words which provides a first selection of potentially plagiarized texts. In the second step, each promising pair is further investigated. We implemented a sliding window approach that computes cosine distances between overlapping text segments from both the source and suspicious documents on a pair wise basis. As a result, a similarity matrix between text segments is obtained, which is smoothed by means of low-pass 2-D filtering. From the smoothed similarity matrix, plagiarized segments are identified by using image processing techniques. Our results were placed in the middle of the official ranking, which considered together two types of plagiarism: intrinsic and external.Postprint (published version

Financial Development and International Trade: Regional and Sectoral Analysis

Financial development has been argued as a potential source of comparative advantage and its relationships with trade has been theoretically developed. This theory posits that countries that are well financially developed should experience greater volumes of international trade. We empirically investigate the effects of financial development on trade of both agricultural and manufactured products. The results show a positive impact of financial development on bilateral trade flows for the manufacturing sector, which enjoys a greater impact than the agricultural sector. The impacts differ across regions. In most cases, developing countries (Asia, Latin America, MENA and SSA) experience greater impacts of financial development on exports in both agriculture and manufacturing sectors than do advanced countries.agricultural sector, comparative advantage, financial development, international trade, manufacturing sector, International Development, International Relations/Trade,