Researchers who lead the trends

Xuan-Hung Doan, Phuong-Tram T. Nguyen, Viet-Phuong La, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen (2019). Chapter 5. Researchers who lead the trends. In Quan-Hoang Vuong, Trung Tran (Eds.), The Vietnamese Social Sciences at a Fork in the Road (pp. 98–120). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter. DOI:10.2478/9783110686081-010 Online ISBN: 9783110686081 © 2019 Sciend

A Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for Vietnamese

In this paper, we present the first sizable grammar built for Vietnamese using LTAG, developed over the past two years, named vnLTAG. This grammar aims at modelling written language and is general enough to be both application- and domain-independent. It can be used for the morpho-syntactic tagging and syntactic parsing of Vietnamese texts, as well as text generation. We then present a robust parsing scheme using vnLTAG and a parser for the grammar. We finish with an evaluation using a test suite

Isostaticity and the solidification of semiflexible polymer melts

Using molecular dynamics simulations of a tangent-soft-sphere bead-spring polymer model, we examine the degree to which semiflexible polymer melts solidify at isostaticity. Flexible and stiff chains crystallize when they are isostatic as defined by appropriate degree-of-freedom-counting arguments. Semiflexible chains also solidify when isostatic if a generalized isostaticity criterion that accounts for the slow freezing out of configurational freedom as chain stiffness increases is employed. The dependence of the average coordination number at solidification $Z(T_s)$ on chains' characteristic ratio $C_\infty$ has the same functional form [$Z \simeq a - b\ln(C_\infty)$] as the dependence of the average coordination number at jamming $Z(\phi_J)$ on $C_\infty$ in athermal systems, suggesting that jamming-related phenomena play a significant role in thermal polymer solidification

General one-loop formulas for decay h→Zγh\rightarrow Z\gamma

Radiative corrections to the $h\rightarrow Z\gamma$ are evaluated in the one-loop approximation. The unitary gauge gauge is used. The analytic result is expressed in terms of the Passarino-Veltman functions. The calculations are applicable for the Standard Model as well for a wide class of its gauge extensions. In particular, the decay width of a charged Higgs boson $H^\pm \rightarrow W^\pm\gamma$ can be derived. The consistence of our formulas and several specific earlier results is shown.Comment: 33 pages, 3 figures, a new section (V) and references were improved in the published versio

Understanding the interplay of lies, violence, and religious values in folktales

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character. A violent act committed to serving Buddhist mission results in a happy ending for the committer

Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p\u3c0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular