Learning Cross-Lingual IR from an English Retriever

We present DR.DECR (Dense Retrieval with Distillation-Enhanced Cross-Lingual Representation), a new cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) system trained using multi-stage knowledge distillation (KD). The teacher of DR.DECR relies on a highly effective but computationally expensive two-stage inference process consisting of query translation and monolingual IR, while the student, DR.DECR, executes a single CLIR step. We teach DR.DECR powerful multilingual representations as well as CLIR by optimizing two corresponding KD objectives. Learning useful representations of non-English text from an English-only retriever is accomplished through a cross-lingual token alignment algorithm that relies on the representation capabilities of the underlying multilingual encoders. In both in-domain and zero-shot out-of-domain evaluation, DR.DECR demonstrates far superior accuracy over direct fine-tuning with labeled CLIR data. It is also the best single-model retriever on the XOR-TyDi benchmark at the time of this writing.Comment: 9 page

PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development

The field of Question Answering (QA) has made remarkable progress in recent years, thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models, newer realistic benchmark datasets with leaderboards, and novel algorithms for key components such as retrievers and readers. In this paper, we introduce PRIMEQA: a one-stop and open-source QA repository with an aim to democratize QA re-search and facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. PRIMEQA supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension as well as auxiliary capabilities such as question generation.It has been designed as an end-to-end toolkit for various use cases: building front-end applications, replicating SOTA methods on pub-lic benchmarks, and expanding pre-existing methods. PRIMEQA is available at : https://github.com/primeqa

Extended RBAC -Based Design and Implementation for a Secure Data Warehouse

Abstrac

Women in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore

This book examines selected works of a larger than life literary figure, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), with a special focus on his female characters. Works selected for the study are novels Binodini (1903), Gora (1909), The Home and the World (1916) and The Broken Nest (1921), as well as several short stories. A visionary and a social reformist, Tagore, among several other sociocultural, political and religious issues that he addressed in his works, recurrently sought to resort the circumstances of women as mothers, wives and child brides in his fictional writings. As an expression of this, he portrayed all his female characters, especially in the works selected for this study, in a new and convincing style, by consciously and conspicuously moving away from tradition and age-old conventions. Tagore spoke of and felt the need for women to be seen and heard beyond the home. His sympathy for child brides and widows are showcased extensively in many of these narratives. He categorically rejected the traditional concept where women were expected to be confined to the zenana. His passion for freedom was so far and wide that he felt that the liberation and freedom given to men should also be extended to women. He said that women had that natural expression to her, a cadence of restraint in her behaviour, producing poetry of life. She has been an inspiration to man, guiding, often unconsciously, his restless energy into an immense variety of creations in literature, art, music and religion. In the process, justifying the need of women to be liberated from the shackles of home, Tagore rejected all forms of religious extremism and cultural conservatism. This book also examines selected Hindu scriptures to examine how the effects of blind conformity to these scriptures had resulted in women being enslaved, bound and bonded by men in the name of social progress and stability. In the book we have highlighted how women can be both good at home and at the same time extend their radiance beyond home so that they grow intellectually. In doing so, Indian women discover their self-worth as individuals and find agency in their being, moving away from the shadow of the men. This is Tagore’s unique prescription for the emancipation of women, who were otherwise living in a hierarchical, andocentric social system

Novel tactile bottle neck adaptor facilitates eye drop adherence in visually impaired patients

Purpose To test the use of Ring-IT, a novel 3D tactile bottle neck adaptor in topical eye drop adherence in visually impaired patients.Methods Bottle neck ring adaptors with either one, two or three protrusions with cube or sphere endings were designed. In phase 1, low vision was simulated in healthy subjects (n=20) with a 20/200 vision simulator; while in phase 2, visually impaired patients (n=26; 20/70 or worse) were recruited. Subjects were randomised to six combinations of varying protrusions and shapes on medication bottles and asked to identify these traits at different presentations. Responses and time to identify were recorded.Results Phase 1: 98.3% of subjects correctly identified the number of protrusions. Mean time to identify was 4.5±6.1 s. Identification success for cube and sphere end pieces were 91.7% and 73.3%, with average time for identification of 9.9±7.6 and 10.9±9.0 s. In phase 2, 92.3% of subjects correctly identified the number of protrusions. Mean time to identify was 6.0±3.0 s. Identification success for cube and sphere end pieces were 78.2% and 74.4%; with average time for identification of 7.5±4.8 and 8.5±5.6 s, respectively.Conclusions Ring-IT was identified with accuracy and speed by both low vision simulated subjects, and by patients with true limited visual capabilities. These tactile bottle neck ring adaptors can be used as an assistive low vision aid device and may increase eye drop regimen adherence in visually impaired patients