636 research outputs found
Collecting Texts in Endangered Languages: The Chickasaw Narrative Bootcamp
While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian triad, later developments in the generative tradition moved away from narratives. With a resurgence of attention to texts in both linguistic theory and language documentation, the literature on methodologies is growing (i.e., Chelliah 2001, Chafe 1980, Burton & Matthewson 2015). We outline our approach to collecting Chickasaw texts in what we call a ânarrative bootcamp.â Chickasaw is a severely threatened language and no longer in common daily use. Facilitating narrative collection with elder fluent speakers is an important goal, as is the cultivation of second language speakers and the training of linguists and tribal language professionals. Our bootcamps meet these goals. Moreover, we show many positive outcomes to this approach, including a positive sense of language use and âfunâ voiced by the elders, the corpus expansion that occurs by collecting and processing narratives onsite in the workshop, and field methods training for novices. Importantly, we find the sparking of personal recollections facilitates the collection of heretofore unrecorded narrative genres in Chickasaw. This approach offers an especially fruitful way to build and expand a text corpus for small communities of highly endangered languages.National Foreign Language Resource Cente
ALMA and Keck analysis of Fomalhaut field sources: JWST's Great Dust Cloud is a background object
At 7.7 pc, the A-type star Fomalhaut hosts a bright debris disk with multiple
radial components. The disk is eccentric and misaligned, strongly suggesting
that it is sculpted by interaction with one or more planets. Compact sources
are now being detected with JWST, suggesting that new planet detections may be
imminent. However, to confirm such sources as companions, common proper motion
with the star must be established, as with unprecedented sensitivity comes a
high probability that planet candidates are actually background objects. Here,
ALMA and Keck observations of Fomalhaut are found to show significant emission
at the same sky location as multiple compact sources in JWST MIRI coronagraphic
observations, one of which has been dubbed the "Great Dust Cloud" because it
lies within the outer belt. Since the ground-based data were obtained between 6
to 18 years prior to the JWST observations, these compact sources are unlikely
to be common proper motion companions to Fomalhaut. More generally, this work
illustrates that images collected at a range of wavelengths can be valuable for
rejecting planet candidates uncovered via direct imaging with JWST.Comment: MNRAS in pres
'Ilittibaatoksali' 'We Are Working Together': Perspectives on our Chickasaw Tribal-Academic Collaboration
Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and
documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that ânot only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.â Benefitting from an action-research model, our collaboration supports the Chickasaw community by developing revitalization-driven documentation and training materials for learners that both feed into and are drawn from documentation. Both sides of our collaboration are committed to the transfer of knowledge, especially sharing our findings and knowledge with other endangered language communities.
-----
Nous prĂ©sentons ici des recherches issues dâune collaboration tribale-acadĂ©mique entre le programme de revitalisation chickasaw (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, CLRP) et lâUniversitĂ© du Texas Ă Arlington (UTA). Cette collaboration a commencĂ© il y a trois ans dans le cadre dâun voyage de service-apprentissage Ă Ada, Oklahoma. Le programme de revitalisation de langue chickasaw consiste en de nombreuses activitĂ©s destinĂ©es Ă appuyer lâemploi de la langue chez les 70 personnes restantes environ qui parlent couramment la langue. Les communautĂ©s linguistiques confrontĂ©es Ă une grande menace de disparition doivent aborder la revitalisation et la documentation en mĂȘme temps, et ce dâune maniĂšre qui maximise les ressources. Notre partenariat sâattaque Ă ce dĂ©fi. Cet article sâappuie sur les principes de recherche linguistique issue de la communautĂ© (Community-Based Language Research), dĂ©finie dans Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) comme un modĂšle qui permet la production des donnĂ©es sur une langue mais qui prĂ©sume Ă©galement que ces donnĂ©es peuvent et doivent ĂȘtre construites pour, avec et par des membres de la communautĂ©, et quâelles
ne sont pas uniquement (ou mĂȘme principalement) produites par ou destinĂ©es aux linguistes. Profitant dâun modĂšle de rechercheaction, notre collaboration soutient la communautĂ© chickasaw en dĂ©veloppant des matĂ©riaux de documentation et de formation pour des apprenants, centrĂ©e sur la revitalisation, qui alimentent et sont tirĂ©s de la documentation. Les deux cĂŽtĂ©s de notre collaboration se sont engagĂ©s au transfert du savoir, surtout le partage de nos dĂ©couvertes et de notre savoir avec dâautres communautĂ©s de langue en voie de disparition
GLIMMER: generalized late-interaction memory reranker
Memory-augmentation is a powerful approach for efficiently incorporating
external information into language models, but leads to reduced performance
relative to retrieving text. Recent work introduced LUMEN, a memory-retrieval
hybrid that partially pre-computes memory and updates memory representations on
the fly with a smaller live encoder.
We propose GLIMMER, which improves on this approach through 1) exploiting
free access to the powerful memory representations by applying a shallow
reranker on top of memory to drastically improve retrieval quality at low cost,
and 2) incorporating multi-task training to learn a general and higher quality
memory and live encoder. GLIMMER achieves strong gains in performance at faster
speeds compared to LUMEN and FiD on the KILT benchmark of knowledge-intensive
tasks
Pre-computed memory or on-the-fly encoding? A hybrid approach to retrieval augmentation makes the most of your compute
Retrieval-augmented language models such as Fusion-in-Decoder are powerful,
setting the state of the art on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks.
However, they are also expensive, due to the need to encode a large number of
retrieved passages. Some work avoids this cost by pre-encoding a text corpus
into a memory and retrieving dense representations directly. However,
pre-encoding memory incurs a severe quality penalty as the memory
representations are not conditioned on the current input. We propose LUMEN, a
hybrid between these two extremes, pre-computing the majority of the retrieval
representation and completing the encoding on the fly using a live encoder that
is conditioned on the question and fine-tuned for the task. We show that LUMEN
significantly outperforms pure memory on multiple question-answering tasks
while being much cheaper than FiD, and outperforms both for any given compute
budget. Moreover, the advantage of LUMEN over FiD increases with model size
FiDO: Fusion-in-Decoder optimized for stronger performance and faster inference
Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) is a powerful retrieval-augmented language model that
sets the state-of-the-art on many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, the
architecture used for FiD was chosen by making minimal modifications to a
standard T5 model, which our analysis shows to be highly suboptimal for a
retrieval-augmented model. In particular, FiD allocates the bulk of FLOPs to
the encoder, while the majority of inference time results from memory bandwidth
constraints in the decoder. We propose two simple changes to the FiD
architecture to alleviate memory bandwidth constraints, and speed up inference
by 7x. This allows us to use a much larger decoder at modest cost. We denote
FiD with the above modifications as FiDO, and show that it strongly improves
performance over existing FiD models for a wide range of inference budgets. For
example, FiDO-Large-XXL performs faster inference than FiD-Base and achieves
better performance than FiD-Large.Comment: ACL Findings 202
The Effect of Gibberellin on Millett
We are testing the effects of gibberellic acid on millet plants to determine if the mutation that caused them to be dwarf plants are gibberellin deficient or if the gibberellin response system is affected. In order to determine this, we will apply gibberellin solution to the millet plants and observe their growth or lack of growth. The dwarf mutant millet plants that are gibberellin would show growth like those with no mutation, and the millet plants that have a mutation in the gibberellin response system would not demonstrate any growth since they would be unable to process the gibberellin. The plants are measured weekly, and the data will determine the significance on the gibberellin application
An analysis of major target deviations in craniospinal irradiation treatment plans for patients with intermediate-risk medulloblastoma within a phase 3 clinical trial (Children\u27s Oncology Group Study ACNS0331)
PURPOSE: Craniospinal irradiation remains an essential and yet difficult part of the treatment of patients with medulloblastoma. Whereas technological advances offer promise of increased conformity, realiance on advanced technology is not without risk, and it remains critical to carefully delineate targets. We describe examples of target deviations (TDs) in craniospinal irradiation treatment plans for postoperative patients with medulloblastoma in a phase 3 clinical trial (ACNS 0331).
METHODS AND MATERIALS: The principal investigator independently performed a review of the treatment plans and portal films of enrolled patients and evaluated the plans for TDs. TDs of dose, dose uniformity, and volume were defined as major or minor deviations. Major TDs scored as protocol violations. The effect of major TDs on event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) was evaluated using the stratified Cox proportional hazards model.
RESULTS: Of the 549 patients enrolled, 461 were available for this analysis. Thirty-two (7%) plans did not have data sufficient for TD evaluation. Major TDs were found in 32 of the 461 plans (7%). Of those, 21 were deviations of target volume alone, 7 were deviations of target dose alone, and 4 were deviations of both target volume and dose. The 25 patients with TDs of volume involved 29 sites. The most common major TDs of volume involved the brain (9 of 29) and the posterior fossa (9 of 29). On Cox proportional hazards modeling, the presence of a major TD did not statistically significantly affect EFS (hazard ratio, 0.98; 95% confidence interval, 0.45-2.11;
CONCLUSIONS: Although intensity modulated radiation therapy and proton therapy are promising in improving conformity and sparing organs at risk, technology does not substitute for careful anatomic definition of target volumes. The study was not powered to evaluate the effect of TDs on EFS and OS; therefore, the statistical analysis presented in this study must be interpreted with caution
No evidence for changes in GABA concentration, functional connectivity, or working memory following continuous theta burst stimulation over dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) is thought to reduce cortical excitability and modulate functional connectivity, possibly by altering cortical inhibition at the site of stimulation. However, most evidence comes from the motor cortex and it remains unclear whether similar effects occur following stimulation over other brain regions. We assessed whether cTBS over left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex altered gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration, functional connectivity and brain dynamics at rest, and brain activation and memory performance during a working memory task. Seventeen healthy individuals participated in a randomised, sham-controlled, cross-over experiment. Before and after either real or sham cTBS, magnetic resonance spectroscopy was obtained at rest to measure GABA concentrations. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was also recorded at rest and during an n-back working memory task to measure functional connectivity, regional brain activity (low-frequency fluctuations), and task-related patterns of brain activity. We could not find evidence for changes in GABA concentration (P = 0.66, Bayes factor [BF10] = 0.07), resting-state functional connectivity (P(FWE) > 0.05), resting-state low-frequency fluctuations (P = 0.88, BF10 = 0.04), blood-oxygen level dependent activity during the n-back task (P(FWE) > 0.05), or working memory performance (P = 0.13, BF10 = 0.05) following real or sham cTBS. Our findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting the effects of cTBS are highly variable between individuals and question the notion that cTBS is a universal âinhibitoryâ paradigm
- âŠ