A word sense disambiguation corpus for Urdu

The aim of word sense disambiguation (WSD) is to correctly identify the meaning of a word in context. All natural languages exhibit word sense ambiguities and these are often hard to resolve automatically. Consequently WSD is considered an important problem in natural language processing (NLP). Standard evaluation resources are needed to develop, evaluate and compare WSD methods. A range of initiatives have lead to the development of benchmark WSD corpora for a wide range of languages from various language families. However, there is a lack of benchmark WSD corpora for South Asian languages including Urdu, despite there being over 300 million Urdu speakers and a large amounts of Urdu digital text available online. To address that gap, this study describes a novel benchmark corpus for the Urdu Lexical Sample WSD task. This corpus contains 50 target words (30 nouns, 11 adjectives, and 9 verbs). A standard, manually crafted dictionary called Urdu Lughat is used as a sense inventory. Four baseline WSD approaches were applied to the corpus. The results show that the best performance was obtained using a simple Bag of Words approach. To encourage NLP research on the Urdu language the corpus is freely available to the research community

The distribution and re-distribution of income of selfemployed as freelancers and entrepreneurs in Europe

The economic transformations of modern industrial societies have changed the labor markets in terms of industrial relations and occupational structure. The transformation of the traditional welfare state, the deregulation of the labor markets, the technological change and the reorganization of industrial structures influenced strongly the attitude of individuals towards their preferred labor contract. The structural change of the occupational structure was one of the results of this tendency. In particular the self-employed and freelancers have been affected and are a driving factor of labor market changings. On the one side the value of autonomy regarding industrial relations is becoming more important for employees. On the other side employers want to get rid of social security contributions. As a result the multitudinousness of these professions increased. The increasing varieties of occupations among the self-employed and freelancers influenced strongly their income distribution. Recent studies for Germany have shown a great dispersion and a heterogeneous structure of earnings in particular of freelancers (liberal professions) and self-employed. Though there are a variety of international income distribution studies, but – as to the best to our knowledge – no study focusing on the selfemployed and freelancers within the total labor force. In our study we concentrate on the income distribution of self-employed and freelancers in different European countries. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) we analyze five different European countries and the United States structured by different types of welfare states according to Esping Anderson. We analyze income distributional aspects, an occupational decomposition à la Shorrocks, and re-distributional effects of the tax and transfer systems