A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference

This paper introduces the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MultiNLI) corpus, a dataset designed for use in the development and evaluation of machine learning models for sentence understanding. In addition to being one of the largest corpora available for the task of NLI, at 433k examples, this corpus improves upon available resources in its coverage: it offers data from ten distinct genres of written and spoken English--making it possible to evaluate systems on nearly the full complexity of the language--and it offers an explicit setting for the evaluation of cross-genre domain adaptation.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figures, 5 tables. v2 corrects a misreported accuracy number for the CBOW model in the 'matched' setting. v3 adds a discussion of the difficulty of the corpus to the analysis section. v4 is the version that was accepted to NAACL201

Towards Model-independent Predictions for R-parity Violating Supersymmetry

Extensive searches for supersymmetry (SUSY), over the last four decades, have returned no evidence for it yet. Particularly, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) results, this begs the question: “Is it time to give up on the idea of SUSY at energy scales accessible to us, or are there still potential gaps in our coverage that need to be explored?” In this thesis, we advocate the latter view. In particular, we consider the R-parity violating Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (RPV-MSSM). We argue that this setup is as well-motivated as the MSSM. On the other hand, the phenomenological space is vastly more complex; this creates potential for gaps in our SUSY coverage. In this thesis, we identify and focus on four such gaps in our current studies: (i) There is no systematic classification of the RPV-MSSM signatures at colliders. In particular, there could be signatures we may have missed in our coverage. (ii) Lepton parton distribution functions (PDFs) can initiate resonant squark production in the RPV-MSSM at the LHC, resulting in a clean final state consisting of a single charged lepton, no/low missing energy, and either one or a few jets. This can be a sensitive probe to SUSY that has not been covered at the LHC yet. (iii) The RPV-MSSM can accommodate massive neutrinos. However, the implications of the precisely measured neutrino oscillation data have not been analyzed for the most general RPV-MSSM setup. (iv) The mass of the lightest neutralino – if bino-like – is still completely unconstrained in the RPV-MSSM. On the flip side, we argue that, with recent and upcoming developments in the field, each of the above offers an exciting new opportunity to find SUSY. We explicitly demonstrate this by implementing studies that take steps towards covering the above gaps. Our results show that, in this way, there is still significant potential to discover SUSY in the near future. Our approach, throughout, will emphasize model-independence

Mothers, Daughters, Wives, And Widows: The Politics Of India\u27s Social Programs For Women, 1985-2015

Why is social policy for women in the global south increasingly focused on women as mothers? While existing literature explains the rise of maternalist (mother-focused) social policy in 20th-century Europe and the United States, I show that it does not account for the newest wave of maternalist social policy, which is unfolding in developing countries around the world. Using India as a case study, I compare the surprising and divergent trajectories of two contemporaneous women’s programs to unearth the causes of growing maternalism in the global south. One of the programs, Janani Suraksha Yojana (Mother Protection Scheme, or JSY), had modest origins but is among the most generously funded women-specific programs in the country and among the largest conditional cash transfer programs in the world today. The other, Indira Mahila Yojana (Indira Woman Scheme, or IMY), was designed to overhaul India’s social policy for women’s socioeconomic advancement but turned out to have only a short life of limited consequence. The study of these programs shows that India’s growing attention to women as mothers results from two factors. First, international organizations such as the UN have placed maternal health on the global development agenda more successfully than they have advocated gendered interventions in other fields such as higher education, paid work, and political participation, creating incentives for national actors to design programs for pregnant women. Second, social policy thinking in India conflates gender with poverty, treating them as a single dimension of social stratification. This leads to efforts to address gender by solving poverty and undercuts arguments for women-specific programs for educational, economic, and political empowerment. The result is a system of social provisioning that is uncommonly attentive to adult women, but almost exclusively during their pregnancies

Zr-pendent polyimide carbon/glass composites and their property comparisons with the corresponding non pendent polyimide composites

The objective of this research project is to synthesize two and three component polyimide by solution polymerization technique. Further, to synthesize four-component pendent polyimides by attaching the zirconium complex to the three component (3,4\u27 -ODA/ODPA/MADA) polyimide backbones in presence of DCC to give the atomic oxygen resistant polyamic acid and polyimide. The synthesized zirconium complex pendent polyamic acid was characterized by Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) to investigate its formation. TLC results indicated that no free zirconium complex remain in the polymer solution. Woven glass and carbon fibres were impregnated with the polyamic acid in the ratio of 40:60 of the resin : fibre forming a prepreg. Using the standard processing conditions for polyamic acids (resembling NASA\u27s LARC-IA polyimide), the prepregs were cured to fabricate single and four ply glass and carbon fibre reinforced composites of both parent (without pendent groups) and pendent polymers using autoclave machine at the University of Delaware to obtain well consolidated laminates. The molding cycle, as adopted, yielded laminates of 2-, 3- and 4- component polyimides. Mechanical testing were then carried out on these laminates. The mechanical properties, such as tensile strength, flexural strength, DMA, Izod impact strength, and hardness were measured and compared for two, three and four component polyimide composites. In glass fibre composite laminates, the Zr pendent polyimide has higher glass transition temperature, Tg, storage modulus, E\ and thermal stability than the parent polyimides as observed from DMA results. The tensile strength and hardness of the four component glass fibre composites was higher compared to the parent polyimides. This could be due to strong adhesion of Zr pendent group to glass fibre. Thus, this composite could have potential use in the applications where adhesion of the polymer to any glass substrate is required. The two component carbon fibre composites showed better xiv performance in tensile, flexural and impact strength as well as hardness compared to three and four component polyimide composites. The composites were also observed under the Optical Microscope and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) after the mechanical tests to study the effects of adhesion of polymer resin to the fiber reinforcement. Our hypothesis that the zirconium pendant group is responsible for the strong adhesion to glass was supported by these mechanical tests

A moving control volume approach to computing hydrodynamic forces and torques on immersed bodies

We present a moving control volume (CV) approach to computing hydrodynamic forces and torques on complex geometries. The method requires surface and volumetric integrals over a simple and regular Cartesian box that moves with an arbitrary velocity to enclose the body at all times. The moving box is aligned with Cartesian grid faces, which makes the integral evaluation straightforward in an immersed boundary (IB) framework. Discontinuous and noisy derivatives of velocity and pressure at the fluid-structure interface are avoided and far-field (smooth) velocity and pressure information is used. We re-visit the approach to compute hydrodynamic forces and torques through force/torque balance equation in a Lagrangian frame that some of us took in a prior work (Bhalla et al., J Comp Phys, 2013). We prove the equivalence of the two approaches for IB methods, thanks to the use of Peskin's delta functions. Both approaches are able to suppress spurious force oscillations and are in excellent agreement, as expected theoretically. Test cases ranging from Stokes to high Reynolds number regimes are considered. We discuss regridding issues for the moving CV method in an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) context. The proposed moving CV method is not limited to a specific IB method and can also be used, for example, with embedded boundary methods