61 research outputs found
Advertisement, media bias, political polarisation
When consumers value cognitive consistency between the news they read and policies they support, politicians are induced to make policies that conform to a polarized media landscape which not only depends on user subscription for revenue but also advertisement receipts. Following Guo et. al. (2018), I develop a model to study how the dependency on advertisement revenue affects media bias, political polarisation, and voter preferences. I show that though the equilibrium prices of the two newspapers fall when they depend on advertising receipts, the difference between the equilibrium prices and thus ideological position of a marginal voter remains unchanged, compared to Guo et. Al. (2018). Moreover, the extents of political and media polarisation do not depend on newspapers\u27 dependence on advertisement receipts. I also find that when political parties are not ideologically driven and newspapers have a stronger preference for editorial neutrality, then increase in the public\u27s trust on the newspapers for news consumption leads to increased media and political polarisation
The Impact of Caste on Income Disparity in India Today. A Pan-India Panel Data Approach
India has enacted several affirmative action policies since the 1990s to benefit the lower castes. This paper investigates if caste still affect an individual’s income in India today. Previous studies in this field have focused on specific regions or castes, and there is a dearth of pan-India empirical studies using panel data to investigate the relationship between caste and income. There is also a lack of studies that highlight the factors that help accentuate or ameliorate the caste-based income disparity in India. This paper addresses these gaps. The sample used for this paper is composed of respondents from all across India. Using the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) panel data, it is found that although the impact of caste on income has reduced, lower caste individuals’ income is still lower than that of their upper caste counterparts. The paper also finds evidence that the effects of caste on income are ameliorated in rural areas and that higher state-level GDP per capita and attainment of at least high school-level qualifications also contribute to reducing the impact of caste on income. Finally, this paper finds that the lower the caste, the stronger the ameliorating effect of attaining a high school-level qualification and state-level GDP per capita
DALE: Generative Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Legal NLP
We present DALE, a novel and effective generative Data Augmentation framework
for low-resource LEgal NLP. DALE addresses the challenges existing frameworks
pose in generating effective data augmentations of legal documents - legal
language, with its specialized vocabulary and complex semantics, morphology,
and syntax, does not benefit from data augmentations that merely rephrase the
source sentence. To address this, DALE, built on an Encoder-Decoder Language
Model, is pre-trained on a novel unsupervised text denoising objective based on
selective masking - our masking strategy exploits the domain-specific language
characteristics of templatized legal documents to mask collocated spans of
text. Denoising these spans helps DALE acquire knowledge about legal concepts,
principles, and language usage. Consequently, it develops the ability to
generate coherent and diverse augmentations with novel contexts. Finally, DALE
performs conditional generation to generate synthetic augmentations for
low-resource Legal NLP tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DALE on 13
datasets spanning 6 tasks and 4 low-resource settings. DALE outperforms all our
baselines, including LLMs, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements
of 1%-50%.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 Main Conference. Code:
https://github.com/Sreyan88/DAL
ASPIRE: Language-Guided Augmentation for Robust Image Classification
Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly
relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the
class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world
atypical scenarios where such features are absent. Supplementing the training
dataset with images without such spurious features can aid robust learning
against spurious correlations via better generalization. This paper presents
ASPIRE (Language-guided data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a
simple yet effective solution for expanding the training dataset with synthetic
images without spurious features. ASPIRE, guided by language, generates these
images without requiring any form of additional supervision or existing
examples. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background
features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced
language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously
correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image
generation model to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious
features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ASPIRE on 4 datasets, including
the very challenging Hard ImageNet dataset, and 9 baselines and show that
ASPIRE improves the classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. Code
soon at: https://github.com/Sreyan88/ASPIRE.Comment: Pre-print Under Revie
CompA: Addressing the Gap in Compositional Reasoning in Audio-Language Models
A fundamental characteristic of audio is its compositional nature.
Audio-language models (ALMs) trained using a contrastive approach (e.g., CLAP)
that learns a shared representation between audio and language modalities have
improved performance in many downstream applications, including zero-shot audio
classification, audio retrieval, etc. However, the ability of these models to
effectively perform compositional reasoning remains largely unexplored and
necessitates additional research. In this paper, we propose CompA, a collection
of two expert-annotated benchmarks with a majority of real-world audio samples,
to evaluate compositional reasoning in ALMs. Our proposed CompA-order evaluates
how well an ALM understands the order or occurrence of acoustic events in
audio, and CompA-attribute evaluates attribute binding of acoustic events. An
instance from either benchmark consists of two audio-caption pairs, where both
audios have the same acoustic events but with different compositions. An ALM is
evaluated on how well it matches the right audio to the right caption. Using
this benchmark, we first show that current ALMs perform only marginally better
than random chance, thereby struggling with compositional reasoning. Next, we
propose CompA-CLAP, where we fine-tune CLAP using a novel learning method to
improve its compositional reasoning abilities. To train CompA-CLAP, we first
propose improvements to contrastive training with composition-aware hard
negatives, allowing for more focused training. Next, we propose a novel modular
contrastive loss that helps the model learn fine-grained compositional
understanding and overcomes the acute scarcity of openly available
compositional audios. CompA-CLAP significantly improves over all our baseline
models on the CompA benchmark, indicating its superior compositional reasoning
capabilities.Comment: Pre-print under revie
Synthesis and Microstructural Studies of Iron Oxypnictide LaO1-xFxFeAs Superconductors
We report on the synthesis and structural/ microstructural studies of iron
based fluorine doped LaOFeAs superconductors. We have successfully synthesized
fluorine doped superconducting LaO1-xFxFeAs materials by choosing lower
temperature (1150^0C) and longer synthesis duration (60 hours) as compared to
the standard values of these employed in the pioneering first contribution
[Kamihara et al 2008 J Am Chem Soc 130 3296]. Decrease of lattice parameters as
determined by x-ray diffraction confirm the substitution of fluorine. The
superconducting transition temperature is 27.5 K which is observed at doping
level of x=0.2. This superconducting material LaO1-xFxFeAs exhibits interesting
microstructural characteristic. This relates to the existence of another
structural phase, besides the standard phase, having c parameters of ~12.67A.
This suggests existence of modulated structure, similar to the cuprates, in
these new oxypnictides. This phase may have new impacts on this new high-Tc
family.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Accepted in Supercod. Sci Technol (2008
Late gadolinium enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance predicts clinical worsening in patients with pulmonary hypertension
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) occurs at the right ventricular (RV) insertion point (RVIP) in patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH) and has been shown to correlate with cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) derived RV indices. However, the prognostic role of RVIP-LGE and other CMR-derived parameters of RV function are not well established. Our aim was to evaluate the predictive value of contrast-enhanced CMR in patients with PH.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>RV size, ejection fraction (RVEF), and the presence of RVIP-LGE were determined in 58 patients with PH referred for CMR. All patients underwent right heart catheterization, exercise testing, and N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) evaluation; results of which were included in the final analysis if performed within 4 months of the CMR study. Patients were followed for the primary endpoint of time to clinical worsening (death, decompensated right ventricular heart failure, initiation of prostacyclin, or lung transplantation).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Overall, 40/58 (69%) of patients had RVIP-LGE. Patients with RVIP- LGE had larger right ventricular volume index, lower RVEF, and higher mean pulmonary artery pressure (mPAP), all p < 0.05. During the follow-up period of 10.2 ± 6.3 months, 19 patients reached the primary endpoint. In a univariate analysis, RVIP-LGE was a predictor for adverse outcomes (p = 0.026). In a multivariate analysis, CMR-derived RVEF was an independent predictor of clinical worsening (p = 0.036) along with well-established prognostic parameters such as exercise capacity (p = 0.010) and mPAP (p = 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The presence of RVIP-LGE in patients with PH is a marker for more advanced disease and poor prognosis. In addition, this study reveals for the first time that CMR-derived RVEF is an independent non-invasive imaging predictor of adverse outcomes in this patient population.</p
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