Augmenting Librispeech with French Translations: A Multimodal Corpus for Direct Speech Translation Evaluation

Recent works in spoken language translation (SLT) have attempted to build end-to-end speech-to-text translation without using source language transcription during learning or decoding. However, while large quantities of parallel texts (such as Europarl, OpenSubtitles) are available for training machine translation systems, there are no large (100h) and open source parallel corpora that include speech in a source language aligned to text in a target language. This paper tries to fill this gap by augmenting an existing (monolingual) corpus: LibriSpeech. This corpus, used for automatic speech recognition, is derived from read audiobooks from the LibriVox project, and has been carefully segmented and aligned. After gathering French e-books corresponding to the English audio-books from LibriSpeech, we align speech segments at the sentence level with their respective translations and obtain 236h of usable parallel data. This paper presents the details of the processing as well as a manual evaluation conducted on a small subset of the corpus. This evaluation shows that the automatic alignments scores are reasonably correlated with the human judgments of the bilingual alignment quality. We believe that this corpus (which is made available online) is useful for replicable experiments in direct speech translation or more general spoken language translation experiments.Comment: LREC 2018, Japa

İstinye Koyu ve İstinye Tersanesi

Taha Toros Arşivi, Dosya No: 51-İstinyeİstanbul Kalkınma Ajansı (TR10/14/YEN/0033) İstanbul Development Agency (TR10/14/YEN/0033

David Miller\u27s Nationalism: A Critique

This thesis examines David Miller’s defence of nationalism. It considers what is termed “the compatriot partiality thesis”, that is, the view that we are justified in giving our compatriots more moral consideration than we give to outsiders. It examines the debate between Miller’s own ethical particularism and the ethical universalist position. Miller’s particularist view rests in part on his view that political theory must embrace a feasibility constraint, and his case for that is examined. Finally, Miller claims that his defence of nationalism is consistent with the endorsement of human rights. The thesis examines his attempt to incorporate an idea of human rights, and concludes that his attempt to do so is inconsistent with his ethical particularism

A Quest to Identify the Emerging Leadership Skills in VUCA World and Investigation of Their Applications in Various Organizational Levels and Security Environments

The theoretical framework of this research is based on “skills approach” that emphasizes the leader’s capabilities (skills, knowledge, and capabilities) that can be learned, taught, and fostered. VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment is chosen as the focal point of this research as the leadership skills are extracted from studies referring to such environment. Although the acronym is dominantly used in management and business domains, the military also uses it to describe the complex operational environments like in Iraq and Afghanistan. The identification of individual leadership skills and delivering the right skill, at the right time, to the right individual is the only way to employ the “employee/leader we need” instead of “employee/leader we have.” It is harder than ever to specify with any degree of certainty which skills are required. It is also needed to have quality leaders, who need to qualify as both experts and generalists at the same time. The primary purpose of the research is to identify, categorize the emerging leadership skills required in a VUCA environment, and also to examine how the military officers perceive the identified emerging skills in various security environments and organizational levels. To achieve this, the research employs the hybrid method. The qualitative part delivers a content analysis on the identification and the categorization of emerging leadership skills that feed into the survey instrument used in quantitative part to investigate the relationship between security environments and application of these emerging leadership skills as military officers perceive it. The fact that the primary data is collected from active and retired military officers from various nations, services, and ranks makes this research more noteworthy. This research fills a gap by identifying and categorizing leadership skills that VUCA environment necessitates in broad and practically applicable perspective and also provides empirical evidence to show that military officers favor some leadership skills more than others in the different security environment and organizational level. The findings will contribute to the leadership and organizational management domains by providing a broad and holistic perspective to improve our understanding of leadership skillsets in VUCA environment and by increasing the knowledge on skills and organizational-security context relationship. The results show that retired military officers think statistically significantly different than those on active duty. The results of this research also demonstrate a need to create a better understanding of the VUCA dynamics in military, and the findings can be used as the foundation for further research in the area of VUCA leadership skills

A Study on the Hydrodynamics of a Bench-Scale Top-Fed Bubbling Fluidized Bed Gasifier using Biomass and Coal as Feedstocks

The production of synthetic gas (syngas) from renewable or carbon-neutral sources can significantly reduce greenhouse and other emissions associated with conventional fuels. One of the most promising technologies to efficiently convert carbonaceous feedstocks such as biomass, coal, or municipal waste into syngas for transportation, power, heat, electricity generation, and or production of added-value chemicals is the bubbling fluidized-bed gasifier (BFBG). However, the gasification process inside a BFBG is a very complex high-temperature multiphase flow phenomena still not well understood, particularly when binary mixtures are investigated. As a result, despite the numerous correlations in the literature developed to predict the hydrodynamics inside a BFBG, the results are inconsistent, particularly for the minimum fluidization velocity, Umf. As predicting the fluidization hydrodynamics is paramount for optimum gasification, this investigation observed the effect of some of the most important fluidization parameters such as the particle size and shape, fluidizing gas properties, moisture content, bed aspect ratio etc. This study designed and built two separate experimental platforms: a bench-scale BFBG with automated feeding and a cold flow model with the same geometry and dimensions as the BFBG. The experiments used well-characterized (i.e., known size and shape distribution, density, moisture content, initial mixing condition) inert material (sand, glass beads) and feedstock (biomass (sawdust) and coal). The cold flow investigation results showed that the initial mixing conditions for binary mixtures with biomass had a significant effect on the measured Umf. For example, the relative error in predicting Umf using the available correlation in the literature increased for segregated mixtures. Moreover, lower relative errors in Umf suggested that the fluidization quality was better if the mixture was initially well-mixed (premixed). In addition, a larger biomass moisture content decreased Umfof premixed binary mixtures but increased the relative error between the predicted and the experimental Reynolds number, Re. After reaching the minimum fluidization condition, the fluidization behavior and mixing at various flow rates were also recorded with a high-speed camera. The processed images were used to determine the interval for the fluidizing-gas superficial velocity that produced the best mixing for a particular mixture composition and initial conditions. The images showed that while segregated biomass mixtures did not mix if the bed aspect ratio was larger than five, coal mixtures did mix homogeneously along the reactor bed. Finally, experiments performed at temperatures up to 800 °C showed a large increase in the bed pressure drop at minimum fluidization velocity with the bed temperature due to the large effect on the fluidizing gas density and viscosity. On the contrary, Umf decreased when the process temperature increased. Finally, preliminary biomass and coal gasification experiments in the BFBG setup produced acceptable syngas composition, suggesting that the BFBG developed in this study can be successfully used to further investigate biomass and coal gasification