Determinants of vertical coordination in buyer-seller relations: Exploratory findings from a developing economy

This study aims at understanding determinants of vertical coordination for firms in developing economies by conducting exploratory study in Tanzania. The study is centred on business - to business buyer -seller relations. Primary data were collected from buying side of the relationship. The main supplier of each firm was identified and used for answering the questionnaire. Findings suggest contractual flexibility to have higher significant positive effect in determining vertical coordination. The interaction effect between buyer asset specificity and contractual flexibility was also significant, while asset specificity by itself was not found to be significant. These prelimenary findings suggest the strength of vertical coordination relies to extent onwhether parties in relationship agree to be flexible in their contracts

Multiple segmentations of Thai sentences for neural machine translation

Thai is a low-resource language, so it is often the case that data is not available in sufficient quantities to train an Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model which perform to a high level of quality. In addition, the Thai script does not use white spaces to delimit the boundaries between words, which adds more complexity when building sequence to sequence models. In this work, we explore how to augment a set of English–Thai parallel data by replicating sentence-pairs with different word segmentation methods on Thai, as training data for NMT model training. Using different merge operations of Byte Pair Encoding, different segmentations of Thai sentences can be obtained. The experiments show that combining these datasets, performance is improved for NMT models trained with a dataset that has been split using a supervised splitting tool

Improved real-time imaging spectrometer

An improved AOTF-based imaging spectrometer that offers several advantages over prior art AOTF imaging spectrometers is presented. The ability to electronically set the bandpass wavelength provides observational flexibility. Various improvements in optical architecture provide simplified magnification variability, improved image resolution and light throughput efficiency and reduced sensitivity to ambient light. Two embodiments of the invention are: (1) operation in the visible/near-infrared domain of wavelength range 0.48 to 0.76 microns; and (2) infrared configuration which operates in the wavelength range of 1.2 to 2.5 microns