LDC Arabic Treebanks and Associated Corpora: Data Divisions Manual

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has developed hundreds of data corpora for natural language processing (NLP) research. Among these are a number of annotated treebank corpora for Arabic. Typically, these corpora consist of a single collection of annotated documents. NLP research, however, usually requires multiple data sets for the purposes of training models, developing techniques, and final evaluation. Therefore it becomes necessary to divide the corpora used into the required data sets (divisions). This document details a set of rules that have been defined to enable consistent divisions for old and new Arabic treebanks (ATB) and related corpora.Comment: 14 pages; one cove

Learning with Students at the Margins: Creighton University’s Pilot Program with Jesuit Worldwide Learning 2017-2018

Creighton University in cooperation with Jesuit Worldwide Learning: Higher Education at the Margins (formerly Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins) piloted a program in 2017-2018 in which 8 Creighton University undergraduates in the College of Arts & Sciences took an online course in Jesuit Worldwide Learning’s Diploma in Liberal Studies and a newly developed online course at Creighton University that framed their online experience in a global classroom with students living at the margins through readings, videos, discussions, reflections, and community service. This small-scale qualitative study seeks to understand what benefits arise for privileged students in a global classroom with students at the margins who also take an accompanying course designed to enhance this experience. Drawing upon questionnaires, an interview, and an essay, these findings are primarily descriptive in nature and reveal that students gained knowledge of and appreciation for the empowerment of (a Jesuit) education, displayed empathy with the marginalized populations, increased their self-knowledge, and also discovered a commitment to serve others

Automatic Identification of Errors in Arabic Handwriting Recognition

Arabic handwriting recognition (HR) is a challenging problem due to Arabic's connected letter forms, consonantal diacritics and rich morphology. In this paper we isolate the task of identification of erroneous words in HR from the task of producing corrections for these words. We consider a variety of linguistic (morphological and syntactic) and non-linguistic features to automatically identify these errors. We also consider a learning curve varying in two dimensions: number of segments and number of n-best hypotheses to train on. We additionally evaluate the performance on different test sets with different degrees of errors in them. Our best approach achieves a roughly ~20% absolute increase in F-score over a simple but reasonable baseline. A detailed error analysis shows that linguistic features, such as lemma models, help improve HR-error detection precisely where we expect them to: semantically inconsistent error words

La discriminación de las lesbianas en el derecho español

Treballs Finals de Grau de Dret. Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2014-2015. Tutor: Antonio Giménez MerinoParto de la premisa de que el Estado es el representante de los intereses de la clase dominante y, en tanto que clase esencialmente masculina, contribuye a consolidar el poder de los hombres sobre las mujeres. Dado que el lesbianismo supone una afrenta al patriarcado, el Estado tiene interés en reprimirlo sutilmente, para lo cual se sirve, esencialmente, del silenciamiento y la invisibilización de la realidad lesbiana. La hipótesis que intentaré demostrar a lo largo del trabajo es que el ordenamiento jurídico, aun siendo el reflejo de las contradicciones sociales, favorece, en términos globales, la marginación del lesbianism

Early Greek Philosophy and the Discovery of Nature

Few conceptual discoveries rival the impact of the idea of nature on the development of ancient Greek philosophy. The famous φύσις-νόμος debates of the fifth-century B.C. pit nature against custom as the ultimate guide to human life. Plato’s timeless theory of justice is grounded on a conception of nature dictating what is best. Aristotle likewise develops his systematic understanding of the natural world according to the idea that nature is an inner principle of motion and rest that acts as a final cause. In each of these cases, nature is understood as teleological, i.e. oriented toward an end. But the idea of nature as a way to explain the existence of the cosmos and the identity, growth, and behavior of the entities within it emerges in Greek philosophers that precede Plato, the so-called Presocratics. How did the earliest philosophers conceive of the idea of the nature of things? And to what extent, if any, do the earliest conceptions of nature display purposive features? This dissertation tells the story of the origins and development of the idea of purposive nature in early Greek philosophy. Over the course of six chapters, I develop accounts of substantially different conceptualizations of nature found in ten of the earliest Greek philosophers. Contrary to long-standing scholarly opinion, I argue that no single “Greek concept of nature” in fact exists among the Presocratics, but rather that the idea of nature emerges more dynamically, evolving through critical debate as different thinkers put forth competing theories about what nature is and what it implies. In each theory, however, the unique facets of these different conceptions of nature are marked by elements of purposiveness. Far from being anti-teleological, then, the Presocratic polysemous concept of nature serves as a vital first step in the development of early forms of purposiveness in nature into the more robust teleological conceptions found in Plato and Aristotle. As my account demonstrates, the idea of nature becomes more explicitly purposive over the course of the Presocratic period. Finally, this reading of the early Greek period paints a picture of the way the Presocratic engagement with nature leads to the various “corrupted” views of nature in the φύσις-νόμος debate among the Greek sophists, and ultimately to the suggestion that the Platonic and Aristotelian defense of the value of philosophy is grounded in a defense and development of the idea of purposive nature

CATiB: The Columbia Arabic Treebank

The Columbia Arabic Treebank (CATiB) is a resource for Arabic parsing. CATiB contrasts with previous efforts on Arabic treebanking and treebanking of morphologically rich languages in that it encodes less linguistic information in the interest of speedier annotation of large amounts of text. This paper describes CATiB's representation and annotation procedure, and reports on achieved inter-annotator agreement and annotation speed