Using percolated dependencies for phrase extraction in SMT

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems rely heavily on the quality of the phrase pairs induced from large amounts of training data. Apart from the widely used method of heuristic learning of n-gram phrase translations from word alignments, there are numerous methods for extracting these phrase pairs. One such class of approaches uses translation information encoded in parallel treebanks to extract phrase pairs. Work to date has demonstrated the usefulness of translation models induced from both constituency structure trees and dependency structure trees. Both syntactic annotations rely on the existence of natural language parsers for both the source and target languages. We depart from the norm by directly obtaining dependency parses from constituency structures using head percolation tables. The paper investigates the use of aligned chunks induced from percolated dependencies in French–English SMT and contrasts it with the aforementioned extracted phrases. We observe that adding phrase pairs from any other method improves translation performance over the baseline n-gram-based system, percolated dependencies are a good substitute for parsed dependencies, and that supplementing with our novel head percolation-induced chunks shows a general trend toward improving all system types across two data sets up to a 5.26% relative increase in BLEU

Spatiotemporal Regularity in Networks with Stochastically Varying Links

In this work we investigate time varying networks with complex dynamics at the nodes. We consider two scenarios of network change in an interval of time: first, we have the case where each link can change with probability pt, i.e. the network changes occur locally and independently at each node. Secondly we consider the case where the entire connectivity matrix changes with probability pt, i.e. the change is global. We show that network changes, occurring both locally and globally, yield an enhanced range of synchronization. When the connections are changed slowly (i.e. pt is low) the nodes display nearly synchronized intervals interrupted by intermittent unsynchronized chaotic bursts. However when the connections are switched quickly (i.e. pt is large), the intermittent behavior quickly settles down to a steady synchronized state. Furthermore we find that the mean time taken to reach synchronization from generic random initial states is significantly reduced when the underlying links change more rapidly. We also analyze the probabilistic dynamics of the system with changing connectivity and the stable synchronized range thus obtained is in broad agreement with those observed numerically.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, Keywords: Complex Networks, Temporal Networks, Synchronization, Coupled Map Lattic

Book review: biopolitics of security: a political analytic of finitude

Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory. Ankit Kumar argues that although the book is dense and written in a language that would connect only to academic audience, this book will appeal to a wide-range of specialists from those in theory and philosophy of security and government, global terror, politics, sociology and human geography

Book review: Age of entanglement: German and Indian intellectuals across Empire by Kris Manjapara

"Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire." Kris Manjapara. Harvard University Press. January 2014. --- In this book, Kris Manjapara sets out to explore patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. The author attempts to trace the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Ankit Kumar recommends this book to those studying world history, geopolitics, postcolonialism and development

#IWD2016 Book review: the biopolitics of gender by Jemima Repo

In The Biopolitics of Gender, Jemima Repo traces a genealogy of ‘gender’, arguing that it is not an inherently feminist term, but rather emerged historically from the study of intersex and transgender people in the fields of sexology and psychology in the 1950s and 1960s. Positioning gender as a historically located biopolitical apparatus, Repo therefore questions its utility for contemporary feminist theory and politics. Ankit Kumar finds this a highly useful book for those interested in feminist thought as well as biopower, and hopes for future dialogue with works from the Global South that can contribute to forging a wider genealogy of ‘gender’

MaTrEx: the DCU machine translation system for ICON 2008

In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation system developed at DCU that was used for our participation in the NLP Tools Contest of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON 2008). This was our first ever attempt at working on any Indian language. In this participation, we focus on various techniques for word and phrase alignment to improve system quality. For the English-Hindi translation task we exploit source-language reordering. We also carried out experiments combining both in-domain and out-of-domain data to improve the system performance and, as a post-processing step we transliterate out-of-vocabulary items