Economic co-operation in South Asia: The Dilemma of SAFTA and beyond

This paper attempts to evaluate the Pareto optimality of SAFTA for all the member states. Besides, the welfare optimality of three other alternative sets of coordinated trade policies that go beyond SAFTA has also been studied here. These include (a) extended preferential trading between SAFTA and three other major trading blocs (ASEAN, NAFTA and EU27), (b) coordinated full trade liberalisation (carried out unilaterally or as part of a multilateral agreement) by South Asian countries, and (c) SAFTA plus a customs union (two variants with 5 and 10 CET). The analysis, using the standard static GTAP model, shows that the welfare basis for establishing SAFTA or for deeper trade policy coordination is not very strong. Nor is it obvious that cooperation among the South Asia would be forthcoming given the anticipated welfare impacts.

Trade liberalization, poverty, and food security in India:

food security, Nutrition, Computable general equilibrium (CGE), Globalization, Markets, trade,

Trade Liberalization, Poverty and Food Security in India

This paper attempts to assess the impact of trade liberalization on growth, poverty, and food security in India with the help of a national level computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. It shows that GDP growth and income poverty reduction that might occur following trade liberalization need not necessarily result in an improvement in the food security / nutritional status of the poor. Evidence from simulations of (partial) trade reforms reflecting a possible Doha-like scenario show that the bottom 30% of the population in both rural and urban areas suffer a decline in calorie and protein intake, in contrast to the rest of the population, even as all households increase their intake of fats. Thus, the outcome on food security / status with regard to individual nutrients depends crucially on the movements in the relative prices of different commodities along with the change in income levels. These results show that trade policy analysis should consider indicators of food security in addition to overall growth and poverty traditionally considered in such studies.Doha negotiations, India trade policy, poverty, food security, CGE model

Putting the Horse Before the Cart:A Generator-Evaluator Framework for Question Generation from Text

Automatic question generation (QG) is a useful yet challenging task in NLP. Recent neural network-based approaches represent the state-of-the-art in this task. In this work, we attempt to strengthen them significantly by adopting a holistic and novel generator-evaluator framework that directly optimizes objectives that reward semantics and structure. The {\it generator} is a sequence-to-sequence model that incorporates the {\it structure} and {\it semantics} of the question being generated. The generator predicts an answer in the passage that the question can pivot on. Employing the copy and coverage mechanisms, it also acknowledges other contextually important (and possibly rare) keywords in the passage that the question needs to conform to, while not redundantly repeating words. The {\it evaluator} model evaluates and assigns a reward to each predicted question based on its conformity to the {\it structure} of ground-truth questions. We propose two novel QG-specific reward functions for text conformity and answer conformity of the generated question. The evaluator also employs structure-sensitive rewards based on evaluation measures such as BLEU, GLEU, and ROUGE-L, which are suitable for QG. In contrast, most of the previous works only optimize the cross-entropy loss, which can induce inconsistencies between training (objective) and testing (evaluation) measures. Our evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the widely-used SQuAD benchmark as per both automatic and human evaluation.Comment: 10 pages, The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2019

Development of a thermal and structural analysis procedure for cooled radial turbines

A procedure for computing the rotor temperature and stress distributions in a cooled radial turbine are considered. Existing codes for modeling the external mainstream flow and the internal cooling flow are used to compute boundary conditions for the heat transfer and stress analysis. The inviscid, quasi three dimensional code computes the external free stream velocity. The external velocity is then used in a boundary layer analysis to compute the external heat transfer coefficients. Coolant temperatures are computed by a viscous three dimensional internal flow cade for the momentum and energy equation. These boundary conditions are input to a three dimensional heat conduction code for the calculation of rotor temperatures. The rotor stress distribution may be determined for the given thermal, pressure and centrifugal loading. The procedure is applied to a cooled radial turbine which will be tested at the NASA Lewis Research Center. Representative results are given

Vocative Interjections in Address Forms in Bhojpuri: A Study of Honorifics

The present study examines the use of vocative interjections in the address forms and the politeness strategies that could be correlated with the sociocultural variables such as age, gender, kinship, social status, and educational achievements. Toward the end of this study, a situational analysis of the use of the vocative interjections and politeness strategies will also be provided. Since address forms are an important aspect of the interpersonal communication, they manifest both the identity and the status of the speaker and the person addressed (Mehrotra 1986: 80). In this paper, emphasis is put on the speaker’s choice of vocative interjection to mark the different honorific level. It will also purport how sociocultural variables affect the choice of vocative interjection in the address forms.The present study examines the use of vocative interjections in the address forms and the politeness strategies that could be correlated with the sociocultural variables such as age, gender, kinship, social status, and educational achievements. Toward the end of this study, a situational analysis of the use of the vocative interjections and politeness strategies will also be provided. Since address forms are an important aspect of the interpersonal communication, they manifest both the identity and the status of the speaker and the person addressed (Mehrotra 1986: 80). In this paper, emphasis is put on the speaker’s choice of vocative interjection to mark the different honorific level. It will also purport how sociocultural variables affect the choice of vocative interjection in the address forms

Spoof detection using time-delay shallow neural network and feature switching

Detecting spoofed utterances is a fundamental problem in voice-based biometrics. Spoofing can be performed either by logical accesses like speech synthesis, voice conversion or by physical accesses such as replaying the pre-recorded utterance. Inspired by the state-of-the-art \emph{x}-vector based speaker verification approach, this paper proposes a time-delay shallow neural network (TD-SNN) for spoof detection for both logical and physical access. The novelty of the proposed TD-SNN system vis-a-vis conventional DNN systems is that it can handle variable length utterances during testing. Performance of the proposed TD-SNN systems and the baseline Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) is analyzed on the ASV-spoof-2019 dataset. The performance of the systems is measured in terms of the minimum normalized tandem detection cost function (min-t-DCF). When studied with individual features, the TD-SNN system consistently outperforms the GMM system for physical access. For logical access, GMM surpasses TD-SNN systems for certain individual features. When combined with the decision-level feature switching (DLFS) paradigm, the best TD-SNN system outperforms the best baseline GMM system on evaluation data with a relative improvement of 48.03\% and 49.47\% for both logical and physical access, respectively

Situational awareness / situational intelligence system and method for analyzing, monitoring, predicting and controlling electric power systems

A system and method for modeling, controlling and analyzing electrical grids for use by control room operators and automatic control provides a multi-dimensional, multi-layer cellular computational network (CCN) comprising an information layer; a knowledge layer; a decision-making layer; and an action layer; wherein each said layer of said CCN represents one of a variable in an electric power system. Situational awareness/situational intelligence is provided therefrom so that the operators and grid control systems can make the correct decision and take informed actions under difficult circumstances to maintain a high degree of grid integrity and reliability by analyzing multiple variables within a volume of time and space to provide an understanding of their meaning and predict their states in the near future where these multiple variables can have different timescales