Multi-Agent Simulation of Emergence of Schwa Deletion Pattern in Hindi

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in multi-agent simulation techniques for exploring the nature of language change. However, a lack of appropriate validation of simulation experiments against real language data often calls into question the general applicability of these methods in modeling realistic language change. We try to address this issue here by making an attempt to model the phenomenon of schwa deletion in Hindi through a multi-agent simulation framework. The pattern of Hindi schwa deletion and its diachronic nature are well studied, not only out of general linguistic inquiry, but also to facilitate Hindi grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, which is a preprocessing step to text-to-speech synthesis. We show that under certain conditions, the schwa deletion pattern observed in modern Hindi emerges in the system from an initial state of no deletion. The simulation framework described in this work can be extended to model other phonological changes as well.Language Change, Linguistic Agent, Language Game, Multi-Agent Simulation, Schwa Deletion

Improving cross language information retrieval using corpus based query suggestion approach

Users seeking information may not find relevant information pertaining to their information need in a specific language. But information may be available in a language different from their own, but users may not know that language. Thus users may experience difficulty in accessing the information present in different languages. Since the retrieval process depends on the translation of the user query, there are many issues in getting the right translation of the user query. For a pair of languages chosen by a user, resources, like incomplete dictionary, inaccurate machine translation system may exist. These resources may be insufficient to map the query terms in one language to its equivalent terms in another language. Also for a given query, there might exist multiple correct translations. The underlying corpus evidence may suggest a clue to select a probable set of translations that could eventually perform a better information retrieval. In this paper, we present a cross language information retrieval approach to effectively retrieve information present in a language other than the language of the user query using the corpus driven query suggestion approach. The idea is to utilize the corpus based evidence of one language to improve the retrieval and re-ranking of news documents in the other language. We use FIRE corpora - Tamil and English news collections in our experiments and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed cross language information retrieval approach

Teacher Attitude towards Emergency Remote teaching: challenges in Indian academe

The present study intends to explore the challenges of teachers’ attitudes during Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) in higher educational institutions (HEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also investigates whether teacher age is in any way a mediating factor for teacher attitude. The transformative sequential research design of mixed methods was employed on a random sample of 90 participants pooled ever since the lockdown had been announced in India (March 23, 2020). The qualitative data (text), thus obtained, has been categorized into six challenges, sorted into categories, and transformed into quantitative data (code) for the Chi-square test and interpretation. The Chi-square test confirms no significant association between challenges in ERT identified by teachers’ attitudes and teachers’ ages. The study discusses the challenges felt by teachers and the probable ways of mitigation them for running remote teaching during this pandemic

Analyzing the Socio-Cognitive Structure of an Economic Research Community

Research papers published by authors in various fields give rise to huge datasets. A social network of the authors can be built up using these datasets by treating the references between papers as the links between the authors publishing those papers. These networks also have a cognitive structure to them based on the themes that various authors discuss. In this thesis we describe the procedure of building up a bibliographical tool for presenting a dataset of research papers in a particular field. We show the results that this tool produces on the dataset downloaded from the Repec website. We also describe a few mathematical measures that analyze the relationship between the cognitive and social structure of the network created from this dataset. The results produced by this analysis are in coherence with the results produced by different researchers in the past

Analyzing the Socio-Cognitive Structure of an Economic Research Community

Research papers published by authors in various fields give rise to huge datasets. A social network of the authors can be built up using these datasets by treating the references between papers as the links between the authors publishing those papers. These networks also have a cognitive structure to them based on the themes that various authors discuss. In this thesis we describe the procedure of building up a bibliographical tool for presenting a dataset of research papers in a particular field. We show the results that this tool produces on the dataset downloaded from the Repec website. We also describe a few mathematical measures that analyze the relationship between the cognitive and social structure of the network created from this dataset. The results produced by this analysis are in coherence with the results produced by different researchers in the past.Social Network Analysis; Cognitive Structure of network; Centrality in a network

Medical Entity Linking using Triplet Network

Entity linking (or Normalization) is an essential task in text mining that maps the entity mentions in the medical text to standard entities in a given Knowledge Base (KB). This task is of great importance in the medical domain. It can also be used for merging different medical and clinical ontologies. In this paper, we center around the problem of disease linking or normalization. This task is executed in two phases: candidate generation and candidate scoring. In this paper, we present an approach to rank the candidate Knowledge Base entries based on their similarity with disease mention. We make use of the Triplet Network for candidate ranking. While the existing methods have used carefully generated sieves and external resources for candidate generation, we introduce a robust and portable candidate generation scheme that does not make use of the hand-crafted rules. Experimental results on the standard benchmark NCBI disease dataset demonstrate that our system outperforms the prior methods by a significant margin.Comment: ClinicalNLP@NAACL 201

Enhanced operational stability through interfacial modification by active encapsulation of perovskite solar cells

Encapsulates are, in general, the passive components of any photovoltaic device that provides the required shielding from the externally stimulated degradation. Here we provide comprehensive physical insight depicting a rather non-trivial active nature, in contrast to the supposedly passive, atomic layer deposition (ALD) grown Al2O3 encapsulate layer on the hybrid perovskite [(FA0.83MA0.17)0.95Cs0.05PbI2.5Br0.5] photovoltaic device having the configuration: glass/FTO/SnO2/perovskite/spiro-OMeTAD/Au/(±) Al2O3. By combining various electrical characterization techniques, our experimental observations indicate that the ALD chemistry produces considerable enhancement of the electronic conductivity of the spiro-OMeTAD hole transport medium (HTM), resulting in electronic modification of the perovskite/HTM interface. Subsequently, the modified interface provides better hole extraction and lesser ionic accumulation at the interface, resulting in a significant lowering of the burn-in decay and nearly unchanged charge transport parameters explicitly under the course of continuous operation. Unlike the unencapsulated device, the modified electronic structure in the Al2O3 coated device is essentially the principal reason for better performance stability. Data presented in this communication suggest that the ionic accumulation at the spiro-OMeTAD/perovskite interface triggers the device degradation in the uncoated devices, which is eventually followed by material degradation, which can be avoided by active encapsulation