Summarising News Stories for Children

This paper proposes a system to automatically summarise news articles in a manner suitable for children by deriving and combining statistical ratings for how important, positively oriented and easy to read each sentence is. Our results demonstrate that this approach succeeds in generating summaries that are suitable for children, and that there is further scope for combining this extractive approach with abstractive methods used in text implification

SaferDrive: an NLG-based Behaviour Change Support System for Drivers

Despite the long history of Natural Language Generation (NLG) research, the potential for influencing real world behaviour through automatically generated texts has not received much attention. In this paper, we present SaferDrive, a behaviour change support system that uses NLG and telematic data in order to create weekly textual feedback for automobile drivers, which is delivered through a smartphone application. Usage-based car insurances use sensors to track driver behaviour. Although the data collected by such insurances could provide detailed feedback about the driving style, they are typically withheld from the driver and used only to calculate insurance premiums. SaferDrive instead provides detailed textual feedback about the driving style, with the intent to help drivers improve their driving habits. We evaluate the system with real drivers and report that the textual feedback generated by our system does have a positive influence on driving habits, especially with regard to speeding

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, κ=0.65 and κ=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard

Dynamical Mean-Field Theory of Resonating Valence Bond Antiferromagnets

We propose a theory of the spin dynamics of frustrated quantum antiferromagnets, which is based on an effective action for a plaquette embedded in a self-consistent bath. This approach, supplemented by a low-energy projection, is applied to the kagome antiferromagnet. We find that a spin-liquid regime extends to very low energy, in which local correlation functions have a slow decay in time, well described by a power law behaviour and $\omega/T$ scaling of the response function: $\chi''(\omega)\propto \omega^{-\alpha}F(\omega/T)$.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; contains some clarifications on the role of the triplet states and the triplet ga

Suction Measurement of Bentonite Using Filter Paper Technique

Bentonite is used as buffer material in nuclear waste disposal for which its characteristics should be studied. Soil - water characteristics curve (SWCC) is important to understand the unsaturated soil behaviour. The SWCC provides an understanding between the mass of water in a soil and the energy state of the water phase. Curve between soil suction and water content or degree of saturation gives soil-water characteristic curve. In order determine the relationship between suction and water content of unsaturated soil, filter paper technique can be used. The method is simple, economical and provides result with reasonable accuracy. It is an indirect suction measurement technique. Contact and Non – contact methods of filter paper technique determines the total and matric suction values, respectively. In the current study, bentonite was obtained from Bikaner, Rajasthan. Suction versus water content SWCC was established for the specimens of different dry densities and results are calculated using ASTM correlations. Experimentally obtained suction versus water content relationships were compared with that of the results obtained from Fredlund and Xing (1994) and van Genutchen (1980) models. The study revealed that with the increase in water content, suction value decreases but shows no pattern with dry density. Theoretical models were used to find suction values and compared with experimental results whereas van Genutchen model gives more accurate results than that of Fredlund& Xing model