The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Postprint (published version

An Analysis of Female Characters in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

La finalidad de esta tesis será el análisis de la novela de Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure. Más concretamente, el estudio y comparación de los dos personajes protagonistas femeninos: Sue Bridehead y Arabella Donn, dos mujeres atrapadas en un contexto determinista y naturalista, marcadas por sus diferentes orígenes y posiciones en la obra. Sue es la individualista, la mujer con ideas muy avanzadas para su tiempo, mientras que Arabella forma parte del folclore rural, y está siempre dispuesta a adaptarse para poder sobrevivir. El trabajo mostrará cómo la dicotomía entre ambas mujeres ofrece una crítica abierta a instituciones como el matrimonio. Asimismo, Hardy ofrece un final que no deja indiferente. La incapacidad de Jude de adaptarse solo le traerá desgracias. La última novela de Thomas Hardy muestra, por consiguiente, la incertidumbre del fin-de-siècle y las diferentes reacciones que sus personajes principales muestran ante esta época de grandes cambios. ABSTRACT The main purpose of this dissertation will be the analysis of Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy and, more specifically, the comparative study between the two main female characters: Sue Bridehead and Arabella Donn, two women trapped in a determinist and naturalist context and marked by their different origins and positions in the book. Sue is the individual, a woman ahead of her time, whereas Arabella is member of the folk and always willing to adapt in order to survive. Moreover, this work will show how the dichotomy encapsulated by these two women launches an open critique against institutions such as marriage. Likewise, Hardy offers an ending that does not leave readers indifferent. Jude’s incapacity to readjust will only bring about disgrace. This novel will therefore show the uncertainty prompted by the fin-de-siècle and the different reactions that the characters show towards these drastic changes. <br /

Chemical simulation of hydrogen generation in a plasma fuel reformer

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-103).A model for a plasma fuel reformer or plasmatron has been developed. The model was based in a series of experiments realized at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center with such a plasmatron. The device is set up to produce syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas mixture) from partial oxidation of any hydrocarbon. We studied the behavior of methane as fuel and used the GRI methane combustion mechanism in our simulations. The goal was to characterize the reactor to be able to understand and predict its performance for a wide range of operating conditions, such as different flow rates, air to fuel flow ratio or power supply. The simulation tool used for this purpose was CHEMKIN 3.7. The fuel reformer was designed as a reactor where combustion is initiated by an electric discharge due to ohmic heating of the arc region. Two different types of reactors were used to model the plasmatron. The Plug Flow Reactor (PLUG) assumed a homogenous zero-dimensional closed system. The Partially Stirred Reactor (PASR) considered random mixing determined by a frequency mixing parameter, which is directly dependant of the system fluid dynamic properties. Experimental results with methane generated 6%-7% molar of hydrogen and 5% of carbon monoxide. Hydrogen and oxygen balance evidenced that water and carbon dioxide are important co-products, obtaining respectively 10% and 3% at the exhaust. Also 15%- 20% of methane and 3%-5% of oxygen remained unreacted. From discharge observations, energy estimations and model simulations, it was found that the electric arc initiates combustion by locally rising the temperature and then propagating the reaction by heat and mass transfer/mixing to the surroundings.(cont.) Simulation results demonstrated that there is an optimum characteristic mixing time for each residence time, depending on the initial temperature reached at the arc. It was also found that the more spread the energy is, or the more mass is heated to a moderate temperature, the better the performance results.by Nuria Margarit Bel.S.M

Multilingual resources for NLP in the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF)

Optimizing the production, maintenance and extension of lexical resources is one the crucial aspects impacting Natural Language Processing (NLP). A second aspect involves optimizing the process leading to their integration in applications. With this respect, we believe that a consensual specification on monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexicons can be a useful aid for the various NLP actors. Within ISO, one purpose of Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO-24613) is to define a standard for lexicons that covers multilingual lexical data

Third version (v4) of the integrated platform and documentation

The deliverable describes the third and final version of the PANACEA platform

D7.4 Third evaluation report. Evaluation of PANACEA v3 and produced resources

D7.4 reports on the evaluation of the different components integrated in the PANACEA third cycle of development as well as the final validation of the platform itself. All validation and evaluation experiments follow the evaluation criteria already described in D7.1. The main goal of WP7 tasks was to test the (technical) functionalities and capabilities of the middleware that allows the integration of the various resource-creation components into an interoperable distributed environment (WP3) and to evaluate the quality of the components developed in WP5 and WP6. The content of this deliverable is thus complementary to D8.2 and D8.3 that tackle advantages and usability in industrial scenarios. It has to be noted that the PANACEA third cycle of development addressed many components that are still under research. The main goal for this evaluation cycle thus is to assess the methods experimented with and their potentials for becoming actual production tools to be exploited outside research labs. For most of the technologies, an attempt was made to re-interpret standard evaluation measures, usually in terms of accuracy, precision and recall, as measures related to a reduction of costs (time and human resources) in the current practices based on the manual production of resources. In order to do so, the different tools had to be tuned and adapted to maximize precision and for some tools the possibility to offer confidence measures that could allow a separation of the resources that still needed manual revision has been attempted. Furthermore, the extension to other languages in addition to English, also a PANACEA objective, has been evaluated. The main facts about the evaluation results are now summarized

LMF for multilingual, specialized lexicons

LMF applied to multilingual and specialized lexicons. Detailed description of the multilingual notation package of LMF. LMF is the ISO standard for NLP lexicons. LMF is designed within TC37

Improving variational autoencoder for text modelling with timestep-wise regularisation

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a popular and powerful model applied to text modelling to generate diverse sentences. However, an issue known as posterior collapse (or KL loss vanishing) happens when the VAE is used in text modelling, where the approximate posterior collapses to the prior, and the model will totally ignore the latent variables and be degraded to a plain language model during text generation. Such an issue is particularly prevalent when RNN-based VAE models are employed for text modelling. In this paper, we propose a simple, generic architecture called Timestep-Wise Regularisation VAE (TWR-VAE), which can effectively avoid posterior collapse and can be applied to any RNN-based VAE models. The effectiveness and versatility of our model are demonstrated in different tasks, including language modelling and dialogue response generation

Sustainability strategy and plans beyond the end of the project

The central objective of the Metanet4u project is to contribute to the establishment of a pan-European digital platform that makes available language resources and services, encompassing both datasets and software tools, for speech and language processing, and supports a new generation of exchange facilities for them.Preprin

D7.1. Criteria for evaluation of resources, technology and integration.

This deliverable defines how evaluation is carried out at each integration cycle in the PANACEA project. As PANACEA aims at producing large scale resources, evaluation becomes a critical and challenging issue. Critical because it is important to assess the quality of the results that should be delivered to users. Challenging because we prospect rather new areas, and through a technical platform: some new methodologies will have to be explored or old ones to be adapted