Improving Lexical Choice in Neural Machine Translation

We explore two solutions to the problem of mistranslating rare words in neural machine translation. First, we argue that the standard output layer, which computes the inner product of a vector representing the context with all possible output word embeddings, rewards frequent words disproportionately, and we propose to fix the norms of both vectors to a constant value. Second, we integrate a simple lexical module which is jointly trained with the rest of the model. We evaluate our approaches on eight language pairs with data sizes ranging from 100k to 8M words, and achieve improvements of up to +4.3 BLEU, surpassing phrase-based translation in nearly all settings.Comment: Accepted at NAACL HLT 201

Research paper: firm dynamics and productivity growth in Australian manufacturing and business services, Oct 2014

This paper examines the productivity of firms in manufacturing and business services, particularly the contribution of entry and exit to aggregate productivity growth. Abstract Competitive markets foster the reallocation of inputs where resources are channelled from less competitive to more competitive firms, and hence increase aggregate productivity. The turnover of firms entering and exiting industries is part of this competitive process as entrants vie for market shares and exiters cease consuming inputs. There is a large body of theoretical and empirical work on firm dynamics, yet to date very few large scale studies have been conducted in Australia due to limited access to firm-level data. This study uses a large panel of businesses, drawn from administrative data provided to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which allows us to track firms over the nine years from 2002–03 to 2010–11. Using this comprehensive panel we examine the productivity of firms in manufacturing and business services and, in particular measure the contribution of entry and exit to aggregate productivity growth. We find that exiting firms not only have low productivity relative to established firms in the year prior to exit, but the productivity gap is observed many years before they depart the market. Entrants grow most rapidly in their second year of operation, but after five years are still ten per cent below the productivity level of established firms. At the division level, the main driver of productivity growth is continuing firms, and the net impact of firm turnover is relatively modest. However, among the studied industries, net entry can be significant – a fact masked by the higher level of aggregation. Over the nine year period, entry lowered aggregate productivity growth by 13 per cent in manufacturing and 23 per cent in business services as entrants were less productive than continuing firms. In contrast, exiting firms raised productivity by 12 per cent in manufacturing, and 23 per cent in business services

A geometric proof of the existence of definable Whitney stratifications

We give a geometric proof of existence of Whitney stratifications of definable sets in o-minimal structures.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

No Smoking Guns Here: Residence Life Directors' Perspectives on Concealed Carry in On-Campus Living Communities

The role of student affairs educators is to ensure that students not only obtain an educational experience, but also that out-of-classroom experiences contribute to holistic development. In particular, student affairs professionals often coordinate residential living, student activities, and advising programs. These programmatic offerings need to account for the diversifying student body and respond to shifting political landscapes. Student affairs practitioners face daily dilemmas that require decisions grounded in multicultural competent critical thinking and acute awareness (Pope, Reynolds, & Mueller, 2004; Watt, 2015). An area engendering more attention is the role of concealed carry weapons on college campuses. The emergence of gun violence within college and university settings beginning in 2007 with the Virginia Tech shootings launched myriad discussions about prevention and accountability among campus leadership, concerned citizens, and state legislatures. Within student affairs, conversations about students' safety always have been a priority, so addressing gun violence on campus moved higher on the discussion list. [Discussion questions developed by Alyse Gray Parker.