Report of Recommendations to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, June 30, 2004

State Audit Reports

Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies: PANACEA

El objetivo de PANACEA es engranar diferentes herramientas avanzadas para construir una fábrica de Recursos Lingüísticos (RL), una línea de producción que automatice los pasos implicados en la adquisición, producción, actualización y mantenimiento de los RL que la Traducción Automática y otras tecnologías lingüísticas, necesitan.

PANACEA (Platform for Automatic, Normalised Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies)

The objective of PANACEA is to build a factory of LRs that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of LRs required by MT systems and by other applications based on language technologies, and simplifies eventual issues regarding intellectual property rights. This automation will cut down the cost, time and human effort significantly. These reductions of costs and time are the only way to guarantee the continuous supply of LRs that MT and other language technologies will be demanding in the multilingual Europe.

Towards the automatic merging of language resources

Language Resources are a critical component for Natural Language Processing applications. Throughout the years many resources were manually created for the same task, but with different granularity and coverage information. To create richer resources for a broad range of potential reuses, nformation from all resources has to be joined into one. The hight cost of comparing and merging different resources by hand has been a bottleneck for merging existing resources. With the objective of reducing human intervention, we present a new method for automating merging resources. We have addressed the merging of two verbs subcategorization frame (SCF) lexica for Spanish. The results achieved, a new lexicon with enriched information and conflicting information signalled, reinforce our idea that this approach can be applied for other task of NLP.

Towards the Fully Automatic Merging of Lexical Resources: A Step Forward

This article reports on the results of the research done towards the fully automatically merging of lexical resources. Our main goal is to show the generality of the proposed approach, which have been previously applied to merge Spanish Subcategorization Frames lexica. In this work we extend and apply the same technique to perform the merging of morphosyntactic lexica encoded in LMF. The experiments showed that the technique is general enough to obtain good results in these two different tasks which is an important step towards performing the merging of lexical resources fully automatically.

Towards a User-Friendly Platform for Building Language Resources based on Web Services

This paper presents the platform developed in the PANACEA project, a distributed factory that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of Language Resources required by Machine Translation and other Language Technologies. We adopt a set of tools that have been successfully used in the Bioinformatics field, they are adapted to the needs of our field and used to deploy web services, which can be combined to build more complex processing chains (workflows). This paper describes the platform and its different components (web services, registry, workflows, social network and interoperability). We demonstrate the scalability of the platform by carrying out a set of massive data experiments. Finally, a validation of the platform across a set of required criteria proves its usability for different types of users (non-technical users and providers).

Towards the Automatic Merging of Lexical Resources: Automatic Mapping

Lexical Resources are a critical component for Natural Language Processing applications. However, the high cost of comparing and merging different resources has been a bottleneck to have richer resources with a broad range of potential uses for a significant number of languages.With the objective of reducing cost byeliminating human intervention, we present a new method for automating the merging of resources,with special emphasis in what we call the mapping step. This mapping step, which converts the resources into a common format that allows latter the merging, is usually performed with huge manual effort and thus makes the whole process very costly. Thus, we propose a method to perform this mapping fully automatically. To test our method, we have addressed the merging of two verb subcategorization frame lexica for Spanish, The resultsachieved, that almost replicate human work, demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

A Method Towards the Fully Automatic Merging of Lexical Resources

Lexical Resources are a critical component for Natural Language Processing applications. However, the high cost of comparing and merging different resources has been a bottleneck to obtain richer resources and a broader range of potential uses for a significant number of languages. With the objective of reducing cost by eliminating human intervention, we present a new method towards the automatic merging of resources. This method includes both, the automatic mapping of resources involved to a common format and merging them, once in this format. This paper presents how we have addressed the merging of two verb subcategorization frame lexica for Spanish, but our method will be extended to cover other types of Lexical Resources. The achieved results, that almost replicate human work, demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Iowa Water Pollution Control Works and Drinking Water Facilities Financing Programs, (Joint Programs of the Iowa Finance Authority and The Iowa Department of Natural Resources), Independent Auditor's Reports, Financial Statements and Supplemental Information, June 30, 2004

State Audit Reports

The impact of women's educational and economic resources on fertility: Spanish birth cohorts 1901-1950

In this chapter we portray the effects of female education and professional achievement on fertility decline in Spain over the period 1920-1980 (birth cohorts of 1901-1950).A longitudinal econometric approach is used to test the hypothesis that the effects of women’s education in the revaluing of their time had a very significant influence on fertility decline. Although in the historical context presented here improvements in schooling were on a modest scale, they were continuous (with the interruption of the Civil War) and had a significant impact in shaping a model of low fertility in Spain. We also stress the relevance of this result in a context such as the Spanish for which liberal values were absent, fertility control practices were forbidden, and labour force participation of women was politically and socially constrained.

Report of Recommendations to the State University of Iowa on the Review of Selected General and Application Controls over the University's Human Resources Information System, June 7, 2005-July 29, 2005

Other Audit Reports - Regent Institutions

Report of Recommendations to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, June 30, 2005

State Audit Reports

Iowa Water Pollution Control Works and Drinking Water Facilities Financing Programs, (Joint Programs of the Iowa Finance Authority and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources), Independent Auditor's Reports, Financial Statements and Supplementary Information, Schedule of Findings, June 30, 2005

State Audit Reports

STRATEGIES TO SURPASS THE VULNERABILITY OF THE SMALL ISLAND STATES WITH FEW RESOURCES: THE CASE OF CAPE VERDE

The problem of small Island Developing States (SIDS) is quite recent, end of the 80s and 90s, still looking for a theoretical consolidation. SIDS, as small states in development, formed by one or several islands geographically dispersed, present reduced population, market, territory, natural resources, including drinkable water, and, in great number of the cases, low level of economic activity, factors that together, hinder the gathering of scale economies. To these diseconomies they come to join the more elevated costs in transports and communications which, allies to lower productivities, to a smaller quality and diversification of its productions, which difficult its integration in the world economy. In some SIDS these factors are not dissociating of the few investments in infrastructures, in the formation of human resources and in productive investments, just as it happens in most of the developing countries. In ecological terms, many of them with shortage of natural resources, but integrating important ecosystems in national and world terms, but with great fragility relatively to the pollution action, of excessive fishing, of uncontrolled development of tourism, factors that, conjugated and associated to the stove effect, condition the climate and the slope of the medium level of the sea water and therefore could put in cause the own survival of some of them. The drive to the awareness of the international community towards its problems summed up with the accomplishment by the United Nations in the Barbados’s Conference, 1994 where the right to the development was emphasized, through the going up the appropriate strategies and the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of the SIDS. The orientation of the regional and international cooperation in that sense, sharing technology (namely clean technology and control and administration environmental technology), information and creation of capacity-building, supplying means, including financial resources, creating non discriminatory and just trade rules, it would drive to the establishment of a world system economically more equal, in which the production, the consumption, the pollution levels, the demographic politics were guided towards the sustainability. It constituted an important step for the recognition for the international community on the specificities of those states and it allowed the definition of a group of norms and politics to implement at the national, regional and international level and it was important that they continued in the sense of the sustainable development. But this Conference had in its origin previous summits: the Summit of Rio de Janeiro about Environment and Development, accomplished in 1992, which left an important document - the Agenda 21, in the Conference of Stockholm at 1972 and even in the Conference of Ramsar, 1971 about “Wetlands.” CENTRO DE ESTUDOS AFRICANOS Occasional Papers © CEA - Centro de Estudos Africanos 4 Later, the Valletta Declaration, Malta, 1998, the Forum of Small States, 2002, get the international community's attention for the problems of SIDS again, in the sense that they act to increase its resilience. If the definition of “vulnerability” was the inability of the countries to resist economical, ecological and socially to the external shocks and “resilience” as the potential for them to absorb and minimize the impact of those shocks, presenting a structure that allows them to be little affected by them, a part of the available studies, dated of the 90s, indicate that the SIDS are more vulnerable than the other developing countries. The vulnerability of SIDS results from the fact the they present an assemblage of characteristics that turns them less capable of resisting or they advance strategies that allow a larger resilience to the external shocks, either anthropogenic (economical, financial, environmental) or even natural, connected with the vicissitudes of the nature. If these vulnerability factors were grouped with the expansion of the economic capitalist system at world level, the economic and financial globalisation, the incessant search of growing profits on the part of the multinational enterprises, the technological accelerated evolution drives to a situation of disfavour of the more poor. The creation of the resilience to the external shocks, to the process of globalisation, demands from SIDS and of many other developing countries the endogen definition of strategies and solid but flexible programs of integrated development. These must be assumed by the instituted power, but also by the other stakeholders, including companies and organizations of the civil society and for the population in general. But that demands strong investment in the formation of human resources, in infrastructures, in investigation centres; it demands the creation capacity not only to produce, but also to produce differently and do international marketing. It demands institutional capacity. Cape Verde is on its way to this stage.

Explorando la comunicación multimedia y multilingüística especializada en África

Una aproximación a lo que serán las redacciones del futuro de los medios de comunicación. Nos acercamos a un medio especializado en África, GuinGuinBali.com, que informa en tres idiomas paralelamente, con la versión original de la noticia y traducciones profesionales. Otra forma de entender la comunicación para subsistir en la era online. Proponemos otra mirada hacia África, sin olvidar la realidad, pero resaltando los aspectos más positivos del continente, potenciando y difundiendo su diversidad cultural. Información de África contada por africanos. Les mostraremos como aprovechar la demanda de los lectores gracias a las redes sociales y el nacimiento de un nuevo modelo de negocio que democratiza los medios de comunicación. Analizamos el momento actual en los medios de comunicación, en el que tenemos una oportunidad en nuestras manos que no debemos perder.