An English-translated parallel corpus for the CJK Wikipedia collections

In this paper, we describe a machine-translated parallel English corpus for the NTCIR Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Wikipedia collections. This document collection is named CJK2E Wikipedia XML corpus. The corpus could be used by the information retrieval research community and knowledge sharing in Wikipedia in many ways; for example, this corpus could be used for experimentations in cross-lingual information retrieval, cross-lingual link discovery, or omni-lingual information retrieval research. Furthermore, the translated CJK articles could be used to further expand the current coverage of the English Wikipedia.

Cross-Lingual knowledge discovery : Chinese-to-English article linking in Wikipedia

In this paper we examine automated Chinese to English link discovery in Wikipedia and the effects of Chinese segmentation and Chinese to English translation on the hyperlink recommendation. Our experimental results show that the implemented link discovery framework can effectively recommend Chinese-to-English cross-lingual links. The techniques described here can assist bi-lingual users where a particular topic is not covered in Chinese, is not equally covered in both languages, or is biased in one language; as well as for language learning.

Characterizing multi-agent team behavior from partial team tracings : evidence from the English Premier League

Real-world AI systems have been recently deployed which can automatically analyze the plan and tactics of tennis players. As the game-state is updated regularly at short intervals (i.e. point-level), a library of successful and unsuccessful plans of a player can be learnt over time. Given the relative strengths and weaknesses of a player’s plans, a set of proven plans or tactics from the library that characterize a player can be identified. For low-scoring, continuous team sports like soccer, such analysis for multi-agent teams does not exist as the game is not segmented into “discretized” plays (i.e. plans), making it difficult to obtain a library that characterizes a team’s behavior. Additionally, as player tracking data is costly and difficult to obtain, we only have partial team tracings in the form of ball actions which makes this problem even more difficult. In this paper, we propose a method to overcome these issues by representing team behavior via play-segments, which are spatio-temporal descriptions of ball movement over fixed windows of time. Using these representations we can characterize team behavior from entropy maps, which give a measure of predictability of team behaviors across the field. We show the efficacy and applicability of our method on the 2010-2011 English Premier League soccer data.

Opportunities for forest finance under the International climate change regime

The international climate change regime has the potential to increase revenue available for forest restoration projects in Commonwealth nations. There are three mechanisms which could be used to fund forest projects aimed at forest conservation, forest restoration and sustainable forest management. The first forest funding opportunity arises under the clean development mechanism, a flexibility mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. The clean development mechanism allows Annex I parties (industrialised nations) to invest in emission reduction activities in non-Annex 1 (developing countries) and the establishment of forest sinks is an eligible clean development mechanism activity. Secondly, parties to the Kyoto Protocol are able to include sustainable forest management activities in their national carbon accounting. The international rules concerning this are called the Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry Guidelines. Thirdly, it is anticipated that at the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations that a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) instrument will be created. This will provide a direct funding mechanism for those developing countries with tropical forests. Payments made under a REDD arrangement will be based upon the developing country with tropical forest cover agreeing to protect and conserve a designated forest estate. These three funding options available under the international climate change regime demonstrate that there is potential for forest finance within the regime. These opportunities are however hindered by a number of technical and policy barriers which prevent the ability of the regime to significantly increase funding for forest projects. There are two types of carbon markets, compliance carbon markets (Kyoto based) and voluntary carbon markets. Voluntary carbon markets are more flexible then compliance markets and as such offer potential to increase revenue available for sustainable forest projects.

The International regulation of persons displaced by climate change

It is certain that there will be changes in environmental conditions across the globe as a result of climate change. Such changes will require the building of biological, human and infrastructure resilience. In some instances the building of such resilience will be insufficient to deal with extreme changes in environmental conditions and legal frameworks will be required to provide recognition and support for people dislocated because of environmental change. Such dislocation may occur internally within the country of original origin or externally into another State’s territory. International and national legal frameworks do not currently recognise or assist people displaced as a result of environmental factors including displacement occurring as a result of climate change. Legal frameworks developed to deal with this issue will need to consider the legal rights of those people displaced and the legal responsibilities of those countries required to respond to such displacement. The objective of this article is to identify the most suitable international institution to host a program addressing climate displacement. There are a number of areas of international law that are relevant to climate displacement, including refugee law, human rights law and international environmental law. These regimes, however, were not designed to protect people relocating as a result of environmental change. As such, while they indirectly may be of relevance to climate displacement, they currently do nothing to directly address this complex issue. In order to determine the most appropriate institution to address and regulate climate displacement, it is imperative to consider issues of governance. This paper seeks to examine this issue and determine whether it is preferable to place climate displacement programs into existing international legal frameworks or whether it is necessary to regulate this area in an entirely new institution specifically designed to deal with the complex and cross-cutting issues surrounding the topic. Commentators in this area have proposed three different regulatory models for addressing climate displacement. These models include: (a) Expand the definition of refugee under the Refugee Convention to encompass persons displaced by climate change; (b) Implement a new stand alone Climate Displacement Convention; and (c) Implement a Climate Displacement Protocol to the UNFCCC. This article will examine each of these proposed models against a number of criteria to determine the model that is most likely to address the needs and requirements of people displaced by climate change. It will also identify the model that is likely to be most politically acceptable and realistic for those countries likely to attract responsibilities by its implementation. In order to assess whether the rights and needs of the people to be displaced are to be met, theories of procedural, distributive and remedial justice will be used to consider the equity of the proposed schemes. In order to consider the most politically palatable and realistic scheme, reference will be made to previous state practice and compliance with existing obligations in the area. It is suggested that the criteria identified by this article should underpin any future climate displacement instrument.

Shifting global powers and international law : challenges and opportunities [Challenges of Globalisation series]

This book examines the influence of emerging economies on international legal rules, institutions and processes. It describes recent and predicted changes in economic, political and cultural powers, flowing from the growth of emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia, and analyses the influence of these changes on various legal frameworks and norms. Its contributors come from a variety of fields of expertise, including international law, politics, environmental law, human rights, economics and finance. The book begins by providing a broad analysis of the nature of the shifting global dynamic in its historical and contemporary contexts, including analysis of the rise of China as a major economic and political power and the end of the period of United States domination in international affairs. It illustrates the impact of these changes on states’ domestic policies and priorities, as they adapt to a new international dynamic. The authors then offer a range of perspectives on the impact of these changes as they relate to specific regimes and issues, including climate change regulation, collective security, indigenous rights, the rights of women and girls, environmental protection and foreign aid and development. The book provides a fresh and comprehensive analysis of an issue with extensive implications for international law and politics.

A new framework of measuring national nutrients balance for international and global comparison

Nutrients balance such as nitrogen and phosphorus balance are increasingly used as an indicator of the environmental performance of agricultural sector in international and global context. However there still is a lack of harmony in the use of methods for estimating the nutrients balance among countries. This is because of the disagreement regarding the accuracy and uncertainty of different accounting methods. The lack of harmony in the methods used in different countries further increases the uncertainty in the context of the international comparisons. This paper provides a new framework for nutrients balance calculation using the farm-gate accounting method. The calculation under this new framework takes advantage of availability of data from FAO and other reliable national and international sources. Due to this, the proposed framework is highly adaptable in many countries, making the global comparison feasible. The paper also proposes three criteria including adaptability, accuracy and interpretability to assess the appropriateness of nutrients accounting method. Based on these criteria, the paper provides a comprehensive comparison of the farm-gate and soil-surface methods in accounting country-level nutrients balance of agricultural production. The paper identifies some shortcomings of the soil-surface balance and shows that the farm-gate method has a greater potential of providing a more accurate and meaningful estimation of national nutrients balance.

Link discovery for Chinese/English cross-language web information retrieval

Nowadays people heavily rely on the Internet for information and knowledge. Wikipedia is an online multilingual encyclopaedia that contains a very large number of detailed articles covering most written languages. It is often considered to be a treasury of human knowledge. It includes extensive hypertext links between documents of the same language for easy navigation. However, the pages in different languages are rarely cross-linked except for direct equivalent pages on the same subject in different languages. This could pose serious difficulties to users seeking information or knowledge from different lingual sources, or where there is no equivalent page in one language or another. In this thesis, a new information retrieval task—cross-lingual link discovery (CLLD) is proposed to tackle the problem of the lack of cross-lingual anchored links in a knowledge base such as Wikipedia. In contrast to traditional information retrieval tasks, cross language link discovery algorithms actively recommend a set of meaningful anchors in a source document and establish links to documents in an alternative language. In other words, cross-lingual link discovery is a way of automatically finding hypertext links between documents in different languages, which is particularly helpful for knowledge discovery in different language domains. This study is specifically focused on Chinese / English link discovery (C/ELD). Chinese / English link discovery is a special case of cross-lingual link discovery task. It involves tasks including natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and cross-lingual link discovery. To justify the effectiveness of CLLD, a standard evaluation framework is also proposed. The evaluation framework includes topics, document collections, a gold standard dataset, evaluation metrics, and toolkits for run pooling, link assessment and system evaluation. With the evaluation framework, performance of CLLD approaches and systems can be quantified. This thesis contributes to the research on natural language processing and cross-lingual information retrieval in CLLD: 1) a new simple, but effective Chinese segmentation method, n-gram mutual information, is presented for determining the boundaries of Chinese text; 2) a voting mechanism of name entity translation is demonstrated for achieving a high precision of English / Chinese machine translation; 3) a link mining approach that mines the existing link structure for anchor probabilities achieves encouraging results in suggesting cross-lingual Chinese / English links in Wikipedia. This approach was examined in the experiments for better, automatic generation of cross-lingual links that were carried out as part of the study. The overall major contribution of this thesis is the provision of a standard evaluation framework for cross-lingual link discovery research. It is important in CLLD evaluation to have this framework which helps in benchmarking the performance of various CLLD systems and in identifying good CLLD realisation approaches. The evaluation methods and the evaluation framework described in this thesis have been utilised to quantify the system performance in the NTCIR-9 Crosslink task which is the first information retrieval track of this kind.

Grenada, Education and Revolution, 1979-83

Grenada’s New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, was the first indigenous political grouping in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean to overthrow an existing government by armed force. Yet most of the four and a half years of the Revolution (1979-83) were characterized by considerable popular support for the new People’s Revolutionary Government before it came to it’s tragic, unexpected and shocking end in October 1983. Social, economic and political change seems possible in the 1970s and ‘80s. People in newly decolonizing countries were encouraged by the beginnings of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World nations demanding new international economic order that would win them some economic justice after the ravages of colonialism. People also saw that some radical regimes, such as that led by Michael Manley in Jamaica and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were articulating and implementing basic rights that held the promise of countering the social and political oppression that they had endured throughout the centuries of colonial history. A majority of Grenadians committed themselves to fighting by the side of the People’s Revolutionary Government for such new goals. This chapter will analyse how the Grenada Revolution reconceptualised the education, planned new goals, and implemented bold new educational policies. It will discuss the extent to which the government and people were able to reshape education as a tool for national reconstruction and the raising of national consciousness.

The Capacity to Share : A Study of Cuba's International Cooperation in Educational Development

Since 1959, international cooperation has been a key feature of Cuba’s commitment to egalitarian social well-being. Aspects of this experience have been well documented , in general and with reference to specific initiatives across human development and occupational sectors. Others have been little examined, of which education is one. This book describes the internationalism of Cuban education policy as practised in Cuba and in other parts of the Global “South.”

The International Film and Television School in Cuba : for a stronger media culture in the global south

A little-known facet of Cuban internationalism is the Cuba shares in the education of young people who want to help build a stronger media culture that represents voices from the global South. Cuba was instrumental in the establishment and operation of the International Film and Television School at San Antonio de los Baños. The Cuban government provided the location and buildings for the school, and among the range of international media professionals who teach the students are selected Cuban professors from the Institute of the Arts, based n Havana. The International Film and Television School is supported by funding from Spain and other countries, and by the willingness of international media professionals to teach short courses for little more than an honorarium. Cuba used to provide full scholarships for student from the South to study a two-year course in film or television, but now charges fees for its three-year diploma course.

Militarism and International Relations : Political economy, security, theory, edited by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012, 212 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-61491-7

An engaging narrative is maintained throughout this edited collection of articles that address the issue of militarism in international relations. The book seamlessly integrates historical and contemporary perspectives on militarism with theory and relevant international case studies, resulting in a very informative read. The work is comprised of three parts. Part 1 deals with the theorisation of militarism and includes chapters by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, Martin Shaw, Simon Dalby, and Nicola Short. It covers a range of topics relating to historical and contemporary theories of militarism, geopolitical threat construction, political economy, and the US military’s ‘cultural turn’.

An entry mode decision-making model for the international expansion of construction enterprises

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a new type of entry mode decision-making model for construction enterprises involved in international business. Design/methodology/approach – A hybrid method combining analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) is used to aid entry mode decisions. The AHP is used to decompose the entry mode problem into several dimensions and determine the weight of each criterion. In addition, PROMETHEE method is used to rank candidate entry modes and carry out sensitivity analyses. Findings – The proposed decision-making method is demonstrated to be a suitable approach to resolve the entry mode selection decision problem. Practical implications – The research provides practitioners with a more systematic decision framework and a more precise decision method. Originality/value – The paper sheds light on the further development of entry strategies for international construction markets. It not only introduces a new decision-making model for entry mode decision making, but also provides a conceptual framework with five determinants for a construction company entry mode selection based on the unique properties of the construction industry.