Best-worst Scaling (BWS) is a methodology for annotation based on comparing and ranking instances, rather than classifying or scoring individual instances. Studies have shown the efficacy of this methodology applied to NLP tasks in terms of a higher
quality of the datasets produced by following it. In this system demonstration paper, we present Litescale, a free software library to create and manage BWS annotation tasks. Litescale computes the tuples to annotate, manages the users and the annotation process, and creates the final gold standard. The functionalities of Litescale can be accessed programmatically through a Python module, or via two alternative user interfaces, a textual console-based one and a graphical Web-based one. We further developed and deployed a fully online version of Litescale complete with multi-user support.
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary, local constra
ints on sequences of symbols, and various other factors all shape the lexicons of the world's languages. Despite their importance in shaping lexical structure, the relative contributions of these factors have not been fully quantified. Taking a coding-theoretic view of the lexicon and making use of a novel generative statistical model, we define upper bounds for the compressibility of the lexicon under various constraints. Examining corpora from 7 typologically diverse languages, we use those upper bounds to quantify the lexicon's optimality and to explore the relative costs of major constraints on natural codes. We find that (compositional) morphology and graphotactics can sufficiently account for most of the complexity of natural codes---as measured by code length.
تعرّف هذه المقالة بأهمية ترشيد استهلاك الطاقة بأشكالها كافة من أجل تحقيق معايير التنمية المستدامة
و الحد من أخطار التلوث البيئي المدمرة. و قد تناولنا فيها بصورة عامة الإجراءات و التشريعات الواجب
اتخاذها لإدارة الطلب على مصادر الطاقة المتاحة، و وسائ
ل تحسين كفاءة اسـتخدامها فـي مختلـف
القطاعات الإنتاجية و الفعاليات البشرية.
إننا نأمل أن تعمل هذه المقالة على تأكيد الوعي المشترك لمثل هذه المسائل الحيوية التي تتعلق بنمـو
المجتمع و ازدهاره. و أن تكون في الوقت نفسه عاملا" محرضا" لجميع الهيئات و المختصين، كل في مجال
عمله، لدراسات أعمق و تطبيقات أشمل، وفق مقولة:
طاقة أقل لمنتج أجود و بيئة آمنة
