LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectrum of document types. This first-ever large-scale dataset unleashes the power of deep neural networks for reading order detection. Specifically, our proposed LayoutReader captures the text and layout information for reading order prediction using the seq2seq model. It performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and significantly improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results in our experiments. The dataset and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutreader.

Leveraging Order-Free Tag Relations for Context-Aware Recommendation

Tag recommendation relies on either a ranking function for top-k tags or an autoregressive generation method. However, the previous methods neglect one of two seemingly conflicting yet desirable characteristics of a tag set: orderlessness and inter-dependency. While the ranking approach fails to address the inter-dependency among tags when they are ranked, the autoregressive approach fails to take orderlessness into account because it is designed to utilize sequential relations among tokens. We propose a sequence-oblivious generation method for tag recommendation, in which the next tag to be generated is independent of the order of the generated tags and the order of the ground truth tags occurring in training data. Empirical results on two different domains, Instagram and Stack Overflow, show that our method is significantly superior to the previous approaches.

Analytical Study Of The Impact Of The Corona Pandemic On The Tourism Demand For Accommodation Facilities In Lattakia Governorate

The study focused on the following problem: Is there an impact of the Corona pandemic on the tourist demand for accommodation facilities in Lattakia Governorate?. The study aimed at the following: To clarify the reality of the tourist demand for accommodation facilities before the Corona pandemic, in addition to determining the changes in the structure of the tourist demand in the accommodation facilities (hotels, chalets and furnished apartments, and visitors) during the period of the Corona pandemic in the Lattakia Governorate in 2020. A descriptive analytical approach was used.The study found a set of results, the most important of which are: The Corona pandemic affected the overall tourism demand for accommodation facilities in the Lattakia Governorate significantly in 2020 compared to 2019, There is an improvement in the overall tourism demand for accommodation facilities in the Lattakia Governorate in the three years before the pandemic. The pandemic affected the components of the Tourism Demand (hotels, furnished apartments, visitors) in Lattakia Governorate in 2020, The tourist demand for hotels was affected less than the Tourism demand for chalets, apartments, and visitors.

Requesting clarifications with speech and gestures

In multimodal natural language interaction both speech and non-speech gestures are involved in the basic mechanism of grounding and repair. We discuss a couple of multimodal clarifica- tion requests and argue that gestures, as well as speech expressions, underlie comparable paral- lelism constraints. In order to make this precise, we slightly extend the formal dialogue frame- work KoS to cover also gestural counterparts of verbal locutionary propositions.

Proposed Model for Estimating the Total Social Demand for Health Services in Lattakia Governorate between 2003 and 2018

The demand for health services is of great importance as it is linked to the social aspect, which is the health status of citizens in a country, and it is from this importance that our current study focusing on a very important problem related to the ability to estimate the total social demand for health services was chosen. The study was the reality of social demand On health services in the public sector in Lattakia Governorate is one of the most important objectives of the study, in addition to studying the reality of social demand for health services in the private sector in Lattakia Governorate, and working on proposing a model for estimating social demand for health services in the public and private sectors.An analytical descriptive approach has been used, and at the end of the study the study reached an important set of results related to the port of the model and the estimation of social demand for health services in pharmacies, clinics and laboratories based on a questionnaire distributed to families in Latakia, in addition to the opinion of specialists from doctors, pharmacists, laboratory owners, and specialists At the Doctors Syndicate, the Dental Association, and the Pharmacists Syndicate. The health insurance system applied to workers in the country also contributed to increasing the demand for medical treatment in private sector clinics, as well as increasing social demand for health services provided in public hospitals during the study period, and the current crisis and the war on Syria have increased the demand for health services in general in Lattakia Governorate.

Study of performance standards for public transport between the cities of Latakia and Jableh

Most of the villages and rural towns, in general, and in Latakia, in particular, suffer from poor transport organizing and Serving of people so that travelling has become a great suffering for most people. After studying the transport situation between Jableh and Latakia, we found that this city suffers from transport problems like other cities. This is because of transport poor management and regulation including timing, the number of vehicles available and inability to meet demand, which causes a deterioration in service quality. The research provided a comprehensive method to evaluate the performance of public transport on the road by evaluating travel time, the journey speed, and the buses volume and frequency. Considering these indicators as a criterion for evaluating the performance of public transport to determine the most effective factors regarding the quality of performance of public transport and improve this performance in future. A field and practical study of the research has been conducted, which includes selecting of study sites, collecting engineering and traffic data, designing of questionnaires and distributing them on random passengers and drivers working on Jableh - Lattakia transportation road to find out their opinions. Then the data has been inserted into SPSS Statistics Base program for analyzing the results. The research has concluded that the performance of public transport between Jableh and Latakia is generally weak, and the largest proportion of passengers depend on their mobility on minibuses, which does not satisfy the required transportation level. Therefore, a range of solutions has been developed depending on local conditions which will ease the burden of mobility and raise the transportation performance level.

The impact of economic and demographic factors on the demand for life insurance in Syria

This paper deals with the insurance sector in the Syrian Arab Republic during the period between 1990-2012, we studied the impact of economic and demographic factors on the demand for life insurance size. It was considered the volume of life insurance premiums indication of the size of the demand for life insurance, also we study the impact of some determinants on the demand / income - unemployment - interest rate - inflation - life expectations - education - urbanization /. A statistical analysis by spss to study variables program was carried out, in order to reach the most important determinants affecting the insurance demand, income and the inflation and the interest rate are the most effective determinant in influencing the insurance demand, While statistically significant for the rest of determinants effect does not appear.

Studying the performance and the Efficiency of random linear network coding in achieving the reliable transfer of data in losing wireless networks

Wireless networks suffer from frequent loss of packets for many reasons such as interference, collision and fading. This makes wireless medium unreliable medium for data transfer. The main methods for ensuring the reliability in this medium are using transmission control protocol (TCP) and the automatic repeat request (ARQ). Recently, network coding has been found as new technology that changes the traditional forwarding method (Store- and- Forward) in the networks to more effective and intelligent method (Code- and- Forward), which contributes to the increase of both capacity and throughput of these networks. In this research, random linear network coding is used as promising technology that aims to achieve the reliable transfer of data in losing wireless networks, and studying the enhancement that this technology presents to the performance of these networks in unicast and multicast transmission. For evaluating the efficiency of this technology and comparing its performance with the performance of reliable transfer protocols, we use the networks simulator (NS3). Simulation results showed that random linear network coding achieve the reliable transfer of data with bigger throughput and less delay and number of transmission compared with the protocols (TCP, ARQ).

Evaluating performance and reliability of AODV, ADV routing protocols in VANET environment using NCTUns 6.0 simulator

In this paper, we use NCTUns 6.0 to simulate this kind of networks ,because it is difficult to do that is the real world .In this paper, two routing protocols (AODV, ADV) are studied within many scenarios to achieve their performances and reliability using many metrics. We conclude that ADV routing protocol adapts quickly when the complexity of network and mobility of nodes increase. This is achieved by varying the size and frequency of routing updates.

Analytical Study of Public Health Insurance Point of View Employees of Tourism Department in Lattakia

This study has aimed to recognize public health insurance services introduced to the employees of Tourism department in Lattakia. Also, for knowing the customers (partners) satisfaction level on health insurance services. In addition, it has aimed to show the coverage level of insurance companies for illnesses and the control efficiency range applied by the governmental agencies on these companies. The researcher has used the analytical descriptive approach to show the employees satisfaction on health insurance services. Data has been collected through direct interviews with a sample of employees in Lattakia tourism department. Moreover, a questionnaire on another sample of tourism department employees has been designed and distributed. Data, in fact, has been studied and analyzed by SPSS.