Fabula Entropy Indexing: Objective Measures of Story Coherence

Automated story generation remains a difficult area of research because it lacks strong objective measures. Generated stories may be linguistically sound, but in many cases suffer poor narrative coherence required for a compelling, logically-sound story. To address this, we present Fabula Entropy Indexing (FEI), an evaluation method to assess story coherence by measuring the degree to which human participants agree with each other when answering true/false questions about stories. We devise two theoretically grounded measures of reader question-answering entropy, the entropy of world coherence (EWC), and the entropy of transitional coherence (ETC), focusing on global and local coherence, respectively. We evaluate these metrics by testing them on human-written stories and comparing against the same stories that have been corrupted to introduce incoherencies. We show that in these controlled studies, our entropy indices provide a reliable objective measure of story coherence.

Domain Divergences: A Survey and Empirical Analysis

Domain divergence plays a significant role in estimating the performance of a model in new domains. While there is a significant literature on divergence measures, researchers find it hard to choose an appropriate divergence for a given NLP application. We address this shortcoming by both surveying the literature and through an empirical study. We develop a taxonomy of divergence measures consisting of three classes --- Information-theoretic, Geometric, and Higher-order measures and identify the relationships between them. Further, to understand the common use-cases of these measures, we recognise three novel applications -- 1) Data Selection, 2) Learning Representation, and 3) Decisions in the Wild -- and use it to organise our literature. From this, we identify that Information-theoretic measures are prevalent for 1) and 3), and Higher-order measures are more common for 2). To further help researchers choose appropriate measures to predict drop in performance -- an important aspect of Decisions in the Wild, we perform correlation analysis spanning 130 domain adaptation scenarios, 3 varied NLP tasks and 12 divergence measures identified from our survey. To calculate these divergences, we consider the current contextual word representations (CWR) and contrast with the older distributed representations. We find that traditional measures over word distributions still serve as strong baselines, while higher-order measures with CWR are effective.

Representations of Language Varieties Are Reliable Given Corpus Similarity Measures

This paper measures similarity both within and between 84 language varieties across nine languages. These corpora are drawn from digital sources (the web and tweets), allowing us to evaluate whether such geo-referenced corpora are reliable for modelling linguistic variation. The basic idea is that, if each source adequately represents a single underlying language variety, then the similarity between these sources should be stable across all languages and countries. The paper shows that there is a consistent agreement between these sources using frequency-based corpus similarity measures. This provides further evidence that digital geo-referenced corpora consistently represent local language varieties.

Administrative Regulations for the Protection of Air from Pollution by Pesticides (Iraq- Egypt- Syria) As a Model

This research outlines the legal regulations for this kind of pollution in Iraq, Egypt and Syria by defining pesticides, their source and harmful effects on humans and the environment; and then outlining the laws that control it in the above-mentioned countries which put preventive and punitive measures to protect air from pollution by pesticides to ensure the best level of protection of public health; one of the aims of administrative regulations for the protection of the environment. It also presents applicable suggestions and recommendations that help any one who aims at reaching good management of pesticides and a clean environment.

Key Performance Measures that affect the performance of construction projects in Syria

A comprehensive literature review was carried out in order to identify potential factors that have an influence on project performance. Based on this review, a formal questionnaire survey was developed and sent to a carefully selected focus group of construction experts from within the Syrian construction industry.

Evaluation multi-measures of traffic performance for two- way, two- lane rural roads

The rural roads are a large part of the existing roads network, particularly that consisting of two-lane. Evaluation of traffic performance for two-way, two-lane rural roads is complex process due to their characteristics. Many performance measures were introduced by many authors in many countries to fit the local conditions. This research presents an empirical evaluation of the relationship between operational performance and platooning phenomenon in rural two-lane roads in Tartous. Six performance measures and three platooning variables were defined and calculated for ten study sites using traffic data from rural roads in Ash-Shaykh Badr region of Tartous governorate. Using graphical and statistical analyses, the associations between the performance measures and the platooning variables were examined. The platooning variables investigated, traffic flow in the direction of travel has the highest correlations with performance measures. As the overall findings confirmed that the follower density is the most characterization of the relationship between traffic performance and platooning, which is suitable for the study of operational performance.

Analyzing Financial Statements Using Window Data Envelopment Analysis

Internal and external data users are interested in financial data analysis, because of their need to obtain financial information about the company and to know the strength of its financial position. Although ratio analysis is always considered as one of the best financial statements analysis methods, but its interpretation is often difficult and controversial. Where each group of ratios can only show a single financial dimension, thus it may be difficult, when analyzing financial statements, tointe grate the results of different groups of financial analyses. So, an approach namely Data Envelopment Analysis, which is used in this research with Window approach by using variable returns of scale model, known as BCC related to researches Banker, Charnes and Coopers. In order to study the efficiency of the 19 subcompany of the General Establishment for food industries during the period 2008-2010. And also to study the direction of performance changes, in order to determine the best and the worst company through the company's efficiency using Super-Efficiency model. The study results showed that the number of efficient companies are six, and the number of inefficient companies are 13. Also showed that the Boken Water Company got the highest efficiency, and the company conserves Hasaka got less efficiency. All companies have less efficiency during the study period.

The liquidity between the traditional view and alternative concepts An Empirical Study of the Syrian Arab Republic

This research aims at studying and analyzing the traditional liquidity measures (Current ratio, quick ratio), and alternative liquidity measures (cash conversion cycle, the ratio of net balance of fluid), in order to assess the information provided about the entity's ability to repay short-term financial obligations from operating cash flows in a sample of establishments listed in the stock of the Syrian Commission on Financial Markets. The results of the comparative analysis and logistic regression showed that the alternative measures are considered better than conventional measures, regarding the accuracy of the information provided about the ability of an entity to repay short-term obligations. It was found also that the traditional measures can indicate a good level of liquidity, according to the traditional concept and in spite of the non-established ability to repay current liabilities by operating cash flow, it was noted that the relative decline in the conversion of cash and the relative rise in the ratio of net liquid balance cycle may be associated with a rise in the proportion of operating cash flow to current liabilities.