Showing papers by "Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences published in 2015"

Vietnamese compounds show an anti-frequency effect in visual lexical decision

Abstract: Although Vietnamese has a long history of linguistic research, as yet no psycholinguistic studies addressing lexical processing in this language have been carried out. This paper is the first to investigate lexical processing in Vietnamese, and this addresses the reading of Vietnamese bi-syllabic compound words. A large single-subject experiment with 20,000 words was complemented by a smaller multiple-subject experiment with 550 words. We report the novel finding of an inhibitory, anti-frequency effect of Vietnamese compounds’ constituents. We show that this anti-frequency effect is predicted by a computational model of lexical processing grounded in naive discrimination learning. We also show that predictors derived from this model provide a much better fit to the observed reaction times than traditional lexical-distributional predictors. Effects of the density of the compound graph, previously observed for English, were replicated for Vietnamese. Furthermore, tone diacritics were found to be important p...

Under the State's Thumb: Results from an Empirical Survey of Civic Organizations in Vietnam

Abstract: Civic organizations (COs) are neither a good nor a bad thing. They are not inherently fighters for democracy or supporters of authoritarian rule. The way they develop depends on the impact that various forms of state power have on them and on their influence on the state. Vietnamese COs appear to be no exception. When we examine just one direction of these interdependent and reciprocal relations, it becomes clear that under the constraints of the Vietnamese state’s infrastructural power many Vietnamese COs develop features of intra-organizational authoritarianism; that they help to embed the state and the Communist Party more deeply within Vietnamese society; and, finally, that they contribute to bringing the society further under the control of the state and the party. However, this occurs to a very different degree depending on the type of CO. NGOs and faith-based organizations in particular, at least in the field of gender norms and practices, seem to resist the state’s discursive power. This could imply challenges to the state’s and the party’s control of politics and society and leads the authors to draw far-reaching conclusions as far as developmental cooperation with and potential support for various types of Vietnamese COs is concerned.

Poverty dynamics in India between 2004 and 2012 : insights from longitudinal analysis using synthetic panel data

Abstract: Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12 This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three pertinent National Sample Survey rounds into synthetic panels The analysis draws on the synthetic panels to derive a vulnerability line for India that can be used to separate out a population subgroup comprising non-poor households facing a heightened risk of falling into poverty The paper documents a strong pattern of upward mobility out of poverty and vulnerability into the middle class, with a noticeable acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12 The paper further undertakes a careful investigation into the comparability of the survey rounds, prompted by the observation that fairly significant modifications had been made to survey questionnaires The findings suggest that changes in questionnaire design have not compromised the comparability of the data

Vietnamese treebank construction and entropy-based error detection

Abstract: Treebanks, especially the Penn treebank for natural language processing (NLP) in English, play an essential role in both research into and the application of NLP. However, many languages still lack treebanks and building a treebank can be very complicated and difficult. This work has a twofold objective. Firstly, to share our results in constructing a large Vietnamese treebank (VTB) with three levels of annotation including word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis. Major steps in the treebank construction process are described with particular regard to specific Vietnamese properties such as lack of word delimiter and isolation. Those properties make sentences highly syntactically ambiguous, and therefore it is difficult to ensure a high level of agreement among annotators. Various studies of Vietnamese syntax were employed not only to define annotations but also to systematically deal with ambiguities. Annotators were supported by automatic labelling tools, which are based on statistical machine learning methods, for sentence pre-processing and a tree editor for supporting manual annotation. As a result, an annotation agreement of around 90 % was achieved. Our second objective is to present our method for automatically finding errors and inconsistencies in treebank corpora and its application to the construction of the VTB. This method employs the Shannon entropy measure in a manner that the more reduced entropy the more corrected errors in a treebank. The method ranks error candidates by using a scoring function based on conditional entropy. Our experiments showed that this method detected high-error-density subsets of original error candidate sets, and that the corpus entropy was significantly reduced after error correction. The size of these subsets was only about one third of the whole set, while these subsets contained 80---90 % of the total errors. This method can also be applied to languages similar to Vietnamese.

Poverty Dynamics in India between 2004 and 2012: Insights from Longitudinal Analysis Using Synthetic Panel Data

Abstract: Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three pertinent National Sample Survey rounds into synthetic panels. The analysis draws on the synthetic panels to derive a vulnerability line for India that can be used to separate out a population subgroup comprising non-poor households facing a heightened risk of falling into poverty. The paper documents a strong pattern of upward mobility out of poverty and vulnerability into the middle class, with a noticeable acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. The paper further undertakes a careful investigation into the comparability of the survey rounds, prompted by the observation that fairly significant modifications had been made to survey questionnaires. The findings suggest that changes in questionnaire design have not compromised the comparability of the data.

Poverty dynamics in India between 2004 and 2012 : insights from longitudinal analysis using synthetic panel data

Abstract: Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three pertinent National Sample Survey rounds into synthetic panels. The analysis draws on the synthetic panels to derive a vulnerability line for India that can be used to separate out a population subgroup comprising non-poor households facing a heightened risk of falling into poverty. The paper documents a strong pattern of upward mobility out of poverty and vulnerability into the middle class, with a noticeable acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. The paper further undertakes a careful investigation into the comparability of the survey rounds, prompted by the observation that fairly significant modifications had been made to survey questionnaires. The findings suggest that changes in questionnaire design have not compromised the comparability of the data.