Showing papers on "Czech published in 2000"

Morphological tagging: data vs. dictionaries

Abstract: Part of Speech tagging for English seems to have reached the the human levels of error, but full morphological tagging for inflectionally rich languages, such as Romanian, Czech, or Hungarian, is still an open problem, and the results are far from being satisfactory. This paper presents results obtained by using a universalized exponential feature-based model for five such languages. It focuses on the data sparseness issue, which is especially severe for such languages (the more so that there are no extensive annotated data for those languages). In conclusion, we argue strongly that the use of an independent morphological dictionary is the preferred choice to more annotated data under such circumstances.

Glide and Glottal Stop Insertion in Slavic Languages: A DOT Analysis

Abstract: This article investigates glide and glottal stop insertion in Bulgarian, Slovak (two dialects), Polish (two dialects), and Czech. It is argued that Optimality Theory should be modified by introducing derivational levels and that OT auxiliary theories, in particular, output-output theory, MAX (Feature) theory, and sympathy theory, should be rejected.

Towards language independent acoustic modeling

Abstract: We describe procedures and experimental results using speech from diverse source languages to build an ASR system for a single target language. This work is intended to improve ASR in languages for which large amounts of training data are not available. We have developed both knowledge-based and automatic methods to map phonetic units from the source languages to the target language. We employed HMM adaptation techniques and discriminative model combination to combine acoustic models from the individual source languages for recognition of speech in the target language. Experiments are described in which Czech Broadcast News is transcribed using acoustic models trained from small amounts of Czech read speech augmented by English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin acoustic models.

Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956

Abstract: This comparative history of the higher education systems in Poland, East Germany and the Czech lands reveals an unexpected diversity within East European Stalinism. With information gleaned from archives in each of these places, the author offers a case study showing how totalitarian states adapt their policies to the contours of the societies they rule. The Communist dictum that universities be purged of "bourgeois elements" was accomplished most fully in East Germany, where more and more students came from worker and peasant backgrounds. But the Polish party kept potentially disloyal professors on the job in the futile hope that they would train a new intelligentsia, and Czech Stalinists failed to make worker and peasant students a majority at Czech universities. Connelly accounts for these differences by exploring the pre-Stalinist heritage of these countries, and particularly their experiences in World War II. The failure of Polish and Czech leaders to transform their universities became particularly evident during the crises of 1968 and 1989, when university students spearheaded reform movements. In East Germany, by contrast, universities remained true to the state to the end, and students were notably absent from the revolution of 1989.

Presentations of Romanies in the Czech Media: On Category Work in Television Debates:

Abstract: This article concerns categorizations of Romanies in Czech media. We analysed four television debates which were broadcast in the Czech Republic between 1990 and 1995. All of them concerned Romanies, and Czechs and Romanies participated in each of them. The analytic technique we used was membership categorization analysis (MCA), associated with Sacks (1992), and with contemporary ethnomethodology. Our analysis focused on how descriptions of Romanies were used and warranted, and how the membership categorizations both changed in arguments and resisted change. We found that participants did not simply describe Romanies, they warranted the descriptions and, in doing so, presented some of the descriptions as matters of common knowledge and others as facts. Not all `common knowledge' of Romanies was, however, held in common by both Czechs and Romanies. Czechs know Romanies as those who do not live like normal people, who create problems and commit crimes, but the facts about Romanies as unique people with a va...

Automatic extraction of subcategorization frames for Czech

Abstract: We present some novel machine learning techniques for the identification of subcategorization information for verbs in Czech. We compare three different statistical techniques applied to this problem. We show how the learning algorithm can be used to discover previously unknown subcategorization frames from the Czech Prague Dependency Treebank. The algorithm can then be used to label dependents of a verb in the Czech treebank as either arguments or adjuncts. Using our techniques, we are able to achieve 88% precision on unseen parsed text.

Transforming Management in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract: This book analyzes changes in enterprises in seven European countries since 1989: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia. Economic trends have differed vastly among these countries, but nevertheless, they share common objectives, common problems, and significant similarities in developments. This book shows the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Socialist and the post-Socialist periods.

Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands

Abstract: With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing" absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.

Management in Eastern Europe

Abstract: Management in Central and Eastern Europe: the Legacy of the Past Hungary Poland Russia Czech and Slovak Management Romania Bulgaria Estonia Management in the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia Past, Present and Future

Morpheme Based Language Models for Speech Recognition of Czech

Abstract: In our paper we propose new technique for language modelling of highly inflectional languages such as Czech, Russian an other Slavic languages. Our aim is to alleviate main problem encountered in these languages, which is enormous vocabulary growth caused by great number of different word forms derived from one word (lemma). We reduced the size of the vocabulary by decomposing words into stems and endings and storing these sub-word units (morphemes) in the vocabulary separately. Then we trained morpheme based language model on the decomposed corpus. This paper reports perplexities, OOV rates and some speech recognition results obtained with new language model.

Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies: The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania

Abstract: List of Abbreviations Introduction K.Williams The StB in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1989 K.Williams Czechoslovakia, 1990-92 K.Williams The Czech Republic since 1993 K.Williams Slovakia since 1993 K.Williams The Securitate Legacy in Romania D.Deletant The Successors to the Securitate D.Deletant Conclusion K.Williams Bibliography Index

The Nato enlargement debate in the media and civil‐military relations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Abstract: This article links the NATO enlargement debate to the course of civil‐military relations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. After a general analysis of civil‐military relations and the media, it l...

Employment and Wages in Enterprises Under Communism and in Transition: Evidence from Central Europe and Russia

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative analysis of employment and wage behavior of firms in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Russia during the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The four main findings are: 1) There is evidence of some (not excessive) labor hoarding before the transition and it disappeared shortly thereafter; 2) The estimated elasticities of demand grew over the transition, starting from zero in Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia and from sizeable levels in Hungary and Poland. By the end of the period, the elasticities for the four East European countries were quite similar and those for Russia had not changed significantly; 3) Once other factors are controlled for, there is no significant difference in the employment behavior among firms by ownership or legal status. However, Czech, Slovak and Polish private firms did pay higher wages than state-owned firms immediately after the start of the transition; 4) A closer examination in the Czech Republic of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and newly established firms indicates that SOEs had lower elasticities of employment and allowed less rent sharing than the newly established firms.

The Czech Republic: A Nation of Velvet

Abstract: 1. The Legacies of History: From the Foundation to the Velvet Revolution and the Velvet Divorce 2. Framing Velvet: The Institutional Arena and Rules of the Game in Czech Politics 3. Patchwork Velvet: The Burst Bubble of the Czech Economic Transformation 4. Exporting Velvet: The Czech Republic's Foreign Policy 5. A Nation of Velvet? Towards a New Czech National Identity

Fiscal Decentralisation in Economic Transformation: The Czech and Slovak Cases

Abstract: The successful economic transformation of the former Soviet Union and Soviet bloc cannot yet be taken for granted. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, moving toward recovery and membership in the EU, can apparently be expected to succeed. But these countries, as well as others in the transition process, must yet grapple with serious problems, one of the most significant of which is the transformation of the public sector and the establishment of local self-government.

The Uneasy Birth of Czech Civil Society

Abstract: This paper analyzes both the political discourse and the reality of Czech civil society. It describes how the concept of civil society has emerged in a difficult ideological context, and sets out how policy towards it has developed, also highlighting its economic role. Recent empirical evidence on the existing range of citizens' activities and their attitudes toward aspects of civic society and organizations within it is marshaled in order to estimate the potential for citizenship in the Czech Republic.

Post‐communism Romani migration to Canada

Abstract: The article discusses issues raised by the recent migration of Romani refugee claimants to Canada from the Czech Republic and Hungary. The article provides a historical overview of Romani migration to Canada before outlining the public and government reactions to the 1997 arrival of the Czech Roma and the subsequent arrival of the Hungarian Roma. The processing of the asylulm application of the two groups are detailed, and the differences between the reception of them examined. In particular, the article analyses the power of the rhetoric employed by the media, the Gypsy stereotype, entrenched racism, influential organisations and individuals from the refugee's home country, and assesses the impact of these factors on the interpretation of the validity of asylum claims and the framing of immigration policy.

Identity Politics and Economic Reform: Examining Industry-State Relations in the Czech and Slovak Republics

Abstract: OVER THE PAST DECADE THE capitalist and democratic transformations in Eastern Europe have enabled certain countries to integrate successfully in Western institutions and organisations. In contrast to Slovakia, three Central European states, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic have already become members of NATO and expect to join the European Union before long. Curiously, a rapprochement between the West and Slovakia has been much slower. The diverging paths of Slovakia and the Czech Republic are quite surprising given their identical starting point in 1989. Analysing this divergence may offer insights into understanding the trajectories of other post-communist states vis-a-vis the West. An area of divergence of particular interest between the Czech Republic and Slovakia involves the process of transforming the command economy to a market economy, and specifically the politics that facilitated or obstructed liberalising economic reforms. In the transformation of former communist economies more generally, success in advancing liberal economic reforms can be seen to depend upon the ability of state actors to mediate, and even suppress, the demands of pivotal social and industrial actors. Most post-communist governments recognised the importance of the managers of medium and large enterprises as a key group that could facilitate or hinder the process of capitalist reform. While governments varied in their choice of whether to appease, co-opt, disempower or ally with managers, no government undertaking structural economic reforms could choose to ignore them-as the managerial elite (also known as the former industrial nomenklatura) constituted one of the most powerful interest groups at the end of the communist period. Indeed, after the collapse of the former regime, managers in many post-communist states continued to enjoy widespread powers and privileges. Through their links to technocrats in the branch ministries and through their paternalistic relationships with the labour force, managers were well poised to obstruct or redirect the government's approach to reforming the economy. In this article we explore the relationship between management and the state in economic transition in order to understand why certain economic actors are better able to shape policy making in some contexts than others. We consider two examples of post-communist economic reform-the Czech and Slovak cases-and analyse the extent to which managers shaped the privatisation process and altered the direction of

Public opinion and party choice in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

Abstract: How do voters’ political opinions shape the way they think about political parties? In the left‐right socio-economic competition of advanced democracies the answer to this question is often taken for granted. For this reason many approaches to the study of parties are not easily applicable to countries where different issues dominate political debate. This paper offers an alternative. It provides a method for identifying differences in the weight that voters place on particular issues when they evaluate political parties, using the cases of Slovakia and the Czech Republic to show how these differences shape both electoral outcomes and the overall stability of democracy. The weight that Slovakia’s voters place on national and democracy issues when evaluating parties contrasts sharply with the more familiar left‐right socioeconomic judgements made by Czech voters. This difference helps to explain the weakness of democratic institutions in Slovakia in comparison to those of the Czech Republic.

Population Development in the Czech Republic in the 1990s

Abstract: In January 1993, the Czech Republic has started its independent existence after the dissolution of the Czechoslovakia. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the population of the Czech Republic has been experiencing a new phase of development: a completely new tendencies in demographic behaviour of the Czech population have appeared.

Financial Market Spillovers in Transition Economies

Abstract: This paper examines financial market comovements across European transition economies and compares their experience to that of their regions Correlations in monthly indices of exchange market pressures can partly be explained by direct trade linkages, but not by measures of other fundamentals Higher-frequency data during three crisis periods reveals the presence of structural breaks in the relationship between exchange-, but not stock markets While the reaction of markets during the Asian and Czech crises is muted, the pattern of high-frequency spillovers during the Russian crisis looks very similar to that observed in other regions during turbulent times

On non-self-evident relationships between language and ethnicity : How Germans do not speak German, and Czechs do not speak Czech

Abstract: This article proceeds from the linguistic, social, and political situation that has developed on the territory of the Czech Republic over the course of the 20th century The biographical accounts given by people of German origin who live in the Czech Republic form the empirical starting point The sections on language in the biographical narratives are assessed as revelations of a partial cultural system, a fragment of the ethnolinguistics of the German community members Making use of 'membership categorization analysis' developed in ethnomethodology, this paper deals with one feature related to ethnic categories, namely a particular language It turns out that on the territory of the Czech Republic the relation between ethnic category and language is category-constitutive This paper demonstrates that the relation between language and ethnicity varies and different generations have had different kinds of experience with its concrete form