Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and our decoding process improves results by 3.8% LAS points over the first-best normalization and/or backtransliteration.

In this paper, we propose efficient and less resource-intensive strategies for parsing of code-mixed data. These strategies are not constrained by in-domain annotations, rather they leverage pre-existing monolingual annotated resources for training. We show that these methods can produce significantly better results as compared to an informed baseline. Besides, we also present a data set of 450 Hindi and English code-mixed tweets of Hindi multilingual speakers for evaluation. The data set is manually annotated with Universal Dependencies.

wikiHow is a resource of how-to guides that describe the steps necessary to accomplish a goal. Guides in this resource are regularly edited by a community of users, who try to improve instructions in terms of style, clarity and correctness. In this work, we test whether the need for such edits can be predicted automatically. For this task, we extend an existing resource of textual edits with a complementary set of approx. 4 million sentences that remain unedited over time and report on the outcome of two revision modeling experiments.

A new synthetic route to prepare imidazolium salts with heteroatom-containing functional groups at the backbone has been reported. Accordingly, the first example of a backbone bisthiofunctionalized imidazolium salt (4) was prepared by sequential metal−halogen exchange reaction of 1-methyl-4,5-diiodoimidazole (1) followed by a quaternization reaction with methyl iodide. The metal−carbene complexes 6, 8, and 10 were synthesized conveniently through three different routes, namely, (a) an in situ generated carbene route, (b) a transmetalation method, and (c) direct reaction with a basic metal precursor, and structurally characterized. Subsequently the electronic properties of the newly prepared 1,3dimethyl-4,5-bis(phenylthio)-imidazol-2-ylidene ((SPh) 2 IMe) was studied by measuring the carbonyl stretching frequency of the corresponding [Ir{(SPh) 2 IMe}(CO) 2 (Cl)] complex. In addition, the air-stable palladium−NHC complex 10 was found to be catalytically active in Suzuki−Miyaura coupling reactions of aryl bromides.

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Hydroxypyridine functionalized imidazolium salts (2a−c) have been prepared in a one pot neat reaction between alkyl/aryl imidazoles and 2-chloro-3-hydroxypyridine. The imidazolium salts were used as proligands for the synthesis of new Ni(II) (3a, 3c, and 3c′) and Pd(II) NHC (4a−4c) complexes. Complexes, 3a, 3c, and 4a−4c are four coordinated with square planar geometry around the metal center and feature the C,O chelation of the heterobidentate NHC ligands, using carbene atoms and the O atom of the hydroxypyridine arm. Depending upon the steric bulk of the alkyl/aryl substituents on the ligand, either cis (3a and 4a) or trans (3c, 4b, and 4c) complexes are obtained. For the nickel complex with the 2c ligand, two different isomeric forms (3c and 3c′) were observed. In 3c, both the NHC ligands are bound via C2 and O atoms of the hydroxypyridine arm, whereas, in 3c′, one of the two ligands binds via C4 and N atoms of the hydroxypyridine side arm. 3c′ represents a unique square planar complex with the central metal atom bound simultaneously to both normal and abnormal carbenes. All the five complexes, except 3c′, were evaluated as catalysts for the Kumada−Tamao−Corriu cross-coupling reaction between phenylmagnesium bromide and different aryl chlorides at room temperature.

In recent years, the task of Question Answering over passages, also pitched as a reading comprehension, has evolved into a very active research area. A reading comprehension system extracts a span of text, comprising of named entities, dates, small phrases, etc., which serve as the answer to a given question. However, these spans of text would result in an unnatural reading experience in a conversational system. Usually, dialogue systems solve this issue by using template-based language generation. These systems, though adequate for a domain specific task, are too restrictive and predefined for a domain independent system. In order to present the user with a more conversational experience, we propose a pointer generator based full-length answer generator which can be used with most QA systems. Our system generates a full-length answer given a question and the extracted factoid/span answer without relying on the passage from where the answer was extracted. We also present a dataset of 315,000 question, factoid answer and full-length answer triples. We have evaluated our system using ROUGE-1,2,L and BLEU and achieved 74.05 BLEU score and 86.25 Rogue-L score.

Aconitum chasmanthum Stapf ex Holmes, a highly valued medicinal plant, is a critically endangered plant species with restricted global distribution. Because there is no published report on the in vitro micropropagation of A. chasmanthum, the present study was undertaken to contribute to the development of an efficient micropropagation protocol for its conservation. Seeds collected from the wild showed enhanced germination after being given a chilling treatment (−4 °C and −20 °C) for different durations (10, 20, 30 and 40 days). Seeds given a chilling treatment of −4 °C for 10 days showed enhanced germination rates of 47.59 ± 0.53% with a mean germination time of 10.78 ± 0.21 days compared to seeds kept at room temperature when grown in an MS basal medium. Nodes, leaves and stems, taken from 20–40-day-old seedlings, were used as an explant for micropropagation. An MS medium supplemented with different concentrations of cytokinins (BAP, Kn), auxins (2,4-D, NAA), and an additive adenine sulphate were tested for callusing, direct shoot regeneration and rooting. Only nodal explants responded and showed direct multiple shoot regeneration with 7 ± 0.36 shoots with an elongation of 5.51 ± 0.26 cm in the MS medium supplemented with BAP 0.5 mg/L, and with a response time (RT) of 10.41 ± 0.51 days and a percentage culture response of 77.77 ± 2.77%. Rhizome formation was observed after 8 weeks, with the highest culture response of 36.66 ± 3.33% in the MS basal media with an RT of 43.75 ± 0.50 days. These rhizomes showed a 60% germination rate within 2 weeks and developed into plantlets. The present in vitro regeneration protocol could be used for the large-scale propagation and conservation of A. chasmanthum.