1,721,118 research outputs found
Rediscovery of the elusive moray Gymnothorax polyuranodon (Teleostei: Muraenidae) from Sri Lanka after 84 years
No full textPhylogenetic and phylogeographic insights into Sri Lankan killifishes (Teleostei: Aplocheilidae).
No full textThree nominal species of the killifish genus Aplocheilus are reported from the lowlands of Sri Lanka. Two of these, Aplocheilus dayi and Aplocheilus werneri, are considered endemic to the island, whereas Aplocheilus parvus is reported from both Sri Lanka and Peninsular India. Here, based on a collection from 28 locations in Sri Lanka, also including a dataset of Asian Aplocheilus downloaded from GenBank, we present a phylogeny constructed from the mitochondrial cytochrome b (cytb), mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1), and nuclear recombination activating protein 1 (rag1), and investigate the interrelationships of the species of Aplocheilus in Sri Lanka. The endemic Sri Lankan aplocheilid clade comprising A. dayi and A. werneri is recovered as the sister group to the clade comprising A. parvus from Sri Lanka and Aplocheilus blockii from Peninsular India. The reciprocal monophyly of A. dayi and A. werneri is not supported in our molecular phylogeny. A. dayi and A. werneri display strong sexual dimorphism, but species-level differences are subtle, explained mostly by pigmentation patterns. Their phenotypes exhibit a parapatric distribution and may represent locally adapted forms of a single species. Alternatively, the present study does not rule out the possibility that A. dayi and A. werneri may represent an incipient species pair or that they have undergone introgression or hybridization in their contact zones. We provide evidence that the Nilwala-Gin region of southwestern Sri Lanka may have acted as a drought refugium for these fishes
Sri Lanka’s elusive freshwater spiny eel, Macrognathus pentophthalmos (Teleostei: Mastacembelidae)
No full textThis study focuses on Macrognathus pentophthalmos, one of the two freshwater spiny eel species in Sri Lanka, which was once abundant in lowland floodplains. However, since the 1980s, this species has experienced a significant population decline, the causes of which remain unknown. It is presently assessed as Critically Endangered in the National Red List. Here, we report on a juvenile and an adult M. pentophthalmos discovered in the dry zone lowlands of the island. Using the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 marker, we reveal subtle genetic differences between M. pentophthalmos and its Indian congener, M. aral. Additionally, we delve into the historical records of M.
pentophthalmos in Sri Lanka, tracing its decline, and suggest strategic hotspots for further investigation into its current status. This study aims to contribute insights into the enigmatic decline of this species while shedding light on its genetic relationships and proposing targeted areas for conservation efforts
Deep learning based semantic textual similarity for applications in translation technology
Get PDFA thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the equivalence of meanings
between two textual segments. It is a fundamental task for many natural
language processing applications. In this study, we focus on employing STS in
the context of translation technology. We start by developing models to estimate
STS. We propose a new unsupervised vector aggregation-based STS method
which relies on contextual word embeddings. We also propose a novel Siamese
neural network based on efficient recurrent neural network units. We empirically
evaluate various unsupervised and supervised STS methods, including these
newly proposed methods in three different English STS datasets, two non-
English datasets and a bio-medical STS dataset to list the best supervised and
unsupervised STS methods.
We then embed these STS methods in translation technology applications.
Firstly we experiment with Translation Memory (TM) systems. We propose a
novel TM matching and retrieval method based on STS methods that outperform
current TM systems. We then utilise the developed STS architectures in
translation Quality Estimation (QE). We show that the proposed methods are
simple but outperform complex QE architectures and improve the state-of-theart
results. The implementations of these methods have been released as open
source
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
First record of Lestes concinnus (Zygoptera: Lestidae) from Sri Lanka with observations on its natural history
No full textLestes concinnus is a widespread species in tropical Asia and Oceania. It is a species known to have variable colour patterns ranging between pale and dark phenotypes which have earlier been recognized as distinct species. Lestes concinnus has never been known from Sri Lanka before. We report observations of both phenotypes of the species and intermediate morphs of Lestes concinnus from coastal habitats with dry reed patches in the northern part of the country, adding it to the Odonata fauna of Sri Lanka. With multiple field observations examined, we also provide comments on its identification and natural history in the country
Multilingual offensive language identification for low-resource languages
Get PDFThis is an accepted manuscript of a paper published by ACM on 10/11/2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1145/3457610. The accepted manuscript of the publication may differ from the final published version.Offensive content is pervasive in social media and a reason for concern to companies and government organizations. Several studies have been recently published investigating methods to detect the various forms of such content (e.g., hate speech, cyberbullying, and cyberaggression). The clear majority of these studies deal with English partially because most annotated datasets available contain English data. In this article, we take advantage of available English datasets by applying cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and transfer learning to make predictions in low-resource languages. We project predictions on comparable data in Arabic, Bengali, Danish, Greek, Hindi, Spanish, and Turkish. We report results of 0.8415 F1 macro for Bengali in TRAC-2 shared task [23], 0.8532 F1 macro for Danish and 0.8701 F1 macro for Greek in OffensEval 2020 [58], 0.8568 F1 macro for Hindi in HASOC 2019 shared task [27], and 0.7513 F1 macro for Spanish in in SemEval-2019 Task 5 (HatEval) [7], showing that our approach compares favorably to the best systems submitted to recent shared tasks on these three languages. Additionally, we report competitive performance on Arabic and Turkish using the training and development sets of OffensEval 2020 shared task. The results for all languages confirm the robustness of cross-lingual contextual embeddings and transfer learning for this task.Published versio
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