Comment on Interlingual Word Taboos

Interlingual wordnets validation and word-sense disambiguation

Understanding natural language assumes one way or another, being able to select the appropriate meaning for each word in a text. Word-sense disambiguation is, by far, the most difficult part of the semantic processing required for natural language understanding. In a limited domain of discourse this problem is alleviated by considering only a few of the senses one word would have listed in any ...

Regularized Interlingual Projections: Evaluation on Multilingual Transliteration

In this paper, we address the problem of building a multilingual transliteration system using an interlingual representation. Our approach uses international phonetic alphabet (IPA) to learn the interlingual representation and thus allows us to use any word and its IPA representation as a training example. Thus, our approach requires only monolingual resources: a phoneme dictionary that lists w...

Comment on: Quimp: A word meaning "quality of life impairment".

Taboos, agriculture and poverty

Although cultural practices often have important consequences for household consumption and economic performance, they are seldom studied by economists. To fill this gap we study the impact of taboos on agriculture and poverty. Madagascar is a good case study for this purpose given the prevalence of taboos in everyday life and the variation in cultural practices across the country. We examine t...

Taboos, agriculture and poverty

We study the impact of work taboos (fady days) on agriculture and poverty. Using cross-sectional data from a national household survey for Madagascar, we find that 18% of agricultural households have two or more fady days per week and that an extra fady day is associated with 6 percent lower per capita consumption and 5 percent lower rice productivity. To address the possible endogeneity of fad...