The last time I saw Ken Plummer was in Lancaster, England 2018. He gently and kindly listening to a younger sociologist talking about trying do sexualities scholarship challenging British university environment.

This paper proposes a corpus-based language model for topic identification. We analyze the association of noun-noun and noun-verb pairs in LOB Corpus. The word association norms are based on three factors: 1) word importance, 2) pair co-occurrence, and 3) distance. They are trained on the paragraph and sentence levels for noun-noun and nounverb pairs, respectively. Under the topic coherence pos...

A language model based on word-category n-grams and ambiguous category membership with n increased selectively to trade compactness for performance is presented. The use of categories leads intrinsically to a compact model with the ability to generalise to unseen word sequences, and diminishes the spareseness of the training data, thereby making larger n feasible. The language model implicitly ...

Over a period of four decades F. W. Lancaster has continuously emerged as a visionary leader in the field of library and information science. His research, writings, and teachings have earned him the highest honors in the profession. Lancaster excelled at many fronts: as scholar, educator, mentor, and writer. This essay summarizes the personalized contributions of Lancaster’s friends, family, s...

This paper describes an automatic word classiication system which uses a locally optimal annealing algorithm and average class mutual information. A new word-class representation, the structural tag is introduced and its advantages for use in statistical language modelling are presented. A summary of some results with the one million word lob corpus is given; the algorithm is also shown to disc...

In this paper we present a new database for off-line handwriting recognition, together with a few preprocessing and text segmentation procedures. The database is based on the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen(LOB) corpus. This corpus is a collection of texts that were used to generate forms, which subsequently were filled out by persons with their handwriting. Up to now (December 1998) the database include...

The standard geometrodynamics is reformulated into a theory of conformal geometrodynamics by extending the ADM phase space for canonical general relativity to a phase space consisting of York’s exterior mean curvature time, conformal 3-metric and their momenta. Accordingly, an additional constraint is introduced, called the conformal constraint. In terms of the new canonical variables, a diffeo...

We extend the work of Sarmanov and Lancaster to obtain an expansion for multivariate distributions. The expansion reveals a flexible, detailed dependence structure that goes beyond pairwise linear correlation to include non-linear and higher-order statistical dependencies. Through examples we show how to use the expansion to analyze existing distributions and to construct new distributions with...

Keith Cheverst, Christos Efstratiou, Nigel Davies and Adrian Friday Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Lancaster University, e-mail: [email protected]