The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism can be critical for developing countries seeking to defend their trade rights and development interests. The system has been essential for challenging harmful subsidy programs, eliminating unfair anti-dumping duties and ensuring that least developed countries (LDC) can pursue strategies to diversify trade in order to create new emp...

This paper describes ongoing efforts at Linguistic Data Consortium to create shared resources for improved speech-totext technology. Under the DARPA EARS program, technology providers are charged with creating STT systems whose outputs are substantially richer and much more accurate than is currently possible. These aggressive program goals motivate new approaches to corpus creation and distrib...

The enigma of the Emergence of Natural Languages, coupled or not with the closely related problem of their Evolution, E&ENL Problem for short, is perceived today as one of the most important scientific problems and even, according to the provocative title of [13], as the “hardest” one: “Despite a staggering growth in our scientific knowledge about the origin of life, the universe and (almost) e...

Mass tourism, which may lead to environmental problems, cultural and social degradation, distortion of economic benefits and disease, particularly in poorer countries, provides financial reasons for preserving cultural, historical and natural resources or traditions, which otherwise may be neglected. Vanuatu, is a less developed country (LDC), reliant on tourism for such benefits. Therefore, th...

We have constructed a new “Who-did-What” dataset of over 200,000 fill-in-the-gap (cloze) multiple choice reading comprehension problems constructed from the LDC English Gigaword newswire corpus. The WDW dataset has a variety of novel features. First, in contrast with the CNN and Daily Mail datasets (Hermann et al., 2015) we avoid using article summaries for question formation. Instead, each pro...

Despite a dearth of theoretical studies, there is widespread perception that microfinance is an enormously useful tool for economic development. However, an increasing number of households in lesser developed countries are facing the same debt squeeze as those in the developed world, but are less able to manage debt responsibilities. The consequences are much more dramatic for LDC households be...

Languages are among the most complex systems that evolution has created. With an unforeseen speed many of these unique results of evolution are currently disappearing: every two weeks one of the 6500 still spoken languages is dying and many are subject to extreme changes due to globalization. Experts understood the need to document the languages and preserve the cultural and linguistic treasure...