Past Continuous or Present Perfect? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Indian Philosophy

Contemporary Indian philosophy is a distinct genre of philosophy that draws both on classical Indian philosophical sources and on Western materials, old and new. It is comparative philosophy without borders. In this paper, I attempt to show how contemporary Indian philosophy works through five instances from five of its protagonists: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (his new interpretation of the old rope-snake parable in his essay “Śaṅkara’s Doctrine of Maya”, 1925); Daya Krishna (I focus on the “moral monadism” that the theory of karma in his reading leads to, drawing on his book Discussion and Debate in Indian Philosophy, 2004); Ramchandra Gandhi (his commentary on the concept of Brahmacharya in correspondence with his grandfather, the Mahatma, in his essay “Brahmacharya”, 1981); Mukund Lath (on identity through—not despite—change, with classical Indian music, Rāga music, as his case-study, in his essay “Identity through Necessary Change”, 2003); and Rajendra Swaroop Bhatnagar (on suffering, in his paper “No Suffering if Human Beings Were Not Sensitive”, 2021). My aim is twofold. First, to introduce five contemporary Indian philosophers; and second, to raise the question of newness and philosophy. Is there anything new in philosophy, or is contemporary philosophy just a footnote—à la Whitehead—to the writings of great thinkers of the past? Is contemporary Indian philosophy, my protagonists included, just a series of footnotes to classical thinkers both in India and Europe? Footnotes to the Upaniṣads, Nāgārjuna, Dharmakīrti and Śaṅkara, as much as (let us not forget colonialism and Macaulay) to Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel? Footnotes can be creative and work almost as a parallel text, interpretive, critical, even subversive. However, my contention is that contemporary Indian philosophy (I leave it to others to plea for contemporary Western philosophy) is not a footnote, it is a text with agency of its own, validity of its own, power of its own. It is wholly and thoroughly a text worth reading. In this paper, I make an attempt to substantiate this claim through the philosophical mosaic I offer, in each instance highlighting both the continuity with classical sources and my protagonists’ courageous transgressions and innovations.

Application of corpus technologies in teaching specialized translation

Corpus technologies (corpora of English and Ukrainian texts and tools for their processing) represent modern specialized discourse and facilitate searching for and comparing different units of translation, which makes them a useful tool for both practicing and trainee translators. The purpose of this article is to determine the role and place of corpus technologies in teaching specialized translation on the example of the oil and gas industry. Comparative and parallel text corpora are characterized. The paper reveals methods of applying mono- and bilingual comparative and parallel corpora and corpus managers for acquiring knowledge about genre-stylistic features of texts; developing skills to distinguish a term and determine its collocation profile and semantic preference; analyze translation techniques; translate collocations, complex noun constructions, verbal phrases, and abbreviations. Examples of relevant exercises and tasks that should be performed at the translation training stage are given. Further research should be aimed at integrating corpus-based tasks into the translation practice stage involving the implementation of a translation project.

On word order variation and informationstructure in peninsular spanish and italian ‘why’-interrogatives

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Sliding Window and Parallel LSTM with Attention and CNN for Sentence Alignment on Low-Resource Languages

A parallel text corpus is an important resource for building a machine translation (MT) system. Existing resources such as translated documents, bilingual dictionaries, and translated subtitles are excellent resources for constructing parallel text corpus. A sentence alignment algorithm automatically aligns source sentences and target sentences because manual sentence alignment is resource-intensive. Over the years, sentence alignment approaches have improved from sentence length heuristics to statistical lexical models to deep neural networks. Solving the alignment problem as a classification problem is interesting as classification is the core of machine learning. This paper proposes a parallel long-short-term memory with attention and convolutional neural network (parallel LSTM+Attention+CNN) for classifying two sentences as parallel or non-parallel sentences. A sliding window approach is also proposed with the classifier to align sentences in the source and target languages. The proposed approach was compared with three classifiers, namely the feedforward neural network, CNN, and bi-directional LSTM. It is also compared with the BleuAlign sentence alignment system. The classification accuracy of these models was evaluated using Malay-English parallel text corpus and UN French-English parallel text corpus. The Malay-English sentence alignment performance was then evaluated using research documents and the very challenging Classical Malay-English document. The proposed classifier obtained more than 80% accuracy in categorizing parallel/non-parallel sentences with a model built using only five thousand training parallel sentences. It has a higher sentence alignment accuracy than other baseline systems.

“The Tale of Igor's Campaign” in N. Gumilyov's lyrics of the later period

This research is dedicated to spatiotemporal aspect of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in N. Gumilyov’s lyrics of later period. Based on the lyrical works written over the period from 1913 to 1921, the author contemplates on the role of the Old Russian epic for the poet’s ideology. A hypothesis advanced that the text of the tale is one of the most constructive in worldview of the poet. The article employs the comparative-historical and structural-semiotic methods (juxtaposition of semantics facts that go back to the text  of the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and contained in N. Gumilyov's poetry) for establishing correspondence or semantic changes of words in the original text. The method of parallel text search is applied. Textual analysis of the fragments of N. Gumilyov's works and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaig” is conducted. The article is first to determine and substantiate the interrelation between N. Gumilyov’s poem “War” (1914) and text of the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign”. Detailed analysis is given to the image of the “sowing” and “reaping” Russian warriors. In his later works, Gumilyov associates the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign” with the highest ethical values, history of Russian and world culture, which underlines the historicism of Gumilyov’s thinking. The article reveals the “horse”, “warrior”, “quiver”, “saber” contained in the text of the tale reflect the true life of N. Gumilyov.

Identifying constitutive articles of cumulative dissertation theses by bilingual text similarity. Evaluation of similarity methods on a new short text task

Cumulative dissertations are doctoral theses comprised of multiple published articles. For studies of publication activity and citation impact of early career researchers it is important to identify these articles and link them to their associated theses. Using a new benchmark dataset, this paper reports on experiments of measuring the bilingual textual similarity between, on the one hand, titles and keywords of doctoral theses, and, on the other hand, articles’ titles and abstracts. The tested methods are cosine similarity and L1 distance in the Vector Space Model (VSM) as baselines, the language-indifferent methods Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and trigram similarity, and the language-aware methods fastText and Random Indexing (RI). LSA and RI, two supervised methods, were trained on a purposively collected bilingual scientific parallel text corpus. The results show that the VSM baselines and the RI method perform best but that the VSM method is unsuitable for cross-language similarity due to its inherent monolingual bias.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.