From the award-winning author of Toxic Spirits comes a new and heartbreaking novel about cruelty and marginalization, and the struggle to find meaning in a world of mounting prejudice and false belief. Gay but still closeted and missing his wife Helen — who has fled their home to become a Buddhist nun — Ali Akbar returns in old age from California to India. At the Deer Park where the Buddha gave his first sermon, he comes across a flyer that promises to teach him how to find love again. After being assaulted outside the park at a parade led by a religious fundamentalist, Ali attempts to make good on the promise of the flyer, traveling from Benares up towards the icy heights of Mount Kailash. Along the way, Ali is forced to come to terms with the relentless sexual abuse he suffered in childhood in India, as well as his personal failures, including his expulsion from Cambridge University, his failed career hopes, and most of all, his relationships with Helen and their daughter Homa. Navigating between competing fundamentalisms that mark a time of social collapse, Ali tries, in the time that he has left, to seize that last chance to find love again -- even if it takes a very different form from what he expected. Steeped in the philosophies of classical Greece and India, and layered with colorful travelogues in India, England, and the US, The Conquest of Kailash is written in Mani’s characteristically atmospheric and humane style that has attracted readers worldwide.
With the explosion in the quantity of on-line text and multimedia information in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in automatic summarization. This book provides a systematic introduction to the field, explaining basic definitions, the strategies used by human summarizers, and automatic methods that leverage linguistic and statistical knowledge to produce extracts and abstracts. Drawing from a wealth of research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information retrieval, the book also includes detailed assessments of evaluation methods and new topics such as multi-document and multimedia summarization. Previous automatic summarization books have been either collections of specialized papers, or else authored books with only a chapter or two devoted to the field as a whole. This is the first textbook on the subject, developed based on teaching materials used in two one-semester courses. To further help the student reader, the book includes detailed case studies, accompanied by end-of-chapter reviews and an extensive glossary.Audience: students and researchers, as well as information technology managers, librarians, and anyone else interested in the subject.
With the explosion in the quantity of on-line text and multimedia information in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in automatic summarization. This book provides a systematic introduction to the field, explaining basic definitions, the strategies used by human summarizers, and automatic methods that leverage linguistic and statistical knowledge to produce extracts and abstracts. Drawing from a wealth of research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information retrieval, the book also includes detailed assessments of evaluation methods and new topics such as multi-document and multimedia summarization. Previous automatic summarization books have been either collections of specialized papers, or else authored books with only a chapter or two devoted to the field as a whole. This is the first textbook on the subject, developed based on teaching materials used in two one-semester courses. To further help the student reader, the book includes detailed case studies, accompanied by end-of-chapter reviews and an extensive glossary.Audience: students and researchers, as well as information technology managers, librarians, and anyone else interested in the subject.
From the award-winning author of Toxic Spirits comes a new and heartbreaking novel about cruelty and marginalization, and the struggle to find meaning in a world of mounting prejudice and false belief. Gay but still closeted and missing his wife Helen — who has fled their home to become a Buddhist nun — Ali Akbar returns in old age from California to India. At the Deer Park where the Buddha gave his first sermon, he comes across a flyer that promises to teach him how to find love again. After being assaulted outside the park at a parade led by a religious fundamentalist, Ali attempts to make good on the promise of the flyer, traveling from Benares up towards the icy heights of Mount Kailash. Along the way, Ali is forced to come to terms with the relentless sexual abuse he suffered in childhood in India, as well as his personal failures, including his expulsion from Cambridge University, his failed career hopes, and most of all, his relationships with Helen and their daughter Homa. Navigating between competing fundamentalisms that mark a time of social collapse, Ali tries, in the time that he has left, to seize that last chance to find love again -- even if it takes a very different form from what he expected. Steeped in the philosophies of classical Greece and India, and layered with colorful travelogues in India, England, and the US, The Conquest of Kailash is written in Mani’s characteristically atmospheric and humane style that has attracted readers worldwide.
The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called NarrativeML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates together narratology, AI, and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists. It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists), AI researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, game developers, and narrative theorists. Table of Contents: List of Figures / List of Tables / Narratological Background / Characters as Intentional Agents / Time / Plot / Summary and Future Directions
This book aims to enhance our understanding of the Anglo-American alliance by examining the origins of the alliance during the Second World War. It presents a case study of how power is distributed in British society, and who makes the political decisions that decisively shape the society and world in which we live.
Environmental Metagenomics, Water Quality and Suggested Remediation Measures of Polluted Waters: A Combined Approach is a reference handbook for scientists, engineers and early-career researchers seeking guidance in the areas of water quality, and remediation studies. The comprehensive book, which includes case studies and applications from a range of contributors in the field, offers an essential resource in the science of water quality assessment. Includes a range of applications and case studies in wetland, riverine, drinking, and groundwater metagenomics, along with approaches for the remediation of pollutants from wastewater Offers the latest updates on environmental metagenomics and its correlation with water environments, remediation measures, and SDGs Provides key contributions from global researchers in the fields of water chemistry, environmental science, engineering, and public health
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