Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language change, but also because humans may not agree on what is a euphemism and what is not. Nonetheless, the first step to tackling the issue is to collect and analyze examples of euphemisms. We present a corpus of potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) along with example texts from the GloWbE corpus. Additionally, we present a subcorpus of texts where these PETs are not being used euphemistically, which may be useful for future applications. We also discuss the results of multiple analyses run on the corpus. Firstly, we find that sentiment analysis on the euphemistic texts supports that PETs generally decrease negative and offensive sentiment. Secondly, we observe cases of disagreement in an annotation task, where humans are asked to label PETs as euphemistic or not in a subset of our corpus text examples. We attribute the disagreement to a variety of potential reasons, including if the PET was a commonly accepted term (CAT).

Polar codes provably achieve the capacity of binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channels with low complexity encoding and decoding algorithms, and their finite-length performance on these channels, when combined with suitable decoding algorithms (such as list decoding) and code modifications (such as a concatenated CRC code), has been shown in simulation to be competitive with that of LDPC codes. However, magnetic recording channels are generally modeled as binary-input intersymbol interference (ISI) channels, and the design of polar coding schemes for these channels remains an important open problem. Current magnetic hard disk drives use LDPC codes incorporated into a turbo-equalization (TE) architecture that combines a soft-output channel detector with a soft-input, soft-output sum-product algorithm (SPA) decoder. An interleaved coding scheme with a multistage decoding (MSD) architecture with LDPC codes as component codes has been proposed as an alternative to TE for ISI channels. In this work, we investigate the use of polar codes as component codes in the TE and MSD architectures. It is shown that the achievable rate of the MSD scheme converges to the symmetric information rate of the ISI channel when the number of interleaves is large. Simulations results comparing the performance of LDPC codes and polar codes in TE and MSD architectures are presented.

Many standard problems in computational geometry have been solved asymptotically optimally as far as comparison-based algorithms are concerned, but there has been little work focusing on improving the constant factors hidden in big-Oh bounds on the number of comparisons needed. In this paper, we consider orthogonal-type problems and present a number of results that achieve optimality in the constant factors of the leading terms, including:

In this paper, we present maximum-likelihood modeling of burst errors in magnetic recording channels using hidden Markov models (HMM). We derive low-complexity and memory efficient algorithms for computing the log-likelihood function for burst sequences, and use this algorithm to optimally determine the model parameters using smart search techniques. Finally, we illustrate a modeling example from real observed data collected from hard disks, and show how the model can be applied for evaluating decoder failure rates using Wolf's method [5].

We derive upper and lower bounds on the weight distribution of Over-Extended Reed-Solomon (OERS) codes. Using these bounds, we obtain tight upper and lower bounds on the probability of undetected error for OERS codes on q-ary symmetric channels.

Upper and lower bounds on the weight distribution of overextended Reed-Solomon (OERS) codes are derived, from which tight upper and lower bounds on the probability of undetected error for OERS codes are obtained for q-ary symmetric channels

Fractional Brownian motion (fBm) provides a useful model for processes with strong long-term dependence, such as 1/f/sup /spl beta// spectral behavior. However, fBm's are nonstationary processes so that the interpretation of such a spectrum is still a matter of speculation. To facilitate the study of this problem, another model is provided for the construction of fBm from a white-noise-like process by means of a stochastic or Ito integral in frequency of a stationary uncorrelated random process. Also a generalized power spectrum of the nonstationary fBm process is defined. This new approach to fBm can be used to compute all of the correlations, power spectra, and other properties of fBm. In this paper, a number of these fBm properties are developed from this model such as the T/sup H/ law of scaling, the power law of fractional order, the correlation of two arbitrary fBm's, and the evaluation of the fractal dimension under various transformations. This new treatment of fBm using a spectral representation is extended also, for the first time, to two or more topological dimensions in order to analyze the features of isotropic n-dimensional fBm.>

A general method is presented for constructing a single-error-correcting, run-length-limited code for the class of input-restricted, binary symmetric channels described by the parameters (d,k), where d is the minimum and k the maximum number of consecutive zeros in any allowable channel input sequence. Upper and lower bounds on the rates of these codes are derived.>