A recent study by the author on the asymmetry of (supply, monetary and real or demand shocks) shocks of the 5 largest economies of ASEAN (which were called the big5) strongly suggested that Singapore and Malaysia represent the core group, with Thailand close behind and Philippines and Indonesia constituting the periphery of ASEAN.
In actual fact, in that study, Singapore and Malaysia yielded the lowest cumulative long-run effect of supply, monetary and demand shocks to prices, output and real effective exchange rates. Thailand was close behind, the Philippines next and Indonesia was found to be country that experienced the largest asymmetric movements in the sample.
The purpose of this paper is to link theory and empirical evidence to create a critical synthesis. Twinning theory and empirics provides a greater insight and understanding of the context of this thesis. This paper synthesises the issues and strategic factors of the tea plantations and the broader tea industry that are unique to Sri Lanka, and different from the contexts in which Western/Northern business strategy ideology has been developed. Therefore, this paper provides critical interpretation of managerialist perspective on business strategy so as to understand the role of power relations in strategy process in the Sri Lankan tea industry, especially the tea plantations.
This will give clear insight into the reason why plantation companies merely apply and make use of Western/Northern managerialist perspective at only a nominal level to make up their business strategies and plans. This paper therefore addresses research question: How adequate are current business strategies used in the tea plantations and the industry?; and research question: How can the business strategy perspective used by the Sri Lankan tea industry be improved?
Natural language processing has been in existence for more than fifty years. During this time, it has significantly contributed to the field of human-computer interaction in terms of theoretical results and practical applications. As computers continue to become more affordable and accessible, the importance of user interfaces that are effective, robust, unobtrusive, and user-friendly – regardless of user expertise or impediments – becomes more pronounced. Since natural language usually provides for effortless and effective communication in human-human interaction, its significance and potential in human-computer interaction should not be overlooked – either spoken or typewritten, it may effectively complement other available modalities,1 such as windows, icons, and menus, and pointing; in some cases, such as in users with disabilities, natural language may even be the only applicable modality. This chapter examines the field of natural language processing as it relates to human-computer interaction by focusing on its history, interactive application areas, theoretical approaches to linguistic modeling, and relevant computational and philosophical issues. It also presents a taxonomy for interactive natural language systems based on their linguistic knowledge and processing requirements, and reviews related applications. Finally, it discusses linguistic coverage issues, and explores the development of natural language widgets and their integration into multimodal user interfaces.
The field of natural language processing (NLP) originated approximately five decades ago with machine translation systems. In 1946, Warren Weaver and Andrew Donald Booth discussed the technical feasibility of machine translation “by means of the techniques developed during World War II for the breaking of enemy codes” (Booth and Locke, 1955, p. 2). During the more than fifty years of its existence, the field has evolved from the dictionary-based machine translation systems of the fifties to the more adaptable, robust, and user-friendly NLP environments of the nineties. This evolution has been marked by periods of considerable growth and funding “prosperity,” followed by years of intense criticism and lack of funding. This article attempts to provide an overview of this field by focusing on its history, current trends, some important theories and applications, and the state-of-the-art as it relates to human-computer interaction (HCI).
