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A black box in your car?
As America's road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.
The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America's major roads.
The usually dull arena of highway planning has suddenly spawned intense debate and colorful alliances.
Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them - then use the information to draw up a tax bill.
The tea party is aghast.
The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply concerned, too, raising a variety of privacy issues.
And while Congress can't agree on whether to proceed, several states are not waiting.
They are exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they roll over.
Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, some of which have GPS monitoring, for a test drive.
This really is a must for our nation.
It is not a matter of something we might choose to do, said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which is planning for the state to start tracking miles driven by every California motorist by 2025.
There is going to be a change in how we pay these taxes.
The technology is there to do it.
The push comes as the country's Highway Trust Fund, financed with taxes Americans pay at the gas pump, is broke.
Americans don't buy as much gas as they used to.
Cars get many more miles to the gallon.
The federal tax itself, 18.4 cents per gallon, hasn't gone up in 20 years.
Politicians are loath to raise the tax even one penny when gas prices are high.
The gas tax is just not sustainable, said Lee Munnich, a transportation policy expert at the University of Minnesota.
His state recently put tracking devices on 500 cars to test out a pay-by-mile system.
This works out as the most logical alternative over the long term, he said.
Wonks call it a mileage-based user fee.
It is no surprise that the idea appeals to urban liberals, as the taxes could be rigged to change driving patterns in ways that could help reduce congestion and greenhouse gases, for example.
California planners are looking to the system as they devise strategies to meet the goals laid out in the state's ambitious global warming laws.
But Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has said he, too, sees it as the most viable long-term alternative.
The free marketeers at the Reason Foundation are also fond of having drivers pay per mile.
This is not just a tax going into a black hole, said Adrian Moore, vice president of policy at Reason.
People are paying more directly into what they are getting.
The movement is also bolstered by two former U.S. Transportation secretaries, who in a 2011 report urged Congress to move in the pay-per-mile direction.
The U.S. Senate approved a $90-million pilot project last year that would have involved about 10,000 cars.
But the House leadership killed the proposal, acting on concerns of rural lawmakers representing constituents whose daily lives often involve logging lots of miles to get to work or into town.
Several states and cities are nonetheless moving ahead on their own.
The most eager is Oregon, which is enlisting 5,000 drivers in the country's biggest experiment.
Those drivers will soon pay the mileage fees instead of gas taxes to the state.
Nevada has already completed a pilot.
New York City is looking into one.
Illinois is trying it on a limited basis with trucks.
And the I-95 Coalition, which includes 17 state transportation departments along the Eastern Seaboard (including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida), is studying how they could go about implementing the change.
The concept is not a universal hit.
In Nevada, where about 50 volunteers' cars were equipped with the devices not long ago, drivers were uneasy about the government being able to monitor their every move.
Concerns about Big Brother and those sorts of things were a major problem, said Alauddin Khan, who directs strategic and performance management at the Nevada Department of Transportation.
It was not something people wanted.
As the trial got underway, the ACLU of Nevada warned on its website: "It would be fairly easy to turn these devices into full-fledged tracking devices."
There is no need to build an enormous, unwieldy technological infrastructure that will inevitably be expanded to keep records of individuals' everyday comings and goings.
Nevada is among several states now scrambling to find affordable technology that would allow the state to keep track of how many miles a car is being driven, but not exactly where and at what time.
If you can do that, Khan said, the public gets more comfortable.
The hunt for that technology has led some state agencies to a small California startup called True Mileage.
The firm was not originally in the business of helping states tax drivers.
It was seeking to break into an emerging market in auto insurance, in which drivers would pay based on their mileage.
But the devices it is testing appeal to highway planners because they don't use GPS and deliver a limited amount of information, uploaded periodically by modem.
People will be more willing to do this if you do not track their speed and you do not track their location, said Ryan Morrison, chief executive of True Mileage.
There have been some big mistakes in some of these state pilot programs.
There are a lot less expensive and less intrusive ways to do this.
In Oregon, planners are experimenting with giving drivers different choices.
They can choose a device with or without GPS.
Or they can choose not to have a device at all, opting instead to pay a flat fee based on the average number of miles driven by all state residents.
Other places are hoping to sell the concept to a wary public by having the devices do more, not less.
In New York City, transportation officials are seeking to develop a taxing device that would also be equipped to pay parking meter fees, provide "pay-as-you-drive" insurance, and create a pool of real-time speed data from other drivers that motorists could use to avoid traffic.
Motorists would be attracted to participate because of the value of the benefits it offers to them, says a city planning document.
Some transportation planners, though, wonder if all the talk about paying by the mile is just a giant distraction.
At the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area, officials say Congress could very simply deal with the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund by raising gas taxes.
An extra one-time or annual levy could be imposed on drivers of hybrids and others whose vehicles don't use much gas, so they pay their fair share.
There is no need for radical surgery when all you need to do is take an aspirin, said Randy Rentschler, the commission's director of legislation and public affairs.
If we do this, hundreds of millions of drivers will be concerned about their privacy and a host of other things.
According to the police his death was due to drowning.
However, the police have taken the friend of the deceased into custody for hiding the deceased's luggage at his house.
The police have filed the final investigation report with the court.
It may be recalled that on August 26th the police recovered the body of Jahid Iqbal from the Jhelum river in Padshahi Park.
His family had accused his friends because his mobile and other luggage was missing.
The police said in their report that the deceased's phone and SIM card were checked and his phone was being used by a woman named Saura.
After questioning the woman, she said that the phone had been given to her by a relative named Ruhail Gauhar.
Ruhail also lives in Padshahi Park and was a friend of the deceased.
On August 25th, after Namaaz-e-Jumma, Ruhail had gone with Jahid to bathe in the Jhelum river.
Jahid took off his clothes and left all his things on the banks, while Ruhail went to the other bank to smoke a cigarette.
When he returned Jahid was not there, only his clothes were there.
Ruhail looked for Jahid, but he could not find him.
Then he picked up his mobile phone, watch and other things and kept them for his own use.
He did not tell anyone that Jahid has drowned.
The police told the court that Jahid has drowned and the post-mortem report confirmed this.
However, Ruhail was arrested under section 404 for hiding the facts and possessions of the deceased.
The Maharaja of the dynastic capital has arranged some magnificent cuisine from the majestic palaces.
These special dishes will be available in all the restaurants of the dynastic capital from November 1st to the 5th, in your city.
One must enjoy the heritage of these enriched recipes from the dynastic capital this Diwali with your family and friends.
Crispy Pea Rolls, Surti Plaza, Barsa Dola, Hariwali Patra, Jodhpuri Pakaros, Dakor na Gota nu Chat and Lilava Kachori will be awaiting you in the Special Diwali Thali.
Traditional recipes with vegetables such as Surti Udhiyu, Jaisalmer Panch Kuta, Pithaud ki sabji, Jodhpuri Gatta, Sagaru ke kofte, Rabodi Hara Pyaj, Til wale Aloo, Makai Mirch and Jajaria are included.
The best way to end a regal meal is with desserts like Apple Jalebi, Tomato Halwa, Walnut Halwa, Dudh Pak, Date Barfi, Dryfruit Halwa, Makai Jajaria and Sutar Saini Kheer.
Presenting CAT's trendy footwear and clothing collection.
Chandigarh: On the occasion of the festival of lights the internationally renowned brand CAT presented a collection of trendy footwear and clothing.
CAT is a brand that has been offering strong, durable, beautiful and high quality products for the past one hundred years.
Each of its products is made in the USA and represents the true CAT lifestyle.
It is the perfect gift for your relatives and loved ones.
This collection is ideal for the modern shopper who like this style of footwear, whether female or male.
Available in this style are mid-cuts and wheel boots along with slip-ons and sandals made of premium leather, suede and canvas.
To make this footwear collection even more impressive even a denim range is also available.
It includes woven trousers, graphic T-shirts, polo neck T-shirts, shorts, skirts and jackets.
CAT, in a way, is the blend of durability and lifestyle.
Luggage and travel gear is also available here.
MRF has been awarded the JD Power Award, for the tenth time in a row.
Chandigarh: India's largest tyre manufacturer and one of the top 15 global tyre companies, MRF has been awarded the JD Power award for the tenth time in a row.

Dataset Card for Hindi English Codemix Dataset - HINMIX

HINMIX is a massive parallel codemixed dataset for Hindi-English code switching.

See the 📚 paper on arxiv to dive deep into this synthetic codemix data generation pipeline. Dataset contains 4.2M fully parallel sentences in 6 Hindi-English forms.

Further, we release gold standard codemix dev and test set manually translated by proficient bilingual annotators.

  • Dev Set consists of 280 examples
  • Test set consists of 2507 examples

To load the dataset:

!pip install datasets
from datasets import load_dataset
hinmix_ds = load_dataset("kartikagg98/HINMIX_hi-en","lcsalign-hicmrom") #choose one from lcsalign-en, lcsalign-hicm, lcsalign-hi, lcsalign-hicmrom, lcsalign-noisyhicmrom, lcsalign-hicmdvg
print ([hinmix_ds[i][10]['text'] for i in ['train','valid','test']])

Output:

>>> ['events hi samay men kahin south malabar men ghati hai.',
 'beherhaal, pulis ne body ko sector-16 ke hospital ki mortuary men rakhva diya hai.',
 'yah hamare country ke liye reality men mandatory thing hai.']

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

We construct a large synthetic Hinglish-English dataset by leveraging a bilingual Hindi-English corpus. Split: Train, test, valid Subsets:

  • Hi - Hindi in devanagiri script (Example: अमेरिकी लोग अब पहले जितनी गैस नहीं खरीदते।)
  • Hicm - Hindi sentences with codemix words substituted in English (Example: American people अब पहले जितनी gas नहीं खरीदते।)
  • Hicmrom - Hicm with romanized hindi words (Example: American people ab pahle jitni gas nahin kharidte.)
  • Hicmdvg - Hicm with transliterated english words to devangiri (Example: अमेरिकन पेओपल अब पहले जितनी गैस नहीं खरीदते।)
  • NoisyHicmrom - synthetic noise added to Hicmrom sentences to improve model robustness (Example: Aerican people ab phle jtni gas nain khridte.)

Dataset Sources [optional]

Uses

Dataset can be used individually to train machine translation models for codemix hindi translation in any direction. Dataset can be appended with other languages from similar language family to transfer codemixing capabilities in a zero shot manner. Zero-shot translation on bangla-english showed great performance without even developing bangla codemix corpus. An indic-multilingual model with this data as a subset can improve codemixing by a significant margin.

Source Data

IITB Parallel corpus is chosen as the base dataset to translate into codemix forms. The corpus contains widely diverse content from news articles, judicial domain, indian government websites, wikipedia, book translations, etc.

Data Collection and Processing

  1. Given a source- target sentence pair S || T , we generate the synthetic code-mixed data by substituting words in the matrix language sentence with the corresponding words from the embedded language sentence. Here, hindi is the matrix language which forms the syntactic and morphological structure of CM sentence. English becomes the embedded language from which we borrow words.
  2. Create inclusion list of nouns, adjectives and quantifiers which are candidates for substitution.
  3. POS-tag the corpus using any tagger. We used LTRC for hindi tagging.
  4. Use fast-align for learning alignment model b/w parallel corpora (Hi-En). Once words are aligned, next task is switch words from english sentences to hindi sentence based on inclusion list.
  5. Use heuristics to replace n-gram words and create multiple codemix mappings of the same hindi sentence.
  6. Filter sentences using deterministic and perplexity metrics from a multilingual model like XLM.
  7. Add synthetic noise like omission, switch, typo, random replacement to consider the noisy nature of codemix text. image/png

Recommendations

It's important to recognize that this work, conducted three years ago, utilized the state-of-the-art tools available at the time for each step of the pipeline. Consequently, the quality was inherently tied to the performance of these tools. Given the advancements in large language models (LLMs) today, there is potential to enhance the dataset. Implementing rigorous filtering processes, such as deduplication of similar sentences and removal of ungrammatical sentences, could significantly improve the training of high-quality models.

Citation Information

@misc{kartik2024synthetic,
      title={Synthetic Data Generation and Joint Learning for Robust Code-Mixed Translation}, 
      author={Kartik and Sanjana Soni and Anoop Kunchukuttan and Tanmoy Chakraborty and Md Shad Akhtar},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2403.16771},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Dataset Card Contact

[email protected]

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