Towards a semantic typology of specific determiners

This paper investigates properties of a class of determiners which can be loosely la- belled specific in that their distribution falls in between maximally-quantifying definite determiners and indefinites which only contribute existential quantification. Based on a sample which includes data from Buryat, Komi, Mari, Mordvin, and Turkish, I propose that suffixal determiners form a semantically natural class in that their distribution can be modelled by means of a relational component in the semantics of the determiners which relates the denotation of the noun to an antecedent. I derive the observed distributional differences between languages from the range of values available for the interpretation of this component. In particular, whether a relation of identity falls within the range of val- ues has consequences for whether a suffixal determiner triggers existence presupposition, which, in turn, has consequences both for the interpretation of the DP in question and for the inter-paradigm competition in a language

Scans for signatures of selection in Russian cattle breed genomes reveal new candidate genes for environmental adaptation and acclimation

Domestication and selective breeding has resulted in over 1000 extant cattle breeds. Many of these breeds do not excel in important traits but are adapted to local environments. These adaptations are a valuable source of genetic material for efforts to improve commercial breeds. As a step toward this goal we identified candidate regions to be under selection in genomes of nine Russian native cattle breeds adapted to survive in harsh climates. After comparing our data to other breeds of European and Asian origins we found known and novel candidate genes that could potentially be related to domestication, economically important traits and environmental adaptations in cattle. The Russian cattle breed genomes contained regions under putative selection with genes that may be related to adaptations to harsh environments (e.g., AQP5, RAD50, and RETREG1). We found genomic signatures of selective sweeps near key genes related to economically important traits, such as the milk production (e.g., DGAT1, ABCG2), growth (e.g., XKR4), and reproduction (e.g., CSF2). Our data point to candidate genes which should be included in future studies attempting to identify genes to improve the extant breeds and facilitate generation of commercial breeds that fit better into the environments of Russia and other countries with similar climates

Observations of the snow cover in the southern part of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

The characteristics of the snow cover, as a function of various natural factors, in sectors of the southern part of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic were examined. The thawing process is also discussed

Regional differentiation in the Russian federation: A cluster-based typification

The paper gives a socio-economic analysis of the 89 regions of the Russian Federation. This analysis is implemented in four steps: 1) elaboration of a set of indicators defining the socio-economic situation in all 89 regions of the Russian Federation plus procedures to replace groups of correlated indicators with single estimated (synthetic) targets 2) preparation of the procedure for regions' ordering within multidimensional space (regions' ranking) in relation to the statement base year 1992 and within year-to-year series (1993,1994) 3)clustering of all Russian Federation regions according to their principal types and drawing on the regional typification and providing a rationale for the sorting out of backward and prosperous regions, those in depression and those considered to be border areas 4)description of the problem character of the specific types. The resulting typification . provides a methodological and procedural basis for monitoring the socio-economic situation in the regions of the Russian Federation . can be helpful in preparing scientific foundations of a comprehensive trageted government program . presents an element for further studies on reguonal development in the Russian Federation.

A non-projective greedy dependency parser with bidirectional LSTMs

The LyS-FASTPARSE team presents BIST-COVINGTON, a neural implementation of the Covington (2001) algorithm for non-projective dependency parsing. The bidirectional LSTM approach by Kipperwasser and Goldberg (2016) is used to train a greedy parser with a dynamic oracle to mitigate error propagation. The model participated in the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task. In spite of not using any ensemble methods and using the baseline segmentation and PoS tagging, the parser obtained good results on both macro-average LAS and UAS in the big treebanks category (55 languages), ranking 7th out of 33 teams. In the all treebanks category (LAS and UAS) we ranked 16th and 12th. The gap between the all and big categories is mainly due to the poor performance on four parallel PUD treebanks, suggesting that some `suffixed' treebanks (e.g. Spanish-AnCora) perform poorly on cross-treebank settings, which does not occur with the corresponding `unsuffixed' treebank (e.g. Spanish). By changing that, we obtain the 11th best LAS among all runs (official and unofficial). The code is made available at https://github.com/CoNLL-UD-2017/LyS-FASTPARSEComment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 5 table