One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective

Effects of images on the incidental acquisition of abstract words

Recently, research has investigated whether glossing individual vocabulary words in a reading text with multimedia annotations-either with text, video, or still images- helps students learn the individual items, and therefore improve comprehension (Chun, Plass, 1996; Al-Seghayer, 2001). The studies, which are built around the assumption that students can learn better and more efficiently when information is presented in more than one mode, revealed a positive correlation between imagery and vocabulary acquisition. However, most studies focusing on teaching vocabulary incidentally with multimedia annotations annotated only the more concrete words which can easily be portrayed using still images or video. Research attempting to investigate whether or not still images can adequately represent unknown, abstract vocabulary words, and whether or not they can help the student make meaning of the word, is still identified as a particular need (Kost, Foss and Lenzini, 1999). This study investigates whether still images can adequately represent an abstract word from a language learners\u27 perspective, if still images can help create meaning of unfamiliar, abstract words for ESL learners, and whether imaging abstract words become less meaningful to students the lesser the word\u27s imageability and concreteness ratings (Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan ,1968)

Target Text Contraction in English-into-Korean Translations: A Contradiction of Presumed Translation Universals?

This paper contradicts the prevailing assumptions among the advocates of translation universals (TU’s) that explicitation, a translation behavior which consists of spelling things out rather than leaving them implicit in translation, is a potential TU, irrespective of the specific language pairs involved in the process of translation. Specifically, via a study employing a newly built 517,609-word parallel corpus, it is shown that implicitation and the subsequent TT contraction as well as explicitation and TT expansion entailed were both observed in translations involving Korean and English. The significance of the direction of language combinations in translations employing the same language pair was identified, together with the introduction and verification of the validity of the four measurement units devised for this study to capture diverse aspects of explicitation/implicitation which in turn entail TT expansion/contraction.Cet article contredit l’hypothèse qui a cours parmi les partisans des universels de traduction selon laquelle l’explicitation, procédé consistant à expliquer clairement les choses plutôt que de les laisser implicites dans le texte traduit, est un universel de traduction (UT) potentiel quelles que soient les deux langues présentes dans le processus de traduction. Au moyen de l’étude d’un nouveau corpus parallèle de 517 609 mots, on a notamment observé aussi bien l’implicitation et la contraction du texte d’arrivée qui l’accompagne que l’explicitation et l’expansion du texte traduit que cela implique dans des traductions entre le coréen et l’anglais. On a constaté que la direction des combinaisons linguistiques dans les traductions employant les mêmes langues est significative et on a introduit et vérifié la validité des quatre unités de mesure conçues pour que cette étude saisisse les différents aspects de l’explicitation/implicitation et de l’expansion/contraction du texte traduit qui en découlent.본 논문은 원문 텍스트에 암묵적으로 나타나있는 의미를 ’번역 과정에서 언어적으로 구현하여 의미의 명확성을 제고하는 번역 현상을 가리키는 ’외연화‘가번역언어에 상관없이 나타나는 ’번역보편소‘ 후보라는 ’번역보편소‘ 주창자들의 가설을 실증적 자료분석을 통해 반박한다. 구체적으로는 한국어와 영어 간의 번역 텍스트에서는 외연화와 그에 따른 번역텍스트 확장현상 이외에 원문텍스트에 명시적으로 구현되어 있는 의미를 암묵적 추론이 가능한 방식으로 구성하는 ’내포화‘와 그로 인한 번역텍스트 축소현상도 관찰되고 있음을 보고한다. 연구방법론으로 본 연구를 위해 새로 구성된 517,609 단어(토큰기준)의 병렬코퍼스를 다양한 통계기법을 사용, 분석한다. 이를 통해 동일 언어 쌍이 번역언어로 사용되는 경우에도 언어별 번역방향(한영및영한)이 연구대상인 번역현상에 중요한 차이를 가져온다는 사실을 보고하는 한편, 외연화/암묵화와 그로 인한 번역텍스트 확장/축소의 다양한 측면을 포착하기 위해 고안된 네 가지 측정단위의 타당성을 입증한다

Mobile resistome of human gut and pathogen drives anthropogenic bloom of antibiotic resistance

BACKGROUND:The impact of human activities on the environmental resistome has been documented in many studies, but there remains the controversial question of whether the increased antibiotic resistance observed in anthropogenically impacted environments is just a result of contamination by resistant fecal microbes or is mediated by indigenous environmental organisms. Here, to determine exactly how anthropogenic influences shape the environmental resistome, we resolved the microbiome, resistome, and mobilome of the planktonic microbial communities along a single river, the Han, which spans a gradient of human activities. RESULTS:The bloom of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) was evident in the downstream regions and distinct successional dynamics of the river resistome occurred across the spatial continuum. We identified a number of widespread ARG sequences shared between the river, human gut, and pathogenic bacteria. These human-related ARGs were largely associated with mobile genetic elements rather than particular gut taxa and mainly responsible for anthropogenically driven bloom of the downstream river resistome. Furthermore, both sequence- and phenotype-based analyses revealed environmental relatives of clinically important proteobacteria as major carriers of these ARGs. CONCLUSIONS:Our results demonstrate a more nuanced view of the impact of anthropogenic activities on the river resistome: fecal contamination is present and allows the transmission of ARGs to the environmental resistome, but these mobile genes rather than resistant fecal bacteria proliferate in environmental relatives of their original hosts. Video abstract