Language

The world's greatest playwright is as alive today as he was 400 years ago. His works reflect the political and domestic concerns of contemporary society and are read widely by students, adapted into lavish films, and staged in stunning new productions each year. His words have become commonplaces of the English language and continue to shape our view of the world. And while his works teach us much about ourselves, they also illuminate the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean England in which he lived and wrote. The most exhaustive and authoritative work of its kind, this fully illustrated encyclopedia draws upon the expertise of a distinguished editor, internationally renowned advisory and editorial board, and hundreds of stellar contributors to chronicle Shakespeare's life, works, world, and legacy. Nearly 4,000 alphabetically arranged entries cover individual works, important actors, leading thinkers and theorists, influential modern adaptations, and numerous historical and contemporary social, political, cultural, and intellectual topics, such as Catholicism, costumes and clothing, jazz, lesbianism, madness, race, science, Shakespeare in the Arab world, and Shakespeare online. The entries, ranging from 50 to over 5,000 words, cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with appendices listing DVDs, fiction, and children's and young adult literature; an extensive bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research; and a comprehensive index

Firearms and Tigers are Dangerous, Kitchen Knives and Zebras are Not: Testing whether Word Embeddings Can Tell

This paper presents an approach for investigating the nature of semantic information captured by word embeddings. We propose a method that extends an existing human-elicited semantic property dataset with gold negative examples using crowd judgments. Our experimental approach tests the ability of supervised classifiers to identify semantic features in word embedding vectors and com- pares this to a feature-identification method based on full vector cosine similarity. The idea behind this method is that properties identified by classifiers, but not through full vector comparison are captured by embeddings. Properties that cannot be identified by either method are not. Our results provide an initial indication that semantic properties relevant for the way entities interact (e.g. dangerous) are captured, while perceptual information (e.g. colors) is not represented. We conclude that, though preliminary, these results show that our method is suitable for identifying which properties are captured by embeddings.Comment: Accepted to the EMNLP workshop "Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP

Detecting and ordering adjectival scalemates

This paper presents a pattern-based method that can be used to infer adjectival scales, such as , from a corpus. Specifically, the proposed method uses lexical patterns to automatically identify and order pairs of scalemates, followed by a filtering phase in which unrelated pairs are discarded. For the filtering phase, several different similarity measures are implemented and compared. The model presented in this paper is evaluated using the current standard, along with a novel evaluation set, and shown to be at least as good as the current state-of-the-art.Comment: Paper presented at MAPLEX 2015, February 9-10, Yamagata, Japan (http://lang.cs.tut.ac.jp/maplex2015/

Prevalence and risk factors of chronic diseases of lifestyles in endurance runners

Background: Chronic diseases of lifestyle (CDL) are associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality in South Africa. Although prevalence of CDL has been established in the general population, there is limited research regarding the prevalence and risk factors for CDL in individuals taking part in regular physical activity. Endurance running is a popular sport, with growing levels of participation. Anecdotally, many individuals who participate in endurance running do not undergo formal pre-participation cardiovascular screening. It is also unclear if endurance runners are meeting the World Health Organisation’s recommended weekly moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity hours, or if they have other risk factors for CDL. It is therefore important to establish the prevalence and risk factors of CDL in this active population. Aim and Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of CDL and the associated risk factors in endurance runners in South Africa. The specific objectives of the study were: (a) to determine the presence of risk factors for the development of chronic diseases of lifestyle, including body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, body fat percentage, blood pressure, blood glucose, blood cholesterol, smoking history, dietary intake and weekly physical activity time in South African endurance runners; (b) to determine the presence of non-modifiable risk factors to the development of CDL, namely age and income, in South African endurance runners; (c) to determine whether South African endurance runners are fulfilling the World Health Organization’s recommended weekly moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity hours; and (d) to assess whether there are any relationships between the running characteristics, namely weekly training hours, running speed and level of competition; and the risk factors for chronic diseases of lifestyle. Methods: This study had an analytical, cross-sectional design. Two hundred participants between the ages of 18 to 69 years old, who reported endurance running as their main sport, and ran at least three kilometres twice a week for the past year were included in the study. Participants were excluded if they were pregnant or within six months post-partum, had an injury that required a minimum of two weeks rest or did not complete the questionnaire or physical testing component of the testing process. Participants were recruited through local running clubs and running races in the areas of Nelspruit, Mpumalanga and Cape Town, Western Cape. All participants gave written informed consent, and completed a questionnaire including socio-demographic characteristics, running training characteristics, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire short questionnaire, the modified Borg scale of perceived exertion, and the five-a-day community evaluation tool. Body mass, stature, skin folds and waist circumference were assessed. Blood pressure was measured using an automatic blood pressure monitor. A finger prick test was used to determine random blood glucose and cholesterol concentrations. Participants were requested to fast for three hours prior to testing to standardise the test in a non-fasted state (20). Results: One hundred and twenty four (62%) participants were found to have at least one risk factor for CDL. A high BMI was the most common risk factor for CDL (n=90; 45%). Nineteen participants (9.5%) did not meet the recommended duration of 150 minutes of physical activity per week. Seven percent of female participants (n=7) smoked, which is equivalent to the female population average of South Africa. Multiple risk factors were identified in fifty seven (28.5%) participants, ranging from two risk factors (n=37; 18.5%) to six risk factors (n=1; 0.5%). The majority of participants had no prior medical diagnosis of CDL or risk factors for CDL. The overall self-reported prevalence of a medically diagnosed CDL was 5.5% (n=11). Type 2 diabetes was the most commonly diagnosed CDL (n=6; 3%). Waist circumference, systolic blood pressure and cholesterol were significantly elevated in the older age group. There were no significant differences in risk factors for CDL according to income status. Female runners had significantly higher average sitting times compared to male runners. In addition, participants with a BMI ≥ 25 kg.m-2 had significantly slower 10 km running speeds and lower average weekly training distance, compared to participants with BMI within normal ranges. Conclusion: A high prevalence of risk factors for CDL was identified in South African endurance runners. The majority of endurance runners included in this sample are fulfilling the World Health Organisation’s recommended weekly moderate to vigorous intensity hours. However, the endurance runners in this study remain at risk for developing a CDL due to the presence of other risk factors for CDL. The knowledge and awareness of risk factors for CDL among South African endurance runners needs to be further investigated. Health care professionals are required to improve the prevention and management of risk factors of CDL through education and promotion of healthy lifestyles. A stronger emphasis on the prevention of risk factors for CDL in South African endurance runners is needed

The post-mortem resilience of facial creases and the possibility for use in identification of the dead

The post-mortem resilience of facial creases was studied using donated bodies in order to establish the efficacy of crease analysis for identification of the dead. Creases were studied on normal (pre-embalmed) and bloated (embalmed) cadavers at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) to establish whether facial bloating would affect facial crease visibility. Embalming was chosen to simulate the effects produced by post-mortem bloating. The results suggested that creases are resilient and changes were only detected for creases located on the periphery of the face, particularly at areas where the skin is thick, such as at the cheeks. Two new creases not previously classified were identified; these creases were called the vertical superciliary arch line and the lateral nose crease. This research suggests that facial creases may be resilient enough after death to be utilised for human identification

Word Sense Disambiguation with LSTM: Do We Really Need 100 Billion Words?

Recently, Yuan et al. (2016) have shown the effectiveness of using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for performing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Their proposed technique outperformed the previous state-of-the-art with several benchmarks, but neither the training data nor the source code was released. This paper presents the results of a reproduction study of this technique using only openly available datasets (GigaWord, SemCore, OMSTI) and software (TensorFlow). From them, it emerged that state-of-the-art results can be obtained with much less data than hinted by Yuan et al. All code and trained models are made freely available

Identity and Granularity of Events in Text

In this paper we describe a method to detect event descrip- tions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our com- ponent approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how se- mantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.Comment: Invited keynote speech by Piek Vossen at Cicling 201