35,763 research outputs found
From Physical Aggression to Verbal Behavior: Language Evolution and Self-Domestication Feedback Loop
One Homonym per Translation
The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical
semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the
unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses,
collocations, and sense clusters. We present a new annotated homonym resource
that allows us to test our hypotheses on existing WSD resources. The results of
the experiments provide strong empirical evidence for the hypotheses. This
study represents a step towards a computational method for distinguishing
between homonymy and polysemy, and constructing a definitive inventory of
coarse-grained senses.Comment: 8 pages, including reference
Head-initial constructions in japanese
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses
Dietary garlic and hip osteoarthritis: evidence of a protective effect and putative mechanism of action
Background Patterns of food intake and prevalent osteoarthritis of the hand, hip, and knee were studied using the twin design to limit the effect of confounding factors. Compounds found in associated food groups were further studied in vitro. Methods Cross-sectional study conducted in a large population-based volunteer cohort of twins. Food intake was evaluated using the Food Frequency Questionnaire; OA was determined using plain radiographs. Analyses were adjusted for age, BMI and physical activity. Subsequent in vitro studies examined the effects of allium-derived compounds on the expression of matrix-degrading proteases in SW1353 chondrosarcoma cells. Results Data were available, depending on phenotype, for 654-1082 of 1086 female twins (median age 58.9 years; range 46-77). Trends in dietary analysis revealed a specific pattern of dietary intake, that high in fruit and vegetables, showed an inverse association with hip OA (p = 0.022). Consumption of 'non-citrus fruit' (p = 0.015) and 'alliums' (p = 0.029) had the strongest protective effect. Alliums contain diallyl disulphide which was shown to abrogate cytokine-induced matrix metalloproteinase expression. Conclusions Studies of diet are notorious for their confounding by lifestyle effects. While taking account of BMI, the data show an independent effect of a diet high in fruit and vegetables, suggesting it to be protective against radiographic hip OA. Furthermore, diallyl disulphide, a compound found in garlic and other alliums, represses the expression of matrix-degrading proteases in chondrocyte-like cells, providing a potential mechanism of action
#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds
Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this
paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be
considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We
identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can
identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near
future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times
T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This
technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since
newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the
compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an
overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can
discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful
in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM
conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW
2016
Real-Time Statistical Speech Translation
This research investigates the Statistical Machine Translation approaches to
translate speech in real time automatically. Such systems can be used in a
pipeline with speech recognition and synthesis software in order to produce a
real-time voice communication system between foreigners. We obtained three main
data sets from spoken proceedings that represent three different types of human
speech. TED, Europarl, and OPUS parallel text corpora were used as the basis
for training of language models, for developmental tuning and testing of the
translation system. We also conducted experiments involving part of speech
tagging, compound splitting, linear language model interpolation, TrueCasing
and morphosyntactic analysis. We evaluated the effects of variety of data
preparations on the translation results using the BLEU, NIST, METEOR and TER
metrics and tried to give answer which metric is most suitable for PL-EN
language pair.Comment: machine translation, polish englis
Impact of aeration on the removal of organic matter and nitrogen compounds in constructed wetlands treating the liquid fraction of piggery manure
The increasing demand for sustainable, robust and cost-efficient wastewater treatment techniques strengthen the implementation of constructed wetlands (CWs) in the agricultural sector. In countries like Belgium (Flanders), the compliance of strict water quality standards and surface area requirements have hindered considerably their application. New wetland designs such as aerated CWs, could help to overcome these challenges. This study evaluated the capacity of artificially aerated mesocosm systems to decrease chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentrations below the 125 mgO(2)/L limit imposed on installations treating animal manure. The treatment of this high-strength wastewater has been slightly studied via aerated CWs. A three-stage experiment investigated the effect of constant, intermittent and non-aeration regimes on: ammonium volatilisation, the evolution of organic and nitrogen compounds concentrations, and denitrification. The results were assessed through a mixed modelling procedure using SAS 9.4 software. A COD removal between 65% and 58% in constantly and intermittent aerated systems, versus 27% COD removal in the non-aerated system indicated the effectiveness of aeration. However, a dissimilarity was encountered in the removal of nitrogen compounds, resulting in an 82% decrease of nitrate concentrations in the non-aerated system, versus 0.5% and 11% in the aerated ones. Based on the results, this experimental set-up adjusted to field operational conditions can prove that aerated CWs can treat the liquid fraction of piggery manure
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