1,155 research outputs found

    Negation and lexical morphology across languages: Insights from a trilingual translation corpus

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    This paper proposes an exploratory cross-linguistic bird's eye-view of negative lexical morphology by examining English, French and Italian negative derivational affixes. More specifically, it aims to uncover the French and Italian equivalents of the English affixes de, dis, in, non, un and less. These include morphological equivalents (i.e. negative prefixes in French and Italian) as well as non-morphological equivalents (i.e. single words devoid of negative affixation, multi-word units or paraphrases). The study relies on a nine-million-word trilingual translation corpus made up of texts from the Europarl corpus and shows that the systematic analysis of translation data makes it possible to identify the major morphological dissimilarities between the three languages investigated. The frequent use of non-morphological translations in French and Italian reflects fundamental differences between the source language (English) and the two target lan-guages (French and Italian), hence pointing to possible translation difficulties. Morphological translations, on the other hand, bring to light cross-linguistic similarities in the use of negative affixe

    Multiplane transesophageal echocardiography and stroke

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    Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is considered a basic tool in the diagnostic and follow-up evaluation of stroke patients, since vp to 40% of cerebral ischemic events are presumed to have a cardiac origin. TEE offers a superior resolution of the posterior cardiac structures, such as left atrium and appendage and atrial septum, as well as of the aorta. By means of TEE, evidence has accumulated that some cardiovascular abnormalities (left-sided thrombi, tumors and vegetative lesions, complicated plaques of the aortic arch) are associated with ischemic stroke. Nevertheless, some issues remain unresolved. Will exclusion of atrial thrombus by multiplane TEE preclude embolism after cardioversion of atrial fibrillation? If anticoagulation before and after cardioversion is needed to provide adequate protection against embolism, will TEE be indicated in all patients? Moreover, can the detection of spontaneous echo contrast or enlarged and hypokinetic left atrial appendage in atrial fibrillation modify the therapeutic strategy? Is atrial septal aneurysm (ASA) a real embolic source, particularly when a right-to-left shunt is not associated? Considering the high prevalence of patent foramen ovale (PFO) in normal subjects, how can we identify patients at higher risk of embolism? Furthermore, methodologic points have to be taken into account when we analyze data from the literature. First, most studies are retrospective; a sole prospective study demonstrated that atherosclerotic plaques >4 mm thick in the aortic arch are significant predictors of recurrent brain infarction and other cardiovascular events in patients greater than or equal to 60 years of age. Second, the association between the aforementioned cardiac abnormalities (mainly ASA and PFO) and cardiogenic embolism is biased by the patient-enrollment criteria used in those studies so that their pathogenetic role has not yet been established. prospective studies with the enrollment of appropriate control groups will be necessary to define what can be considered a marker of embolic risk; the diagnosis "cardiogenic embolism" will not be a definitive diagnosis in most cases. (C) 1998 by Excerpta Medica, Inc

    Effectiveness and Cost of Shrub Removal Methods in Degraded Woodlands Being Converted to Silvopasture

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    Transforming degraded woodlands to silvopasture is of interest in the Midwestern USA as it increases profitability of farms and benefits animal health. Invasive shrubs within woodlands, however, are a major obstacle to silvopasture establishment. Research was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness, cost and resulting herbaceous canopy light interception of common brush-control methods when used alone or integrated over a two-year timeframe. Five treatments were established in a randomized complete block design. In the first year, treatments were either forestry mowed (mow) or rotationally grazed by goats (goats) at a stocking density of 5700 to 6000 kg per hectare. In the second year, mow and goat treatments were either grazed by goats again or shrubs were treated with a herbicide (herb). These were compared to a non-treated control. Costs of each treatment were calculated based on labor, equipment/supplies, and contracts. Vegetation composition and herbaceous canopy light interception were evaluated the summer after treatments were implemented. Forestry mowing followed by herbicide was the least expensive treatment at $1833/ha, while goats were 72% higher. Light interception by the herbaceous canopy was not reduced by goats, but mowing followed by goats increased light interception such that it was greater than repeated goat grazing (p\u3c0.05). While shrubs were initially impacted by treatments, resprouting resulted in no differences in abundance compared with non-treated controls. Grass abundance was similar in control plots and treatments (p\u3e0.05). Forb abundance remained similar in control and goat-grazed treatments but increased in mowed areas. Costs and effectiveness of multi-year treatments will continue to be evaluated through 2024

    A Task-based Evaluation of French Morphological Resources and Tools

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    Morphology is a key component for many Language Technology applications. However, morphological relations, especially those relying on the derivation and compounding processes, are often addressed in a superficial manner. In this article, we focus on assessing the relevance of deep and motivated morphological knowledge in Natural Language Processing applications. We first describe an annotation experiment whose goal is to evaluate the role of morphology for one task, namely Question Answering (QA). We then highlight the kind of linguistic knowledge that is necessary for this particular task and propose a qualitative analysis of morphological phenomena in order to identify the morphological processes that are most relevant. Based on this study, we perform an intrinsic evaluation of existing tools and resources for French morphology, in order to quantify their coverage. Our conclusions provide helpful insights for using and building appropriate morphological resources and tools that could have a significant impact on the application performance

    Word-formation in original and translated English: source language influence on the use of un- and less

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    This article aims to assess whether the word-formation features of translated language, as opposed to original language, are source language (SL)-dependent or translation-related. To do so, we analyze the use of the -less and un- negative affixes in original English and in English translated from four SL: French, Italian, Dutch and German. Findings based on the Europarl corpus show that the use of -less and un- in translated English is partially SL-dependent

    Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

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    The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets
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