4,905 research outputs found
The CorDis Corpus Mark-up and Related Issues
CorDis is a large, XML, TEI-conformant, POS-tagged, multimodal, multigenre corpus representing a significant portion of the political and media discourse on the 2003 Iraqi conflict. It was generated from different sub-corpora which had been assembled by various research groups, ranging from official transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, both in the US and the UK, to the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry, from American and British newspaper coverage of the conflict to White House press briefings and to transcriptions of American and British TV news programmes. The heterogeneity of the data, the specificity of the genres and the diverse discourse analytical purposes of different groups had led to a wide range of coding strategies being employed to make textual and meta-textual information retrievable.
The main purpose of this paper is to show the process of harmonisation and integration whereby a loose collection of texts has become a stable architecture. The TEI proved a valid instrument to achieve standardisation of mark-up. The guidelines provide for a hierarchical organisation which gives the corpus a sound structure favouring replicability and enhancing the reliability of research. In discussing some examples of the problems encountered in the annotation, we will deal with issues like consistency and re-usability, and will examine the constraints imposed on data handling by specific research objectives. Examples include the choice to code the same speakers in different ways depending on the various (institutional) roles they may assume throughout the corpus, the distinction between quotations of spoken or written discourse and quotations read aloud in the course of a spoken text, and the segmentation of portions of news according to participants interaction and use of camera/voiceover
Metastability for reversible probabilistic cellular automata with self--interaction
The problem of metastability for a stochastic dynamics with a parallel
updating rule is addressed in the Freidlin--Wentzel regime, namely, finite
volume, small magnetic field, and small temperature. The model is characterized
by the existence of many fixed points and cyclic pairs of the zero temperature
dynamics, in which the system can be trapped in its way to the stable phase.
%The characterization of the metastable behavior %of a system in the context of
parallel dynamics is a very difficult task, %since all the jumps in the
configuration space are allowed. Our strategy is based on recent powerful
approaches, not needing a complete description of the fixed points of the
dynamics, but relying on few model dependent results. We compute the exit time,
in the sense of logarithmic equivalence, and characterize the critical droplet
that is necessarily visited by the system during its excursion from the
metastable to the stable state. We need to supply two model dependent inputs:
(1) the communication energy, that is the minimal energy barrier that the
system must overcome to reach the stable state starting from the metastable
one; (2) a recurrence property stating that for any configuration different
from the metastable state there exists a path, starting from such a
configuration and reaching a lower energy state, such that its maximal energy
is lower than the communication energy
Linear Boltzmann dynamics in a strip with large reflective obstacles: stationary state and residence time
The presence of obstacles modify the way in which particles diffuse. In
cells, for instance, it is observed that, due to the presence of macromolecules
playing the role of obstacles, the mean square displacement ofbiomolecules
scales as a power law with exponent smaller than one. On the other hand,
different situations in grain and pedestrian dynamics in which the presence of
an obstacle accelerate the dynamics are known. We focus on the time, called
residence time, needed by particles to cross a strip assuming that the dynamics
inside the strip follows the linear Boltzmann dynamics. We find that the
residence time is not monotonic with the sizeand the location of the obstacles,
since the obstacle can force those particles that eventually cross the strip to
spend a smaller time in the strip itself. We focus on the case of a rectangular
strip with two open sides and two reflective sides and we consider reflective
obstaclea into the strip
Relaxation Height in Energy Landscapes: an Application to Multiple Metastable States
The study of systems with multiple (not necessarily degenerate) metastable
states presents subtle difficulties from the mathematical point of view related
to the variational problem that has to be solved in these cases. We introduce
the notion of relaxation height in a general energy landscape and we prove
sufficient conditions which are valid even in presence of multiple metastable
states. We show how these results can be used to approach the problem of
multiple metastable states via the use of the modern theories of metastability.
We finally apply these general results to the Blume--Capel model for a
particular choice of the parameters ensuring the existence of two multiple, and
not degenerate in energy, metastable states
On the Classical Model for Microwave Induced Escape from a Josephson Washboard Potential
We revisit the interpretation of earlier low temperature experiments on
Josephson junctions under the influence of applied microwaves. It was claimed
that these experiments unambiguously established a quantum phenomenology with
discrete levels in shallow wells of the washboard potential, and macroscopic
quantum tunneling. We here apply the previously developed classical theory to a
direct comparison with the original experimental observations, and we show that
the experimental data can be accurately represented classically. Thus, our
analysis questions the necessity of the earlier quantum mechanical
interpretation.Comment: 4 pages, one table, three figures. Submitted for publication on
December 14, 200
Does communication enhance pedestrians transport in the dark?
We study the motion of pedestrians through an obscure tunnel where the lack
of visibility hides the exits. Using a lattice model, we explore the effects of
communication on the effective transport properties of the crowd of
pedestrians. More precisely, we study the effect of two thresholds on the
structure of the effective nonlinear diffusion coefficient. One threshold
models pedestrians's communication efficiency in the dark, while the other one
describes the tunnel capacity. Essentially, we note that if the evacuees show a
maximum trust (leading to a fast communication), they tend to quickly find the
exit and hence the collective action tends to prevent the occurrence of
disasters
Sum of exit times in series of metastable states in probabilistic cellular automata
Reversible Probabilistic Cellular Automata are a special class
of automata whose stationary behavior is described by Gibbs--like
measures. For those models the dynamics can be trapped for a very
long time in states which are very different from the ones typical
of stationarity.
This phenomenon can be recasted in the framework of metastability
theory which is typical of Statistical Mechanics.
In this paper we consider a model presenting two not degenerate in
energy
metastable states which form a series, in the sense that,
when the dynamics is started at one of them, before reaching
stationarity, the system must necessarily visit the second one.
We discuss a rule for combining the exit times
from each of the metastable states
Correlation functions by Cluster Variation Method for Ising model with NN, NNN and Plaquette interactions
We consider the procedure for calculating the pair correlation function in
the context of the Cluster Variation Methods. As specific cases, we study the
pair correlation function in the paramagnetic phase of the Ising model with
nearest neighbors, next to the nearest neighbors and plaquette interactions in
two and three dimensions. In presence of competing interactions, the so called
disorder line separates in the paramagnetic phase a region where the
correlation function has the usual exponential behavior from a region where the
correlation has an oscillating exponentially damped behavior. In two
dimensions, using the plaquette as the maximal cluster of the CVM
approximation, we calculate the phase diagram and the disorder line for a case
where a comparison is possible with results known in literature for the
eight-vertex model. In three dimensions, in the CVM cube approximation, we
calculate the phase diagram and the disorder line in some cases of particular
interest. The relevance of our results for experimental systems like mixtures
of oil, water and surfactant is also discussed.Comment: 31 pages, LaTeX file, 7 figure
- …