Short-term effect of soil disturbance by mechanical weeding on plant available nutrients in an organic vs conventional rotations experiment

The question whether soil disturbance from mechanical weeding in organic systems affects nutrient release from organic matter in compost-amended soil was examined in a long-term organic-versus-conventional rotational cropping system experiment over three years. The experimental design included continuous snap beans, and a fully phased snap beans/fall rye crop rotation sequence. Treatments were combinations of yearly applied fertiliser (synthetic fertiliser, 1× compost, 3× compost) and weed control (herbicide, mechanical weeding). The 1× compost rate was calculated to deliver the equivalent of 50 kg N ha-1: equal to the rate ofN in the synthetic fertiliser treatments. Ion exchange membranes were buried for 24 hours following mechanical weeding in bean plots. Adsorbed ions were then eluted and quantified. Available ammonium-nitrogen was not affected byweeding treatment, but nitrate-nitrogen was consistently less in mechanically weeded plots than in plots treated with herbicide. Principal component analysis of NH4-N, NO3-N, P, K, Ca and Mg availabilities showed distinct groupings of treatments according to fertility treatment rather than weeding treatment. The effect of cropping sequence on available nutrients was pronounced (P ≤ 0.001) only in plots amended with synthetic fertilisers

Controlled Natural Language Generation from a Multilingual FrameNet-based Grammar

This paper presents a currently bilingual but potentially multilingual FrameNet-based grammar library implemented in Grammatical Framework. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it offers a methodological approach to automatically generate the grammar based on semantico-syntactic valence patterns extracted from FrameNet-annotated corpora. Second, it provides a proof of concept for two use cases illustrating how the acquired multilingual grammar can be exploited in different CNL applications in the domains of arts and tourism

Literature Review of the Effects of Radiation and Temperature on the Aging of Concrete

The open literature and accessible United States Department of Energy-sponsored reports were reviewed for the effects of radiation and temperature on concrete. No effects of radiation were found for exposures less than 1010 neutron/cm2 or 1010 Gy gamma for periods less than 50 years. Reductions in compressive and tensile strength and a marked increase in volume are reported for exposures greater than 1020 neutron/cm2 or 1010 rads of gamma. There are conflicting reports of damage for doses in the middle ranges

Parameter Selection for Department of Energy Spent Nuclear Fuel to be Used in the Yucca Mountain License Application

This report contains the chemical, physical, and radiological parameters that were chosen to represent the U.S. Department of Energy spent nuclear fuel in the Yucca Mountain license application. It also contains the selected packaging requirements for the various fuel types and the criticality controls that were used. The data are reported for representative fuels and bounding fuels in groups of fuels that were selected for the analysis. The justification for the selection of each parameter is given. The data reported were not generated under any quality assurance program

Semantic frame induction as a community detection problem

Resources such as FrameNet provide semantic information that is important for multiple tasks. However, they are expensive to build and, consequently, are unavailable for many languages and domains. Thus, approaches able to induce semantic frames in an unsupervised manner are highly valuable. In this paper we approach that task from a network perspective as a community detection problem that targets the identification of groups of verb instances that evoke the same semantic frame. To do so, we apply a graph-clustering algorithm to a graph with contextualized representations of verb instances as nodes connected by an edge if the distance between them is below a threshold that defines the granularity of the induced frames. By applying this approach to the benchmark dataset defined in the context of the SemEval shared task we outperformed all the previous approaches to the task.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Cross-language frame semantics transfer in bilingual corpora

Abstract. Recent work on the transfer of semantic information across languages has been recently applied to the development of resources annotated with Frame information for different non-English European languages. These works are based on the assumption that parallel corpora annotated for English can be used to transfer the semantic information to the other target languages. In this paper, a robust method based on a statistical machine translation step augmented with simple rule-based post-processing is presented. It alleviates problems related to preprocessing errors and the complex optimization required by syntax-dependent models of the cross-lingual mapping. Different alignment strategies are here in-vestigated against the Europarl corpus. Results suggest that the quality of the de-rived annotations is surprisingly good and well suited for training semantic role labeling systems.