Relationships between parameters of chemical fertility and water retention in soils developed on marl limestones and hard limestones

Abstract not availabl

Study of the coexistence pattern of two alternative phenotypes in the palmate newt (Lissotriton helveticus), the answer from microsatellite markers

peer reviewe

Integrating lexical and prosodic features for automatic paragraph segmentation

Spoken documents, such as podcasts or lectures, are a growing presence in everyday life. Being able to automatically identify their discourse structure is an important step to understanding what a spoken document is about. Moreover, finer-grained units, such as paragraphs, are highly desirable for presenting and analyzing spoken content. However, little work has been done on discourse based speech segmentation below the level of broad topics. In order to examine how discourse transitions are cued in speech, we investigate automatic paragraph segmentation of TED talks using lexical and prosodic features. Experiments using Support Vector Machines, AdaBoost, and Neural Networks show that models using supra-sentential prosodic features and induced cue words perform better than those based on the type of lexical cohesion measures often used in broad topic segmentation. Moreover, combining a wide range of individually weak lexical and prosodic predictors improves performance, and modelling contextual information using recurrent neural networks outperforms other approaches by a large margin. Our best results come from using late fusion methods that integrate representations generated by separate lexical and prosodic models while allowing interactions between these features streams rather than treating them as independent information sources. Application to ASR outputs shows that adding prosodic features, particularly using late fusion, can significantly ameliorate decreases in performance due to transcription errors.The second author was funded from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the GA H2020-RIA-645012 and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity Juan de la Cierva program. The other authors were funded by the University of Edinburgh

Corpora compilation for prosody-informed speech processing

Research on speech technologies necessitates spoken data, which is usually obtained through read recorded speech, and specifically adapted to the research needs. When the aim is to deal with the prosody involved in speech, the available data must reflect natural and conversational speech, which is usually costly and difficult to get. This paper presents a machine learning-oriented toolkit for collecting, handling, and visualization of speech data, using prosodic heuristic. We present two corpora resulting from these methodologies: PANTED corpus, containing 250 h of English speech from TED Talks, and Heroes corpus containing 8 h of parallel English and Spanish movie speech. We demonstrate their use in two deep learning-based applications: punctuation restoration and machine translation. The presented corpora are freely available to the research community

What kind of sustainable development do we need?

Today, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the main framework of reference when addressing sustainability and human development. Unfortunately, there are several aspects and issues that the SDGs have ignored or underestimated and can become serious obstacles to their success. Among them, the ethical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human life seem to have faded into oblivion. Without these dimensions, the SDGs may become a kind of well-intended but blind problem-solving strategy that ignores the reasons of the crisis it wants to redress. This absence is apparent when the vocabulary used by the SDGs comes under scrutiny and is still more evident when it is compared with the language used in other well-known international declarations on the same subject. Bringing this shortcoming to light opens the possibility for the SDGs to review the strategies with which they could be more effective when pursuing their purposes in the coming years.Hoy, los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) constituyen el marco de referencia principal a la hora de abordar la sostenibilidad y el desarrollo humano. Desafortunadamente, existen varios aspectos y cuestiones que se han ignorado en los ODS, o bien subestimado, que pueden convertirse en serios obstáculos para su éxito. Entre ellos, las dimensiones éticas, culturales y espirituales de la vida humana parecen haberse desvanecido en el olvido. Sin estas dimensiones, los ODS pueden convertirse en una especie de estrategia de resolución de problemas bien intencionada, mas ciega, en la que se ignoran las razones de la crisis que se desea corregir. Dicha ausencia es clara cuando se examina el vocabulario utilizado en los ODS y resulta más evidente cuando se compara con el lenguaje empleado en otras conocidas declaraciones internacionales sobre el mismo tema. Sacar a la luz esta carencia abre la posibilidad de que los ODS revisen las estrategias con las que podrían ser más efectivos a la hora de perseguir sus propósitos en los próximos años.&nbsp

Acylation of Chiral Alcohols: A Simple Procedure for Chiral GC Analysis

The use of iodine as a catalyst and either acetic or trifluoroacetic acid as a derivatizing reagent for determining the enantiomeric composition of acyclic and cyclic aliphatic chiral alcohols was investigated. Optimal conditions were selected according to the molar ratio of alcohol to acid, the reaction time, and the reaction temperature. Afterwards, chiral stability of chiral carbons was studied. Although no isomerization was observed when acetic acid was used, partial isomerization was detected with the trifluoroacetic acid. A series of chiral alcohols of a widely varying structural type were then derivatized with acetic acid using the optimal conditions. The resolution of the enantiomeric esters and the free chiral alcohols was measured using a capillary gas chromatograph equipped with a CP Chirasil-DEX CB column. The best resolutions were obtained with 2-pentyl acetates (α = 3.00) and 2-hexyl acetates (α = 1.95). This method provides a very simple and efficient experimental workup procedure for analyzing chiral alcohols by chiral-phase GC

La sobirania tecnològica per al català: quines opcions tenim?

Les aplicacions tecnològiques amb alguna finalitat lingüística com ara traductors automàtics, sistemes de diàleg, reconeixedors de la parla, generadors de resums automàtics, etc. tenen normalment una arquitectura comuna a totes les llengües. Cada aplicació, aleshores, s'adapta mitjançant corpus específics per a cada llengua. Per tant, es necessiten dos components: l'arquitectura i les dades, i tant l'un com l'altre constitueixen recursos que poden ser de propietat o lliures. En el cas del programari lliure, l'usuari té accés al codi font i el pot modificar a la seva conveniència i/o distribuir-lo lliurement. També pot ser, però, que l'usuari tingui accés al codi font, però no pugui modificar-lo ni distribuir el producte, de manera que tindríem un recurs de codi obert però no lliure. Els seus usos i possibilitats es determinen a través de la llicència que s'atorga a cada producte

Revisió sobre l'efectivitat dels corticoides en les pneumònies hospitalitzades adquirides a la comunitat

Resultats: no s'observen diferències estadísticament significatives en mortalitat entre els grups tractats amb i sense corticoides, però sí en el subgrup de pneumònies greus. Els corticoides poden reduir el temps d'hospitalització. No s'ha observat un augment d'efectes adversos en els grups de corticoides. Conclusions: els corticoides no semblen tenir un efecte en la disminució de la mortalitat en les pneumònies hospitalitzades. Tot i així, sí que tenen cert efecte en la reducció de la mortalitat de les pneumònies greus. $a Antecedents: les pneumònies són la primera causa de mort infecciosa al món. Els corticoides podrien ser un tractament adjuvant útil per intentar reduir la seva mortalitat.Objectiu: avaluar l'efectivitat dels corticoides com a tractament adjuvant en les pneumònies adquirides a la comunitat que requereixen hospitalització.Metodologia: s'ha realitzat una recerca a la base de dades Pubmed dels darrers 15 anys sobre articles que avaluen l'ús de corticoides en pneumònies adquirides a la comunitat hospitalitzades. S'han seleccionat dos estudis retrospectius, cinc assajos clínics i cinc metanàlisis.Background: community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is the most common infectious cause of death in the world. Adjunctive corticosteroid therapy could reduce mortality. Purpose: to examine the effect of corticosteroid in patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia. Methods: Pubmed database from the last 15 year was searched. Studies analysing adjunctive corticosteroid therapy in hospitalized patients with CAP were evaluated. Two retrospective studies, five randomized clinical trials and five meta-analysis were chosen. Results: there is no statistical difference in mortality between groups treated with and without corticosteroids, although there is a reduction in mortality in patients with severe CPA. Moreover, corticosteroids may reduce length of hospital stay. Adverse events no differ between groups. Conclusions: corticosteroids don't seem to have an impact on mortality in hospitalized CAP. However, they may reduce mortality in severe CAP