Identifying Causal Relations in Legal Documents with Dependency Syntactic Analysis

This article describes a method for enriching a dependency-based parser with causal connectors. Our specific objective is to identify causal relationships between elementary discourse units in Spanish legal texts. For this purpose, the approach we follow is to search for specific discourse connectives which are taken as causal dependencies relating an effect event (head) with a verbal or nominal cause (dependent). As a result, we turn a specific syntactic parser into a discourse parser aimed at recognizing causal structures

Evaluation of Distributional Models with the Outlier Detection Task

In this article, we define the outlier detection task and use it to compare neural-based word embeddings with transparent count-based distributional representations. Using the English Wikipedia as text source to train the models, we observed that embeddings outperform count-based representations when their contexts are made up of bag-of-words. However, there are no sharp differences between the two models if the word contexts are defined as syntactic dependencies. In general, syntax-based models tend to perform better than those based on bag-of-words for this specific task. Similar experiments were carried out for Portuguese with similar results. The test datasets we have created for outlier detection task in English and Portuguese are released

Propuesta para una semántica de las dependencias sintácticas

El principal objetivo de este artículo es proponer un modelo formal del proceso de interpretación semántica de las dependencias sintácticas. Definiremos una dependencia sintáctica como una operación binaria que toma como argumentos las denotaciones de dos palabras relacionadas (núcleo y modificador), y devuelve una reordenación de sus denotaciones. Asumimos que esta operación binaria desempeña un papel esencial en el proceso de interpretación semántica

The Meaning of Syntactic Dependencies

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties of dependencies, the paper will be focused on two particular linguistic tasks: word sense disambiguation and attachment resolution. The second task will be performed using a strategy based on automatic acquisition from corpora

Using the Outlier Detection Task to Evaluate Distributional Semantic Models

In this article, we define the outlier detection task and use it to compare neural-based word embeddings with transparent count-based distributional representations. Using the English Wikipedia as a text source to train the models, we observed that embeddings outperform count-based representations when their contexts are made up of bag-of-words. However, there are no sharp differences between the two models if the word contexts are defined as syntactic dependencies. In general, syntax-based models tend to perform better than those based on bag-of-words for this specific task. Similar experiments were carried out for Portuguese with similar results. The test datasets we have created for the outlier detection task in English and Portuguese are freely availableThis work was supported by a 2016 BBVA Foundation Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators and by Project TELEPARES, Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2014-51978-C2-1-R). It has received financial support from the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2016–2019, ED431G/08) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)S

Nanosized metallic oxides governing the chemical and biochemical oxidation of pollutants present in wastewater

Esta tesis doctoral conlleva el desarrollo e implementación de una tecnología viable para la eliminación de contaminantes emergentes procedentes de aguas residuales basada en la catálisis química y biológica soportada en nanopartículas magnéticas. Se considerará un amplio espectro de catalizadores: nanopartículas ferromagnéticas como catalizadores Fenton y óxidos metálicos separables magnéticamente como fotocatalizadores novedosos y altamente eficaces. Además, se avanza en el desarrollo de reactores bajo diferentes configuraciones, con la intención de integrar la etapa de reacción con la etapa de separación magnética que asegure la retención del catalizador