Supersense and Sensibility: Proxy Tasks for Semantic Annotation of Prepositions

Prepositional supersense annotation is time-consuming and requires expert training. Here, we present two sensible methods for obtaining prepositional supersense annotations by eliciting surface substitution and similarity judgments. Four pilot studies suggest that both methods have potential for producing prepositional supersense annotations that are comparable in quality to expert annotations.Comment: Presented at LAW XIV in 202

Overview of AMALGUM – Large Silver Quality Annotations across English Genres

Corpus resources for Linguistics and NLP research on discourse phenomena, such as coreference and discourse trees, are limited by a lack of large scale, well-understood, annotated datasets: corpora are either very large (100M-10G tokens) but shallowly annotated and with unknown composition, or richly annotated, but smaller. Here, we present a resource that takes a middle path, combining some of the best features of scraped corpora - size, open licenses, lexical diversity - and high quality curated data for more interpretable inferences with complex annotations

GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation

We present GENTLE, a new mixed-genre English challenge corpus totaling 17K tokens and consisting of 8 unusual text types for out-of domain evaluation: dictionary entries, esports commentaries, legal documents, medical notes, poetry, mathematical proofs, syllabuses, and threat letters. GENTLE is manually annotated for a variety of popular NLP tasks, including syntactic dependency parsing, entity recognition, coreference resolution, and discourse parsing. We evaluate state-of-the-art NLP systems on GENTLE and find severe degradation for at least some genres in their performance on all tasks, which indicates GENTLE's utility as an evaluation dataset for NLP systems.Comment: Camera-ready for LAW-XVII collocated with ACL 202

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Root traits as drivers of plant and ecosystem functioning: current understanding, pitfalls and future research needs

The effects of plants on the biosphere, atmosphere, and geosphere are key determinants of terrestrial ecosystem functioning. However, despite substantial progress made regarding plant belowground components, we are still only beginning to explore the complex relationships between root traits and functions. Drawing on literature in plant physiology, ecophysiology, ecology, agronomy and soil science, we review 24 aspects of plant and ecosystem functioning and their relationships with a number of traits of root systems, including aspects of architecture, physiology, morphology, anatomy, chemistry, biomechanics and biotic interactions. Based on this assessment, we critically evaluate the current strengths and gaps in our knowledge, and identify future research challenges in the field of root ecology. Most importantly, we found that below-ground traits with widest importance in plant and ecosystem functioning are not those most commonly measured. Also, the fair estimation of trait relative importance for functioning requires us to consider a more comprehensive range of functionally-relevant traits from a diverse range of species, across environments and over time series. We also advocate that establishing causal hierarchical links among root traits will provide a hypothesis-based framework to identify the most parsimonious sets of traits with strongest influence on the functions, and to link genotypes to plant and ecosystem functioning