Postcopulatory sexual selection

The female reproductive tract is where competition between the sperm of different males takes place, aided and abetted by the female herself. Intense postcopulatory sexual selection fosters inter-sexual conflict and drives rapid evolutionary change to generate a startling diversity of morphological, behavioural and physiological adaptations. We identify three main issues that should be resolved to advance our understanding of postcopulatory sexual selection. We need to determine the genetic basis of different male fertility traits and female traits that mediate sperm selection; identify the genes or genomic regions that control these traits; and establish the coevolutionary trajectory of sexes

Summarizing Short Texts Through a Discourse-Centered Approach in a Multilingual Context

The chapter presents the architecture of a system targeting summaries of short texts in six languages. At the core of a summary, which is comprised of clauses and sentences extracted from the original text, is the structure of the discourse and its relationship with its coreferential links. The approach shows a uniform design for all languages, while language specificity is attributed to the resources that fuel the component modules. The design described here includes a number of feedback loops used to fine-tune the parameters by comparing the output of the modules against annotated corpora. “Average ” summaries over some human-produced ones are used to evaluate the accuracy of each of the monolingual systems. The study also presents some quantitative data on the corpora used, showing a comparison among languages and results that, mostly, prove to be above the state-of-the-art.

ANNODIS and related projects: case studies on the annotation of discourse structure

International audienceIn this paper we report on the efforts of three projects to annotate texts and dialogues with discourse structure. We provide a theoretical discussion of various alternatives and then present our approach to discourse structure annotation, along with some applications of the resources that we have developed