Modelling Italian construction flexibility with distributional semantics: are constructions enough?

The present study combines psycholinguistic evidence on Italian valency coercion and a distributional analysis. The paper suggests that distributional properties can provide useful insights on how general abstract constructions influence the resolution of coercion effects. However, complete understanding of the processing and recognition of coercion requires to take into consideration the complex intertwining of lexical verb and abstract constructions

Refining the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis for Unsupervised Hypernym Identification

Several unsupervised methods for hypernym detection have been investigated in distributional semantics. Here we present a new approach based on a smoothed version of the distributional inclusion hypothesis. The new method is able to improve hypernym detection after testing on the BLESS dataset

AHyDA: Automatic Hypernym Detection with feature Augmentation

Several unsupervised methods for hypernym detection have been investigated in distributional semantics. Here we present a new approach based on a smoothed version of the distributional inclusion hypothesis. The new method is able to improve hypernym detection after testing on the BLESS dataset

Event Knowledge in Compositional Distributional Semantics

The great majority of compositional models in distributional semantics present methods to compose vectors or tensors in a representation of the sentence. Here we propose to enrich one of the best performing methods (vector addition, which we take as a baseline) with distributional knowledge about events. The resulting model is able to outperform our baseline

Functional Role of the Secretin/Secretin Receptor Signaling During Cholestatic Liver Injury

Liver diseases are a major health concern and affect a large proportion of people worldwide. There are over 100 types of liver disorders, including cirrhosis, cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), hepatocellular carcinoma, and hepatitis. Despite the relevant number of people who are affected by liver diseases, and the increased awareness with regard to these disorders, the number of deaths corresponding to liver injury is expected to increase in the foreseeable future. One of the possible reasons for this is that a complete comprehension of the mechanisms of hepatic damage involving specific liver anatomical districts is lacking, and, as a consequence, current treatments available are suboptimal. A major burden in the clinical setting are chronic cholestatic liver diseases (e.g., primary biliary cholangitis [PBC], primary sclerosing cholangitis [PSC], biliary atresia), which target the biliary epithelium and are characterized by cholestasis.(1, 2) Because the secretin (Sct)/secretin receptor (SR) axis (expressed only by cholangiocytes in the liver)(3, 4) is the major regulator of ductal bile secretion,(5, 6) it is intuitive that this axis plays a key role in the maintenance of biliary homeostasis during the progression of cholangiopathies. For instance, PBC is characterized by reduced bicarbonate secretion, a phenomenon possibly impeding the formation of an HCO3 canalicular film (“bicarbonate umbrella”) on bile ducts, which has protective properties against highly concentrated bile acids (BAs).(1, 7, 8) In this review, we examined the molecular mechanisms by which the Sct/SR axis regulates biliary function and the homeostasis of the biliary epithelium in normal and pathophysiological conditions

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Event Knowledge in Compositional Distributional Semantics

The great majority of compositional models in distributional semantics present methods tocompose vectors or tensors in a representation of the sentence. Here we propose to enrich oneof the best performing methods (vector addition, which we take as a baseline) with distributionalknowledge about events. The resulting model is able to outperform our baseline

MEDEA: Merging Event knowledge and Distributional vEctor Addition

The great majority of composi- tional models in distributional semantics present methods to compose distributional vectors or tensors in a representation of the sentence. Here we propose to enrich the best performing method (vector addition, which we take as a baseline) with distri- butional knowledge about events, outper- forming our baseline

From speed to car and back. An exploratory study about associations between abstract nouns and images

Abstract concepts, notwithstanding their lack of physical referents in real world, are grounded in sensorimotor experience. In fact, images depicting concrete entities may be associated to abstract concepts, both via direct and indirect grounding processes. However, what are the links connecting the concrete concepts represented by images and abstract ones is still unclear. To investigate these links, we conducted a preliminary study collecting word association data and image-abstract word pair ratings, to identify whether the associations between visual and verbal systems rely on the same conceptual mappings. The goal of this research is to understand to what extent linguistic associations could be confirmed with visual stimuli, in order to have a starting point for multimodal analysis of abstract and concrete concepts