Una ceremonia coral: las entradas virreinales en Nápoles

L’article ofereix una reflexió de conjunt sobre el procés d’entrada dels nous virreis a Nàpols els segles XVI i XVII. A través d’una relectura i classificació de les fonts, es mostra com aquesta cerimònia fou, de vegada en vegada, el resultat d’un procés de recerca d’un nou equilibri —sovint transitori— entres les forces dels principals poders actius dins la densa societat de la capital delregne. A partir d’aquí s’analitzen l’evolució i els principals canvis dins el ritual d’aquesta cerimònia al llarg de les dècadesEl artículo presenta una reflexión sobre el proceso de la entrada de los nuevos virreyes en Nápoles en los siglos xvi y xvii. A través de una clasificación de las fuentes, se muestra cómo esta ceremonia fue cada vez más el resultado de un proceso de búsqueda de un nuevo equilibrio entre las fuerzas de los principales poderes activos en la densa sociedad de la capital del reino. Bajo esta luz se analiza la evolución y los principales cambios en el ritual de esta ceremonia a lo largo de las décadasThis paper presents a series of considerations relating to the process of the entry for new viceroys in Naples in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through the classification of the different sources, is evident that this ceremony was the result of a complex process of balance between the main powers that were active within the Neapolitan society. In a second part, the text analyses the evolution and the main changes in the ritual of this ceremony throughout the decade

Primi risultati di un censimento di pipistrelli mediante catture notturne in Sardegna

The preliminary results of a study of non-troglophilous Sardinian bats, carried out after nocturnal capture with mist-nets, along the course of the rivers, are reported here. The paper describes the method of capture in 25 different places and reviews the 8 species of non troglophilous bats caught

Report on the 11th IWSLT Evaluation Campaign

The paper overviews the 11th evaluation campaign organized by the IWSLT workshop. The 2014 evaluation offered multiple tracks on lecture transcription and translation based on the TED Talks corpus. In particular, this year IWSLT included three automatic speech recognition tracks, on English, German and Italian, five speech translation tracks, from English to French, English to German, German to English, English to Italian, and Italian to English, and five text translation track, also from English to French, English to German, German to English, English to Italian, and Italian to English. In addition to the official tracks, speech and text translation optional tracks were offered, globally involving 12 other languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese (B), Hebrew, Chinese, Polish, Persian, Slovenian, Turkish, Dutch, Romanian, Russian. Overall, 21 teams participated in the evaluation, for a total of 76 primary runs submitted. Participants were also asked to submit runs on the 2013 test set (progress test set), in order to measure the progress of systems with respect to the previous year. All runs were evaluated with objective metrics, and submissions for two of the official text translation tracks were also evaluated with human post-editing

No Pitch Left Behind: Addressing Gender Unbalance in Automatic Speech Recognition through Pitch Manipulation

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are known to be sensitive to the sociolinguistic variability of speech data, in which gender plays a crucial role. This can result in disparities in recognition accuracy between male and female speakers, primarily due to the under-representation of the latter group in the training data. While in the context of hybrid ASR models several solutions have been proposed, the gender bias issue has not been explicitly addressed in end-to-end neural architectures. To fill this gap, we propose a data augmentation technique that manipulates the fundamental frequency (f0) and formants. This technique reduces the data unbalance among genders by simulating voices of the under-represented female speakers and increases the variability within each gender group. Experiments on spontaneous English speech show that our technique yields a relative WER improvement up to 9.87% for utterances by female speakers, with larger gains for the least-represented f0 ranges.Comment: Accepted at ASRU 202

Towards a methodology for evaluating automatic subtitling

In response to the increasing interest towards automatic subtitling, this EAMT-funded project aimed at collecting subtitle post-editing data in a real use case scenario where professional subtitlers edit automatically generated subtitles. The post-editing setting includes, for the first time, automatic generation of timestamps and segmentation, and focuses on the effect of timing and segmentation edits on the post-editing process. The collected data will serve as the basis for investigating how subtitlers interact with automatic subtitling and for devising evaluation methods geared to the multimodal nature and formal requirements of subtitling

Plural Embodiment(s) of Mind. Genealogy and Guidelines for a Radically Embodied Approach to Mind and Consciousness

This article focuses on a scientific approach to the study of cognition that Warren McCulloch introduced in the era of cybernetics as “experimental epistemology.” In line with recent attempts to highlight its contribution to cognitive science and AI, our article intends to draw attention to its unexplored influence on contemporary embodied approaches to the investigation of mind and consciousness. To this end, we will survey a series of models of cognitive systems genealogically related to the McCulloch-Pitts networks-based modeling approach, i.e., von Foerster’s model of the biological computer, the Maturana-Varela model of the autopoietic system, and Varela’s model of emergent selves. Based on examination of the relevant aspects of these models, we will argue that they offered the McCulloch-Pitts “cybernetic of networks” a coherent methodological and theoretical line of development, complementary to the well-known computationalist one. As we will show, this alternative evolutionary line empowered the biological orientation of McCulloch’s experimental epistemology, laying foundations for contemporary “radically embodied” approaches to mind and consciousness – in particular the Thompson-Varela approach. We will identify the heritage of this tradition of inquiry for future research in cognitive science and AI by proposing guidelines that synthetize how its methodological and theoretical insights suggest taking into account the role(s) played by the biological body in cognitive processes – consciousness included