The relevant prefixes of coloured Motzkin walks: An average case analysis

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Identifying communicative functions in discourse with content types

Texts are not monolithic entities but rather coherent collections of micro illocutionary acts which help to convey a unitary message of content and purpose. Identifying such text segments is challenging because they require a fine-grained level of analysis even within a single sentence. At the same time, accessing them facilitates the analysis of the communicative functions of a text as well as the identification of relevant information. We propose an empirical framework for modelling micro illocutionary acts at clause level, that we call content types, grounded on linguistic theories of text types, in particular on the framework proposed by Werlich in 1976. We make available a newly annotated corpus of 279 documents (for a total of more than 180,000 tokens) belonging to different genres and temporal periods, based on a dedicated annotation scheme. We obtain an average Cohen’s kappa of 0.89 at token level. We achieve an average F1 score of 74.99% on the automatic classification of content types using a bi-LSTM model. Similar results are obtained on contemporary and historical documents, while performances on genres are more varied. This work promotes a discourse-oriented approach to information extraction and cross-fertilisation across disciplines through a computationally-aided linguistic analysis

MultiEmotions-it: A new dataset for opinion polarity and emotion analysis for Italian

This paper1 presents a new linguistic resource for Italian, called MultiEmotions-It, containing comments to music videos and advertisements posted on YouTube and Facebook. These comments are manually annotated according to four different dimensions: i.e., relatedness, opinion polarity, emotions and sarcasm. For the annotation of emotions we adopted the Plutchik\u2019s model taking into account both basic and complex emotions, i.e. dyads

The Tennis Ball Problem

AbstractMallows and Shapiro, (J. Integer Sequences2 (1999)) have recently considered what they dubbed the problem of balls on the lawn. Our object is to explore a natural generalization, the s-tennis ball problem, which reduces to that considered by Mallows and Shapiro in the case s=2. We show how this generalization is connected with s-ary trees, and employ the notion of generating trees to obtain a solution expressed in terms of generating functions

One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective

Annotating Causality in the TempEval-3 Corpus

While there is a wide consensus in the NLP community over the modeling of temporal relations between events, mainly based on Allen\u2019s temporal logic, the question on how to annotate other types of event relations, in particular causal ones, is still open. In this work, we present some annotation guidelines to capture causality between event pairs, partly inspired by TimeML. We then implement a rule-based algorithm to automatically identify explicit causal relations in the TempEval-3 corpus. Based on this annotation, we report some statistics on the behavior of causal cues in text and perform a preliminary investigation on the interaction between causal and temporal relations

DaDoEval @ EVALITA 2020: Same-genre and cross-genre dating of historical documents

In this paper we introduce the DaDoEval shared task at EVALITA 2020, aimed at automatically assigning temporal information to documents written in Italian. The evaluation exercise comprises three levels of temporal granularity, from coarse-grained to year-based, and includes two types of test sets, either having the same genre of the training set, or a different one. More specifically, DaDoEval deals with the corpus of Alcide De Gasperi's documents, providing both public documents and letters as test sets. Two systems participated in the competition, achieving results always above the baseline in all subtasks. As expected, coarse-grained classification into five periods is rather easy to perform automatically, while the year-based one is still an unsolved problem also due to the lack of enough training data for some years. Results showed also that, although De Gasperi's letters in our test set were written in standard Italian and in a style which was not too colloquial, cross-genre classification yields remarkably lower results than the same-genre setting

Local and Distributed fMRI Changes Induced by 40 Hz Gamma tACS of the Bilateral Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex: A Pilot Study

Over the past few years, the possibility of modulating fast brain oscillatory activity in the gamma (γ) band through transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has been discussed in the context of both cognitive enhancement and therapeutic scenarios. However, the effects of tACS targeting regions outside the motor cortex, as well as its spatial specificity, are still unclear. Here, we present a concurrent tACS-fMRI block design study to characterize the impact of 40 Hz tACS applied over the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in healthy subjects. Results suggest an increase in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activity in the targeted bilateral DLPFCs, as well as in surrounding brain areas affected by stimulation according to biophysical modeling, i.e., the premotor cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, off-target effects were also observed, primarily involving the visual cortices, with further effects on the supplementary motor areas (SMA), left subgenual cingulate, and right superior temporal gyrus. The specificity of 40 Hz tACS over bilateral DLPFC and the possibility for network-level effects should be considered in future studies, especially in the context of recently promoted gamma-induction therapeutic protocols for neurodegenerative disorders. © 2022 Lucia Mencarelli et al

Super congruences and Euler numbers

Let $p>3$ be a prime. We prove that $$\sum_{k=0}^{p-1}\binom{2k}{k}/2^k=(-1)^{(p-1)/2}-p^2E_{p-3} (mod p^3),$$ $$\sum_{k=1}^{(p-1)/2}\binom{2k}{k}/k=(-1)^{(p+1)/2}8/3*pE_{p-3} (mod p^2),$$ $$\sum_{k=0}^{(p-1)/2}\binom{2k}{k}^2/16^k=(-1)^{(p-1)/2}+p^2E_{p-3} (mod p^3)$$, where E_0,E_1,E_2,... are Euler numbers. Our new approach is of combinatorial nature. We also formulate many conjectures concerning super congruences and relate most of them to Euler numbers or Bernoulli numbers. Motivated by our investigation of super congruences, we also raise a conjecture on 7 new series for $\pi^2$, $\pi^{-2}$ and the constant $K:=\sum_{k>0}(k/3)/k^2$ (with (-) the Jacobi symbol), two of which are $$\sum_{k=1}^\infty(10k-3)8^k/(k^3\binom{2k}{k}^2\binom{3k}{k})=\pi^2/2$$ and $$\sum_{k>0}(15k-4)(-27)^{k-1}/(k^3\binom{2k}{k}^2\binom{3k}k)=K.$