The CorDis Corpus Mark-up and Related Issues

CorDis is a large, XML, TEI-conformant, POS-tagged, multimodal, multigenre corpus representing a significant portion of the political and media discourse on the 2003 Iraqi conflict. It was generated from different sub-corpora which had been assembled by various research groups, ranging from official transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, both in the US and the UK, to the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry, from American and British newspaper coverage of the conflict to White House press briefings and to transcriptions of American and British TV news programmes. The heterogeneity of the data, the specificity of the genres and the diverse discourse analytical purposes of different groups had led to a wide range of coding strategies being employed to make textual and meta-textual information retrievable. The main purpose of this paper is to show the process of harmonisation and integration whereby a loose collection of texts has become a stable architecture. The TEI proved a valid instrument to achieve standardisation of mark-up. The guidelines provide for a hierarchical organisation which gives the corpus a sound structure favouring replicability and enhancing the reliability of research. In discussing some examples of the problems encountered in the annotation, we will deal with issues like consistency and re-usability, and will examine the constraints imposed on data handling by specific research objectives. Examples include the choice to code the same speakers in different ways depending on the various (institutional) roles they may assume throughout the corpus, the distinction between quotations of spoken or written discourse and quotations read aloud in the course of a spoken text, and the segmentation of portions of news according to participants interaction and use of camera/voiceover

Analisi del discorso attraverso tecniche di ‘Concordancing’. Aspetti teorico metodologici

The seminar aims at providing theoretical and methodological background to Corpus Linguistics research, in terms of corpus creation, annotation and analysis. A corpus is a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language, a collection of texts representative of a given language put together for linguistic analysis. Corpus-based approaches to language analysis are used to expound, test or exemplify theories and descriptions that were formulated before large corpora became available to inform language study. Corpus-driven linguists are strictly committed to the integrity of the data as a whole. Theoretical statements are fully consistent with, and reflect directly, the evidence provided by the corpus. Corpus mark-up is the system of standard codes inserted into a document stored in electronic form to provide information about the text itself. The most widely used mark-up schemes are TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and CES (Corpus Encoding Standard). Annotation makes extracting information easier, faster and enables human analysts to exploit and retrieve analyses of which they are not themselves capable. Annotated corpora are reusable resources. Corpus annotation records a linguistic analysis explicitly and provides a standard reference resource, a stable base of linguistic analyses, so that successive studies can be compared and contrasted. There are different types of corpora: parallel corpora (source texts plus translations) which can be either unidirectional (from La to Lb or from Lb to Lc alone) or bidirectional (from La to Lb and from Lb to La); comparable corpora (monolingual subcorpora designed using the same sampling techniques); general corpora (BNC, AMC); specialised corpora (MICASE); monitor corpora (Bank of English); reference corpora. Corpora can be used for a wide variety of language analyses. These range from lexicography/terminology to (computational) Linguistics, from dictionaries and grammars to (Critical) Discourse Analysis, from Translation practice and theory to Language teaching and learning. Basic notions of Corpus Linguistics methodology include; Concordance / Concordancer, Collocation (Lexis), Colligation (Grammar), Semantic Preference (Semantics), Discourse Prosody (Pragmatics), Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Dimensions, the lexico-grammar approach, the idiom principle vs. open-choice principle. To know a word is to know how to use it since certain grammar attracts certain words. For example grammatical words like “a” and “the” are often used in phrases rather than being used independently, compare: “A free hand” vs. “her free hand”, “Hurt his leg” vs. “hit someone in the leg”, “Turn her face” vs. “a slap in the face”. During the seminar different software tools were presented, highlighting their similarities and differences. These include Xaira, WordSmith Tools, AntConc, Concgram as well as web-resources

Editorial: Public and private finance and financial markets during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

The third issue of the journal Risk Governance and Control: Financial Markets and Institutions provides contributions to the exploration of subjects related to public and private finance and the functioning and investment techniques of financial markets. These are all topical issues that may give rise to further research in order to understand better how countries, markets and companies are facing the challenges due to the Covid-19

Analisi statistiche e significato: ll confronto di collocati in corpora paragonabili

L’intervento si propone di confrontare l’uso del termine “war” in tre diversi corpora, uno rappresentativo dell’inglese comune, il British National Corpus, e due rappresentativi di testi dei media, i corpora CorDis e IntUne. Il confronto avverrà attraverso una riflessione sull’utilizzo di test statistici per l’individuazione dei collocati di “war” nei tre corpora in modo da individuare usi comuni ed utilizzi specifici del termine

Validation of Simplified Micro-models for the Static Analysis of Masonry Arches and Vaults

Compared to simple masonry walls, numerical modelling of masonry vaulted structures is particularly complex due to their three-dimensional curved geometry and articulated masonry pattern. Moreover, the scarce availability of experimental data makes it difficult to validate numerical models for these types of structures. Recently, the simplified micro-modelling approach has been applied by different authors, despite some intrinsic limits, such as huge numerical effort and adoption of ad-hoc written numerical codes. The aim of this study is to overcome these difficulties by using a commercial software with built-in friction interface models and to validate the proposed simplified-micro model through experimental tests on in-scale specimens of arch and cross vault. The proposed approach has shown promising features: experimental results have been numerically reproduced with a high degree of accuracy, both in case of planar and space structures, with both dry and mortar joints. The final result of the study is a validated modelling strategy that could be confidently applied to real masonry vaulted structures

Seismic in-plane displacement capacity of masonry barrel vaults: the role of constructive aspects

Historic masonry vaults are one of the most vulnerable elements with respect to the seismic action. Cracks are often detected after post-earthquake surveys. However, it is difficult to directly link the observed damage to causes. Different mechanisms can occur during an earthquake, such as in-plane horizontal shear distortion or longitudinal opening/closing of the abutments. These mechanisms are not necessarily associated to a specific crack pattern, since other factors are involved in the determination of the detected crack status. Among these factors, constructive aspects (such as the brick pattern) play a major role. This study aims at investigating the possible correlation between constructive aspects and the crack pattern in barrel vaults subjected to in-plane shear mechanism. Numerical simulations are carried out on an ideal circular vault with a rectangular base of dimensions 3.1x5.3 m, and rise of 1.175 m. Three brick patterns are considered: radial, diagonal and vertical. In order to investigate these aspects, a micromodelling numerical approach has been adopted. Results are presented in terms of ultimate displacement capacity, collapse mechanisms and crack pattern charts

FE modelling of the Streicker Footbridge

The Streicker footbridge was completed in 2010 at the Princeton University Campus, over the Washington Road. It is about 104 m long and consists of a central main span supported by a steel arch and four lateral approaching legs. The deck is a post-tensioned high-performance concrete girder. Steel columns with “Y” shape support four lateral legs that connect the bridge to the lateral bearings on the ground and the whole system results a slender varying cross section main girder. The original shape in the horizontal plane provides horizontal stability to the footbridge despite the intrinsic slenderness of the steel supporting columns. Vertical stability is provided also by the arch in the central main-span and by the supporting columns under the legs. Cross section width increases from the midpoint of the main span to the connections with the legs and then remains constant up to the ground bearings. This work is focused on the development of a finite element analysis of the footbridge at different levels of refinement from the essential implementation of beam elements to more refined FE solutions for the prestressed concrete deck. The models are identified with respect to the available operational modal parameters. This deck discretization could further allow simulating the motion of a running/walking pedestrian along different trajectories

Maximally entangled fermions

Fermions play an essential role in many areas of quantum physics and it is desirable to understand the nature of entanglement within systems that consists of fermions. Whereas the issue of separability for bipartite fermions has extensively been studied in the present literature, this paper is concerned with maximally entangled fermions. A complete characterization of maximally entangled quasifree (gaussian) fermion states is given in terms of the covariance matrix. This result can be seen as a step towards distillation protocols for maximally entangled fermions.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, RevTex, minor errors are corrected, section "Conclusions" is adde

6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference (CADAAD 2016) - Book of Abstracts

Book of Abstracts of the 6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference (CADAAD 2016