Constituency and Dependency Parsers Evaluation

This work presents the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of a set of both constituency and dependency parsers which are to be used in the development of a knowledgebased automatic MT metric. Firstly, the methodology used in both types of evaluation is described; secondly, we show the results obtained, and finally we draw some conclusions

Evaluación de analizadores de constituyentes y de dependencias

El presente trabajo muestra la evaluación cuantitativa y cualitativa de un grupo de analizadores de constituyentes y de dependencias con el objetivo de ser usados en el desarrollo de una métrica automática basada en conocimiento para evaluar la salida de sistemas de traducción automática. Primero se describe la metodología seguida en ambos tipos de evaluación y a continuación se muestran los resultados obtenidos y las conclusiones alcanzadas.This work presents the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of a set of both constituency and dependency parsers which are to be used in the development of a knowledge-based automatic MT metric. Firstly, the methodology used in both types of evaluation is described; secondly, we show the results obtained, and finally we draw some conclusions.This work has been funded by the Spanish Government project KNOW, TIN2009-14715-C0403

Investigación de una toxiinfección alimentaria en un centro penitenciario de alta ocupación

ResumenIntroducciónEl 25 de septiembre de 2005 más de un centenar de reclusos presentaron síntomas de gastroenteritis, casi un 5% de los 1.800 reclusos de una prisión. El objetivo del estudio fue confirmar la existencia de un brote, identificar los factores de riesgo, implementar medidas de control y establecer recomendaciones.MétodosSe realizó un análisis de cohortes de una muestra aleatoria estratificada de todos los internos, un análisis de cohortes de uno de los módulos de la prisión y una investigación medioambiental.ResultadosSe seleccionaron 221 internos de toda la prisión, de los cuales se entrevistó a 196. Un 28% eran casos, cuya sintomatología principal fue dolor abdominal (85%) y diarrea (71%). Todos los alimentos consumidos presentaron tasas de ataque similares. Se asoció con la enfermedad el hecho de comer toda la ración de salpicón de marisco de la comida (riesgo relativo [RR]=2; intervalo de confianza [IC] del 95%, 1,1-3,8) o toda la ración de gambas rebozadas en la cena (RR=1,8; IC del 95%, 1,1-3,1) del día 24 de septiembre. En el análisis de uno de los módulos de la prisión se obtuvo resultados similares a la muestra aleatoria. En una muestra de salpicón de marisco se aislaron Clostridium perfringens, Bacillus cereus y Escherichia coli.ConclusiónSe confirmó un brote de gastroenteritis por varios patógenos. Tanto los síntomas como el período de incubación corresponden a los patógenos aislados. La preparación de los alimentos en centros penitenciarios debe cumplir los estándares mínimos de seguridad, que incluya la refrigeración y la educación de los manipuladores.AbstractBackgroundOn September 25 2005, more than 100 inmates (almost 5% of the 1,800 prison population) experienced sudden onset gastroenteritis. This outbreak was the largest foodborne outbreak described in a prison population in Spain. Our objective was to confirm the outbreak, identify risk factors, implement control measures, and provide recommendations.MethodsWe conducted a cohort analysis of a stratified random sample of all the inmates, a cohort analysis of the one of the prison blocks, and an environmental investigation.ResultsA total of 221 inmates were selected, of which 196 were interviewed. Twenty-eight percent had gastroenteritis and the main symptoms were abdominal pain (85%) and diarrhea (71%). All foods consumed caused similar attack rates. Factors associated with the risk of illness were eating the entire portion of seafood cocktail at lunch or all of the fried shrimp at dinner on September 24 (RR=2; 95% CI, 1.1-3.8, and RR=1.8; 95% CI, 1.1-3.1). Analysis of one of the prison blocks yielded results similar to those of the random sample. Clostridium perfringens, Bacillus cereus and Escherichia coli were isolated from a sample of the seafood cocktail.ConclusionA gastroenteritis outbreak caused by several pathogens was confirmed. Both the reported symptoms and the calculated incubation periods corresponded to the pathogens isolated. Preparation of food in prison facilities should meet minimum safety standards, including refrigeration and training of food handlers

Genetic diversity and structure of the commercially important native fish pacu (Piaractus mesopotamicus) from cultured and wild fish populations: relevance for broodstock management

Pacu (Piaractus mesopotamicus) is one of the most important Neotropical freshwater fish species produced by aquaculture in South America. This study is the first attempt to inquire about aquaculture stocks in Argentina regarding genetic diversity and structure. Neither genetic characterization nor pedigree records are available for pacu stocks in farms in Argentina. The presence of hybrids in both natural environment (Lower Paraná River) and farms has not been evaluated yet at the southern region of pacu distribution. Genetic characterization of pacu broodstocks, corresponding to 8 farms, and wild individuals from four areas at Lower Paraná River was performed. Pacu hybrids were not detected neither in wild nor in farm stocks analyzed. In general, similar levels of genetic diversity were observed between cultured and wild fish populations. Global genetic differentiation (Fst = 0.055) indicated a low level of structure and AMOVA showed that genetic variation was mostly within populations. Reduced contemporary effective population size (Ne) was observed, and probably reflects the bottleneck by founder effect in farmed fish populations. Moreover, kinship analysis showed that in fish farms, on average, 43.00% of the individuals were genetically related, whereas in wild population it was 36.40%. We recommend that broodstock management practices, such as using large Ne, single pair mating, precise records, and tagging of brood fish, should be implemented to avoid unintentional mismanagement.Fil: Del Pazo, F.. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Sánchez, Sebastián. Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Instituto de Ictiología del Nordeste; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Nordeste; ArgentinaFil: Posner, Victoria. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Sciara, Andrés A.. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Arranz, Silvia Eda. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; ArgentinaFil: Villanova, Gabriela V.. Universidad Nacional de Rosario; Argentin

A Metadata Schema for the Description ofLanguage Resources (LRs)

This paper presents the metadata schema for describing language resources (LRs) currently under development for the needs of META-SHARE, an open distributed facility for the exchange and sharing of LRs. An essential ingredient in its setup is the existence of formal and standardized LR descriptions, cornerstone of the interoperability layer of any such initiative. The description of LRs is granular and abstractive, combining the taxonomy of LRs with an inventory of a structured set of descriptive elements, of which only a minimal subset is obligatory; the schema additionally proposes recommended and optional elements. Moreover, the schema includes a set of relations catering for the appropriate inter-linking of resources. The current paper presents the main principles and features of the metadata schema, focusing on the description of text corpora and lexical / conceptual resources

Design and implementation of a data acquisition system for combustion tests

En los últimos años, el mercado de la biomasa ha aumentado constantemente. La industria de fabricación de pellets ha comenzado a buscar nuevos productos, como desechos de bosques, agricultura y residuos agroindustriales, entre otros, con el potencial de ser utilizados como biocombustibles. Sin embargo, algunos de estos desechos tienen algunas características que dificultan tanto el proceso de combustión como las condiciones de operación y mantenimiento de los equipos térmicos. Por lo tanto, se necesita más investigación para optimizar el rendimiento y garantizar el cumplimiento de los niveles atmosféricos máximos. Para llevar a cabo estos estudios, se llevó a cabo el diseño e implementación de un sistema de supervisión, control y adquisición de datos para una caldera de pellets doméstica, lo que hace posible obtener más información sobre el rendimiento de los biocombustibles no convencionales. Así, estos biocombustibles, provenientes de diferentes fuentes, se sometieron a diferentes regímenes de trabajo, facilitando la comprensión de los resultados y la corrección de los elementos limitantes. Los resultados de las pruebas iniciales fueron confiables y precisos, coincidiendo con las lecturas de verificación que se realizaron con un termómetro y un analizador de gases de combustión. Bajo estas condiciones, el sistema diseñado constituye una herramienta fundamental para examinar los procesos térmicos con biocombustibles alternativos, con el objetivo de aprovechar al máximo los diferentes desechos de biomasa como fuentes de energía renovables.In recent years, the biomass market has constantly increased. The pellet manufacture industry has started looking for new products, such as wastes from forest, agriculture, and agroindustrial residues, among others, with the potential to be used as biofuels. However, some of these wastes have some characteristics that make both the combustion process and operating and maintenance conditions of thermal equipment difficult. Thus, further research to optimize the performance and ensure the compliance of the maximum atmospheric levels is needed. In order to carry out these studies, the design and implementation of a supervision, control, and data acquisition system for a domestic pellet boiler was carried out, which makes obtaining further information about the performance of non-conventional biofuels possible. Thus, these biofuels, coming from different sources, underwent different working regimes, facilitating the understanding of the results and the correction of limiting elements. The results from initial tests were reliable and precise, coinciding with the check readings that were done with a thermometer and a combustion gas analyser. Under these conditions, the system designed constitutes a fundamental tool to examine thermal processes with alternative biofuels, with the objective of making the most of different biomass wastes as renewable energy sources.• Gobierno de Extremadura . Ayuda GR10151peerReviewe

Decision-making processes on sustainable packaging options in the European food sector

Food packaging improves shelf life and allows longer transportation distances in global food supply chains, but it is also responsible for huge volumes of waste. The transition to sustainable packaging by food companies has often been slow and inconsistent. How decisions on (sustainable) packaging are made within companies in the food sector remains mostly opaque to research. To explore the decision-making process and identify barriers for cleaner, more resource efficient food packaging, we carried out 17 interviews in four European countries across different food sectors using the theoretical decision-making process of Nutt (1984) as an analytical framework. Through qualitative content analysis, we found that decision-making processes often lack structure and extend over long stretches of time. Frequently, they are initiated in response to packaging material manufacturers or suppliers. Switching to more sustainable packaging often implies costly investments into new machinery. Economic sustainability takes precedence over ecological sustainability. We recommend companies move to life-cycle cost models for packaging decisions, commit to mono- and other recyclable materials, and establish structured decision-making processes with clear cut-off criteria so as to streamline implementation decisions. Our results further support a call for progressive legislation towards a circular economy in the packaging sector.This article/publication is based upon work from COST Action Circul-a-bility, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), www.cost.eu.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Decision-making processes on sustainable packaging options in the European food sector

Food packaging improves shelf life and allows longer transportation distances in global food supply chains, but it is also responsible for huge volumes of waste. The transition to sustainable packaging by food companies has often been slow and inconsistent. How decisions on (sustainable) packaging are made within companies in the food sector remains mostly opaque to research. To explore the decision-making process and identify barriers for cleaner, more resource efficient food packaging, we carried out 17 interviews in four European countries across different food sectors using the theoretical decision-making process of Nutt (1984) as an analytical framework. Through qualitative content analysis, we found that decision-making processes often lack structure and extend over long stretches of time. Frequently, they are initiated in response to packaging material manufacturers or suppliers. Switching to more sustainable packaging often implies costly investments into new machinery. Economic sustainability takes precedence over ecological sustainability. We recommend companies move to life-cycle cost models for packaging decisions, commit to mono- and other recyclable materials, and establish structured decision-making processes with clear cut-off criteria so as to streamline implementation decisions. Our results further support a call for progressive legislation towards a circular economy in the packaging sector.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Deep-diving beaked whales dive together but forage apart

Funding: Data collection and analysis were performed with funds from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the US National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), the US Strategic Environmental Research Development Program (SERDP) and the Spanish Government National Projects CETOBAPH (CGL2009-13112) and DEEPCOM (CTM2017-88686-P). J.A.T. is currently the recipient of a FPU Doctoral Scholarship (FPU16/00490) from the Spanish Ministry of Universities. M.J. is supported by the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the EU H2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant 754513. P.A. is funded by an Agustín de Bethencourt fellowship from the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife and NAS by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship from the Spanish Government. V.E.W. is funded by a University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship. C.J.P.G. is partially funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) of Spain under Grant PID2019-110442GB-I00. T.A.M. thanks partial support from CEAUL (funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the project UIDB/00006/2020).Echolocating animals that forage in social groups can potentially benefit from eavesdropping on other group members, cooperative foraging or social defence, but may also face problems of acoustic interference and intra-group competition for prey. Here, we investigate these potential trade-offs of sociality for extreme deep-diving Blainville′s and Cuvier's beaked whales. These species perform highly synchronous group dives as a presumed predator-avoidance behaviour, but the benefits and costs of this on foraging have not been investigated. We show that group members could hear their companions for a median of at least 91% of the vocal foraging phase of their dives. This enables whales to coordinate their mean travel direction despite differing individual headings as they pursue prey on a minute-by-minute basis. While beaked whales coordinate their echolocation-based foraging periods tightly, individual click and buzz rates are both independent of the number of whales in the group. Thus, their foraging performance is not affected by intra-group competition or interference from group members, and they do not seem to capitalize directly on eavesdropping on the echoes produced by the echolocation clicks of their companions. We conclude that the close diving and vocal synchronization of beaked whale groups that quantitatively reduces predation risk has little impact on foraging performance.PostprintPeer reviewe

Robust and scalable barcoding for massively parallel long‑read sequencing

Nucleic-acid barcoding is an enabling technique for many applications, but its use remains limited in emerging long-read sequencing technologies with intrinsically low raw accuracy. Here, we apply so-called NS-watermark barcodes, whose error correction capability was previously validated in silico, in a proof of concept where we synthesize 3840 NS-watermark barcodes and use them to asymmetrically tag and simultaneously sequence amplicons from two evolutionarily distant species (namely Bordetella pertussis and Drosophila mojavensis) on the ONT MinION platform. To our knowledge, this is the largest number of distinct, non-random tags ever sequenced in parallel and the frst report of microarray-based synthesis as a source for large oligonucleotide pools for barcoding. We recovered the identity of more than 86% of the barcodes, with a crosstalk rate of 0.17% (i.e., one misassignment every 584 reads). This falls in the range of the index hopping rate of established, highaccuracy Illumina sequencing, despite the increased number of tags and the relatively low accuracy of both microarray-based synthesis and long-read sequencing. The robustness of NS-watermark barcodes, together with their scalable design and compatibility with low-cost massive synthesis, makes them promising for present and future sequencing applications requiring massive labeling, such as long-read single-cell RNA-Seq.Fil: Ezpeleta, Joaquín. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y de Sistemas; Argentina.Fil: Labari, Ignacio Garcia. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y de Sistemas; Argentina.Fil: Bulacio, Pilar. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y de Sistemas; Argentina.Fil: Tapia, Elizabeth. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y de Sistemas; Argentina.Fil: Ezpeleta, Joaquín. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Ingeniería y Agrimensura; Argentina.Fil: Bulacio, Pilar. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Ingeniería y Agrimensura; Argentina.Fil: Tapia, Elizabeth. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Ingeniería y Agrimensura; Argentina.Fil: Villanova, Gabriela Vanina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.Fil: Lavista Llanos, Sofía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.Fil: Villanova, Gabriela Vanina. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Bioquímicas y Farmacéuticas. Laboratorio Mixto de Biotecnología Acuática. Centro Científico Tecnológico y Educativo Acuario del Río Paraná; Argentina.Fil: Posner, Victoria María. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Bioquímicas y Farmacéuticas. Laboratorio Mixto de Biotecnología Acuática. Centro Científico Tecnológico y Educativo Acuario del Río Paraná; Argentina.Fil: Arranz, Silvia Eda. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Ciencias Bioquímicas y Farmacéuticas. Laboratorio Mixto de Biotecnología Acuática. Centro Científico Tecnológico y Educativo Acuario del Río Paraná; Argentina.Fil: Krsticevic, Flavia. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Robert H Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment; Israel