Bootstrapping Information from Corpora in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

The achievements of Romance language corpus-driven studies deserve more attention from the scientific community at the world level for both their quantity and quality. This book contains papers given at the 3rd International LABLITA Workshop in Corpus Linguistics (Italian Department, University of Florence, June 4th-5th 2008 ), and it aims at integrating new ideas and results derived from Romance language corpora in the framework of the overall achievements of Corpus Linguistics. The volume contains the contribution of a leading scholar of Corpus Linguistics (Douglas Biber), and a set of articles presented to Biber by notable European researchers and those from other countries. Papers report on long-term studies ranging from Italian to Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

La variazione semantica del verbo "essere" nelI'italiano parlato

The volume proposes a corpus-driven study on the 14,000 occurrences of the verb “essere” (to be) in a corpus of Italian speech C-ORAL-ROM, in the light of the main proposals for the semantic interpretation of the verb. Thus, the very possibility of carrying out research that is strongly characterised in a theoretical sense on a large amount of oral data, generally not very inclined to a systematic taxonomic treatment, is put to the test. The observable datum therefore defines the explicandum of linguistic reflection and the analysis on corpus guarantees the observational adequacy with respect to the actual production data. The proposed results show that the wide semantic variation in the use of the verb is structured in broadly comprehensive macro-classes: the copula (attributive) uses, the identifying uses and the predicative uses with a locative basis. Within each of these classes, primary, consistent and productive variation lines are found

Complex Illocutive Units in L-AcT: An Analysis of Non-Terminal Prosodic Breaks of Bound and Multiple Comments / Unidades Ilocucionárias Complexas na L-AcT: uma análise de quebras prosódicas não-terminais em Comentários Ligados e Comentários Múltiplos

Abstract: This work presents a pilot study for a prosodic analysis of two different spoken structures in spoken Italian within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT): (i) chains of two or more Bound Comments (COB) that do not form a compositional informative and prosodic unit; (ii) compositional Information Units formed by two or more Multiple Comments (CMM), linked together by a conventional prosodic model that implements specific meta-illocutive structures. This work analyzes COBs and CMMs from the DB-IPIC Italian Minicorpus. Different prosodic cues are taken into account: f0 reset, pauses, final lengthening, intensity lowering and initial rush. The distinctive feature for COBs is a flat trend of f0 before the boundary, with a low number of f0 reset, while CMMs vary between different f0 shapes. Vowel elongation and a no rushing speech rate cooperate in perceiving the prolongation of one COB into another. Initial rush is a characteristic feature of CMMs, while the lengthening of the last vowel of the unit is easier to find at the end of a COB than in a CMM.Keywords: prosody; spontaneous speech segmentation; non-terminal breaks; L-AcT.Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta um estudo piloto sobre uma análise prosódica de duas estruturas distintas em italiano falado, sob a perspectiva da Teoria da Língua em Ato (L-AcT): (i) cadeiras de dois ou mais Comentários Ligados (COB) que não formam uma unidade informacional e prosódica composicional; (ii) unidades informacionais composicionais formadas por dois ou mais Comentários Múltiplos (CMM), ligados entre si por um modelo prosódico convencional que implementa estruturas metailocutivas específicas. Os COBs e CMMs analisados foram extraídos do minicorpus italiano disponível no DB-IPIC. Diferentes aspectos prosódicos são levados em conta: reset de f0, pausas, alongamento final, abaixamento de intensidade e rush inicial. O traço distintivo para os COBs é uma tendência a achatamento de f0 antes da fronteira, com um baixo número de reset de f0, enquanto os CMMs variam entre diferentes formatos de f0. Alongamento de vogal e uma velocidade de fala sem rushing cooperam na percepção do prolongamento de um COB naquele que o segue. O rush inicial é um traço característico dos CMMs, enquanto o alongamento da última vogal da unidade é mais fácil de encontrar ao final de um COB do que de um CMM.Palavras-chave: prosódia; segmentação da fala espontânea; quebras não-terminais; L-Ac

Just a Matter of ‘Manner’? Modeling Action Verb Semantics in an Inter-Linguistic Perspective

Action vebs are important testing ground for the study of lexical encoding of the ‘manner’ feature. In this respect, the opposition between ‘manner’ and ‘result’ verbs has definitely become one of the central nodes to describe different ways to lexicalize the meaning components. Nonetheless, a more integrated way to conceive cognitive and semantic conceptualization of actions can lead to highlighting a wider range of lexicalization strategies. The inter-linguistic comparison of these strategies can make a major contribution to this end. In this paper, we will mostly focus on Chinese, English and Italian, and we will analyze the meaning components of different seriees of verbs from the semantic fields of ‘breaking’, ‘cutting’, ‘cooking’, ‘killing’, and ‘motion’. In order to perform such an analysis, we assumed the framework adopted by the IMAGACT Ontology, a multilingual database linking visually represented action concepts and lexical entries. The results lead to reconsidering the weight of some of the traditional categories used to describe action verb sematics. More specifically, we will see that ‘manner’ and ‘result’ features can interact in different and complex ways, and that other components, such as the ‘goal’ of the action, can be useful to descibe the meaning of verbs encoding neither ‘manner’ nor ‘result’

IMAGACT: Deriving an Action Ontology from Spoken Corpora

This paper presents the IMAGACT annotation infrastructure which uses both corpus - based and competence - based methods for the simultaneous extraction of a language independent Action ontology from English and Italian spontaneous speech corpora. The infrastructure relies on an innovative methodology based on images of prototypical scenes and will identify high frequency action concepts in everyday life, suitable for the implementation of an open set of languages

Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation

Most of the papers collected in this book resulted from presentations and discussions undertaken during the V Lablita Workshop that took place at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on August 23-25, 2011. The workshop was held in conjunction with the II Brazilian Seminar on Pragmatics and Prosody. The guiding themes for the joint event were illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation. Thus, all papers presented here are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of speech. Among the papers in this volume, there are different theoretical orientations, which are mirrored through the methodological designs of studies pursued. However, all papers are based on the analysis of actual speech, be it from corpora or from experimental contexts trying to emulate natural speech. Prosody is the keyword that comes out from all the papers in this publication, which indicates the high standing of this category in relation to studies that are geared towards the understanding of major elements that are constitutive of the structuring of speech

Verb interpretation for basic action types: annotation, ontology induction and creation of prototypical scenes

In the last 20 years dictionaries and lexicographic resources such as WordNet have started to be enriched with multimodal content. Short videos depicting basic actions support the user\u27s need (especially in second language acquisition) to fully understand the range of applicability of verbs. The IMAGACT project has among its results a repository of action verbs ontologically organised around prototypical action scenes in the form of both video recordings and 3D animations. The creation of the IMAGACT ontology, which consists in deriving action types from corpus instances of action verbs, intra and cross linguistically validating them and producing the prototypical scenes thereof, is the preliminary step for the creation of a resouce that users can browse by verb, learning how to match different action prototypes with the correct verbs in the target language. The mapping of IMAGACT types onto WordNet synsets allows for a mutual enrichment of both resources

Spatial variability of nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde and residential exposure of children in the industrial area of Viadana, Northern Italy

Chipboard production is a source of ambient air pollution. We assessed the spatial variability of outdoor pollutants and residential exposure of children living in proximity to the largest chipboard industry in Italy, and evaluated the reliability of exposure estimates obtained from a number of available models. We obtained passive sampling data on NO2 and formaldehyde collected by the environmental protection agency of Lombardia region at 25 sites in the municipality of Viadana during 10 weeks (2017-18), and compared NO2 measurements with average weekly concentrations from continuous monitors. We compared interpolated NO2 and formaldehyde surfaces with previous maps for 2010. We assessed the relationship between residential proximity to the industry and pollutant exposures assigned using these maps, as well as other available countrywide/continental models based on routine data on NO2, PM10, and PM2.5. The correlation between NO2 concentrations from continuous and passive sampling was high (Pearson\u2019s r=0.89), although passive sampling underestimated NO2 especially during winter. For both 2010 and 2017-18, we observed higher NO2 and formaldehyde concentrations in the south of Viadana, with hot-spots in proximity to the industry. PM10 and PM2.5 exposures were higher for children at <1km compared to the children living at >3.5 km to the industry, whereas NO2 exposure was higher at 1-1.7 km to the industry. Road and population densities were also higher close to the industry. Findings from a variety of exposure models suggest that children living in proximity to the chipboard industry in Viadana are more exposed to air pollution, and that exposure gradients are relatively stable over time

modelling and simulation for major incidents

In recent years, there has been a rise in Major Incidents with big impact on the citizens health and the society. Without the possibility of conducting live experiments when it comes to physical and/or toxic trauma, only an accurate in silico reconstruction allows us to identify organizational solutions with the best possible chance of success, in correlation with the limitations on available resources (e.g. medical team, first responders, treatments, transports, and hospitals availability) and with the variability of the characteristic of event (e.g. type of incident, severity of the event and type of lesions). Utilizing modelling and simulation techniques, a simplified mathematical model of physiological evolution for patients involved in physical and toxic trauma incident scenarios has been developed and implemented. The model formalizes the dynamics, operating standards and practices of medical response and the main emergency service in the chain of emergency management during a Major Incident