Recognition and Prediction for Implicit Contrastive Focus in Romanian

This paper is made up of two parts: \textbf{the first part} continues the theoretical investigations on Information Structure (IS), linguistic, and computational approaches suitable to provide solutions to the prosody prediction problem of Implicit Contrastive Focus (ICF) concept, introduced in our previous papers. ICF is meant to be the particular case but also the counterpart of the classical category of contrastive Focus at the finite clause level, as the second item in the Background-Focus pair of IS dimension. The classical contrastive Focus, which we called Explicit Contrastive Focus (ECF), is the intonationally F marked entity introduced by overt lexical contrastive markers. ICF labels the situations where contrastive intonational focusation occurs but without the lexical presence of the contrastive Focus markers! The only and main device to introduce the contrastive focusation on certain constituents is the syntactic dislocation from their specific positions in the Systemic Ordering (SO) of syntactic-semantic roles for the Romanian finite clause. The ICF problem means to obtain reliable algorithms and procedures on the Discourse-Prosody interface in order to accurately predict the contrastive Focus distribution within the Romanian ICF-type affirmative finite clause. \textbf{The second, applicative part} of the paper describes algorithms for solving the ICF problem for Romanian, trying to exploit the typically dislocated constituents in the finite clause and to predict their Prosodic Prominence (PP). Procedures for the development of intonational-prosodic patterns assigned to the ICF distribution by certain ICF estimation schemes are developed and tested for a balanced set of Romanian ICF-type affirmative finite clauses

CoRoLa Starts Blooming – An update on the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language

This article reports on the on-going CoRoLa project, aiming at creating a reference corpus of contemporary Romanian (from 1945 onwards), opened for online free exploitation by researchers in linguistics and language processing, teachers of Romanian, students. We invest serious efforts in persuading large publishing houses and other owners of IPR on relevant language data to join us and contribute the project with selections of their text and speech repositories. The CoRoLa project is coordinated by two Computer Science institutes of the Romanian Academy, but enjoys cooperation of and consulting from professional linguists from other institutes of the Romanian Academy. We foresee a written component of the corpus of more than 500 million word forms, and a speech component of about 300 hours of recordings. The entire collection of texts (covering all functional styles of the language) will be pre-processed and annotated at several levels, and also documented with standardized metadata. The pre-processing includes cleaning the data and harmonising the diacritics, sentence splitting and tokenization. Annotation will include morpho-lexical tagging and lemmatization in the first stage, followed by syntactic, semantic and discourse annotation in a later stage

Study on the Weldability of Copper—304L Stainless Steel Dissimilar Joint Performed by Robotic Gas Tungsten Arc Welding

The welding process of dissimilar metals, with distinct chemical, physical, thermal, and structural properties, needs to be studied and treated with special attention. The main objectives of this research were to investigate the weldability of the dissimilar joint made between the 99.95% Cu pipe and the 304L stainless steel plate by robotic Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW), without filler metal and without preheating of materials, and to find the optimum welding regime. Based on repeated adjustments of the main process parameters—welding speed, oscillation frequency, pulse frequency, main welding current, pulse current, and decrease time of welding current at the process end—it was determined the optimum process and, further, it was possible to carry out joints free of cracks and porosity, with full penetration, proper compactness, and sealing properties, that ensure safety in operating conditions. The microstructure analysis revealed the fusion zone as a multi-element alloy with preponderant participation of Cu that has resulted from mixing the non-ferrous elements and iron. Globular Cu- or Fe-rich compounds were developed during welding, being detected by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Moreover, the Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (EDAX) recorded the existence of a narrow double mixing zone formed at the interface between the fusion zone and the 304L stainless steel that contains about 66 wt.% Fe, 18 wt.% Cr, 8 wt.% Cu, and 4 wt.% Ni. Due to the formation of Fe-, Cr-, and Ni-rich compounds, a hardness increase up to 127 HV0.2 was noticed in the fusion zone, in comparison with the copper material, where the average measured microhardness was 82 HV0.2. The optimization of the robotic welding regime was carried out sequentially, by adjusting the parameters values, and, further, by analyzing the effects of welding on the geometry and on the appearance of the weld bead. Finally, employing the optimum welding regime—14 cm/min welding speed, 125 A main current, 100 A pulse current, 2.84 Hz oscillation frequency, and 5 Hz pulse frequency—appropriate dissimilar joints, without imperfections, were achieved

An Insight into the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian

This paper presents the almost final results of a priority project of the Romanian Academy – the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa). The Corpus includes data in both written and spoken forms of the language. The textual collection is made up of publications covering the period from the 2nd World War to our days, while the spoken collection includes only recent recordings