What to talk about, and how: studies on prominence and patterns of coreference

The concept of prominence has been variously defined, and it overlaps with other ideas in both theoretical and cognitive linguistics, such as activation, emphasis, or accessibility. Moreover, prominence has an important role in the interpretation and production of language, influencing what anaphoric patterns are produced and/or seen as mostly likely, and what referring expressions are chosen to express coreference. This thesis presents psycholinguistic, crosslinguistic studies on prominence and coreference, grouping them in two parts respectively on the surface form and repercussions of prominence and on prominence as seen in different components of meaning. The first study, on English, surveys how prominence is expressed in cleft constructions by extracting emphasis markers and "formal" features within clefts from two corpora at different registers, exploring the patterns in which syntactic marking, graphical emphasis markers, and the variants of contraction, pronoun and complementiser are used in a synergy to express prominence. The second study uses the same structure of the cleft in Italian, and focusses on two factors affecting prominence: information structure and sentence boundary. It then analyses the next-mention choices that writers make, and how this choice is carried on with referring expressions. Moving to prominence in smaller linguistic components, the studies in the third section analyse event and entity coreference in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, using different referring expressions and features of the verb (aspect and causative-inchoative alternation) as proxies to manipulate the prominence of entities versus the events in which they are involved. Finally, the fourth and last section investigates number conceptualisation in named entities in the same five languages: in coreference, speakers have to choose whether to index the entity according to its morphosyntactic or notional number, marking agreement on the pronoun consequently. The prominence of grammatical and semantic number in the speakers' indexing of referents is shown to change crosslinguistically and with the formality of a text, as well as with features of the entity. Overall, the results of this research show a varied interplay between prominence and patterns of coreference, with different manifestations at different levels of linguistic structure and results that can sometimes be extended crosslinguistically

Compound Climate Events and Extremes in the Midlatitudes: Dynamics, Simulation, and Statistical Characterization

The workshop, conducted virtually due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19, gathered scientists from six countries and focused on the mechanistic understanding, statistical characterization, and modeling of societally relevant compound climate events and extremes in the midlatitudes. These ranged from co-occurring hot–humid or wet–windy extremes, to spatially compounding wet and dry extremes, to temporally compounding hot–wet events and more. The aim was to bring together selected experts studying a diverse range of compound climate events and extremes to present their ongoing work and outline challenges and future developments in this societally relevant field of research

Twenty-three unsolved problems in hydrology (UPH) – a community perspective

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through on-line media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, prioritised, and synthesised. In spite of the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work. Questions remain focussed on process-based understanding of hydrological variability and causality at all space and time scales. Increased attention to environmental change drives a new emphasis on understanding how change propagates across interfaces within the hydrological system and across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the expansion of the human footprint raises a new set of questions related to human interactions with nature and water cycle feedbacks in the context of complex water management problems. We hope that this reflection and synthesis of the 23 unsolved problems in hydrology will help guide research efforts for some years to come

Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression

Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and non-entity coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of recent work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders' preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, but portraying an event as completed does not reach statistical significance (though showing quite uniform patterns). Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference.Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verb-driven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons

Unsupervised discovery of unaccusative and unergative verbs

We present an unsupervised method to detect English unergative and unaccusative verbs. These categories allow us to identify verbs participating in the causative-inchoative alternation without knowing the semantic roles of the verb. The method is based on the generation of intransitive sentence variants of candidate verbs and probing a language model. We obtained results on par with similar approaches, with the added benefit of not relying on annotated resources

A Model for Temporal Dynamics of Brown Rot Spreading in Fruit Orchards

International audienceBrown rot, caused by Monilinia spp., is a major disease of stone fruit and, in favorable environmental conditions and in the absence of fungicide treatments, it causes important economic losses. In the present work, we propose a modification of classical susceptible, exposed, infectious and removed compartmental models to grasp the peculiarities of the progression of brown rot epidemics in stone fruit orchards in the last stage of the fruit growth (i.e., from the end of the pit hardening to harvest time). Namely, we took into account (i) the lifespan of airborne spores; (ii) the dependence of the latent period on the cuticle crack surface area, which itself varies in time with fruit growth; (iii) the impossibility of recovery in infectious fruit; and (iv) the abrupt interruption of disease development by the elimination of the host fruit at harvest time. We parametrized the model by using field data from a peach Prunus persica orchard infected by Monilinia laxa and M. fructicola in Avignon (southern France). The basic reproduction number indicates that the environmental conditions met in the field were extremely favorable to disease development and the model closely fitted the temporal evolution of the fruit abundance in the different epidemiological compartments. The model permits us to highlight crucial mechanisms undergoing brown rot build up and to evaluate the consequences of different agricultural practices on the quantity and quality of the yield. We found that winter sanitation practices (which decrease the initial infection incidence) and the control of the fruit load (which affects the host fruit density and the single fruit growth trajectory) can be effective in controlling brown rot in conjunction with or in place of fungicide treatments

Quadro sinottico degli impatti dei cambiamenti climatici sulla regione Lombardia

I cambiamenti climatici potrebbero comportare gravi effetti sulle risorse idriche, sulla salute umana, sugli ecosistemi e sull’agricoltura nella regione Lombardia. È quindi utile predisporre preventivamente un quadro sinottico per una visione di insieme delle possibili ricadute dei cambiamenti climatici a livello locale, considerando sia gli impatti diretti dovuti alle forzanti climatiche (aumento dei gas serra, variazione della temperatura e del regime delle precipitazioni), sia gli impatti indiretti. Il quadro sinottico è organizzato in modo tale da rappresentare la rete degli impatti secondo una logica di causa ed effetto, evidenziando le interazioni tra gli elementi coinvolti, per i seguenti macro-settori: variabili meteo-climatiche, risorse idriche, eventi estremi, ecosistemi terrestri, suolo, ecosistemi acquatici, salute umana, agricoltura, infrastrutture. Ogni macrosettore è a sua volta suddiviso in comparti che descrivono dettagliatamente gli impatti diretti o indiretti specificando il tempo di risposta, le evidenze di cambiamenti già in atto, le aree o i settori vulnerabili della Lombardia e, infine, i commenti per i decision maker. Scopo principale è rendere fruibile il quadro sinottico soprattutto ai decisori, evidenziando in modo sintetico, ma esaustivo, le vulnerabilità della regione e le eventuali lacune informative, fornendo spunti di discussione e approfondimento e punti di partenza per l’identificazione di politiche adattative e mitigative