Towards Personalised Simplification based on L2 Learners' Native Language

We present an approach to improve the selection of complex words for automatic text simplification, addressing the need of L2 learners to take into account their native language during simplification. In particular, we develop a methodology that automatically identifies ‘difficult’ terms (i.e. false friends) for L2 learners in order to simplify them. We evaluate not only the quality of the detected false friends but also the impact of this methodology on text simplification compared with a standard frequency-based approach

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Talking About This and That: Deictic Pronouns in Dravidian and Indo-aryan Languages

Secondo i dati pi\uf9 recenti, il numero di lingue attestate in India \ue8 452. Da questa cifra sono esclusi dialetti e variet\ue0. Le lingue attestate appartengono a quattro famiglie linguistiche diverse: Indo-ariane, Tibeto-Burmane, Dravidiche e Austro-asiatiche. L'obiettivo di questa tesi \ue8 di rendere conto del comportamento dei sistemi pronominali di sei di queste lingue, rappresentative di due famiglie distinte, Indo-ariane e Dravidiche: Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil e Telugu. In questo lavoro, l'attenzione \ue8 stata concentrata sui sistemi pronominali di queste lingue, che sono marcati morfologicamente da ci\uf2 che ho definito "deictic features" (tratti deittici). Come il nome suggerisce, i tratti deittici sono in relazione diretta con il contesto frasale. Pi\uf9 precisamente, le terze persone dei pronomi di molte lingue Dravidiche e Indo-ariane realizzano un morfema che specifica la posizione spaziale del referente. In altri termini, i pronomi analizzati realizzano gli stessi tratti che vengono normalmente realizzati dai pronomi dimostrativi in lingue come l'Inglese o l'Italiano. Tuttavia, il comportamento di questi pronomi nelle lingue in oggetto, si discosta da quello normalmente osservato a proposito dei dimostrativi. La maggior parte degli studi tipologici e teorici che hanno come oggetto i pronomi delle lingue Indiane, si concentrano principalmente su problemi relativi a pronomi riflessivi (blocking effects, teoria del legamento, etc.), mentre l'importanza dei tratti deittici nell'ambito della teoria della referenza ha ricevuto poca attenzione. La letteratura di riferimento non riporta neppure un insieme di dati solido e congruo. Per questo motivo, la prima fase del mio progetto di ricerca \ue8 consistita nella creazione di un questionario linguistico che \ue8 stato in seguito utilizzato per la raccolta dei dati sul campo (attivit\ue0 che ho condotto in India grazie al supporto della Central University of Hyderabad). Il corpus di dati che ho collezionato ha in seguito portato alla luce alcuni fenomeni linguistici nuovi, almeno in parte. Ad esempio la agrammaticalit\ue0 di elementi prossimali (simili al dimostrativo "questo") in contesti di variabile legata, fenomeno che \ue8 solidamente attestato in entrambe le famiglie linguistiche. Alcuni dei dati pi\uf9 frequentemente attestati nel corpus sono stati in seguito discussi e, in parte, si \ue8 cercato di offrire un'analisi che rendesse conto della loro rilevanza teorica. Questa ricerca tipologica \ue8, secondo quanto ho potuto constatare, la prima nel suo genere. Una delle conseguenze di questo fatto \ue8 che molti aspetti interessanti riguardo i sistemi pronominali osservati non hanno trovato spazio nell'analisi e sono stati messi da parte per un'eventuale ricerca futura. La struttura della tesi \ue8 la seguente: Il capitolo 1 offre un'introduzione basilare ad alcune nozioni teoriche a proposito della propriet\ue0 referenziali dei pronomi dimostrativi in generale e a proposito del loro uso come elementi del discorso; il secondo capitolo tratta di alcuni aspetti tipologici delle lingue in oggetto, soprattutto a proposito del problema della referenzialit\ue0, come ad esempio l'ordine dei costituenti, gli argomenti nulli, la morfologia dei pronomi e la distribuzione di pronomi e elementi anaforici nella frase; il terzo capitolo contiene un resoconto esaustivo dei dati che ho potuto raccogliere durante l'attivit\ue0 di lavoro sul campo, introdotti da alcune generalizzazioni preliminari; nel quarto capitolo, infine, si fornisce una discussione pi\uf9 dettagliata di alcuni dei fenomeni di maggior interesse che sono risultati dalla raccolta dati, come ad esempio il mancato accordo di tratti deittici tra pronome ed antecedente osservato in molte delle lingue campione ed il comportamento dei tratti prossimali rispetto a coreferenzialit\ue0 e legamento.According to the most recent data in India there are at least 452 attested languages, excluding dialects and varieties. All these languages are grouped into four major families: Indo-aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian and Austro Asiatic. The goal of this dissertation is to account for the behavior of the pronominal systems of six of those languages, representative of 2 of major families, namely Dravidian and Indo-aryan:\u2022 Bangla \u2022 Hindi \u2022 Punjabi \u2022 Malayalam \u2022 Tamil\u2022 Telugu. What is remarkable about these languages (and in general about their language families) is that their pronominal systems are overtly marked by morphemes that realize what I labelled \u201ddeictic features\u201d. As the name suggests, deictic features have a clear relationship with the context of utterance. More specifically, the 3rd person pronouns of many Dravidian and Indo-aryan languages realize an overt morpheme that encodes the position of their referent in the Place of utterance. In other terms, the deictic pronouns that I am analyzing here realize the same features that are realized by demonstratives in languages like English or Italian. However, their behavior, in some specific linguistic contexts, deviates from what is normally observed for demonstratives. The recent typological and theoretical researches on Indo-aryan and Dravidian pronominal systems focus mainly on problems related to reflexivity (blocking effects, long distance binding, etc.), and little attention has been devoted to the relevance of deictic features for a theory of reference. As a matter of fact, even the basic dataset is not available. For this reason, the first phase of my research project focused on the design of a questionnaire that I submitted to native speakers during my fieldwork activity (hosted by the Central University of Hyderabad). The data set that I collected, which constitutes the real backbone of this dissertation, brought to light some previously unnoticed facts, like the behavior of some pronominal elements akin to the English demonstrative pronoun this (a so called \u201cproximal element\u201d) in bound variable reading contexts, that is consistently attested in the two unrelated language families. Some of the most significant consistencies observed in the sample data are successively discussed and, in part, accounted for. However, the language survey is the first on its genre, to my knowledge. As a consequence, many interesting aspects of the behavior of deictic pronouns remained unaccounted for and had to be left aside for future research. The dissertation is structured as follows. In Chapter 1 I provide some basic notions about the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives to- gether with some facts about the pragmatic uses of demonstratives. In Chapter 2 I discuss some of the most relevant typological facts about the sample languages that are related to reference, such as word order, argument drop, pronominal morphology and distribution of pronouns and anaphors. Chapter 3 contains an exhaustive account of the data that I was able to gather during my fieldwork activity, accompanied by some preliminary generalizations about the classes of data. In Chapter 4, finally, I provide a discussion of some of the most relevant phenomena that resulted from the survey, such as the deictic features mismatches between pronouns and antecedents, and the behavior of proximal pronouns with respect to coreference and binding

Towards Personalised Simplification based on L2 Learners' Native Language

We present an approach to improve the selection of complex words for automatic text simplification, addressing the need of L2 learners to take into account their native language during simplification. In particular, we develop a methodology that automatically identifies ‘difficult’ terms (i.e. false friends) for L2 learners in order to simplify them. We evaluate not only the quality of the detected false friends but also the impact of this methodology on text simplification compared with a standard frequency-based approach

PD-1 Inhibitors-Related Neurological Toxicities in Patients with Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer: A Literature Review

The advent of immune checkpoint inhibitors gave rise to a new era in oncology and general medicine. The increasing use of programmed death-1 (PD-1) inhibitors in non-small cell lung cancer and in other malignancies means clinicians have to face up to new challenges in managing immune-related adverse events (irAEs), which often resemble autoimmune diseases. Neurological irAEs represent an emerging toxicity related to immunotherapy, and it is mandatory to know how to monitor, recognize, and manage them, since they can rapidly lead to patient death if untreated. Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of these irAEs have been recently published but sharing some of the most unusual clinical cases is crucial, in our opinion, to improve awareness and to optimize the approach for these patients. A literature review on the diagnosis and treatment of immune-related neurotoxicity’s has been conducted starting from the report of four cases of neurological irAEs regarding cases of polyneuropathy, myasthenia gravis, Bell’s palsy, and encephalopathy, all of which occurred in oncological patients receiving PD-1 inhibitors (pembrolizumab and nivolumab) for the treatment of non-oncogene addicted advanced non-small cell lung cancer. The exclusion of other differential diagnoses and the correlation between the suspension of immunotherapy and improvement of symptoms suggest that immunotherapy could be the cause of the neurological disorders reported