Towards Computing Inferences from English News Headlines

Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people, thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its appearance in a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we suggest and implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines, excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences could be useful for assessing the impact of the news headline on readers including children. The understandability of the current state of social affairs depends greatly on the assimilation of the headlines. As the inferences that are independent of the context depend mainly on the syntax of the headline, dependency trees of headlines are used in this approach, to find the syntactical structure of the headlines and to compute inferences out of them.Comment: PACLING 2019 Long paper, 15 page

Thermodynamic Tree: The Space of Admissible Paths

Is a spontaneous transition from a state x to a state y allowed by thermodynamics? Such a question arises often in chemical thermodynamics and kinetics. We ask the more formal question: is there a continuous path between these states, along which the conservation laws hold, the concentrations remain non-negative and the relevant thermodynamic potential G (Gibbs energy, for example) monotonically decreases? The obvious necessary condition, G(x)\geq G(y), is not sufficient, and we construct the necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, it is impossible to overstep the equilibrium in 1-dimensional (1D) systems (with n components and n-1 conservation laws). The system cannot come from a state x to a state y if they are on the opposite sides of the equilibrium even if G(x) > G(y). We find the general multidimensional analogue of this 1D rule and constructively solve the problem of the thermodynamically admissible transitions. We study dynamical systems, which are given in a positively invariant convex polyhedron D and have a convex Lyapunov function G. An admissible path is a continuous curve along which $G$ does not increase. For x,y from D, x\geq y (x precedes y) if there exists an admissible path from x to y and x \sim y if x\geq y and y\geq x. The tree of G in D is a quotient space D/~. We provide an algorithm for the construction of this tree. In this algorithm, the restriction of G onto the 1-skeleton of $D$ (the union of edges) is used. The problem of existence of admissible paths between states is solved constructively. The regions attainable by the admissible paths are described.Comment: Extended version, 31 page, 9 figures, 69 cited references, many minor correction

The impact of Stieltjes' work on continued fractions and orthogonal polynomials

Stieltjes' work on continued fractions and the orthogonal polynomials related to continued fraction expansions is summarized and an attempt is made to describe the influence of Stieltjes' ideas and work in research done after his death, with an emphasis on the theory of orthogonal polynomials

Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope Combined with Digital Holography for Three-Dimensional Electromagnetic Field Reconstruction

International audienceNear-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) has proven to be a very powerful imaging technique that allows overcoming the diffraction limit and obtaining information on a scale much smaller than what can be achieved by classical optical imaging techniques. This is achieved using nanosized probes that are placed in close proximity to the sample surface, and thus allow the detection of evanescent waves that contain important information about the properties of the sample on a subwavelength scale. In particular, some aperture-based probes use a nanometer-sized hole to locally illuminate the sample. The far-field radiation of such probes is essential to their imaging properties, but cannot be easily estimated since it highly depends on the environment with which it interacts. In this chapter, we tackle this problem by introducing a microscopy method based on full-field off-axis digital holography that allows us to study in details the three-dimensional electromagnetic field scattered by a NSOM probe in different environments. We start by describing the NSOM and holography techniques independently, and continue by highlighting the advantage of combining both methods. We present a comparative study of the reconstructed light from a NSOM tip located in free space or coupled to transparent and plasmonic media. While far-field methods, such as back focal plane imaging, can be used to infer the directionality of angular radiation patterns, the advantage of our technique is that a single hologram contains information on both the amplitude and phase of the scattered light, allowing to reverse numerically the propagation of the electromagnetic field towards the source. We also present Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulations to model the radiation of the NSOM tip as a superposition of a magnetic and an electric dipole. We finally propose some promising applications that could be performed with this combined NSOM-holography technique