The importance of seasonality at different levels of ecological organization in the marine ecosystem of the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea

[eng] From an oceanographic perspective, seasonality has been widely studied, and abundant research exists about low trophic level organisms such as phytoplankton and zooplankton. Nevertheless, at a regional scale, this information is not always homogenous and certain areas lack longer time series to track seasonal cycles. This knowledge gap is emphasized as one moves to higher trophic level organisms, whose studies tend to focus on single seasons or inter-annual variation rather than on seasonal changes and intra-annual dynamics. This Ph.D. thesis aims to broaden the knowledge about the marine ecosystem of the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea incorporating the importance of seasonality in key ecological processes, such as body condition, fitness, spatial distribution, and trophic ecology of marine species, and, finally, the structure and functioning of marine food webs. Seasonality is approached at different levels of the marine community, including the demersal component focusing on commercially important species of fish (Merluccius merluccius, Lophius budegassa, Lophius piscatorius, Mullus barbatus), crustaceans (Liocarcinus depurator, Squilla mantis) and cephalopods (Illex coindetii, Eledone cirrhosa), the pelagic component targeting the most abundant and commercially important small pelagic fish species (Sardina pilchardus and Engraulis encrasicolus), and at the ecosystem level using system indicators. To attain these objectives, various methodological approaches have been combined, such as species distribution models, stable isotopes analysis, bayesian isotope mixing isotope models, analysis of biometrical/biophysical parameters (Kn, GSI, fat content), generalized additive models and ecosystem modelling. Results show seasonal variations in species distribution with species-specific patterns in the case of demersal species. Bathymetry, temperature and fishing effort are important drivers explaining biomass spatial distribution of these species. European hake is further studied in one of the chapters, and the predicted posterior mean weight distribution also presents spatial differences between winter and summer. Ontogenetic and seasonal variations are also detected in the diet of this species. Spatial and seasonal variations in fitness are found at the local scale for European sardines and anchovies. These changes are mostly explained by environmental variables while spatial and seasonal factors are also important. Moreover, trophic variables also contributed to the species dynamics, suggesting that variations in prey abundance, composition and quality can impact their fitness. At the ecosystem level, we investigate changes in indicators of ecosystem structure and functioning when using seasonal input data vs annual averages in marine ecosystem models for the characterization of our study area. We find several indicators showing significant variations in ecosystem structure and energy transfer. Overall, the findings of this Ph.D. show seasonal variation at different levels of biological organization and in various ecological processes, which highlights the relevance of seasonality in the marine realm, specifically in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea. Therefore, we can conclude that considering seasonality in ecological studies can provide complementary insights into our understanding of species biological and ecological dynamics, which cascades up to the knowledge about ecosystem structure and functioning.[spa] Desde una perspectiva oceanográfica y climatológica, la estacionalidad se ha estudiado ampliamente y existen múltiples investigaciones desarrolladas con organismos situados en niveles tróficos bajos, como el fitoplancton y el zooplancton. Sin embargo, a escala regional, esta información no siempre es homogénea y algunas zonas carecen de series temporales largas. Esta laguna de conocimiento se acentúa a medida que se avanza hacia organismos de nivel trófico superior. Esta tesis pretende mejorar el conocimiento sobre el ecosistema marino del mar Mediterráneo noroccidental investigando el efecto de la estacionalidad en algunos procesos ecológicos clave, como la condición corporal, la distribución espacial y la ecología trófica de las especies, así como en la estructura y el funcionamiento de las redes tróficas marinas. La estacionalidad se aborda a distintos niveles de la comunidad marina, incluyendo el componente demersal (especies de peces, crustáceos y cefalópodos), pelágico (la sardina y el boquerón) y a nivel de ecosistema. Para alcanzar estos objetivos, se han combinado diversos enfoques metodológicos (e.g. modelos de distribución de especies, análisis de isótopos estables, análisis de parámetros biométricos/biofísico y modelización de ecosistemas). Para las especies demersales, los resultados muestran variaciones estacionales en su distribución espacial, y la batimetría, la temperatura y el esfuerzo pesquero aparecen como importantes impulsores. La merluza europea se estudia con más detalle en uno de los capítulos y se detectan variaciones ontogenéticas y estacionales en la dieta de esta especie. En el caso de la sardina y el boquerón, se observan variaciones espaciales y estacionales en la condición a escala local. Estos cambios se explican principalmente por variables ambientales y los factores espaciales y estacionales, pero las variables tróficas también contribuyen. A nivel de ecosistema, investigamos los cambios en los indicadores de estructura y funcionamiento de los ecosistemas al utilizar datos de entrada estacionales, frente a medias anuales. Encontramos varios indicadores que muestran variaciones significativas en la estructura del ecosistema y la transferencia de energía. En general, los resultados de esta tesis muestran una variación estacional en diferentes niveles de organización biológica y en varios procesos ecológicos, lo que pone de manifiesto la relevancia de la estacionalidad en el mar Mediterráneo noroccidental. Se concluye que considerar la estacionalidad en los estudios ecológicos puede aportar conocimientos complementarios a la comprensión de la dinámica biológica y ecológica de las especies, y a la estructura y el funcionamiento de los ecosistemas marinos

The use of Natural Language Processing techniques to support Health Literacy: an evidence-based review

Background and objectives: To conduct a literature search and analysis of the existing research using natural language processing for improving or helping health literacy, as well as to discuss the importance and potentials of addressing both fields in a joint manner. This review targets researchers who are unfamiliar with natural language processing in the field of health literacy, and in general, any researcher, regardless of his or her background, interested in multi-disciplinary research involving technology and health care. Methods: We introduce the concepts of health literacy and natural language processing. Then, a thorough search is performed using relevant databases and well-defined criteria. We review the existing literature addressing these topics, both in an independent and joint manner, and provide an overview of the state of the art using natural language processing in health literacy. We additionally discuss how the different issues in health literacy that are related to the comprehension of specialised health texts can be improved using natural language processing techniques, and the challenges involved in these processes. Results: The search process yielded 235 potential relevant references, 49 of which fully fulfilled the established search criteria, and therefore they were later analysed in more detail. These articles were clustered into groups with respect to their purpose, and most of them were focused on the development of specific natural language processing modules, such as question answering, information retrieval, text simplification or natural language generation in order to facilitate the understanding of health information.This research work has been partially funded by the University of Alicante, Generalitat Valenciana, Spanish Government and the European Commission through the projects, "Tratamiento inteligente de la informacion para la ayuda a la toma de decisiones" (GRE12-44), "Explotacion y tratamiento de la informacion disponible en Internet para la anotacion y generacion de textos adaptados al usuario" (GRE13-15), DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001), ATTOS (TIN2012-38536-C03-03), LEGOLANG-UAGE (TIN2012-31224), SAM (FP7-611312), and FIRST (FP7-287607)

Desmayarse, atreverse, estar furioso... : La representación del amor y el matrimonio en la pintura española del Renacimiento y Barroco

@font-face { font-family: "Cambria Math"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }span.TextonotapieCar { }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; } Durante los siglos XVI y XVII, la Monarquía y la Iglesia españolas, establecieron unas normas de control de la población que incluían también el gobierno de las emociones. Para imponer su dominio sobre espacios tan íntimos como los del deseo y el amor, la pintura fue un vehículo eficaz. El objetivo del presente trabajo es el de reflexionar, no sólo acerca del modo en el que las imágenes pintadas[1] colaboraron al relato de la construcción de las conductas en el ámbito de los afectos, sino también cómo en estas representaciones se entrevén las discrepancias y los desacuerdos. [1] Es preciso aclarar que, en este trabajo, sólo se van a utilizar las imágenes de los cuadros, por lo que los grabados quedan excluidos de él

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context. From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.This research work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y competitividad) through the project “Técnicas de Deconstrucción en la Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano” (TIN2012–31224), and by the Valencian Government through projects PROMETEO (PROMETEO/2009/199) and ACOMP/2011/001

COMPENDIUM: a text summarisation tool for generating summaries of multiple purposes, domains, and genres

In this paper, we present a Text Summarisation tool, compendium, capable of generating the most common types of summaries. Regarding the input, single- and multi-document summaries can be produced; as the output, the summaries can be extractive or abstractive-oriented; and finally, concerning their purpose, the summaries can be generic, query-focused, or sentiment-based. The proposed architecture for compendium is divided in various stages, making a distinction between core and additional stages. The former constitute the backbone of the tool and are common for the generation of any type of summary, whereas the latter are used for enhancing the capabilities of the tool. The main contributions of compendium with respect to the state-of-the-art summarisation systems are that (i) it specifically deals with the problem of redundancy, by means of textual entailment; (ii) it combines statistical and cognitive-based techniques for determining relevant content; and (iii) it proposes an abstractive-oriented approach for facing the challenge of abstractive summarisation. The evaluation performed in different domains and textual genres, comprising traditional texts, as well as texts extracted from the Web 2.0, shows that compendium is very competitive and appropriate to be used as a tool for generating summaries.This research has been supported by the project “Desarrollo de Técnicas Inteligentes e Interactivas de Minería de Textos” (PROMETEO/2009/119) and the project reference ACOMP/2011/001 from the Valencian Government, as well as by the Spanish Government (grant no. TIN2009-13391-C04-01)

Studying the influence of adding lexical-semantic knowledge to Principal Component Analysis technique for multilingual summarization

El objetivo de la generación automática de resúmenes es reducir la dimensión de un texto y a su vez mantener la información relevante del mismo. En este artículo se analiza y aplica la técnica de Análisis de Componentes Principales, que es independiente del idioma, para la generación de resúmenes extractivos mono-documento y multilingües. Dicha técnica se estudiará con el objetivo de poder evaluar su funcionamiento cuando se incorpora (o no) conocimiento léxico-semántico, a partir del uso de recursos y herramientas dependientes del idioma. La experimentación propuesta se ha realizado en base a dos corpus de diferente naturaleza: noticias periodísticas y artículos de la Wikipedia en tres idiomas (alemán, español e inglés) para verificar el uso de esta técnica en varios escenarios. Los enfoques propuestos presentan resultados muy competitivos comparados con generadores de resúmenes multilingües existentes, lo que indica que, aunque exista un claro margen de mejora respecto a la técnica y el tipo de conocimiento incorporado, ésta tiene una gran potencial para ser aplicada en otros contextos e idiomas.The objective of automatic text summarization is to reduce the dimension of a text keeping the relevant information. In this paper we analyse and apply the language-independent Principal Component Analysis technique for generating extractive single-document multilingual summaries. This technique will be studied to evaluate its performance with and without adding lexical-semantic knowledge through language-dependent resources and tools. Experiments were conducted using two different corpora: newswire and Wikipedia articles in three languages (English, German and Spanish) to validate the use of this technique in several scenarios. The proposed approaches show very competitive results compared to multilingual available systems, indicating that, although there is still room for improvement with respect to the technique and the type of knowledge to be taken into consideration, this has great potential for being applied in other contexts and for other languages.Esta investigación se ha realizado gracias a la financiación recibida en los proyectos: DIIM2.0: Desarrollo de técnicas Inteligentes e Interactivas de Minería y generación de información sobre la web 2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001) de la Generalitat Valenciana; SAM (FP7-611312) de la Comisión Europea; “Análisis de Tendencias Mediante Técnicas de Opinión Semántica” (TIN2012-38536-C03-03) y “Técnicas de Deconstrucción en la Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano” (TIN2012-31224)), del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad del Gobierno de España; “Explotación y tratamiento de la información disponible en Internet para la anotación y generación de textos adaptados al usuario” (GRE13-15), de la Universidad de Alicante

SemPCA-Summarizer: Exploiting Semantic Principal Component Analysis for Automatic Summary Generation

Text summarization is the task of condensing a document keeping the relevant information. This task integrated in wider information systems can help users to access key information without having to read everything, allowing for a higher efficiency. In this research work, we have developed and evaluated a single-document extractive summarization approach, named SemPCA-Summarizer, which reduces the dimension of a document using Principal Component Analysis technique enriched with semantic information. A concept-sentence matrix is built from the textual input document, and then, PCA is used to identify and rank the relevant concepts, which are used for selecting the most important sentences through different heuristics, thus leading to various types of summaries. The results obtained show that the generated summaries are very competitive, both from a quantitative and a qualitative viewpoint, thus indicating that our proposed approach is appropriate for briefly providing key information, and thus helping to cope with a huge amount of information available in a quicker and efficient manner

Analysis of Gamification Techniques to Learn Complex Subjects through Collaborative Applications

Learning concepts about specific subjects may be regarded differently depending on the level of the difficulty of concept itself and the background or cognitive capacity of the student. This article analyses the motivation and perception of real users towards learning literary figures by means of a proposed application called GRAMA that includes gamification elements, and provides a collaborative and social environment. The results obtained show that this type of computer applications are motivating and useful to learn new and complex concepts in an easier and funnier manner

TravelSum

Sfotware resultado del trabajo de fin de grado de Alberto Esteban titulado "TravelSum: diseño y desarrollo de una aplicación de generación automática de resúmenes abstractivos multigénero" (http://rua.ua.es/dspace/handle/10045/57069). Artículo científico "Propuesta y desarrollo de una aproximación de generación de resúmenes abstractivos multigénero" derivado del trabajo realizado y publicado en la revista Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. 2017, 58: 53-60 (http://rua.ua.es/dspace/handle/10045/64014).TravelSum es una aplicación que permite la generación de resúmenes multigénero abstractivos a partir de dos fuentes heterogéneas de datos como son TripAdvisor y Twitter con el objetivo de proporcionar a los usuarios los aspectos más y/o menos favorables sobre hoteles y restaurantes