Semantic processing with and without awareness. Insights from computational linguistics and semantic priming.

During my PhD, I’ve explored how native speakers access semantic information from lexical stimuli, and weather consciousness plays a role in the process of meaning construction. In a first study, I exploited the metaphor linking time and space to assess the specific contribution of linguistically–coded information to the emergence of priming. In fact, time is metaphorically arranged on either the horizontal or the sagittal axis in space (Clark, 1973), but only the latter comes up in language (e.g., "a bright future in front of you"). In a semantic categorization task, temporal target words (e.g., earlier, later) were primed by spatial words that were processed either consciously (unmasked) or unconsciously (masked). With visible primes, priming was observed for both lateral and sagittal words; yet, only the latter ones led to a significant effect when the primes were masked. Thus, unconscious word processing may be limited to those aspects of meaning that emerge in language use. In a second series of experiments, I tried to better characterize these aspects by taking advantage of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs; Marelli, 2017), which represent word meaning as vectors built upon word co–occurrences in large textual database. I compared state–of–the–art DSMs with Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI; Church & Hanks, 1990), a measure of local association between words that is merely based on their surface co–occurrence. In particular, I tested how the two indexes perform on a semantic priming dataset comprising visible and masked primes, and different stimulus onset asynchronies between the two stimuli. Subliminally, none of the predictor alone elicited significant priming, although participants who showed some residual prime visibility showed larger effect. Post-hoc analyses showed that for subliminal priming to emerge, the additive contribution of both PMI and DSM was required. Supraliminally, PMI outperforms DSM in the fit to the behavioral data. According to these results, what has been traditionally thought of as unconscious semantic priming may mostly rely on local associations based on shallow word cooccurrence. Of course, masked priming is only one possible way to model unconscious perception. In an attempt to provide converging evidence, I also tested overt and covert semantic facilitation by presenting prime words in the unattended vs. attended visual hemifield of brain–injured patients suffering from neglect. In seven sub–acute cases, data show more solid PMI–based than DSM–based priming in the unattended hemifield, confirming the results obtained from healthy participants. Finally, in a fourth work package, I explored the neural underpinnings of semantic processing as revealed by EEG (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). As the behavioral results of the previous study were much clearer when the primes were visible, I focused on this condition only. Semantic congruency was dichotomized in order to compare the ERP evoked by related and unrelated pairs. Three different types of semantic similarity were taken into account: in a first category, primes and targets were often co–occurring but far in the DSM (e.g., cheese-mouse), while in a second category the two words were closed in the DSM, but not likely to co-occur (e.g., lamp-torch). As a control condition, we added a third category with pairs that were both high in PMI and close in DSMs (e.g., lemon-orange). Mirroring the behavioral results, we observed a significant PMI effect in the N400 time window; no such effect emerged for DSM. References Church, K. W., & Hanks, P. (1990). Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational linguistics, 16(1), 22-29. Clark, H. H. (1973). Space, time, semantics, and the child. In Cognitive development and acquisition of language (pp. 27-63). Academic Press. Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2011). Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annual review of psychology, 62, 621-647. Marelli, M. (2017). Word-Embeddings Italian Semantic Spaces: a semantic model for psycholinguistic research. Psihologija, 50(4), 503-520. Commentat

Stepping out of the Chinese Room: Word meaning with and without consciousness

What is the role of consciousness in language processing? Unconscious priming experiments show that words can prime other words with related meanings (cat \u2013 dog), and these priming effects are assumed to reflect the activation of conceptual knowledge in semantic memory. Alternatively, however, unconscious priming effects could reflect predictive relationships between the words\u2019 forms, since words that are semantically related are also statistically related in language use. Therefore, unconscious \u201csemantic\u201d priming effects could be due to relationships between words\u2019 forms mimicking conceptual relationships, as in Searle\u2019s Chinese Room thought experiment. To distinguish wordform-based and semantics-based accounts of priming we conducted an experiment in which temporal words (e.g., earlier, later) were preceded by spatial words that were processed either consciously or unconsciously. Time is typically conceptualized as a spatial continuum extending along either the sagittal (front-back) or the lateral (left-right) axis, but only the sagittal space-time mapping is encoded in language (e.g. the future is ahead, not to the right). Results showed that temporal words were primed both by sagittal words (back, front) and lateral words (left, right) when primes were perceived consciously, as predicted by both wordformbased and semantics-based accounts. Yet, only sagittal words produced an unconscious priming effect, as predicted by the wordform-based account. Unconscious word processing appears to be limited to relationships between words\u2019 forms, and consciousness may be needed to activate words\u2019 meanings

Human Sperm Cryopreservation: Update on Techniques, Effect on DNA Integrity, and Implications for ART

Cryopreservation of human spermatozoa—introduced in the 1960's—has been recognized as an efficient procedure for management of male fertility before therapy for malignant diseases, vasectomy or surgical infertility treatments, to store donor and partner spermatozoa before assisted reproduction treatments and to ensure the recovery of a small number of spermatozoa in severe male factor infertility. Despite the usefulness of it, cryopreservation may lead to deleterious changes of sperm structure and function: while the effects of cryopreservation on cells are well documented, to date there is no agreement in the literature on whether or not cryopreservation affects sperm chromatin integrity or on the use of a unique and functional protocol for the freezing-thawing procedure. Therefore, sperm cryopreservation is an important component of fertility management and much of its successful application seems to affect the reproductive outcome of assisted reproduction technologies (ART): appropriate use of cryoprotectants before and sperm selection technologies after cryopreservation seem to have the greatest impact on preventing DNA fragmentation, thus improving sperm cryosurvival rates

Foliar and root applications of the rare sugar tagatose control powdery mildew in soilless grown cucumbers

Biodegradation of a mixture of PAHs was assessed in forest soil microcosms performed either without or with bioaugmentation using individual fungi and bacterial and a fungal consortia. Respiratory activity, metabolic intermediates and extent of PAH degradation were determined. In all microcosms the low molecular weight PAH’s naphthalene, phenanthrene and anthracene, showed a rapid initial rate of removal. However, bioaugmentation did not significantly affect the biodegradation efficiency for these compounds. Significantly slower degradation rates were demonstrated for the high molecular weight PAH’s pyrene, benz[a]anthracene and benz[a]pyrene. Bioaugmentation did not improve the rate or extent of PAH degradation, except in the case of Aspergillus sp. Respiratory activity was determined by CO2 evolution and correlated roughly with the rate and timing of PAH removal. This indicated that the PAHs were being used as an energy source. The native microbiota responded rapidly to the addition of the PAHs and demonstrated the ability to degrade all of the PAHs added to the soil, indicating their ability to remediate PAH-contaminated soils

Comments on anomaly versus WKB/tunneling methods for calculating Unruh radiation

In this Letter we make a critique of, and comparison between, the anomaly method and WKB/tunneling method for obtaining radiation from non-trivial spacetime backgrounds. We focus on Rindler spacetime (the spacetime of an accelerating observer) and the associated Unruh radiation since this is the prototype of the phenomena of radiation from a spacetime, and it is the simplest model for making clear subtle points in the tunneling and anomaly methods. Our analysis leads to the following conclusions: (i) neither the consistent and covariant anomaly methods gives the correct Unruh temperature for Rindler spacetime and in some cases (e.g. de Sitter spacetime) the consistent and covariant methods disagree with one another; (ii) the tunneling method can be applied in all cases, but it has a previously unnoticed temporal contribution which must be accounted for in order to obtain the correct temperature.Comment: 13 pages, 0 figures, revtex4, To be published PLB. Critic of detailed balance dropped and reference added which shows how detailed balance works if one correctly takes into account the temporal piece. Discussion added about temporal contribution giving P_abs=1 condition added showing why "complex integration" constant is not neede

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

Local associations and semantic ties in overt and masked semantic priming

Distributional semantic models (DSM) are widely used in psycholinguistic research to automatically assess the degree of semantic relatedness between words. Model estimates strongly correlate with human similarity judgements and offer a tool to successfully predict a wide range of language-related phenomena. In the present study, we compare the state-of-art model with pointwise mutual information (PMI), a measure of local association between words based on their surface cooccurrence. In particular, we test how the two indexes perform on a dataset of sematic priming data, showing how PMI outperforms DSM in the fit to the behavioral data. According to our result, what has been traditionally thought of as semantic effects may mostly rely on local associations based on word co-occurrence

Mortadella Machine

Nell\u2019anno di Expo Milano 2015, dedicato al tema dell\u2019alimentazione e della nutrizione, luned\uec 22 settembre, apre al pubblico a Palazzo Pepoli. Museo della Storia di Bologna, la nuova installazione sulla storia gastronomica della citt\ue0 di Bologna: La Manifattura del Gusto. Il Museo della Storia di Bologna aggiunge un nuovo spazio espositivo al suo percorso museale per raccontare l\u2019eccellenza della tradizione culinaria della citt\ue0, sviluppatasi nel corso dei secoli. Il percorso espositivo, ideato dal collettivo Open Stories con il supporto software di LOOP, si compone di tre installazioni ispirate ai tre alimenti \u201cprotagonisti\u201d della cucina locale: il tortellino, la tagliatella e la mortadella. L\u2019area tematica celebra, attraverso le sue installazioni interattive, la tradizione, la convivialit\ue0 e la capacit\ue0 produttiva di Bologna \u201cla grassa\u201d e ne sottolinea, in maniera divertente e coinvolgente, l\u2019eccellenza manifatturiera. La Manifattura del Gusto Palazzo Pepoli. Museo della Storia di Bologna dedica uno spazio alla storia gastronomica di Bologna, attraverso il filo conduttore dei tre alimenti simbolo della cucina locale: il tortellino, la tagliatella e la mortadella, a ognuno dei quali \ue8 dedicata un\u2019installazione. Il percorso espositivo con un allestimento caratterizzato da comandi in tessuto interattivo, privo di macchinari a vista si snoda lungo tre aree che esprimono lo spirito profondo della cultura gastronomica bolognese: la tradizione, la convivialit\ue0 e la capacit\ue0 produttiva. Un\u2019estetica ideata per favorire un\u2019esperienza immersiva poetica, fatta di contatto materico ed emozioni. Mortadella Machine L\u2019eccellenza gastronomica bolognese \ue8 frutto anche della tecnologia. Per questo, nell\u2019ultima sezione di questo percorso espositivo legato al cibo, troviamo un\u2019installazione che ricostruisce, attraverso un gioco proiettato su un tessuto interattivo, le diverse fasi della lavorazione della mortadella. Se il giocatore \ue8 abile e vince, alla fine sar\ue0 premiato con l\u2019emissione, da parte della Mortadella Machine, di un premio davvero speciale. Divertente e coinvolgente, \ue8 un modo giocoso di comunicare l\u2019eccellenza manifatturiera e tecnologica della citt\ue0 di Bologna

Tortellino Memories: La Manifattura del Gusto

Nell\u2019anno di Expo Milano 2015, dedicato al tema dell\u2019alimentazione e della nutrizione, luned\uec 22 settembre 2015, ha aperto al pubblico a Palazzo Pepoli. Museo della Storia di Bologna, Bologna la nuova installazione sulla storia gastronomica della citt\ue0 di Bologna: La Manifattura del Gusto. Il Museo della Storia di Bologna aggiunge un nuovo spazio espositivo al suo percorso museale per raccontare l\u2019eccellenza della tradizione culinaria della citt\ue0, sviluppatasi nel corso dei secoli. Il percorso espositivo, ideato dal collettivo Open Stories con il supporto software di LOOP, si compone di tre installazioni ispirate ai tre alimenti \u201cprotagonisti\u201d della cucina locale: il tortellino, la tagliatella e la mortadella. L\u2019area tematica celebra, attraverso le sue installazioni interattive, la tradizione, la convivialit\ue0 e la capacit\ue0 produttiva di Bologna \u201cla grassa\u201d e ne sottolinea, in maniera divertente e coinvolgente, l\u2019eccellenza manifatturiera. La Manifattura del Gusto Palazzo Pepoli. Museo della Storia di Bologna dedica uno spazio alla storia gastronomica di Bologna, attraverso il filo conduttore dei tre alimenti simbolo della cucina locale: il tortellino, la tagliatella e la mortadella, a ognuno dei quali \ue8 dedicata un\u2019installazione. Il percorso espositivo con un allestimento caratterizzato da comandi in tessuto interattivo, privo di macchinari a vista si snoda lungo tre aree che esprimono lo spirito profondo della cultura gastronomica bolognese: la tradizione, la convivialit\ue0 e la capacit\ue0 produttiva. Un\u2019estetica ideata per favorire un\u2019esperienza immersiva poetica, fatta di contatto materico ed emozioni. Tortellino Memories La prima area tematica racconta la storia e le peculiarit\ue0 dei tre alimenti protagonisti attraverso suggestive proiezioni, realizzate con immagini originali e di repertorio. L\u2019installazione Tortellino Memories descrive le caratteristiche della lavorazione della mortadella, la tipicit\ue0 e il valore che lega le tagliatelle al territorio emiliano e infine l\u2019abilit\ue0 che le sfogline impiegano nella realizzazione dei tortellini. Scegliendo attraverso il tessuto-tovaglia la prelibatezza preferita, il visitatore si trova avvolto dalle memorie e dalle leggende della gastronomia pi\uf9 celebre del mondo