The spy saw a cop with a telescope: Who has the telescope? An attempt to understand the basic building blocks of ambiguous PP-attachment sequences

This paper explores the problem of ambiguous PP-attachment by extracting information from a PP-attachment corpus using Python. Cases of ambiguous PP-attachment involve sequences of the head words of the following type: verb > noun > preposition > noun. The head nouns of ambiguous PP-attachment sentences, as well as aspects beyond head words, are investigated by testing a number of hypotheses using a corpus of thousands of real-world examples. The hypotheses are partially based on theory and partially on empirical evidence. The results support some theoretical claims while discarding others. For instance, one finding that supports an existing claim is that of-PPs always attach to NPs whose heads are classifiers. This kind of knowledge can be put into practice when parsing natural language.This paper explores the problem of ambiguous PP-attachment by extracting information from a PP-attachment corpus using Python. Cases of ambiguous PP-attachment involve sequences of the head words of the following type: verb > noun > preposition > noun. The head nouns of ambiguous PP-attachment sentences, as well as aspects beyond head words, are investigated by testing a number of hypotheses using a corpus of thousands of real-world examples. The hypotheses are partially based on theory and partially on empirical evidence. The results support some theoretical claims while discarding others. For instance, one finding that supports an existing claim is that of-PPs always attach to NPs whose heads are classifiers. This kind of knowledge can be put into practice when parsing natural language

Perspectives and challenges of applying the water-food-energy nexus approach to lake eutrophication modelling

Embargo until August 4, 2023The water-food-energy (WFE) nexus is about balancing competing interests to secure the sustainability of services provided by interconnected sectors. Ignoring the interconnections could cause serious consequences. For example, eutrophication caused by overemphasizing on food production maximization could threaten water security. Worldwide eutrophication intensification is one of the most important causes of the lake water quality deteriorations. Water quality models are usually important decision making tools for policy makers. This study attempts to explore the possibilities of applying the WFE nexus concept into water quality models. We propose the most significant challenge is lack of a common modelling framework to streamline connections between up- and downstream models. As the most important water quality issue, eutrophication modeling should increase its visibility in the United Nations Sustainable Develop Goals.acceptedVersio

Detect Depression from Social Networks with Sentiment Knowledge Sharing

Social network plays an important role in propagating people's viewpoints, emotions, thoughts, and fears. Notably, following lockdown periods during the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of depression has garnered increasing attention, with a significant portion of individuals resorting to social networks as an outlet for expressing emotions. Using deep learning techniques to discern potential signs of depression from social network messages facilitates the early identification of mental health conditions. Current efforts in detecting depression through social networks typically rely solely on analyzing the textual content, overlooking other potential information. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation that unveils a strong correlation between depression and negative emotional states. The integration of such associations as external knowledge can provide valuable insights for detecting depression. Accordingly, we propose a multi-task training framework, DeSK, which utilizes shared sentiment knowledge to enhance the efficacy of depression detection. Experiments conducted on both Chinese and English datasets demonstrate the cross-lingual effectiveness of DeSK

Cascade conversion of furfural to fuel bioadditive ethyl levulinate over bifunctional zirconium-based catalysts

Abstract(#br)Biomass-derived ethyl levulinate (EL) is currently deemed as a promising fuel bioadditive to improve (bio)diesel combustion performance without the sacrifice of its octane number. In this contribution, a range of Zr–Al bimetallic catalysts were prepared for the cascade conversion of furfural to EL by the integration of transfer hydrogenation and ethanolysis in ethanol. The ratio of Lewis to Brønsted acid sites (L/B) could be tuned by the ratio of Al 2 O 3 to ZrO 2 over SBA-15 support. Among these catalysts, Zr–Al/SBA-15(30:10) with appropriate L/B ratio of 2.25 exhibited an outstanding catalytic performance to give a furfural (FF) conversion up to 92.8% with a EL selectivity as high as 71.4% at 453 K in 3 h

Green production of a novel sorbent from kaolin for capturing gaseous PbCl2 in a furnace

The pollution of semi-volatile heavy metals is one of the key environmental risks for municipal solid waste incineration, and in-situ adsorption of metals within the furnace by mineral sorbents such as kaolin has been demonstrated as a promising emission control method. To lessen the consumption of sorbent, a novel material of amorphous silicate was produced from kaolin through pressurised hydrothermal treatment. Its performance of gaseous PbCl2 capture was tested in a fixed bed furnace and compared with unmodified kaolin and metakaolin. With increasing temperature, the adsorption rates for all sorbents declined due to higher saturated vapour pressure, while the partitions of residual form lead increased which indicated higher stability of heavy metals in the sorbent because of melting effect. The new sorbent with a larger surface area and reformed structure presented 26% more adsorption efficiency than raw kaolin at 900 °C, and increasing the modification pressure improved these properties. Additionally, the production of this high-temperature sorbent was relatively inexpensive, required little thermal energy and no chemicals to produce and no waste effluent was generated, thus being much cleaner than other modification methods

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

Draft genome sequence of the mulberry tree Morus notabilis

Human utilization of the mulberry–silkworm interaction started at least 5,000 years ago and greatly influenced world history through the Silk Road. Complementing the silkworm genome sequence, here we describe the genome of a mulberry species Morus notabilis. In the 330-Mb genome assembly, we identify 128 Mb of repetitive sequences and 29,338 genes, 60.8% of which are supported by transcriptome sequencing. Mulberry gene sequences appear to evolve ~3 times faster than other Rosales, perhaps facilitating the species’ spread worldwide. The mulberry tree is among a few eudicots but several Rosales that have not preserved genome duplications in more than 100 million years; however, a neopolyploid series found in the mulberry tree and several others suggest that new duplications may confer benefits. Five predicted mulberry miRNAs are found in the haemolymph and silk glands of the silkworm, suggesting interactions at molecular levels in the plant–herbivore relationship. The identification and analyses of mulberry genes involved in diversifying selection, resistance and protease inhibitor expressed in the laticifers will accelerate the improvement of mulberry plants

Prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing in Mandarin Chinese

It is well established that focus plays an important role in facilitating language processing, i.e., focused words are recognised faster and remembered better. In addition, more recent research shows that alternatives to a word (e.g., sailor as an alternative to captain) are more activated when listeners hear the word with contrastive prominence (e.g., ‘The captain put on the raincoat) (bold indicates contrastive prominence). The mechanism behind these processing advantages is focus. Focus has two broad conceptions in relation to its effect on language processing: focus as updating the common ground and focus as indicating alternatives. Considerable psycholinguistic evidence has been obtained for processing advantages consistent with the first conception, and this evidence comes from studies across a reasonably wide range of languages. But the evidence for the second conception only comes from a handful of closely related languages (i.e., English, Dutch and German). Further, it has largely been confined to contrastive accenting as a marker of focus. Therefore, it is not clear if other types of focus marking (e.g., clefts) have similar processing effects. It is also not known if all this is true in Mandarin, as there is very little research in these areas in Mandarin. Mandarin uses pitch expansion to mark contrastive prominence, rather than the pitch accenting found in Germanic languages. Therefore, the investigation of Mandarin expands our knowledge of these speech processing effects to a different language and language family. It also expands our knowledge of the relative roles of prosody and syntax in marking focus and in speech processing in Mandarin, and in general. This thesis tested how different types of focus marking affect the perception of focus and two aspects of language processing related to focus: the encoding and activation of discourse information (focused words and focus alternatives). The aim was to see whether there is a link between the relative importance of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Mandarin and their effectiveness in these aspects of language processing. For focus perception, contrastive prominence and clefting have been claimed to mark focus in Mandarin, but it has not been well tested whether listeners perceive them as focus marking. For the first aspect of processing, it is not yet clear what cues listeners use to encode focused information beyond prominence when processing a discourse. For the second aspect, there has been rapidly growing interest in the role of alternatives in language processing, but little is known regarding the effect of clefting. In addition, it is not clear whether the prosodic and syntactic cues are equally effective, and again little research has been devoted to Mandarin. Therefore, the following experiments were conducted to look at these cues in Mandarin. Experiment 1, a norming study, was conducted to help select stimuli for the following Experiments 2, 3, 4A and 4B. Experiment 2 investigated the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in a question-answer appropriateness rating task. The findings show that in canonical word order sentences, the focus was perceived to be on the word that was marked by contrastive prominence. In clefts where the prominence and syntactic cues were on the same word, that word was perceived as being in focus. However, in ‘mismatch’ cases, e.g., 是[船长]F 穿上的[雨衣]F ‘It was the [captain]F who put on the [raincoat]F’ (F indicates focus), the focus was perceived to be on raincoat, the word that had contrastive prominence. In other words, participants weighted prosodic cues more highly. This suggests that prosodic prominence is a stronger focus cue than syntax in Mandarin. Experiment 3 looked at the role of prosodic and syntactic cues in listeners’ encoding of discourse information in a speeded ‘false alternative’ rejection task. This experiment shows that false alternatives to a word in a sentence (e.g., sailor to captain in ‘The captain put on the raincoat’) were more easily rejected if captain was marked with prosodic cues than with syntactic cues. This experiment shows congruent results to those of Experiment 2, in that prosodic cues were more effective than syntactic cues in encoding discourse information. It seems that a more important marker of focus provides more effective encoding of discourse information. Experiments 4A and 4B investigated the role of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in the activation of discourse information in Mandarin, using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm. Both studies consistently show that prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, facilitates the activation of identical targets (e.g., captain after hearing ‘The captain put on the raincoat’). Similarly, prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, primes alternatives (e.g., sailor). But focus marking does not prime noncontrastive associates (e.g., deck). These findings, together with previous findings on focus particles (e.g., only), suggest that alternative priming is particularly related to contrastive prominence, at least in languages looked at to date. The relative priming effects of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in Experiments 4A and 4B are in line with their relative weights in Experiments 2 and 3. This thesis presents a crucial link between the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic cues in marking focus, their degrees of effectiveness in encoding discourse information and their ability to activate discourse information in Mandarin. This research contributes significantly to our cross-linguistic understanding of prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing, showing the processing advantages of focus may be common across languages, but what cues trigger the effects differ by language

Rejecting false alternatives in Chinese and English: The interaction of prosody, clefting, and default focus position

In a discourse, a listener must keep track of information which is presupposed, or established, with the speaker, and that which is new in the common ground. Focus marking helps listeners identify the new information, and reject false alternatives to it; while presupposed information is not expected to be falsified. It is not yet clear, however, what cues listeners use to identify the focus, beyond prosodic prominence; e.g., syntactic clefting or word position, given final objects have been previously found to have a default focus bias, even without overt focus marking. We report two speeded false alternative rejection experiments, in Chinese and English, which looked at how prosodic prominence, clefting, and default focus affect encoding of referents in discourse. It was found that, in both languages, prosodic cues facilitated encoding, though this effect was stronger in Chinese. In both languages, clefting played an inhibitory rather than facilitatory role and there was a clear positional default focus bias. This research establishes cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the role of prosodic prominence, clefting, and phrase position in encoding discourse information in Chinese and English. The results suggest language-specific weighting of these cues

The role of prosody and beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information in Mandarin

Both auditory (e.g., prosody) and visual cues (e.g., beat gesture) available in communication are important for listeners to comprehend discourse, given that speech is multimodal. While a vast amount of research has been devoted to investigating the role of prosody in discourse comprehension, it is surprising that relatively little research has been conducted to uncover how visual cues interact with auditory cues given the importance of visual cues in speech processing. This paper examines the roles of prosodic prominence and beat gesture in the memory for discourse information in Mandarin. A dominant role of prosody but not beat gesture was found in facilitating the memory for discourse information. This study contributes significantly to our limited knowledge of multimodal comprehension of focus, and how cues from multilevel sources are integrated