Perceptual compasses: spatial navigation in multisensory environments

Moving through space is a crucial activity in daily human life. The main objective of my Ph.D. project consisted of investigating how people exploit the multisensory sources of information available (vestibular, visual, auditory) to efficiently navigate. Specifically, my Ph.D. aimed at i) examining the multisensory integration mechanisms underlying spatial navigation; ii) establishing the crucial role of vestibular signals in spatial encoding and processing, and its interaction with environmental landmarks; iii) providing the neuroscientific basis to develop tailored assessment protocols and rehabilitation procedures to enhance orientation and mobility based on the integration of different sensory modalities, especially addressed to improve the compromised navigational performance of visually impaired (VI) people. To achieve these aims, we conducted behavioral experiments on adult participants, including psychophysics procedures, galvanic stimulation, and modeling. In particular, the experiments involved active spatial navigation tasks with audio-visual landmarks and selfmotion discrimination tasks with and without acoustic landmarks using a motion platform (Rotational-Translational Chair) and an acoustic virtual reality tool. Besides, we applied Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation to directly modulate signals coming from the vestibular system during behavioral tasks that involved interaction with audio-visual landmarks. In addition, when appropriate, we compared the obtained results with predictions coming from the Maximum Likelihood Estimation model, to verify the potential optimal integration between the available multisensory cues. i) Results on multisensory navigation showed a sub-group of integrators and another of non-integrators, revealing inter-individual differences in audio-visual processing while moving through the environment. Finding these idiosyncrasies in a homogeneous sample of adults emphasizes the role of individual perceptual characteristics in multisensory perception, highlighting how important it is to plan tailored rehabilitation protocols considering each individual’s perceptual preferences and experiences. ii) We also found a robust inherent overestimation bias when estimating passive self-motion stimuli. This finding shed new light on how our brain processes and elaborates the available cues building a more functional representation of the world. We also demonstrated a novel impact of the vestibular signals on the encoding of visual environmental cues without actual self-motion information. The role that vestibular inputs play in visual cues perception, and space encoding has multiple consequences on humans’ ability to functionally navigate in space and interact with environmental objects, especially when vestibular signals are impaired due to intrinsic (vestibular disorders) or environmental conditions (altered gravity, e.g. spaceflight missions). Finally, iii) the combination of the Rotational-Translational Chair and the acoustic virtual reality tool revealed a slight improvement in self-motion perception for VI people when exploiting acoustic cues. This approach shows to be a successful technique for evaluating audio-vestibular perception and improving spatial representation abilities of VI people, providing the basis to develop new rehabilitation procedures focused on multisensory perception. Overall, the findings resulting from my Ph.D. project broaden the scientific knowledge about spatial navigation in multisensory environments, yielding new insights into the exploration of the brain mechanisms associated with mobility, orientation, and locomotion abilities

ITALIAN CANCER FIGURES - REPORT 2015: The burden of rare cancers in Italy = I TUMORI IN ITALIA - RAPPORTO 2015: I tumori rari in Italia

OBJECTIVES: This collaborative study, based on data collected by the network of Italian Cancer Registries (AIRTUM), describes the burden of rare cancers in Italy. Estimated number of new rare cancer cases yearly diagnosed (incidence), proportion of patients alive after diagnosis (survival), and estimated number of people still alive after a new cancer diagnosis (prevalence) are provided for about 200 different cancer entities. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data herein presented were provided by AIRTUM population- based cancer registries (CRs), covering nowadays 52% of the Italian population. This monograph uses the AIRTUM database (January 2015), which includes all malignant cancer cases diagnosed between 1976 and 2010. All cases are coded according to the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O-3). Data underwent standard quality checks (described in the AIRTUM data management protocol) and were checked against rare-cancer specific quality indicators proposed and published by RARECARE and HAEMACARE (www.rarecarenet.eu; www.haemacare.eu). The definition and list of rare cancers proposed by the RARECAREnet "Information Network on Rare Cancers" project were adopted: rare cancers are entities (defined as a combination of topographical and morphological codes of the ICD-O-3) having an incidence rate of less than 6 per 100,000 per year in the European population. This monograph presents 198 rare cancers grouped in 14 major groups. Crude incidence rates were estimated as the number of all new cancers occurring in 2000-2010 divided by the overall population at risk, for males and females (also for gender-specific tumours).The proportion of rare cancers out of the total cancers (rare and common) by site was also calculated. Incidence rates by sex and age are reported. The expected number of new cases in 2015 in Italy was estimated assuming the incidence in Italy to be the same as in the AIRTUM area. One- and 5-year relative survival estimates of cases aged 0-99 years diagnosed between 2000 and 2008 in the AIRTUM database, and followed up to 31 December 2009, were calculated using complete cohort survival analysis. To estimate the observed prevalence in Italy, incidence and follow-up data from 11 CRs for the period 1992-2006 were used, with a prevalence index date of 1 January 2007. Observed prevalence in the general population was disentangled by time prior to the reference date (≤2 years, 2-5 years, ≤15 years). To calculate the complete prevalence proportion at 1 January 2007 in Italy, the 15-year observed prevalence was corrected by the completeness index, in order to account for those cancer survivors diagnosed before the cancer registry activity started. The completeness index by cancer and age was obtained by means of statistical regression models, using incidence and survival data available in the European RARECAREnet data. RESULTS: In total, 339,403 tumours were included in the incidence analysis. The annual incidence rate (IR) of all 198 rare cancers in the period 2000-2010 was 147 per 100,000 per year, corresponding to about 89,000 new diagnoses in Italy each year, accounting for 25% of all cancer. Five cancers, rare at European level, were not rare in Italy because their IR was higher than 6 per 100,000; these tumours were: diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and squamous cell carcinoma of larynx (whose IRs in Italy were 7 per 100,000), multiple myeloma (IR: 8 per 100,000), hepatocellular carcinoma (IR: 9 per 100,000) and carcinoma of thyroid gland (IR: 14 per 100,000). Among the remaining 193 rare cancers, more than two thirds (No. 139) had an annual IR <0.5 per 100,000, accounting for about 7,100 new cancers cases; for 25 cancer types, the IR ranged between 0.5 and 1 per 100,000, accounting for about 10,000 new diagnoses; while for 29 cancer types the IR was between 1 and 6 per 100,000, accounting for about 41,000 new cancer cases. Among all rare cancers diagnosed in Italy, 7% were rare haematological diseases (IR: 41 per 100,000), 18% were solid rare cancers. Among the latter, the rare epithelial tumours of the digestive system were the most common (23%, IR: 26 per 100,000), followed by epithelial tumours of head and neck (17%, IR: 19) and rare cancers of the female genital system (17%, IR: 17), endocrine tumours (13% including thyroid carcinomas and less than 1% with an IR of 0.4 excluding thyroid carcinomas), sarcomas (8%, IR: 9 per 100,000), central nervous system tumours and rare epithelial tumours of the thoracic cavity (5%with an IR equal to 6 and 5 per 100,000, respectively). The remaining (rare male genital tumours, IR: 4 per 100,000; tumours of eye, IR: 0.7 per 100,000; neuroendocrine tumours, IR: 4 per 100,000; embryonal tumours, IR: 0.4 per 100,000; rare skin tumours and malignant melanoma of mucosae, IR: 0.8 per 100,000) each constituted <4% of all solid rare cancers. Patients with rare cancers were on average younger than those with common cancers. Essentially, all childhood cancers were rare, while after age 40 years, the common cancers (breast, prostate, colon, rectum, and lung) became increasingly more frequent. For 254,821 rare cancers diagnosed in 2000-2008, 5-year RS was on average 55%, lower than the corresponding figures for patients with common cancers (68%). RS was lower for rare cancers than for common cancers at 1 year and continued to diverge up to 3 years, while the gap remained constant from 3 to 5 years after diagnosis. For rare and common cancers, survival decreased with increasing age. Five-year RS was similar and high for both rare and common cancers up to 54 years; it decreased with age, especially after 54 years, with the elderly (75+ years) having a 37% and 20% lower survival than those aged 55-64 years for rare and common cancers, respectively. We estimated that about 900,000 people were alive in Italy with a previous diagnosis of a rare cancer in 2010 (prevalence). The highest prevalence was observed for rare haematological diseases (278 per 100,000) and rare tumours of the female genital system (265 per 100,000). Very low prevalence (<10 prt 100,000) was observed for rare epithelial skin cancers, for rare epithelial tumours of the digestive system and rare epithelial tumours of the thoracic cavity. COMMENTS: One in four cancers cases diagnosed in Italy is a rare cancer, in agreement with estimates of 24% calculated in Europe overall. In Italy, the group of all rare cancers combined, include 5 cancer types with an IR>6 per 100,000 in Italy, in particular thyroid cancer (IR: 14 per 100,000).The exclusion of thyroid carcinoma from rare cancers reduces the proportion of them in Italy in 2010 to 22%. Differences in incidence across population can be due to the different distribution of risk factors (whether environmental, lifestyle, occupational, or genetic), heterogeneous diagnostic intensity activity, as well as different diagnostic capacity; moreover heterogeneity in accuracy of registration may determine some minor differences in the account of rare cancers. Rare cancers had worse prognosis than common cancers at 1, 3, and 5 years from diagnosis. Differences between rare and common cancers were small 1 year after diagnosis, but survival for rare cancers declined more markedly thereafter, consistent with the idea that treatments for rare cancers are less effective than those for common cancers. However, differences in stage at diagnosis could not be excluded, as 1- and 3-year RS for rare cancers was lower than the corresponding figures for common cancers. Moreover, rare cancers include many cancer entities with a bad prognosis (5-year RS <50%): cancer of head and neck, oesophagus, small intestine, ovary, brain, biliary tract, liver, pleura, multiple myeloma, acute myeloid and lymphatic leukaemia; in contrast, most common cancer cases are breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers, which have a good prognosis. The high prevalence observed for rare haematological diseases and rare tumours of the female genital system is due to their high incidence (the majority of haematological diseases are rare and gynaecological cancers added up to fairly high incidence rates) and relatively good prognosis. The low prevalence of rare epithelial tumours of the digestive system was due to the low survival rates of the majority of tumours included in this group (oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, and liver), regardless of the high incidence rate of rare epithelial cancers of these sites. This AIRTUM study confirms that rare cancers are a major public health problem in Italy and provides quantitative estimations, for the first time in Italy, to a problem long known to exist. This monograph provides detailed epidemiologic indicators for almost 200 rare cancers, the majority of which (72%) are very rare (IR<0.5 per 100,000). These data are of major interest for different stakeholders. Health care planners can find useful information herein to properly plan and think of how to reorganise health care services. Researchers now have numbers to design clinical trials considering alternative study designs and statistical approaches. Population-based cancer registries with good quality data are the best source of information to describe the rare cancer burden in a population

Building new resources for historical linguistics

This volume collects the papers originally presented at the workshop Building New Resources for Historical Linguistics, held at the University of Pavia in November 2020. The purpose of this workshop was to provide an opportunity for researchers engaged in the development of linguistic resources for historical linguistics to share their experience and knowledge. Sharing is crucial in computational linguistics in order to avoid multiplying efforts and encourage the use of compatible tools, formats, and formalisms to increase the interoperability. Reflecting the purpose of the original workshop, this book introduces the reader to different projects aimed at creating, developing and linking linguistic resources for historical linguistics. While some of the papers in the volume describe mature resources and discuss their possible application, others introduce resources that are still in progress, presenting their aims, the challenges faced in their construction, and the methodologies employed to tackle them. The different types of resources described in the volume include syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks), dependency lexica, as well as lexical and typological databases. Furthermore, some of the papers are concerned with the thriving field of Linguistic Linked Open Data, the current up-to-date standard to link linguistic resources

HoDeL: una nuova risorsa per lo studio dei verbi nel greco omerico

The paper presents the Homeric Dependency Lexicon - HoDeL, a new resource for the study of Homeric Greek verbs and their dependents. HoDeL is a corpus-driven lexicon automatically induced from the Homeric texts treebanked at AGLDT 2.0 (Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency treebank). From the syntactic layer of AGLDT 2.0, using a series of SQL queries, Homeric verbs have been extracted along with their dependents tagged as SBJ, OBJ, PNOM, and OCOMP. Their argumental or non-argumental status is theory dependent as discussed in the paper. HoDeL allows searching for specific verbs and dependents by directly typing them in Beta-Code. It incorporates several filters on both verbs and dependents, which makes exploring the lexicon a very user-friendly experience. HoDeL also includes transliteration of Greek script and aligned translation of Homeric passages. The paper also addresses some practical issues that may affect the users’ experience (e.g. annotation and/or lemmatization errors in the base data; inadequacy of the treebank structure to deal with specificities of the Homeric language) and propose possible solutions

Presenting HoDeL - A new resource for research on Homeric Greek verbs

In this paper, we present a new resource that has been created at the Univer-sity of Pavia for the study of Homeric Greek verbs and their dependents: the Homeric Greek Dependency Lexicon (HoDeL). This resource is based on AGLDT 2.0 (Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank 2.0), which in its earliest version (AGLDT 1.0) is the first treebank for Ancient Greek and Latin.HoDeL allows searching for verbs along with their dependents that are annotated as being included in the verbal valency in AGLDT 2.0. In the next sections, we discuss technical issues concerning the construction of HoDeL and the queries used to build it (Section 2), theoretical issues regarding the annotation scheme of AGLDT 2.0 (Section 3), and practical issues emerging from usage of the resource (Section 4

Linking the Ancient Greek WordNet to the Homeric Dependency Lexicon

The Ancient Greek WordNet is a new resource that is being developed at the Universities of Pavia and Exeter, based on the Princeton WordNet. The Princeton WordNet provides sentence frames for verb senses, but this type of information is lacking in most WordNets of other languages. In fact, exporting sentence frames from English to other languages is not a trivial task, as sentence frames depend on the syntax of individual languages. In addition, the information provided by the Princeton WordNet is not corpus-based but relies on native speakers’ knowledge. This type of information is not available for dead languages, which are by definition corpus languages. In this paper, we show how sentence frames can be extracted from morpho-syntactically parsed corpora by linking an existing depend- ency lexicon of Homeric verbs (HoDeL) to verbs in the Ancient Greek WordNet. Given its features, HoDeL allows automatically extracting all subcategorization frames available for each verb along with information concerning their frequency as well as semantic information regarding the possible arguments occurring in specific frames. In the paper, we show our method to automatically link the two resources and compare some of the resulting sentence frames with the English sentence frames in the Princeton WordNet

Linking the Sanskrit WordNet to the Vedic Dependency Treebank: a pilot study

The Sanskrit WordNet is a resource currently under development, whose core was induced from a Vedic text sample semantically annotated by means of an ontology mapped on the Princeton WordNet synsets. Building on a previous case study on Ancient Greek (Zanchi et al. 2021), we show how sentence frames can be extracted from morphosyntactically parsed corpora by linking an existing dependency treebank of Vedic Sanskrit to verbal synsets in the Sanskrit WordNet. Our case study focuses on two verbs of asking, y{\=a}c- and prach-, featuring a high degree of variability in sentence frames. Treebanks enhanced with WordNet-based semantic information revealed to be of crucial help in motivating sentence frame alternations

Space in Diachrony

International audienc