Bootstrapping Information from Corpora in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

The achievements of Romance language corpus-driven studies deserve more attention from the scientific community at the world level for both their quantity and quality. This book contains papers given at the 3rd International LABLITA Workshop in Corpus Linguistics (Italian Department, University of Florence, June 4th-5th 2008 ), and it aims at integrating new ideas and results derived from Romance language corpora in the framework of the overall achievements of Corpus Linguistics. The volume contains the contribution of a leading scholar of Corpus Linguistics (Douglas Biber), and a set of articles presented to Biber by notable European researchers and those from other countries. Papers report on long-term studies ranging from Italian to Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

La variazione semantica del verbo "essere" nelI'italiano parlato

The volume proposes a corpus-driven study on the 14,000 occurrences of the verb “essere” (to be) in a corpus of Italian speech C-ORAL-ROM, in the light of the main proposals for the semantic interpretation of the verb. Thus, the very possibility of carrying out research that is strongly characterised in a theoretical sense on a large amount of oral data, generally not very inclined to a systematic taxonomic treatment, is put to the test. The observable datum therefore defines the explicandum of linguistic reflection and the analysis on corpus guarantees the observational adequacy with respect to the actual production data. The proposed results show that the wide semantic variation in the use of the verb is structured in broadly comprehensive macro-classes: the copula (attributive) uses, the identifying uses and the predicative uses with a locative basis. Within each of these classes, primary, consistent and productive variation lines are found

IMAGACT: Deriving an Action Ontology from Spoken Corpora

This paper presents the IMAGACT annotation infrastructure which uses both corpus - based and competence - based methods for the simultaneous extraction of a language independent Action ontology from English and Italian spontaneous speech corpora. The infrastructure relies on an innovative methodology based on images of prototypical scenes and will identify high frequency action concepts in everyday life, suitable for the implementation of an open set of languages

Spatial variability of nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde and residential exposure of children in the industrial area of Viadana, Northern Italy

Chipboard production is a source of ambient air pollution. We assessed the spatial variability of outdoor pollutants and residential exposure of children living in proximity to the largest chipboard industry in Italy, and evaluated the reliability of exposure estimates obtained from a number of available models. We obtained passive sampling data on NO2 and formaldehyde collected by the environmental protection agency of Lombardia region at 25 sites in the municipality of Viadana during 10 weeks (2017-18), and compared NO2 measurements with average weekly concentrations from continuous monitors. We compared interpolated NO2 and formaldehyde surfaces with previous maps for 2010. We assessed the relationship between residential proximity to the industry and pollutant exposures assigned using these maps, as well as other available countrywide/continental models based on routine data on NO2, PM10, and PM2.5. The correlation between NO2 concentrations from continuous and passive sampling was high (Pearson\u2019s r=0.89), although passive sampling underestimated NO2 especially during winter. For both 2010 and 2017-18, we observed higher NO2 and formaldehyde concentrations in the south of Viadana, with hot-spots in proximity to the industry. PM10 and PM2.5 exposures were higher for children at <1km compared to the children living at >3.5 km to the industry, whereas NO2 exposure was higher at 1-1.7 km to the industry. Road and population densities were also higher close to the industry. Findings from a variety of exposure models suggest that children living in proximity to the chipboard industry in Viadana are more exposed to air pollution, and that exposure gradients are relatively stable over time

modelling and simulation for major incidents

In recent years, there has been a rise in Major Incidents with big impact on the citizens health and the society. Without the possibility of conducting live experiments when it comes to physical and/or toxic trauma, only an accurate in silico reconstruction allows us to identify organizational solutions with the best possible chance of success, in correlation with the limitations on available resources (e.g. medical team, first responders, treatments, transports, and hospitals availability) and with the variability of the characteristic of event (e.g. type of incident, severity of the event and type of lesions). Utilizing modelling and simulation techniques, a simplified mathematical model of physiological evolution for patients involved in physical and toxic trauma incident scenarios has been developed and implemented. The model formalizes the dynamics, operating standards and practices of medical response and the main emergency service in the chain of emergency management during a Major Incident

La variazione semantica del verbo essere nelI'italiano parlato

The book proposes a corpus-driven study conducted on 14,000 occurrences of the verb to be in the corpus of spoken Italian C-ORAL-ROM, in the light of the main proposals for semantic interpretation of the verb. This puts to the test the very possibility of developing a study with a strong theoretical connotation on a significant mass of oral data, generally not very prone to a systematic taxonomic treatment. Thus the observable datum defines the explicandum of the linguistic reflection and the analysis of the corpus guarantees the observational adequacy in relation to the data of real production. The results proposed illustrate how the broad semantic variation in the use of the verb proves to be divided into widely comprehensive macroclasses: copular uses (attributive), identificative uses and predicative uses on locative basis. Within each of these categories we can observe principal lines of variation that are consistent and productive