Using syntactic and semantic features for classifying mo- dal values in the portuguese language

This paper presents a study made in a field poorly explored in the Portuguese language – modality and its automatic tagging. Our main goal was to find a set of attributes for the creation of automatic tag- gers with improved performance over the bag-of-words (bow) approach. The performance was measured using precision, recall and F1. Because it is a relatively unexplored field, the study covers the creation of the corpus (composed by eleven verbs), the use of a parser to extract syntac- tic and semantic information from the sentences and a machine learning approach to identify modality values. Based on three different sets of attributes – from trigger itself and the trigger’s path (from the parse tree) and context – the system creates a tagger for each verb achiev- ing (in almost every verb) an improvement in F1 when compared to the traditional bow approach.

Salted-Fish industry in Roman Lusitania: Trade Memories between Oceanus and Mare Nostrum

Initiated by Augustus, Rome’s Atlantic policy seems to have been consolidated in the age of Claudius, with the acknowledgement of the economic potential offered by the Atlantic region. It is in this context that we must understand the development of the salted-fish industry in Lusitania. In the same geographical contexts, and in close relationship with fish-processing factories, are known about 20 pottery centres producing amphorae, located in the regions of Peniche, Sado and Tejo valleys, and the coasts of Alentejo and Algarve. This production extended in time beyond the end of the Western Roman Empire and up to the end of the 5th and 6th centuries, according to the archaeological data of some amphora kilns and fish-processing sites. The identification of Lusitanian amphorae in distant consuming centres and several shipwrecks in the Mediterranean basin confirm the long-distance commerce and the total integration of this “peripheral” region into the trade routes of the Roman Empire.

Into the looking glass: Literacy acquisition and mirror invariance in preschool and first-grade children

At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same–different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation independent)-on geometric shapes and letters. On orientation-based judgments, first graders out- performed preschoolers who had the strongest difficulty with mirrored pairs. On shape-based judgments, first graders were slower for mirrored than identical pairs, and even slower than preschoolers. This mirror cost emerged with letter knowledge. Only first graders presented worse shape-based judgments for mirrored and rotated pairs of reversible (e.g., b-d; b-q) than nonreversible (e.g., e-ә) letters, indicating readers’ difficulty in ignoring orientation contrasts relevant to letters.

First report on Meloidogyne chitwoodi hatching inhibition activity of essential oils and essential oils fractions

The Columbia root-knot nematode (CRKN), Meloidogyne chitwoodi, is an EPPO A2 type quarantine pest since 1998. This nematode causes severe damage in economically important crops such as potato and tomato, making agricultural products unacceptable for the fresh market and food processing. Commonly used nematicidal synthetic chemicals are often environmentally unsafe. Essential oils (EOs) may constitute safer alternatives against RKN. EOs, isolated from 56 plant samples, were tested against CRKN hatching, in direct contact bioassays. Some of the most successful EOs were fractionated and the hydrocarbon molecules (HM) and oxygen-containing molecules (OCM) fractions tested separately. 24 EOs displayed very strong hatching inhibitions (≥90 %) at 2 µL mL−1 and were further tested at lower concentrations. Dysphaniaambrosioides, Filipendula ulmaria, Ruta graveolens, Satureja montana and Thymbra capitata EOs revealed the lowest EC50 values (<0.15 µL mL−1). The main compounds of these EOs, namely 2-undecanone, ascaridol, carvacrol, isoascaridol, methyl salicylate, p-cymene and/or γ-terpinene, were putatively considered responsible for CRKN hatching inhibition. S. montana and T. capitata OCM fractions showed hatching inhibitions higher than HM fractions. The comparison of EO and corresponding fractions EC50 values suggests interactions between OCM and HM fractions against CRKN hatching. These species EOs showed to be potential environmentally friendly CRKN hatching inhibitors; nonetheless, bioactivity should be considered globally, since its HM and OCM fractions may contribute, diversely, to the full anti-hatching activity.