Context sensitive design of provincial road Galliera SP4.

In the past centuries and before the invention of automobile, roads consisted mainly of unpaved paths connecting only few cities. Later, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the automobile was introduced and a new type of the transportation system was born. Therefore, it was necessary to change the condition of roads to fit with the automobiles. With the spread and the development of the automobiles, roads also have developed and increased all over the world. That caused negative effects on the environment and humans’ life quality. Thus, highways associations and communities had to take some steps to reduce these effects and care about environmental and cultural issues with the traditional commitment to safety and mobility, and that is known as context sensitive design. The aim of this thesis is to use the concepts of context sensitive design to reduce the negative environmental impacts of provincial road Galliera, which connects via Colombo in city of Bologna to provincial road 3 in Argelato city. Some solutions were proposed in this thesis to reduce traffic noise, fragmentation, fauna mortality and to improve the aesthetics of the road.

Progettazione sensibile al contesto dell'adeguamento dell'asse viario esistente nel parco naturale dell'isola dell'Asinara(SS)

lo scopo della presente tesi di laurea è stato quello di redigere un progetto per l’adeguamento funzionale della strada ubicata nel Parco Nazionale dell’ Asinara, tenendo quindi in particolare considerazione le caratteristiche ambientali del territorio, ma garantendo, allo stesso tempo, caratteristiche prestazionali migliorative e una maggiore sicurezza per il traffico veicolare.

La traduzione dei racconti di Pat Mora: muoversi tra due lingue e due culture

This dissertation deals with the translations of seven books for children written by the Chicano author Pat Mora. I started to be interested in the Chicano world, a world suspended between Mexico and the United States, after reading a book by Sandra Cisneros. I decided to deepen my curiosity and for this reason, I discovered a hybrid reality full of history, culture and traditions. In this context, the language used is characterized by a continuous code switching between Spanish and English and I thought it was an interesting phenomenon from the literary and translation point of view. During my research in the Chicano culture, I ran across Pat Mora. Her books for children fascinated me because of their actual themes (the cultural diversity and the defense of identity) and their beautiful illustrations. For this reason, I chose to translate seven of her books because I believe they could be an enrichment for children literature in Italy. The work consists of five chapters. The first one deals with the identity of Chicano people, their history, their literature and their language. In the second chapter, I outline Pat Mora’s profile. I talk about her biography and I analyze her most famous works. In the third chapter, I introduce the seven books for children to be translated and I point out their plots and main themes. In the fourth chapter, I present the translation of the books. The fifth chapter is the translation comment. I deal with the linguistic analysis of the source texts and the analysis of the target texts focusing on the choices made during the translation process.

Bio-QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Interpretable Biomedical Question Answering

Nowadays the idea of injecting world or domain-specific structured knowledge into pre-trained language models (PLMs) is becoming an increasingly popular approach for solving problems such as biases, hallucinations, huge architectural sizes, and explainability lack—critical for real-world natural language processing applications in sensitive fields like bioinformatics. One recent work that has garnered much attention in Neuro-symbolic AI is QA-GNN, an end-to-end model for multiple-choice open-domain question answering (MCOQA) tasks via interpretable text-graph reasoning. Unlike previous publications, QA-GNN mutually informs PLMs and graph neural networks (GNNs) on top of relevant facts retrieved from knowledge graphs (KGs). However, taking a more holistic view, existing PLM+KG contributions mainly consider commonsense benchmarks and ignore or shallowly analyze performances on biomedical datasets. This thesis start from a propose of a deep investigation of QA-GNN for biomedicine, comparing existing or brand-new PLMs, KGs, edge-aware GNNs, preprocessing techniques, and initialization strategies. By combining the insights emerged in DISI's research, we introduce Bio-QA-GNN that include a KG. Working with this part has led to an improvement in state-of-the-art of MCOQA model on biomedical/clinical text, largely outperforming the original one (+3.63\% accuracy on MedQA). Our findings also contribute to a better understanding of the explanation degree allowed by joint text-graph reasoning architectures and their effectiveness on different medical subjects and reasoning types. Codes, models, datasets, and demos to reproduce the results are freely available at: \url{https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/bio-qagnn}.