Corpus annotation of causal relations and their signals in English and Spanish

El estudio de las relaciones causales y su expresión lingüística ha sido comúnmente estudiado desde diferentes perspectivas en los años recientes. Sin embargo, pocos estudios han intentado combinar diferentes enfoques para establecer el significado de estas relaciones, y han investigado de manera contrastiva las señales usadas para expresarlas. Este trabajo de fin de master es un proyecto para avanzar el conocimiento en este área mediante la investigación de: a) la posibilidad de caracterizar las relaciones causales en diferentes tipos, usando características que combinan un enfoque funcional y cognitivo; b) los tipos de relaciones causales preferidas en los textos expositivos en inglés y sus traducciones al español; c) las expresiones lingüísticas preferidas para expresar dichas relaciones causales en los textos originales en inglés y sus traducciones al español. La metodología usada en esta investigación se basa en la anotación manual de un corpus bilingüe compuesto de un total de 37 textos expositivos (incluyendo los textos originales en inglés y sus traducciones al español) extraídos del corpus MULTINOT, un corpus de alta calidad, con registros diversificados y multifuncional bilingüe inglésespañol, actualmente compilado y anotado multidimensionalmente por los miembros del grupo de investigación FUNCAP con el proyecto MULTINOT (véase Lavid et al.2015) El estudio se llevó a cabo en cuatro pasos principales: primero, un esquema de anotación para las relaciones causales en inglés y español fue diseñado constando de tres sistemas interrelacionados y sus correspondientes características; tras ello, se compiló un inventario de señales para las relaciones causales en inglés y español, y una categorización en diferentes tipos; seguidamente, el esquema de anotación fue implementado en la herramienta UAM Corpus Tool y el conjunto de textos bilingües fue anotado por el autor de este estudio; finalmente, los datos extraídos de la anotación fueron analizados estadísticamente para comprobar las posibles diferencias entre los textos originales en inglés y sus traducciones al español respecto a la selección del tipo de relación de causa y sus señales. El análisis estadístico de los datos anotados sugiere que los tipos de relaciones de causa preferidos en los textos originales en inglés y son los tipos de contenido y no volitivos, que el orden de aparición de estos tipos de señales preferido es la segunda posición, y las señales más recurrentes usadas para expresar dichas relaciones son las conjunciones, seguidas de los sintagmas verbales. El análisis de las traducciones al español revela un alto grado de similitud con los datos de los textos originales en inglés, lo que sugiere que en las traducciones al español se conservan las preferencias de los textos originales en la mayoría de los casos y que estas elecciones pueden considerarse un indicativo de los textos expositivos en inglés. Proyectos futuros se centraran en el análisis de los textos originales en español para comprobar si las tendencias observadas en los textos originales en inglés y sus traducciones al español son también validas en textos originales en español, y en la especificación de patrones que puede ayudar al análisis automático de estas relaciones

Restauración de la obra, Corpus Iuris Civilis. Venecia, 1560: (signatura: BH FLL 9628)

En las páginas siguientes se detalla el tratamiento de restauración aplicado por la autora a la obra referenciada en el título, que constituye el único ejemplar que consta en el Catalogo Colectivo del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español y cuyo estado inicial hacía necesaria dicha intervención. El trabajo se realizó en el contexto de las prácticas curriculares de los estudios superiores de Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Culturales, bajo convenio de colaboración entre la Biblioteca Histórica de la UCM y la Escuela Superior de Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Culturales de Madrid.

A Curated Corpus for Sentiment-Topic Analysis

Postprint

As vogais médias tônicas: um estudo contrastivo da metafonia com base em corpus

This research analyzes the average previous stressed vowels [ε] and [e] and later [ɔ] and [o] in nominal and verbal forms in the 1st person singular and 3rd person singular and plural in the present tense, specifically the umlaut process of mid vowels /e/ and /o/, which assimilate in /ε/ and /ᴐ/ in stressed position. The general objective of this research is to describe and quantify the occurrence of umlaut and subsequently analyze in which words there is regularity or not. As specific objectives we have: i) to compile and to label an oral, spontaneous, synchronic and regional corpus, from radio programs produced in the city of Ituiutaba, Minas Gerais; ii) to describe the characteristics of the corpus to be compiled; iii) to investigate the alternating timbre of mid vowels in stressed position; iv) to identify instances of nominal and verbal umlaut of the middle vowels in stressed position; v) to describe the identified cases of nominal and verbal umlaut; vi) to analyze the probable causes for the variation of the middle vowels. To perform the proposed analysis, we have adopted as a theoretical-methodological basis multi-representational models: Phonology of Use (BYBEE, 2001) and Exemplar Theory (PIERREHUMBERT, 2001) combined with the precepts of Corpus Linguistics (BEBER SARDINHA, 2004). The corpus consisted of 16 radio programs – eight political and eight religious – from the city of Ituiutaba-MG, with recordings of about 20 to 40 minutes. We note, by means of the results generated by WordSmith Tools® software, version 6.0 (SCOTT, 2012), that the analyzed forms show little variation, which shows that the umlaut is a process already lexicalized in participants of the radio programs analyzed. We conclude that the results converge with the proposal of the Phonology of Use (BYBEE, 2001; PHILLIPS, 1984) that less frequent words that have no phonetic environment conducive to change, are changed first.

A nasalidade no dialeto quilombola do Norte de Minas: uma análise contrastiva baseada em corpus

This research investigated the nasality of vowels in the spontaneous speech of inhabitants of the quilombola communities of Brejo dos Crioulos and Poções (MG). As a theoretical framework, we based on the assumptions of Phonetics and Phonology, in renowned scholars on the investigation of nasality (CAGLIARI, 1977; CÂMARA JR., 1984, 2013; BISOL, 2013; ABAURRE; PAGOTTO, 1996; SILVA, 2015), with subsidies of the Corpus Linguistics. Its general goal was to investigate the occurrence of nasality, in the dialect of these quilombola communities, and their linguistic behavior, considering the linguistic factors that can interfere in the phenomenon. Specifically it was aimed to a) detect the occurrence of nasalized vowels with the help of the resources that the Corpus Linguistics provides (Praat and WorldSmith Tolls); b) discriminate the different types of occurring contexts of nasalized vowels; c) make quantitative and qualitative analyzes of the nasalized vowels in the study corpus; d) describe and analyze the behavior of nasalized vowels and; e) contrast the values of F1 and F2 of the oral and nasalized vowels. It was hypothesized that the nasality happens because it is conditioned by the nasal segment following the nasalized vowel - phonological process of “assimilation” - its position as the primary stress and grammatical category. It was believed that the quilombolas communities of Brejo dos Crioulos and Poções produce nasalized vowels in their speech and this linguistic phenomenon is favored by the adjacent presence of consonants or nasal vowels. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that the values of F1 and F2 of oral and nasalized vowels in these communities are distinct. The following research questions were elaborated: (i) is the presence of nasalized vowels in the speech of these quilombola communities conditioned to the presence of a nasal sound segment? (ii) does the nasal sound segment following the nasalized vowel favor the occurrence of the nasality phenomenon? is there a difference between the values of F1 and F2 of the oral and nasalized vowels in both quilombola communities considered? To compose our corpus, 24 interviews recordings were used (12 female speakers and 12 male speakers), a total of 24 participants. It was found that the following nasal sound segment tends to condition the nasalized vowel. In general, it assimilates the lowering of the soft palate of nasal consonant segment immediately following, but there are cases of nasal vowel segment - regressive assimilation; the stressed syllable tends to favor the nasality, but it occurs in pretonic and postonic position as well; F1 and F2 values of oral and nasalized vowels in the quilombola communities of Poções and Brejo dos Crioulos are distinct: the group of Brejo dos Crioulos tends to produce the F1 of oral and nasalized vowels more lowered than the group of Poções and the F2, in a more anterior position. The nasality tends to occur in verbs and nouns, although it is not specific to a grammatical category. This research found cases of spurious nasalization, confirming previous studies. In turn, it revealed cases of lexical items with favorable context for nasalization, but with its non-occurrence. This last case, considered as the lowering of the uniform soft palate in PB, presented pronounced vowels without the soft palate lowering. That is, it was detected variation in the phenomenon of nasalization in PB. With this work, it was promoted the discussion about nasality, in order to contribute to the linguistic studies about the functioning of Brazilian Portuguese in this geographical context.

Désambiguïsation de corpus monolingues par des approches de type Lesk

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

A facile spin-cast route for cation exchange of multilayer perpendicularly-aligned nanorod assemblies

A facile spin cast route was developed to convert perpendicularly aligned nanorod assemblies of cadmium chalcogenides into their silver and copper analogues. The assemblies are rapidly cation exchanged without affecting either the individual rod dimensions or collective superlattice order extending over several multilayers.

Improving cross language information retrieval using corpus based query suggestion approach

Users seeking information may not find relevant information pertaining to their information need in a specific language. But information may be available in a language different from their own, but users may not know that language. Thus users may experience difficulty in accessing the information present in different languages. Since the retrieval process depends on the translation of the user query, there are many issues in getting the right translation of the user query. For a pair of languages chosen by a user, resources, like incomplete dictionary, inaccurate machine translation system may exist. These resources may be insufficient to map the query terms in one language to its equivalent terms in another language. Also for a given query, there might exist multiple correct translations. The underlying corpus evidence may suggest a clue to select a probable set of translations that could eventually perform a better information retrieval. In this paper, we present a cross language information retrieval approach to effectively retrieve information present in a language other than the language of the user query using the corpus driven query suggestion approach. The idea is to utilize the corpus based evidence of one language to improve the retrieval and re-ranking of news documents in the other language. We use FIRE corpora - Tamil and English news collections in our experiments and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed cross language information retrieval approach.

Droplet etching of deep nanoholes for filling with self-aligned complex quantum structures

Strain-free epitaxial quantum dots (QDs) are fabricated by a combination of Al local droplet etching (LDE) of nanoholes in AlGaAs surfaces and subsequent hole filling with GaAs. The whole process is performed in a conventional molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) chamber. Autocorrelation measurements establish single-photon emission from LDE QDs with a very small correlation function g (2)(0)≃ 0.01 of the exciton emission. Here, we focus on the influence of the initial hole depth on the QD optical properties with the goal to create deep holes suited for filling with more complex nanostructures like quantum dot molecules (QDM). The depth of droplet etched nanoholes is controlled by the droplet material coverage and the process temperature, where a higher coverage or temperature yields deeper holes. The requirements of high quantum dot uniformity and narrow luminescence linewidth, which are often found in applications, set limits to the process temperature. At high temperatures, the hole depths become inhomogeneous and the linewidth rapidly increases beyond 640 °C. With the present process technique, we identify an upper limit of 40-nm hole depth if the linewidth has to remain below 100 μeV. Furthermore, we study the exciton fine-structure splitting which is increased from 4.6 μeV in 15-nm-deep to 7.9 μeV in 35-nm-deep holes. As an example for the functionalization of deep nanoholes, self-aligned vertically stacked GaAs QD pairs are fabricated by filling of holes with 35 nm depth. Exciton peaks from stacked dots show linewidths below 100 μeV which is close to that from single QDs.

Désambiguïsation de corpus monolingues par des approches de type Lesk

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Annotated record of the detailed examination of Mn deposits from PR II, CORPUS 4 Cruise, R/V Atlantic Twin off the coast of Puerto Rico

The dredges described in this report were taken on the PR II, CORPUS 4 Expedition in January 1969 by the USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center from the R/V Atlantic Twin. Dredges recovered and are available at USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center for sampling and study.

Financial media, globalisation, and China’s economic integration: comparing narrative construction of the Economist and Caijing

In June 2015, legal frameworks of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank were signed by its 57 founding members. Proposed and initiated by China, this multilateral development bank is considered to be an Asian counterpart to break the monopoly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2015, China’s Central Bank announced a benchmark interest rate cut to combat the economic slowdown. The easing policy coincides with the European Central Bank’s announcement of doubts over US Fed’s commitment to raise interest rates. Global stock markets responded positively to China’s move, with the exception of the indexes from Wall Street (Bland, 2015; Elliott, 2015). In the meantime, China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (or New Silk Road Economic Belt) became atopic of discourse in relation to its growing global economy, as China pledged $40 billion to trade and infrastructure projects (Bermingham, 2015). The foreign policy aims to reinforce the economic belt from western China through Central Asia towards Europe, as well as to construct maritime trading routes from coastal China through the South China Sea (Summers, 2015). In 2012, The Economist launched a new China section, to reveal the complexity of the‘meteoric rise’ of China. John Micklethwait, who was then the chief editor of the magazine, said that China’s emergence as a global power justified giving it a section of its own(Roush, 2012). In July 2015, Hu Shuli, the former chief editor of Caijing, announced the launch of a think tank and financial data service division called Caixin Insight Group, which encompasses the new Caixin China Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). Incooperation with with Markit Group, a principal global provider of PMI, the index soon became a widely cited economic indicator. One anecdote from November’s Caixin shows how much has changed: in a high-profile dialogue between Hu Shuli and Kevin Rudd, Hu insisted on asking questions in English; interestingly, the former Prime Minister of Australia insisted on replying in Chinese. These recent developments point to one thing: the economic ascent of China and its increasing influence on the power play between economics and politics in world markets. China has begun to take a more active role in rule making and enforcement under neoliberal frameworks. However, due to the country’s size and the scale of its economy in comparison to other countries, China’s version of globalisation has unique characteristics. The ‘Capitalist-socialist’ paradox is vital to China’s market-oriented transformation. In order to comprehend how such unique features are articulated and understood, there are several questions worth investigating in the realms of media and communication studies,such as how China’s neoliberal restructuring is portrayed and perceived by different types of interested parties, and how these portrayals are de-contextualised and re-contextualised in global or Anglo-American narratives. Therefore, based on a combination of the themes of globalisation, financial media and China’s economic integration, this thesis attempts to explore how financial media construct the narratives of China’s economic globalisation through the deployment of comparative and multi-disciplinary approaches. Two outstanding elite financial magazines, Britain’s The Economist, which has a global readership and influence, and Caijing, China’s leading financial magazine, are chosen as case studies to exemplify differing media discourses, representing, respectively, Anglo-American and Chinese socio-economic and political backgrounds, as well as their own journalistic cultures. This thesis tries to answer the questions of how and why China’s neoliberal restructuring is constructed from a globally-oriented perspective. The construction primarily involves people who are influential in business and policymaking. Hence, the analysis falls into the paradigm of elite-elite communication, which is an important but relatively less developed perspective in studying China and its globalisation. The comparing of characteristics of narrative construction are the result of the textual analysis of articles published over a ten-year period (mid-1998 to mid-2008). The corpus of samples come from the two media outlets’ coverage of three selected events:China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, its outward direct investment, and the listing of stocks of Chinese companies in overseas exchanges, which are mutually exclusive in sample collection and collectively exhaustive in the inclusion of articles regarding China’s economic globalisation. The findings help to understand that, despite language, socio-economic and political differences, elite financial media with globally-oriented readerships share similar methods of and approaches to agenda setting, the evaluation of news prominence, the selection of frame, and the advocacy of deeply rooted neoliberal ideas. The comparison of their distinctive features reflects the different phases of building up the sense of identity in their readers as global elites, as well as the different economic interests that are aligned with the corresponding readerships. However, textual analysis is only relevant in terms of exploring how the narratives are constructed and the elements they include; textual analysis alone prevents us from seeing the obstacles and the constrains of the journalistic practices of construction. Therefore, this thesis provides a brief discussion of interviews with practitioners from the two media, in order to understand how similar or different narratives are manifested and perceived, how the concept of neoliberalism deviates from and is justified in the Chinese context, and how and for what purpose deviations arise from Western to Chinese contexts. The thesis also contributes to defining financial media in the domain of elite communication. The relevant and closely interlocking concepts of globalisation, elitism and neoliberalism are discussed, and are used as a theoretical bedrock in the analysis of texts and contexts. It is important to address the agenda-setting and ideological role of elite financial media, because of its narrative formula of infusing business facts with opinions,which is important in constructing the global elite identity as well as influencing neoliberal policy-making. On the other hand, ‘journalistic professionalism’ has been redefined, in that the elite identity is shared by the content producer, reader and the actors in the news stories emerging from the much-compressed news cycle. The professionalism of elite financial media requires a dual definition, that of being professional in the understanding of business facts and statistics, and that of being professional in the making sense of stories by deploying economic logic.

Third-mission policy goals and incentives from performance-based funding: Are they aligned?

In competitive knowledge-based economies, policymakers recognize the importance of universities’ engagement in third mission activities. This article investigates how a specific policy approach to encourage third mission engagement—the use of performance-based funding to reward universities’ success in this domain—aligns with the broader goals of third mission policy. Considering the case of the UK, the first country to have implemented a system of this kind, we analyse how the system has come into being and how it has evolved, and we discuss whether its implementation is likely to encourage universities to behave in ways that are aligned with the goals of third mission policy, as outlined in government documents. We argue that the system encourages universities to focus on a narrow range of income-producing third mission activities, and this is not well aligned with the policy goal to support a complex innovation ecosystem comprising universities with different third mission objectives and strategies. The article concludes by proposing possible avenues for achieving greater alignment between incentives and policy goals.

The Plutarch’s Motive of "Descensus Animae" in "Nag Hammadi and the Corpus Hermeticum"

Al evaluar los contactos de Plutarco con otras culturas contemporáneas, los investigadores todavía no han llegado a un consenso acerca de la relación entre el queronense y la literatura cristiano-primitiva. Un buen ejemplo de esto aparece al atender al motivo de la creación del alma humana. La intención de las próximas páginas es, tras un análisis de los textos plutarqueos, atender a estos posibles contactos con NHC, los heresiólogos y el Corpus Hermeticum a fin de dilucidar sus similitudes y diferencias.

La fijación léxica en el "Corpus diacrónico del español del Reino de Granada (CORDEREGRA)"

El estudio de las combinaciones léxicas según su grado de fijación y su distinción en combinaciones libres, colocaciones y locuciones ha sido realizado desde la perspectiva sincrónica. Planteamos la posibilidad de aplicar las pautas para distinguir estos tipos de estructuras en materiales de tipo diacrónico. Concretamente, nos basamos en los documentos que componen el Corpus del Español del Reino de Granada (CORDEREGRA) para valorar los materiales de este corpus histórico-lingüístico y comprobar si los criterios sincrónicos se pueden aplicar al estudio de documentos de otros siglos.