Event Structure Research Articles

Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification

Many English verbs typically used agentively allow non-agentive uses. Some recent approaches assume such verbs are unspecified for agentivity, although in principle, polysemy is also an option. We demonstrate the complexity of variable agentivity through an in-depth examination of the English verb sweep, which shows variable agentivity due to both underspecification and motivated polysemy. Drawing on corpus data, we identify two senses for sweep, each with unique argument realization options and interpretive properties. The prototypical uses of this verb, which involve the use of a broom, are obligatorily agentive; however, we claim they instantiate a specialized sense. We argue that the verb’s basic sense, which underlies all its other uses, is unspecified for agentivity, being found with agentive and non-agentive subjects. We formulate event structures for both senses that encode the grammatically relevant components of meaning common across all the verb’s uses: an entity moves along a surface while imparting a force via contact with it. We show that the event structure for the specialized sense, which fixes the moving entity to be a broom, is derived via established processes involving the lexicalization of instruments and routine goal-oriented activities. We demonstrate how the argument realization options and interpretive properties that the verb shows in each sense emerge from applying established principles of argument realization and semantic composition to these event structures.

Sampling rare events using nanostructures for universal Pt neural network potential

The density functional theory (DFT) data-driven approach to generating potential energy surfaces using machine learning has been proven to quickly and accurately predict the molecular and crystal structures of various elements. However, training databases consisting of hundreds of well-known symmetric structures have shown fatal weaknesses in calculating amorphous or nano-scale structures. Ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations create a training set that compensates for these shortcomings, but there are still many rare event structures. Here we introduce a new method to easily enlarge the data diversity and dramatically reduce data points based on the highly defected nano structures for universal machine learned potential. Our potential applies to bulk and nano systems and has been shown to high accuracy and computational efficiency while requiring minimal DFT training data. The developed potential is expected to help observation of structural changes in the Pt-based nano-catalysts that have been difficult to simulate at the DFT-level.

Poster 108: Arthroscopic Posterior Labral Repair Patients Experience Less Instability Events and Full Dislocations Yet Are More Commonly Male Contact Athletes that Require Concomitant Procedures When Compared to Arthroscopic Anterior Labral Repair Patients

Objectives: Direct comparisons between the direction of shoulder instability as it pertains to clinical and demographic risk factors are lacking. The purpose of this study is to identify and compare demographic, clinical, and peri-operative variables in patients receiving arthroscopic treatment for anterior and posterior shoulder instability. Methods: A retrospective chart review was performed for consecutive patients who underwent primary arthroscopic labral repair surgery for anterior and posterior shoulder instability with a minimum 2-year follow-up. Surgeries were performed by six surgeons at a single institution between 2012-2020. Patients with prior shoulder instability surgeries of any kind were excluded. Demographics and operative variables included sex, body mass index (BMI), Contact/collision sports, tobacco use, ASA grade, number of dislocations (<1, 1, 2, >2), tear size (120, 240, and 360 degrees), age, time from first dislocation to surgery, number of anchors, and concomitant procedures. Study groups were compared using student’s t-tests and Mann-Whitney U test for continuous variables and Chi-Square or Fisher’s Exact tests for discrete variables with a significance of 0.05. Results: Five hundred and twenty-four (524) patients met inclusion criteria. Overall, there were 133 females (25.4%) and 291 males (74.6%) with a mean age of 27.1 years at the time of surgery (SD ± 9.9) and a BMI of 26.6 (SD ± 5.6). Posterior instability patients were less likely to have experienced a dislocation (15.1% without prior dislocation) than patients with anterior instability (3.4%). Additionally, posterior instability patients that did experience a dislocation (22.6%) were less likely to have greater than two dislocations when compared to anterior instability patients (53.6%). Posterior instability was more frequently associated with males (85%), higher BMI (mean = 28.25), and contact/collision sports (41%). Posterior instability patients were more likely than anterior instability patients to have concomitant procedures performed at the time of labral repair, including capsular plication, (31.6%) biceps tenodesis (14%), and distal clavicle excision (8.8%). Lastly, posterior instability patients typically required fewer anchors (3.4) than anterior instability patients (3.98) at the time of labral repair. Conclusions: Despite having fewer instability events or dislocations, patients that receive a posterior labral repair are more likely to have additional injuries in their shoulder requiring treatment when compared to patients that have received an arthroscopic anterior labral repair. Interestingly, posterior labral repair patients are more commonly male, and contact athletes, as well. With posterior shoulder instability being less common, we speculate that these findings could correlate with a more significant amount of energy/mechanism involved when a shoulder does dislocate posteriorly, thus leading to injuries to additional shoulder structures. It also correlates with the repetitive microtrauma mechanism that can happen with posterior labral tears. Whereas patients may be more likely to experience symptoms over a longer period of time without ever having a full instability event and additional shoulder structures become injured.

Contributions of Basal Ganglia Circuits to Perception, Attention, and Consciousness.

Research into ascending sensory pathways and cortical networks has generated detailed models of perception. These same cortical regions are strongly connected to subcortical structures, such as the basal ganglia (BG), which have been conceptualized as playing key roles in reinforcement learning and action selection. However, because the BG amasses experiential evidence from higher and lower levels of cortical hierarchies, as well as higher-order thalamus, it is well positioned to dynamically influence perception. Here, we review anatomical, functional, and clinical evidence to demonstrate how the BG can influence perceptual processing and conscious states. This depends on the integrative relationship between cortex, BG, and thalamus, which allows contributions to sensory gating, predictive processing, selective attention, and representation of the temporal structure of events.

Event boundary perception in audio described films by people without sight

AbstractAudio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD versions were utilized, differing in the explicitness of conveyed event boundaries. Results reveal that the participants without sight generally perceived event boundaries similarly to their sighted peers, affirming AD's effectiveness in conveying event structures. However, when key event boundaries were more implicitly expressed, event boundary recognition diminished. Collectively, these findings offer valuable insights into event segmentation processes across sensory modalities. Additionally, they underscore the significance of how AD presents event boundaries, influencing the perception and interpretation of audiovisual media for people with a visual impairment and providing applied insights into event segmentation, multimodal processing, and audiovisual accessibility.

Machine Learning of Reactive Potentials.

In the past two decades, machine learning potentials (MLPs) have driven significant developments in chemical, biological, and material sciences. The construction and training of MLPs enable fast and accurate simulations and analysis of thermodynamic and kinetic properties. This review focuses on the application of MLPs to reaction systems with consideration of bond breaking and formation. We review the development of MLP models, primarily with neural network and kernel-based algorithms, and recent applications of reactive MLPs (RMLPs) to systems at different scales. We show how RMLPs are constructed, how they speed up the calculation of reactive dynamics, and how they facilitate the study of reaction trajectories, reaction rates, free energy calculations, and many other calculations. Different data sampling strategies applied in building RMLPs are also discussed with a focus on how to collect structures for rare events and how to further improve their performance with active learning.

The role of working memory capacity in the temporal compression of episodic memories: An individual differences approach.

Remembering past events usually takes less time than their actual duration-their unfolding is temporally compressed in episodic memory. The rate of temporal compression (i.e., the ratio of the actual duration of an event to the duration of its remembering) is not constant but varies between individuals and as a function of the structure of events (e.g., how they can be divided into shorter subevents). However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these variations remain poorly understood. Given its role in the encoding and retrieval of information in episodic memory, working memory (WM) capacity could be an important determinant of temporal compression rates. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments in which we asked participants to watch and then mentally replay short videos showing people engaged in daily life activities. We showed that temporal compression rates depend on an interplay between WM and the structure of the remembered events: participants' WM capacity (assessed using complex span tasks) was negatively associated with temporal compression rates, but only when the remembered events contained few event boundaries (i.e., few subevents). This suggests that the temporal compression of events in episodic memory emerges when some of the subevents to be retained are too long to be fully represented in WM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A graph propagation model with rich event structures for joint event relation extraction

The task of event relation extraction (ERE) aims to organize multiple events and their relations as a directed graph. However, existing ERE methods exhibit two limitations: (1) Events in a document are typically expressed with merely a trigger word or phrase neglecting the rich semantic structure of event arguments and roles. (2) Various event relations such as coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations are correlated with each other, while little work has explored the benefits of extracting all relations in a joint manner. In this work, we investigate an event-relation graph propagation network and a novel document-level semantically-enriched event representation for joint ERE. First, we address the lack of event argument annotations by extracting cross-sentence implicit arguments based on the AMR graph. Then triggers and argument roles are aggregated with a structure-aware encoder. Second, based on the rich event information, event relation interactions are incorporated with a subgraph propagation and aggregation mechanism. During training, we further develop a novel triadic contrastive loss to capture high-order event pair relationships. We conduct experiments based on the public MAVEN-ERE benchmark and the results show that our model achieves 60.7%, 37.4%, 32.9% F1-scores on temporal, causal and subevent relations, and 86.1% MUC-score on coreferences, outperforming the current joint models by a large margin. Further in-depth analysis shows the effectiveness of our model in capturing event-event dependencies in document context. The proposed model can be used for event graph construction and storyline understanding.

Comprehensive Study on the 143 A.D. West Gangu Earthquake in the West Qinling Area, Northeastern Margin of Tibetan Plateau

The 143 A.D. west Gangu earthquake is documented to have occurred in the West Qinling area, which is located on the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau. Initial limited historical records suggest the earthquake took place along the West Qinling fault (WQLF) in the western region of Gangu County. However, the absence of corresponding geological and geomorphological evidence has posed a considerable challenge in accurately quantifying parameters such as the precise location, magnitude, and seismogenic fault segment in earlier investigations. In this study, a comprehensive examination of multiple residual surface rupture zones within the macroseismic zone of this earthquake enabled the determination of the seismogenic structure, magnitude, and rupture zone scale through diverse methodologies, which include field geological investigations, chronology testing, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial surveying, and interpretation of landslides along the fault zone. The results reveal that the seismogenic structure of this seismic event is associated with the Zhangxian fault segment of the WQLF, also marked by a dense distribution of large landslides from Zhangxian to Yuanyangzhen. The epicenter was identified at the eastern end of the Zhangxian fault segment of the WQLF. Furthermore, the magnitude of the 143 A.D. west Gangu earthquake is estimated to be approximately Ms 7–7.3, with the residual surface rupture zone intermittently extending over about 22 km and a maximum horizontal dislocation along the rupture zone of 2.8 ± 0.5 m. This detailed investigation contributes foundational insights for further evaluating the seismic risk across various segments of the WQLF.

Interpreting causee in a ‘permissive’ causative: A case study on Teochew

The verbal domain has been long argued to be a strong phase, of which the origin can be traced back to the discussions on theta role assignment in Chomsky (2000). This study contributes to the phasehood issue at the understudied LF by exploring the argument thematic interpretation in the verbal domain. I argue that in Teochew permissive bun-causative, the interpretation of causee as an understudied external argument is not listed as syntactic primitives, but rather as post-syntactic derivatives derived from syntactically-oriented causal event structure. Such a causal event structure is first affected by the eventuality of the embedded predicate and then influenced by two modalities sublexically encoded in the embedding causative verb, namely a volitional modality in the at-issue meaning and a deontic modality in the presupposition. Such a two-step contextualization mechanism constrains the final interpretation of causee, and, for the first time, sheds light on discussions on the domain sensitivity at LF.

Enhancing Chinese Event Extraction with Event Trigger Structures

The dependency syntactic structure is widely used in event extraction. However, the dependency structure reflecting syntactic features is essentially different from the event structure that reflects semantic features, leading to the performance degradation. In this paper, we propose to use Event Trigger Structure for Event Extraction (ETSEE), which can compensate the inconsistency between two structures. First, we leverage the ACE2005 dataset as case study, and annotate 3 kinds of ETSs, i.e., “light verb + trigger”, “preposition structures” and “tense + trigger”. Then we design a graph-based event extraction model that jointly identifies triggers and arguments, where the graph consists of both the dependency structure and ETSs. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Through empirical analysis and manual observation, we find that the ETSs can bring the following benefits: (1) enriching trigger identification features by introducing structural event information; (2) enriching dependency structures with event semantic information; (3) enhancing the interactions between triggers and candidate arguments by shortening their distances in the dependency graph.

Comparing Entomology-Themed Outreach Events: Annual Festivals and Open Houses in the United States.

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing prevalence of entomology-themed outreach events, which seek to educate the public about insects and other arthropods, fostering a greater appreciation and understanding of these often misunderstood organisms. In 2016, a comparative analysis was initiated to identify science institutions across the United States engaged in providing annual entomology-themed outreach events to the public. Utilizing literature reviews and online searches, several science institutions were identified and subsequently contacted to partake in a survey regarding their events. The survey received a response rate of 93%. Results from the survey offered valuable insights into these entomology-themed outreach events, including records of attendance, event structures, funding sources, popular exhibits, and the impacts on attendees, hosting institutions, and local communities. While the majority of these events have remained in place since the survey, many have experienced significant disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting some to adapt to innovative online formats and virtual experiences. Despite these challenges, the commitment to entomological outreach continues today, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of the entomology community.

The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type

ABSTRACT This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children’s performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that children perform better with passives of predicates that encode a result state, either because they tend to make better adjectival passives or because they have a complex event structure. Moreover, the UPR predicts poorer performance with long passives (i.e., those with a by-phrase) than with short passives, to the extent that construing an adjectival interpretation is more difficult when a by-phrase is present; the UFH predicts no difference between the two. Portuguese-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 8 years were tested on their comprehension of verbal passives of non-actional predicates and actional predicates with or without a result state, using two sentence-picture matching tasks. The results do not entirely fulfill the predictions of the UPR and the UFH: we replicate the delay seen in English with non-actional predicates, but no effect of the result state is seen in the case of actional predicates. We propose that the relevant aspectual property of the passivized predicate may be affectedness rather than the availability of a result state.

Wipe the table clean – German speakers construe telicity differently in adjectival resultatives and transitives

Change of state expressions involving weak-endstate verbs such as wipe and drink exhibit variation in telicity. The present study is the first to experimentally investigate change of state expressions referred to as adjectival control resultatives (e.g., wipe the table clean) and the corresponding simple transitives (e.g., wipe the table) regarding their telicity readings. Based on their semantic properties, we ask whether German speakers interpret adjectival resultatives as telic and simple transitives as fluctuating between telic and atelic. Following an event-structural approach to telicity, we also seek to contribute to the issue of which event-semantic properties adjectival resultatives and simple transitives share: if it is the adjective that evokes a telic interpretation, then the possible telic interpretation of simple transitives must arise by different means, suggesting a non-uniform construal of telicity. Twenty-one adults participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that varied Structure (resultative/transitive) and Event type (complete/incomplete). Generalized mixed effects logistic regression revealed a significant interaction between Event type and Structure. For complete events, acceptance was at ceiling for both structures. For incomplete events, acceptance was significantly lower for resultatives than for simple transitives. These results indicate that in adjectival resultatives telicity is construed semantically – via entailment – and in the corresponding simple transitives via a pragmatic inference, which is not computed very often. We propose that this type of simple transitives designates process events, exactly like their intransitive variant. Resultatives designate a transition event: the adjective and the main verb form a complex predicate; adjectives with closed scales like clean encode the prominent endstate subevent and the verb encodes the process subevent.

Image schemas and (point)-to-point event model for the macro-event

Abstract The macro-event is a fundamental concept in Talmyan motion event typology. A large literature has been documented concerning the status of a particular language in the two-way typology that he proposes, but relatively little literature focusing on the morphosyntactic dimension of the macro-event per se, let alone on the cognitive motivation of the macro-event. This article analyzes the types of macro-events expressed by directional complement constructions in Mandarin, and argues that the macro-events are image-schema-based. The simple image schemas give rise to a more complex three-event-semantic-model, termed (point)-to-point , or to be more particular, (point a)-to-point b, in which to represents the affecting or intervening event, point a represents the original state of point b, point b is the resulting event. point a is usually implied, not explicitly expressed, so it is put in brackets. This model has advantages over Talmy’s main event and co-event structure in that it can largely predict the meaning-form mapping, and explain more constructions. The findings have some implications for cognitive semantics: In grammar, languages generally prioritize the third event; the complex event model might be motivated by simple image schemas.

A general framework and decentralised algorithms for collective computational processes

Recent research on collective adaptive systems and macro-programming has shown the importance of programming abstractions for expressing the self-organising behaviour of ensembles, large and dynamic sets of collaborating devices. These generally leverage the interplay between the execution model and the program logic to steer the global-level emergent behaviour of the system. One notable example is the aggregate process abstraction: in an asynchronous round-based computational model, it allows to specify how aggregate-level computations are spawned, take form or spread on a domain of devices, and ultimately quit. Previous presentations of aggregate processes, however, are given in the formal framework of the field calculus, requiring knowledge of its syntax and articulated semantics. To provide a more accessible and language-agnostic presentation of such an abstraction, in this paper we introduce a general formal framework of collective computational processes (CCP). Specifically, as key contribution, we model and describe the programming interface (spawn construct) and dynamics of CCPs on event structures. Furthermore, we also propose novel algorithms for efficient propagation and termination of CCPs, based on statistics on the information speed and a notion of progressive wave-like closure. Crucially, thanks to our theoretical framework, we can provide optimality guarantees for the proposed algorithms, whose performance, superior to the state of the art, is assessed by simulation. Finally, to show applicability of CCPs, we provide a case study of situated service discovery in peer-to-peer networks.

An Axiomatic Theory for Reversible Computation

Undoing computations of a concurrent system is beneficial in many situations, such as in reversible debugging of multi-threaded programs and in recovery from errors due to optimistic execution in parallel discrete event simulation. A number of approaches have been proposed for how to reverse formal models of concurrent computation, including process calculi such as CCS, languages like Erlang, and abstract models such as prime event structures and occurrence nets. However, it has not been settled as to what properties a reversible system should enjoy, nor how the various properties that have been suggested, such as the parabolic lemma and the causal-consistency property, are related. We contribute to a solution to these issues by using a generic labelled transition system equipped with a relation capturing whether transitions are independent to explore the implications between various reversibility properties. In particular, we show how all properties we consider are derivable from a set of axioms. Our intention is that when establishing properties of some formalism, it will be easier to verify the axioms rather than proving properties such as the parabolic lemma directly. We also introduce two new properties related to causal-consistent reversibility, namely causal liveness and causal safety, stating, respectively, that an action can be undone if (causal liveness) and only if (causal safety) it is independent from all of the following actions. These properties come in three flavours: defined in terms of independent transitions, independent events, or via an ordering on events. Both causal liveness and causal safety are derivable from our axioms.

Creating and studying a scaled interplanetary coronal mass ejection

The Sun, being an active star, undergoes eruptions of magnetized plasma that reach the Earth and cause the aurorae near the poles. These eruptions, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), send plasma and magnetic fields out into space. CMEs that reach planetary orbits are called interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) and are a source of geomagnetic storms, which can cause major damage to our modern electrical systems with limited warning. To study ICME propagation, we devised a scaled experiment using the Big Red Ball (BRB) plasma containment device at the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory. These experiments inject a compact torus of plasma as an ICME through an ambient plasma inside the BRB, which acts as the interplanetary medium. Magnetic and temperature probes provide three-dimensional magnetic field information in time and space, as well as temperature and density as a function of time. Using this information, we can identify features in the compact torus that are consistent with those in real ICMEs. We also identify the shock, sheath, and ejecta similar to the structure of an ICME event. This experiment acts as a first step to providing information that can inform predictive models, which can give us time to shield our satellites and large electrical systems in the event that a powerful ICME were to strike.

Locally Abstract, Globally Concrete Semantics of Concurrent Programming Languages

Formal, mathematically rigorous programming language semantics are the essential prerequisite for the design of logics and calculi that permit automated reasoning about concurrent programs. We propose a novel modular semantics designed to align smoothly with program logics used in deductive verification and formal specification of concurrent programs. Our semantics separates local evaluation of expressions and statements performed in an abstract, symbolic environment from their composition into global computations, at which point they are concretised. This makes incremental addition of new language concepts possible, without the need to revise the framework. The basis is a generalisation of the notion of a program trace as a sequence of evolving states that we enrich with event descriptors and trailing continuation markers. This allows to postpone scheduling constraints from the level of local evaluation to the global composition stage, where well-formedness predicates over the event structure declaratively characterise a wide range of concurrency models. We also illustrate how a sound program logic and calculus can be defined for this semantics.

CHRONOS: A Schema-Based Event Understanding and Prediction System

Chronological and Hierarchical Reasoning Over Naturally Occurring Schemas (CHRONOS) is a system that combines language model-based natural language processing with symbolic knowledge representations to analyze and make predictions about newsworthy events. CHRONOS consists of an event-centric information extraction pipeline and a complex event schema instantiation and prediction system. Resulting predictions are detailed with arguments, event types from Wikidata, schema-based justifications, and source document provenance. We evaluate our system by its ability to capture the structure of unseen events described in news articles and make plausible predictions as judged by human annotators.