Event Structure Research Articles

Large-scale neural dynamics in a shared low-dimensional state space reflect cognitive and attentional dynamics.

Cognition and attention arise from the adaptive coordination of neural systems in response to external and internal demands. The low-dimensional latent subspace that underlies large-scale neural dynamics and the relationships of these dynamics to cognitive and attentional states, however, are unknown. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging as human participants performed attention tasks, watched comedy sitcom episodes and an educational documentary, and rested. Whole-brain dynamics traversed a common set of latent states that spanned canonical gradients of functional brain organization, with global desynchronization among functional networks modulating state transitions. Neural state dynamics were synchronized across people during engaging movie watching and aligned to narrative event structures. Neural state dynamics reflected attention fluctuations such that different states indicated engaged attention in task and naturalistic contexts, whereas a common state indicated attention lapses in both contexts. Together, these results demonstrate that traversals along large-scale gradients of human brain organization reflect cognitive and attentional dynamics.

Neural temporal context reinstatement of event structure during memory recall.

The transformation of experiences into meaningful events and memories is intertwined with the notion of time. Temporal perception can influence, and be influenced by, segmenting continuous experience into meaningful events. Episodic memories formed from these events become associated with temporal information as well. However, it is less clear how temporal perception contributes to structuring events and organizing memory: whether it plays a more active or passive role, and whether this temporal information is encoded initially during perception or influenced by retrieval processes. To address these questions, we examined how event segmentation influences temporal representations during initial perception and memory retrieval, without testing temporal information explicitly. Using a neural measure of temporal context extracted from scalp electroencephalography in human participants (N = 170), we found reduced temporal context similarity between studied items separated by an event boundary when compared to items from the same event. Furthermore, while participants freely recalled list items, neural activity reflected reinstatement of temporal context representations from the study phase, including temporal disruption. A computational model of episodic memory, the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) model, predicted these results, and made novel predictions regarding the influence of temporal disruption on recall order. These findings implicate the impact of event structure on memory organization via temporal representations, underscoring the role of temporal information in event segmentation and episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Safety of using computer electroacupuncture in the treatment of internal diseases (systematic review)

Objective: to evaluate the frequency, structure and severity of adverse events (AEs) likely associated with computerized electroacupuncture (CEAP) in the complex treatment of diseases of internal organs. Metodology of review. Nine own studies were analyzed, which involved 639 patients suffering from bronchial asthma (BA), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Patients of the main groups, in addition to standard therapy, received courses of CEAP according to a certain scheme. The frequency, severity, structure and relationship of AEs with CEAP were assessed. Conclusion. The use of CEAP in the treatment of patients with IBS is not associated with an increase in the number of AEs. The frequency of AEs, probably associated with the use of CEAP, did not exceed 2.5 cases per 100 people per one course of CEAP.

Neural mechanisms of event visibility in sign languages

ABSTRACT In unrelated sign languages event structure is reflected in the dynamic form of verbs, and hearing non-signers are known to be able to recognise these visual event structures. This study assessed the time course of neural processing mechanisms in non-signers to examine the pathways for incorporation of physical-perceptual motion features into the linguistic system. In an EEG study, hearing non-signers classified telic/atelic verb signs (two-choice lexical decision task). The ERP effects reflect differences in perceptual processing of verb types (early anterior ERP effects) and integration of perceptual and linguistic processing required by the task (later posterior ERP effects). Non-signers appear to segment signed input into discrete events as they try to map the sign to a linguistic concept. This might indicate the potential pathway for co-optation of perceptual features into the linguistic structure of sign languages.

Graph-Enhanced Biomedical Abstractive Summarization Via Factual Evidence Extraction

Infusing structured semantic representations into language models is a rising research trend underpinning many natural language processing tasks that require understanding and reasoning capabilities. Decoupling factual non-ambiguous concept units from the lexical surface holds great potential in abstractive summarization, especially in the biomedical domain, where fact selection and rephrasing are made more difficult by specialized jargon and hard factuality constraints. Nevertheless, current graph-augmented contributions rely on extractive binary relations, failing to model real-world n-ary and nested biomedical interactions mentioned in the text. To alleviate this issue, we present EASumm, the first framework for biomedical abstractive summarization empowered by event extraction, namely graph-based representations of relevant medical evidence derived from the source scientific document. By relying on dual text-graph encoders, we prove the promising role of explicit event structures, achieving better or comparable performance than previous state-of-the-art models on the CDSR dataset. We conduct extensive ablation studies, including a wide experimentation of graph representation learning techniques. Finally, we offer some hints to guide future research in the field.

Hierarchical Event Grounding

Event grounding aims at linking mention references in text corpora to events from a knowledge base (KB). Previous work on this task focused primarily on linking to a single KB event, thereby overlooking the hierarchical aspects of events. Events in documents are typically described at various levels of spatio-temporal granularity. These hierarchical relations are utilized in downstream tasks of narrative understanding and schema construction. In this work, we present an extension to the event grounding task that requires tackling hierarchical event structures from the KB. Our proposed task involves linking a mention reference to a set of event labels from a subevent hierarchy in the KB. We propose a retrieval methodology that leverages event hierarchy through an auxiliary hierarchical loss. On an automatically created multilingual dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical loss against retrieve and re-rank baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate the systems' ability to aid hierarchical discovery among unseen events. Code is available at https://github.com/JefferyO/Hierarchical-Event-Grounding

A shared neural code for the physics of actions and object events

Observing others’ actions recruits frontoparietal and posterior temporal brain regions – also called the action observation network. It is typically assumed that these regions support recognizing actions of animate entities (e.g., person jumping over a box). However, objects can also participate in events with rich meaning and structure (e.g., ball bouncing over a box). So far, it has not been clarified which brain regions encode information specific to goal-directed actions or more general information that also defines object events. Here, we show a shared neural code for visually presented actions and object events throughout the action observation network. We argue that this neural representation captures the structure and physics of events regardless of animacy. We find that lateral occipitotemporal cortex encodes information about events that is also invariant to stimulus modality. Our results shed light onto the representational profiles of posterior temporal and frontoparietal cortices, and their roles in encoding event information.

Variation in nest‐site occupancy and breeding outcome in a threatened Subantarctic raptor

Breeding outcome in birds can be influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, which may contribute differentially to each stage of the breeding cycle. Island raptors are relatively threatened species that rely on simplified food webs and usually co‐occur with invasive species. Here, we studied a population of Striated Caracara Phalcoboenus australis in Isla de los Estados (Argentina) to understand the relative contribution of food availability, topographical features and territoriality to breeding parameters. Caracaras in the area depend on the short seasonal (i.e. pulsed) availability of seabirds for feeding their chicks. On the other hand, the recent introduction of non‐native ungulates may have led to a suboptimal breeding environment by reducing Caracara nest‐site availability within the seabird colonies via disturbance of the grassland. Using data from seven breeding seasons we analyse the abundance, the proportion of breeding individuals, the spatial structure of breeding events and the population‐level breeding performance, including chick sex ratio, to study whether the breeding ecology of this species is still shaped by marine food web pulses or could be associated with invasive herbivore disturbance. The breeding adults represented only 6–15% of the population. The spatial pattern of nest‐sites did not differ from random arrangement after considering the heterogeneous distribution of food availability. Territory identity accounted for most of the variation in clutch size and productivity, and penguin availability explained part of the variability in territory occupancy and hatching rate. The chick sex ratio was biased towards females and varied according to brood size, with the more productive territories producing 91% of males. The breeding cycle of this population is still mainly dependent upon the Rockhopper Penguin Eudyptes chrysocome food pulse and presents mixed evidence of being disrupted by invasive herbivores. The studied factors contributed differentially to the output of each reproductive stage, with territory identity accounting for most of the variation. Our results suggest that individual‐level, long‐term data could be relevant to understanding the dynamics of this species in the Fuegian archipelago, and thus a broad‐scale research programme is warranted to assess the conservation status and propose future management scenarios for this species.

Language contact between Italian and English: a case study on nouns ending in the suffix -ing

Abstract The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix -ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix -ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in -ing, borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian.

Conflict Reduction of Acyclic Flow Event Structures

Event structures are a well-known modeling formalism for concurrent systems with causality and conflict relations. The flow event structure (FES) is a variant of event structures, which is a generalization of the prime event structure. In an FES, two events may be in conflict even though they are not syntactically in conflict; this is called a semantic conflict. The existence of semantic conflict in an FES motivates reducing conflict relations (i.e., conflict reduction) to obtain a simpler structure. In this paper, we study conflict reduction in acyclic FESs. A necessary and sufficient condition for conflict reduction is given; algorithms to compute semantic conflict, local configurations, and conflict reduction are proposed. A great time reduction was observed in computational experiments when comparing the proposed with the naive method.

DEVELOPING INDICATORS OF OPEN INNOVATION EVENT OUTCOMES

Open innovation (OI) events are potent instruments for the development of dynamic ecosystems. However, the literature analyses the structure and mechanisms of OI events insufficiently to demonstrate their efficacy, making it difficult to justify the investments necessary for their success. With better data confirming their impact, funding for OI events should improve by becoming more accessible and, therefore, more conducive to efficient value creation. This regional study contributes to the literature on innovation ecosystems and field-configuring events by responding to the call for more effective measures of OI events to coordinate and improve the ecosystems’ overall competitiveness. Based on an analysis of six in-depth case studies, 28 semi-structured interviews, and secondary sources, we identify 54 best practices and 34 indicators of an event’s success for various actor types. Moreover, we suggest 11 measures of the short- and long-term impacts of an event on its ecosystem.

On ring-like event systems in quantum logic

A class of ring-like structures of events (RLSEs) is studied that generalizes Boolean rings. Quantum logics represented by orthomodular lattices are characterized within this class and the correspondence between Boolean algebras and Boolean rings is enlarged to orthomodular lattices. The structure of RLSEs and various subclasses is analyzed and classical logics are especially identified. Moreover, sets of numerical events within different contexts of physical problems are described. A numerical event is defined as a function [Formula: see text] from a set [Formula: see text] of states of a physical system to [Formula: see text] such that [Formula: see text] is the probability of the occurrence of an event when the system is in state [Formula: see text]. In particular, the question is answered whether a given (small) set of numerical events will give rise to the assumption that one deals with a classical physical system or a quantum-mechanical one.

The Concepts of Discourse and the Theoretical Genealogy of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis has become an important research approach in humanities and social sciences, involving a wide range of disciplines, schools and theories. Among the research literatures, which are named “discourse” or “discourse analysis”, there are significant differences in conceptual connotation and analysis frameworks, which are actually different from the theoretical origin and genealogy. In early studies, in view of structural linguistics, discourse is defined as “language above the sentence”, and discourse analysis is focused on the structure of language. The discourse analysis from the functional perspective emphasizes the use of language, highlighting the language users, the purpose and intention of the language users, or the situational context, including form/function analysis and context analysis. In social science, in approach of post-structuralism, discourse is “a form of social practice in which language plays a central role”, and discourse analysis is dedicated to revealing the social contradictions, conflicts and fairness, as well as the constructive role of discourse in the macro-social, cultural and historical process. The convergence of functional perspective and post-structuralist paradigm of discourse analysis has led to critical discourse analysis, an interdisciplinary field which inherits the post-structuralist view of language, cares about social practice, and at the same time attaches importance to linguistic texts. van Dijk's “Discourse-Cognitive-Social” analysis model, Wodak's “Discourse/History” critical discourse analysis model, and Fairclough's “Social event, Social practice, and Social structure" analytical framework are the typical representatives of critical discourse analysis.

Causal Unfoldings and Disjunctive Causes

In the simplest form of event structure, a prime event structure, an event is associated with a unique causal history, its prime cause. However, it is quite common for an event to have disjunctive causes in that it can be enabled by any one of multiple sets of causes. Sometimes the sets of causes may be mutually exclusive, inconsistent one with another, and sometimes not, in which case they coexist consistently and constitute parallel causes of the event. The established model of general event structures can model parallel causes. On occasion however such a model abstracts too far away from the precise causal histories of events to be directly useful. For example, sometimes one needs to associate probabilities with different, possibly coexisting, causal histories of a common event. Ideally, the causal histories of a general event structure would correspond to the configurations of its causal unfolding to a prime event structure; and the causal unfolding would arise as a right adjoint to the embedding of prime in general event structures. But there is no such adjunction. However, a slight extension of prime event structures remedies this defect and provides a causal unfolding as a universal construction. Prime event structures are extended with an equivalence relation in order to dissociate the two roles, that of an event and its enabling; in effect, prime causes are labelled by a disjunctive event, an equivalence class of its prime causes. With this enrichment a suitable causal unfolding appears as a pseudo right adjoint. The adjunction relies critically on the central and subtle notion of extremal causal realisation as an embodiment of causal history. Finally, we explore subcategories which support parallel causes as well the key operations needed in developing probabilistic distributed strategies with parallel causes.

Spatial Variation in the Synoptic Structure of Convective Systems over the Great Plains

Abstract During the summer, rainfall over the Rocky Mountains peaks in the afternoon. The diurnal time of maximum rain becomes progressively delayed in going eastward from the Rocky Mountains, such that over much of the Great Plains, maximum rain occurs near 0300 local time. We use Rapid Refresh (RAP) reanalysis data from July and August of 2009–19 to show that there is continuous spatial variation in the mean structure of the high-rain events that occur along this anomalous diurnally propagating rainfall feature. High-rain events that occur farther from the Rockies are more likely to be associated with a larger warm anomaly to the south of the rain event center, a smaller cold anomaly, a larger negative surface pressure anomaly, and increased low-level southerly meridional wind. We also use the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) rainfall dataset to show that, on hourly time scales, afternoon rainfall that occurs over the Rocky Mountains propagates eastward onto the Great Plains but is rapidly attenuated and becomes negligible east of 100°W. This eastward rainfall propagation appears to be mediated in part by the formation of a low-level cold anomaly and increased surface pressure over the Rocky Mountains, a reversal of the upslope wind, and increased low-level zonal mass convergence over the adjacent near plains. Significance Statement Models have difficulty in simulating the diurnal time of nocturnal rainfall over the Great Plains. Deep convection in this region is often associated with severe weather. Rainfall variability over the Great Plains has a significant impact on soil moisture and agricultural productivity. This paper explores how the structure of deep convective rain events over the Great Plains varies with longitude. The results improve our understanding of deep convection development in the Great Plains and have the potential to contribute to improved forecasts of convective rainfall.

Event Detection With Dynamic Word-Trigger-Argument Graph Neural Networks

The task of ACE Event Detection (ED) often encounters ambiguous and unseen trigger words. Most conventional ED systems exclusively consider the semantic or syntactic patterns as the additional evidence to resolve the problem of the ambiguous and unseen triggers, but rarely consider taking advantages of structured knowledge of the event itself. In this study, we propose Dynamic Word-Trigger-Argument Graph Neural Networks (DWTA-GNN), a novel framework that leverages event structure knowledge to facilitate the two issues simultaneously. In our approach, we utilize words, entities, and event annotations from training to construct an event background graph, which can provide sufficient information of event structure to better disambiguate polysemous triggers and identify unseen triggers. To make full use of the constructed background graph, we further design a knowledge matching module to dynamically match appropriate event structure knowledge and construct a subgraph for each incoming sentence. Besides, an event-selective graph convolution is applied to filter out the noise in the matched knowledge so as to enhance event representation. Experiments on the ACE2005 dataset show that our model achieves competitive performance and advances previous approaches on ambiguous and unseen trigger words, verifying the effectiveness of incorporating event structure knowledge for event detection.

Anatomy of a Summertime Convective Event over the Arabian Region

Abstract This study investigates the structure and evolution of a summertime convective event that occurred on 14 July 2015 over the Arabian region. We use the WRF Model with 1-km horizontal grid spacing and test three PBL parameterizations: the Mellor–Yamada–Nakanishi–Niino (MYNN) scheme; the Asymmetrical Convective Model, version 2, (ACM2) scheme; and the quasi-normal scale-elimination (QNSE) scheme. Convection initiates near the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman at around 1100 local time (LT; 0700 UTC) and propagates northwestward. A nonorographic convective band along the west coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) develops after 1500 LT as a result of the convergence of cold pools with the sea breeze from the Arabian Gulf. The model simulation employing the QNSE scheme simulates the convection initiation and propagation well. Although the MYNN and ACM2 simulations show convective initiation near the Al Hajar Mountains, they fail to simulate the development of the convective band along the UAE west coast. The MYNN run simulates colder near-surface temperatures and a weaker sea breeze, whereas the ACM2 run simulates a stronger sea breeze but a drier lower troposphere. Sensitivity simulations using horizontal grid spacings of 9 and 3 km show that lower-resolution runs develop broader convective structures and weaker cold pools and horizontal wind divergence, affecting the development of convection along the west coast of the UAE. The 1-km run using the QNSE PBL scheme realistically captures the sequence of events that leads to the moist convection over the UAE and adjacent mountains.

Weakening monsoon event during 2.8 ka BP in East China linked to the North Atlantic cooling

The timing and structure of the past weakening monsoon events, such as the 2.8 ka BP event, is critical for testing the simulation experiment of extreme climate prediction in the future. But the lack of continuous records with high resolution based on precise chronology during 2.8 ka BP hinders the better understanding of the event. In this study, we present a new annually-resolved stalagmite δ18O record covering the 2.8 ka BP event with precisely independent chronology from Central China. Combined with other 7 well-dated stalagmite δ18O records from East China covering 2.8 ka BP period with resolution less than 10 years, the Asian summer monsoon (ASM) signal has been extracted by the principal component analysis (PCA), and the ASM sequence has been built by the first principal component (PC1) on a decadal scale. Two weakening anomalies of the ASM are presented by PC1 during the 2.8 ka BP event and this event has been identified by 1 standard deviation with an asymmetric two-plunging structure and a duration of ∼310 years. The comparisons between the ASM weakening derived from multiple stalagmite δ18O records in this study and the solar insolation minimum with the North Atlantic cooling, suggest that the synchronous North Atlantic cooling should play an important role on the monsoon weakening in East Asia, while the delayed insolation minimum must be impossible to trigger the 2.8 ka BP event. But low solar radiation may magnify the variation amplitude of the monsoon weakening around 2.7 ka BP, which suggest both internal variability and external forcing impact on the 2.8 ka BP event.

Crude oil transportation route choices: A connectivity reliability-based approach

The crucial nodes of maritime transportation routes, such as the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, remain vulnerable to various risk events including political instability and military conflict, piracy and terrorism, and vessel incidents. Existing shipping route choice studies often consider transportation costs and environmental effects, but ignore the connectivity reliability of these straits and canals. In this paper, we develop a bi-objective programming model to determine maritime transportation routes for crude oil, taking both transportation costs and connectivity reliability into consideration. We propose a method to measure the connectivity reliability of straits and canals, which captures the dependence structure of risk events. We apply our model to evaluate Gwadar Port using data covering 1999 to 2021, which is being built to enhance the reliability of Chinese oil imports. We find that the Gwadar Port can substitute for the Lombok Strait only if its connectivity reliability can be improved by 2.4%. In order to fully exploit the strategic advantages of Gwadar Port in substituting for other key straits, its connectivity reliability must be improved by 12.2%. Given the varying dependence of risk events identified in our model, our findings provide rich managerial and policy implications for connectivity reliability improvement.

Constructing the Image of Feminism in Russian Media: A Corpus Study

As any social movement, feminism finds its reflection in the media. Media are a full-fledged institution capable of shaping public consciousness, targeting particular social groups, setting standards of mass behavior, and determining the main directions of social development. This research featured Russian news about feminism in terms of event structure. It covered news headlines published in Russian media in 2014-2021 and retrieved via the Smi2.ru media aggregator. Feminism-related headlines were automatically extracted from a dataset of 8,954 headlines. The subcorpus was analyzed in the Semograph Information System, which made it possible to classify texts, obtain frequency data on certain classes, and establish connections between them. The frequency data analysis was represented as a graphical model of the news space in the field of feminism using the SciVi visualizer. The event and thematic analyses revealed a three-level classification. The media usually informed about events where participants belonged to various social groups that protested against something, e.g., people or performances. The news informed about the actions and reactions of media people and about art sphere. The article introduces a graphical model that shows the links between event components in the headlines. It demonstrated three main areas of action in the field of feminism: art, media, and feminist movements. Each of these fields has its own core and structure. The media sphere appeared to be closed on itself; the art-related news agenda focused mostly on social matters; the field of feminist movements was associated with counteracting and involved descriptions of radical actions. When informing about feminism, the media construct an alternative reality that differs from the real issues that feminism aims at resolving.