Robust Corpus Research Articles

The Movement of slow: From English to Italian and Back Again. A Diachronic Corpus-Based Study

The present study explores the changes in the meaning of the word slow, both in Italian and English, from the beginning of the Slow Food Movement (SFM) up to 2019. Since 1989 and the early days of Carlo Petrini’s SFM, technology has increasingly led people towards multi-tasking in an attempt to save time, while at the same time, back to the past trends are increasingly evident as seen in several other Slow Movements, for example, in catering and hand-made/retro chains. The concept of slowness is becoming a relevant and ethical topic that is often related to what is organic, local and sustainable, leading to the introduction of an anglicism in Italian, but also to a new whole re-semantization of the word slow in English. The primary objective of this study is to explore the semantic changes in the word slow diachronically both in Italian and in English. To this aim, two robust corpora were created, one from the Italian newspaper La Stampa and the other from the British The Guardian. The word slow was analysed within the different newspaper domains exploring frequencies, collocates, and identifying significant “repeated events” (Sinclair 2004: 28) together with their semantic preferences. Results from the diachronic analysis show that through the SFM, the word slow has taken on specific new meanings in Italian, related to the dimensions of ethics, wellbeing, and environmental awareness. These were then partly re-introduced in English. More specifically, the case of reborrowing of slow within the context of movements (slow fashion, slow tourism, etc.) has quite likely been influenced by the Italian SFM. As a matter of fact, this process of reborrowing involves both acquisition and loss in meaning in both languages. This seems to be a relevant phenomenon in a global context of constant linguistic contact where English appears to play a relevant role as a global language.

Applied Machine Learning Predictive Analytics to SQL Injection Attack Detection and Prevention

Abstract: The back-end database is pivotal to the storage of the massive size of big data Internet exchanges stemming from cloud-hosted web applications to Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices. Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection Attack (SQLIA) remains an intruder’s exploit of choice on vulnerable web applications to pilfer confidential data from the database with potentially damaging consequences. The existing solutions of mostly signature approaches were all before the recent challenges of big data mining and at such lacks the functionality and ability to cope with new signatures concealed in web requests. An alternative Machine Learning (ML) predictive analytics provides a functional and scalable mining to big data in detection and prevention of SQLIA. Unfortunately, lack of availability of readymade robust corpus or data set with patterns and historical data items to train a classifier are issues well known in SQLIA research. In this project, we explore the generation of data set containing extraction from known attack patterns including SQL tokens and symbols present at injection points. Also, as a test case, we build a web application that expects dictionary word list as vector variables to demonstrate massive quantities of learning data. The data set is pre-processed, labelled and feature hashing for supervised learning. The trained classifier to be deployed as a web service that is consumed in a custom dot NET application implementing a web proxy Application Programming Interface (API) to intercept and accurately predict SQLIA in web requests thereby preventing malicious web requests from reaching the protected back-end database. This project demonstrates a full proof of concept implementation of an ML predictive analytics and deployment of resultant web service that accurately predicts and prevents SQLIA with empirical evaluations presented in Confusion Matrix (CM) and Receiver Operating Curve (ROC).

Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Slovenian Modality in Socially Unacceptable Facebook Comments

This paper investigates the grammatical and pragmatic uses of epistemic and deontic modal expressions in a corpus of Slovenian socially acceptable and unacceptable Facebook comments. We propose a set of modals that do not interpretatively vary in their modality type in order to enable robust corpus searches and reliable quantification of the results. We show that deontic, but not epistemic, modals are significantly more frequent in socially unacceptable comments, and specifically that they favour violent discourse. We complement the quantitative findings with a qualitative analysis of the discursive roles played by the modals. We explore how pragmatic communicative strategies such as hedging, boosting, and face-saving arise from the underlying syntactic and semantic properties of the modal expressions, such as the modal force and clausal syntax.

Progressing, not regressing: A possible solution to the problem of regression to the mean in unconscious processing studies.

How convincing is current evidence for unconscious processing? Recently, a major criticism suggested that some, if not much, of this evidence might be explained by a mere statistical phenomenon: regression to the mean (RttM). Excluding participants based on an awareness assessment is a common practice in studies of unconscious processing, and this post hoc data selection might lead to false effects that are driven by RttM for aware participants wrongfully classified as unaware. Here, we examined this criticism using both simulations and data from 12 studies probing unconscious processing (35 effects overall). In line with the original criticism, we confirmed that the reliability of awareness measures in the field is concerningly low. Yet, using simulations, we showed that reliability measures might be unsuitable for estimating error in awareness measures. Furthermore, we examined other solutions for assessing whether an effect is genuine or reflects RttM; all suffered from substantial limitations, such as a lack of specificity to unconscious processing, lack of power, or unjustified assumptions. Accordingly, we suggest a new nonparametric solution, which enjoys high specificity and relatively high power. Together, this work emphasizes the need to account for measurement error in awareness measures and evaluate its consequences for unconscious processing effects. It further suggests a way to meet the important challenge posed by RttM, in an attempt to establish a reliable and robust corpus of knowledge in studying unconscious processing.

Morphological and morphometric analyses of a late Middle Pleistocene hominin mandible from Hualongdong, China

Excavations in Hualongdong (HLD), East China, have yielded abundant hominin fossils dated to 300 ka. There is a nearly complete mandible that fits well with a partial cranium, and together they compose the skull labeled as HLD 6. Thus far, detailed morphological description and comparisons of the mandible have not been conducted. Here we present a comprehensive morphological, metric, and geometric morphometric assessment of this mandible and compare it with both adult and immature specimens of Pleistocene hominins and recent modern humans. Results indicate that the HLD 6 mandible exhibits a mosaic morphological pattern characterized by a robust corpus and relatively gracile symphysis and ramus. The moderately developed mental trigone and a clear anterior mandibular incurvation of the HLD 6 mandible are reminiscent of Late Pleistocene hominin and recent modern human morphology. However, the weak expression of all these features indicates that this mandible does not possess a true chin. Moreover, a suite of archaic features that resemble those of Middle Pleistocene hominins includes pronounced alveolar planum, superior transverse torus, thick corpus, a pronounced endocondyloid crest, and a well-developed medial pterygoid tubercle. The geometric morphometric analysis further confirms the mosaic pattern of the HLD 6 mandible. The combination of both archaic and modern human features identified in the HLD 6 mandible is unexpected, given its late Middle Pleistocene age and differs from approximately contemporaneous Homo members such as Xujiayao, Penghu, and Xiahe. This mosaic pattern has never been recorded in late Middle Pleistocene hominin fossil assemblages in East Asia. The HLD 6 mandible provides further support for the high morphological diversity during late Middle Pleistocene hominin evolution. With these findings, it is possible that modern human morphologies are present as early as 300 ka and earlier than the emergence of modern humans in East Asia.

Information extraction and application for constructing guidance corpus of welding fabrication

The rapid development of welding fabrication demands guidance data to support expert decision-making, retroactive process, and production pattern upgrades. Yet, the data is lacking. This paper developed the guidance corpus for welding manufacturing. The unstructured document guiding actual production was collected, and the data were segmented into words employing a conditional random field model. In addition, we organized an annotation team and developed the tool to accomplish data annotation using a Begin-Inside-Outside method. Machine learning and deep learning models were trained for the named entity recognition task under supervised learning to accomplish the challenge of corpus scalability. The corpus contained 19,410 labeled pairs of samples and involved multiple entity categories, that is, “standard,”“technology,”“design,”“department,”“manufacturing,” and “quality.” The baseline of the model on Precision, Recall, and F1-score metrics were listed to provide a reference for welding production research. Furthermore, we also gave some examples of task assignments and knowledge retrieval in conjunction with real production problems. The long-term goal was continually to enhance the corpus through more researchers, suggesting that a robust corpus would support more research and engineering applications in the welding domain.

Letter from the Editors

Blackness as a non-monolithic lived experience surrounds us at all times, permeating across institutions and platforms. Within this antiblack singularity where Black is rendered visible through violence and cruelty, Look @ Me Now: Black (In)Visibility across Institutions and Platforms seeks submissions highlighting Black joy, activism, exploration, and liberation as an unapologetic reclamation. Blackness does not and must not fit into Western technocultural modes of being and living. In lieu of challenges, across various spaces, platforms, and institutions perseverance and ingenuity have long served Black people as catalysts for agency and visibility. Shifting perspectives and bending realities, Blackness continues to leave its imprint within cultures, technologies, institutions, and platforms. Black (In)Visibility speaks to Black narratives and traditions as both demanding visibility and foretelling the benefits of an insular and protective interpretation of obscurity. Particularly, the invisibility of Blackness can be combated through non-oppressive systems and frameworks of knowing, doing, and being. What non-traditional frameworks and technologies do we use to make Blackness visible? How do choices of consumption and engagement confront and produce assumptions and frameworks for Blackness and establish alternative frameworks of vitality and joy? And finally, in what ways does visibility, invisibility, or hypervisibility affect the constitution and perception of Black personhood and everyday life? Our interpretation of (in)visibility encompasses the diversity of Black imaging and imagining and redaction and annotation. Moreover, our hope in this collection is to assemble a robust corpus that engages with Black (In)Visibility across various non-academic spaces and academic disciplines and perspectives.

No lo he visto ‘masque’ yo?

This paper shows that Spanish ‘más que’ (lit. more than) is much more than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence shows that various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these is a (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with a meaning “only” or “just”. By means of robust synchronic and diachronic corpus evidence, this paper explores its morphosyntactic properties and geographic distribution in the modern language, as well as when and how a comparative expression with no polarity associations could come to grammaticalize into a negative polarity item.

Beyond Canonicity: The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract: This introduction to a special issue on "The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers" provides a thumbnail sketch of this subfield's history in order to pinpoint its successes and failures. While scholars have located, edited, and analyzed a robust corpus of works by early modern women writers, these texts have yet to be fully integrated into the canon of early modern literature. A genre of "marginalization lit" has consequently arisen in which feminist critics seek to identify and remedy the factors behind this exclusion. Arguing that pervasive structural issues are actually to blame, this essay notes that the anti-hierarchical, idiosyncratic canon of early modern women writers offers a glimpse of a more egalitarian model for literary study. From that vantagepoint, the future of early modern women writers is the future of early modern literature itself.

English what with absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.

Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English

Abstract The syntactic and semantic properties of the into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, has been studied in some detail, but its historical development has received less attention. This paper looks at the historical shifts in the construction with much more representative and robust corpora than have been used for previous studies. Based on nearly 11,440 tokens from more than 950 million words of text, the paper considers several important changes in the lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of the construction. The study also establishes the value of large, diverse historical corpora and their role in researching syntactic and semantic change.

Recruiting and Retaining Patient–Caregiver–Nurse Triads for Qualitative Hospice Cancer Pain Research

Qualitative pain research for hospice patients with cancer and their caregivers involves recruiting and retaining participants with multiple vulnerabilities and ethical and logistical challenges. These have been reported for studies of individuals or dyads. However, there are no reports of the related challenges and outcomes where the sampled population was a hospice triad. Qualitative research about pain management for home hospice patients with cancer contributes rich descriptive data and such studies are critical to improving cancer pain outcomes. We describe the ethical and pragmatic challenges we faced in a study of the hospice caring triad, operationalized as the patient, family caregiver, and nurse; how our study design anticipated them; and related outcomes. We found that having an established relationship with the hospice agency at which we recruited participants, clearly identifying potential participants at the onset of hospice care, practice using a recruitment script, patient recruitment of caregivers, establishing rapport, and participants determining when interviews should end helped us recruit and retain our sample. We were unable to accrue our anticipated triad sample, partially because of nurse gatekeeping and the condition at admission of patient participants who enrolled but had physical decline or died prior to written consent. Although researchers will always face challenges to enrolling individuals and groups in cancer pain studies, with careful study design, recruitment, and retention planning and research team-participant engagement, it is possible to gather a robust corpus of qualitative data.

The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures by Anthony J. La Vopa

Reviewed by: The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures by Anthony J. La Vopa Katherine E.J. Ellis La Vopa, Anthony J. The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures. UP of Pennsylvania, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8122-4928-6. Pp. 350. As scholars revisit the notion of Enlightenment thought as cementing social divisions, La Vopa offers a nuanced analysis of women's intellectual presence as complicating, if not unsettling, constructs of masculinity in early modern France and Britain. His approach opens with precise, historically contextualized definitions of "labor" and"intellect," concepts he interrogates through a variety of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspectives ranging from religious to secular, feminist to conservative, and materialist to idealist. His analysis underscores a system that reversed the dynamic of desirable leisure and ignoble labor: In the early modern paradigm, [End Page 232] abstract thought represented a socially valuable, exclusively masculine endeavor, whereas feminine intelligence excelled at superfluous, interpersonal, and domestic tasks. Yet the increasingly conspicuous presence of women thinkers pressed a number of Enlightenment authors to alternately reject, celebrate, or reconstruct the established division of intelligence and its implicit gender norms. The progression of La Vopa's analysis highlights these discursive themes, juxtaposing progressive voices like those of François Poullain de la Barre and Anne-Thérèse de Lambert in conversation with conservative narratives such as Denis Diderot's"On Women"and Nicolas Malebranche's The Search after Truth. As a result, La Vopa generates a compelling intertextual discourse on the role of gender in salient Enlightenment debates to include mind-body dualism, the nature of sensibilité, and friendship between men and women. Coupling Bourdieusian theory with gender studies at the intersection of leisure, labor, masculinity, and femininity, La Vopa offers a nuanced and timely exploration of gendered intelligence constructs that inspires examination of a robust corpus of women's writing on their own intellectual nature. Katherine E.J. Ellis Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

On Being a French Heritage Woman in America Today: An Interview with Rhea Côté Robbins

Maine author Rhea Côté Robbins has made the exploration of Franco- American women’s lives the focus of her robust corpus of literary and cultural works. While Côté Robbins voices the untold experiences of women in her culture in her own writings, as founder of the Franco-American Women’s Institute (FAWI) she has also provided a forum for others to tell their stories. In this interview, she speaks candidly about her own work, the FAWI, the rich history and culture of Franco-American women and the importance of developing an understanding of what it means to be of French heritage in America today.

Virtually Legitimate: Using Disembodied Media to Position Oneself in an Embodied Community

Previous research on capoeira suggests that face-to-face training is the ideal mode of learning this art. However, there is a robust corpus of capoeira tutorials available on YouTube. This paper asks what the function of these videos is. I analyze six comment threads taken from YouTube that exhibit a common pattern, concluding that beyond the video’s utility as a source of information, the comments shared by community insiders serve as an invitation for aspiring students to join the embodied capoeira community, paving the way for their adoption of the underlying ethos of capoeira by socializing them into the ‘anyone can do it if they work hard enough’ discourse that is common in capoeira academies. And while this discourse itself is somewhat deceptive insofar as not everyone can do all of the moves of capoeira – even if they work hard – it is actually the mediating link between technical mastery, which could theoretically be achieved from watching videos, and embodiment of capoeira’s generative grammar, which must be learned in an embodied community setting.

Virtually Legitimate: Using Disembodied Media to Position Oneself in an Embodied Community

Previous research on capoeira suggests that face-to-face training is the ideal mode of learning this art. However, there is a robust corpus of capoeira tutorials available on YouTube. This paper asks what the function of these videos is. I analyze six comment threads taken from YouTube that exhibit a common pattern, concluding that beyond the video’s utility as a source of information, the comments shared by community insiders serve as an invitation for aspiring students to join the embodied capoeira community, paving the way for their adoption of the underlying ethos of capoeira by socializing them into the ‘anyone can do it if they work hard enough’ discourse that is common in capoeira academies. And while this discourse itself is somewhat deceptive insofar as not everyone can do all of the moves of capoeira – even if they work hard – it is actually the mediating link between technical mastery, which could theoretically be achieved from watching videos, and embodiment of capoeira’s generative grammar, which must be learned in an embodied community setting.

La escuela colombiana: entre la nuda vida y la biopotencia

Reading the school-armed conflict relationship is a challenging task. It would be difficult not to fall into the temptation to say, almost immediately, that policies have failed. Such a statement would be widely demonstrable from a robust corpus of documentary reports by international organizations, civil society or by the same Colombian State institutions, which have shown increasingly alarming data about human rights violations.Forced recruitment of children and young deprives them of their right to education and undermines their physical and emotional integrity. Threats to teachers in areas of confrontation violates their right to work, to free speech, academic freedom and life itself. Schools operating in these areas are used by actors in the conflict, which constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law.All these situations have certainly had an impact on how the school is set to operate in the midst of armed conflict, as well as in the subjectivity of the school subject and subject teachers who have no other choice than to stay in these territories.So, the question is: How do these schools resist the policies of death, and recreate themselves under exceptional circumstances?

Management of Delayed Onset Postoperative Hemorrhage after Anastomotic Urethroplasty.

Excision with primary anastomosis (EPA) urethroplasty is generally the preferred method for short strictures in the bulbar urethra, given its high success rate and low complication rate compared to other surgical interventions. Bleeding is a presumed risk factor for any surgical procedure but perioperative hemorrhage after an EPA requiring hospitalization and/or reintervention is unreported with no known consensus on the best course for management. Through our experience with three separate cases of significant postoperative urethral hemorrhage after EPA, we developed an algorithm for treatment beginning with conservative management and progressing through endoscopic and open techniques, as well as consideration of embolization by interventional radiology. All the three of these cases were managed successfully though they did require multiple interventions. We theorize that younger patients with more robust corpus spongiosum and more vigorous spontaneous erections, patients that have undergone fewer prior urethral procedures and therefore have more prominent vasculature, and those patients managed with a two-layer closure of the ventral urethra without ligation of the transected bulbar arteries are at a higher risk for this complication.

Preliminary evaluation of the CellFinder literature curation pipeline for gene expression in kidney cells and anatomical parts

Biomedical literature curation is the process of automatically and/or manually deriving knowledge from scientific publications and recording it into specialized databases for structured delivery to users. It is a slow, error-prone, complex, costly and, yet, highly important task. Previous experiences have proven that text mining can assist in its many phases, especially, in triage of relevant documents and extraction of named entities and biological events. Here, we present the curation pipeline of the CellFinder database, a repository of cell research, which includes data derived from literature curation and microarrays to identify cell types, cell lines, organs and so forth, and especially patterns in gene expression. The curation pipeline is based on freely available tools in all text mining steps, as well as the manual validation of extracted data. Preliminary results are presented for a data set of 2376 full texts from which >4500 gene expression events in cell or anatomical part have been extracted. Validation of half of this data resulted in a precision of ∼50% of the extracted data, which indicates that we are on the right track with our pipeline for the proposed task. However, evaluation of the methods shows that there is still room for improvement in the named-entity recognition and that a larger and more robust corpus is needed to achieve a better performance for event extraction.Database URL: http://www.cellfinder.org/

Good News for Dementia Care: Caregiver Interventions Reduce Behavioral Symptoms in People With Dementia and Family Distress

Good News for Dementia Care: Caregiver Interventions Reduce Behavioral Symptoms in People With Dementia and Family Distress