Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Authorship Attribution of Tirant lo Blanc Using Parts of Speech n-grams

Tirant lo Blanc (TLB) is a masterpiece of medieval Catalan chivalric romance. Regarding its authorship, two hypotheses exist: the single-authorship hypothesis claims in agreement with the dedication that Joanot Martorell is the sole author, whereas the dual-authorship hypothesis alleges in line with the colophon that Martorell wrote the first three parts and Martí Joan de Galba added the fourth part. In this study, we revisit the unsettled authorship attribution of TLB with stylometric techniques; specifically, we exploit parts-of-speech (POS) n-grams as stylistic features to investigate stylistic differences (if any) across the work. Furthermore, we address the distinction between narration and conversation, which has previously been omitted. We performed exploratory multivariate analyses and demonstrated that, despite internal differences, single-authorship is more likely from a statistical point of view. If Galba had contributed something to the last quarter of the work, it would have been minimal.
Improving Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing by Unsupervised Learning

UDify (Kondratyuk and Straka, 2019) is a multilingual and multi-task parser fine-tuned on mBERT. It has demonstrated notable performance, even on few-shot languages. However, its performance saturates early and decreases gradually as training progresses with zero-shot languages. This work focuses on this phenomenon, which has not yet been sufficiently studied. Data augmentation methods based on unsupervised learning on monolingual data were designed to transform a zero-shot case into an artificial few-shot case. Experiments were conducted on the Breton language as a typical case study. For the Breton language, the unlabeled attachment score and other evaluation metrics were significantly improved. The parsing accuracies for other languages were not noticeably affected.
Critical Thinking Skills in an Oral Reading Comprehension Test: A Curious Case of the Individuals with Tourette Syndrome

Although a wealth of studies attempted to investigate the motor capabilities of the individuals with Tourette Syndrome (TS), little is known about the linguistic performance of the population in higher-order thinking skills in reading. Using the Fable Interpretation Test, this study explored the critical thinking skills of the individual with TS. In this cross-case analysis research, we invited seven participants from ages 9 to 40 from the Philippines. Their responses were recorded and analyzed through coding. The results revealed that regardless of age, the respondents displayed attenuation of the linguistic performance in their critical thinking skills as displayed in their oral test. Thus, we argue that the attenuation of the linguistic performance took place when oral reading was done. This confirms the past claims of various scholars that phonological decay in the Working Memory (WM) is one observed effect of the tics among the people with TS.
Translation from Historical to Contemporary Japanese Using Japanese T5

This paper presents machine translation from historical Japanese to contemporary Japanese using a Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5). The result of the previous study that used neural machine translation (NMT), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), could not outperform that of the work that used statistical machine translation (SMT). Because an NMT model tends to require more training data than an SMT model, the lack of parallel data of historical and contemporary Japanese could be the reason. Therefore, we used Japanese T5, a kind of large language model to compensate for the lack of data. Our experiments show that the translation with T5 is slightly lower than SMT. In addition, we added the title of the literature book from which the example sentence was extracted at the beginning of the input. Japanese historical corpus consists of a variety of texts ranging in periods when the texts were written and the writing styles. Therefore, we expected that the title gives information about the period and style, to the translation model. Additional experiments revealed that, with title information, the translation from historical Japanese to contemporary Japanese with T5 surpassed that with SMT.
Large Scale Evaluation of End-to-End Pipeline of Speaker to Dialogue Attribution in Japanese Novels

The speaker to dialogue attribution task, which identiﬁes the speaker of an utterance in a novel, is an essential task for the analysis of novels and their characters. Speaker to dialogue attribution task is composed of three tasks: utterance extraction, attributing character mentions to utterances, and clustering character mentions into character entities. However, there are no prior studies targeting Japanese novels that have conducted all of these tasks. Furthermore, the lack of shared evaluation data has made it difﬁcult to compare methods. In this study, we propose a ﬁrst end-to-end speaker to dialogue attribution pipeline applied to the publicly available speaker information annotation data from the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese”. We evaluate the performance of our approach and assess its limitations.
Statistical Measures for Readability Assessment

Neural models and deep learning techniques have predominantly been used in many tasks of natural language processing (NLP), including automatic readability assessment (ARA). They apply deep transfer learning and enjoy high accuracy. However, most of the models still cannot leverage long dependence such as inter-sentential topic-level or document-level information because of their structure and computational cost. Moreover, neural models usually have low interpretability. In this paper, we propose a generalization of passage-level, corpus-level, document-level and topic-level features. In our experiments, we show the effectiveness of “Statistical Lexical Spread (SLS)” features when combined with IDF (inverse document frequency) and TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency), which adds a topological perspective (inter-document) to readability to complement the typological approaches (intra-document) used in traditional readability formulas. Interestingly, simply adding these features in BERT models outperformed state-of-the-art systems trained on a large number of hand-crafted features derived from heavy linguistic processing. In analysis, we show that SLS is also easy-to-interpret because SLS computes lexical features, which appear explicitly in texts, compared to parameters in neural models.
Revisiting Korean Corpus Studies through Technological Advances

The Korean language has been largely studied recently owing to the active development of Korean-specific language models and the disclosure of natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks that followed. Such alignment of technological advances and the proposal of challenging datasets is common in the progress of artificial intelligence research; each affects one another, driving new approaches from the other side, driving the trend. In this paper, we remind how recent achievements in Korean NLP relate to corpus studies so far. Along with a comprehensive diachronic overview, we see how downstream tasks correspond with the advent of modern NLP techniques, at the same time discussing the change of trend in volume, task type, and topic.
RealPersonaChat: A Realistic Persona Chat Corpus with Interlocutors’ Own Personalities

Personality is an important element when designing dialogue systems that sound human-like. The PersonaChat corpus (Zhang et al., 2018), in which interlocutors interact based on given personas, was proposed for this purpose, but since the interactions are not based on the interlocutors’ own personas, the dialogue tends to be unnatural, potentially leading to dialogue models making unnatural utterances. In this study, we constructed the Re-alPersonaChat (RPC) corpus by collecting the actual personality traits and personas of inter-locutors and having them freely engage in dialogue. This corpus contains 14K dialogues in Japanese and is currently the world’s largest corpus of dialogue data that includes personas and personality traits. We compared our corpus with an existing one to clarify the features of RPC and found that the frequency of persona information in RPC utterances is significantly lower than that in the existing corpus. Moreover, we found that our corpus contains dialogues with high dialogue satisfaction. Additionally, by using RPC, we successfully extracted expressions related to high and low scores of personality traits.
Microbial remineralization processes during post-spring-bloom excess phosphate in the northern Baltic Sea

In the northern Baltic, post-spring-bloom low dissolved inorganic nitrogen to phosphorus conditions, degradation of N-rich organic matter potentially supports the drawdown of excess phosphate. During a 17-day-long mesocosm experiment in the south-west Finnish archipelago, we examined nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon acquiring extracellular enzyme activities in three size fractions (<0.2 µm, 0.2–3 µm, and >3 µm), bacterial abundance, production, community composition and its predicted metabolic functions. The mesocosms received different carbon and nitrogen amendments to test for the effect of inorganic nutrient stoichiometry on enzymatic degradation processes that ultimately determine the export potential of organic matter. Alkaline phosphatase activity occurred mainly in the dissolved form and likely contributed to the excess phosphate conditions. In the beginning of the experiment, peptidolytic and glycolytic enzymes were predicted to be produced by free-living bacteria identified within the classes Actinobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria, whereas the contribution of picocyanobacteria increased towards the end. Our results imply that heterotrophic bacteria lost the competition to picocyanobacteria due to the lack of suitable energy sources. The high hydrolytic rates in fractions <0.2 µm and 0.2–3 µm, found in this study, could potentially retain inorganic nutrients in the surface layer and suppress downward fluxes of organic matter and hence carbon sequestration.
Quantitative omnigenic model discovers interpretable genome-wide associations

As their statistical power grows, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified an increasing number of loci underlying quantitative traits of interest. These loci are scattered throughout the genome and are individually responsible only for small fractions of the total heritable trait variance. The recently proposed omnigenic model provides a conceptual framework to explain these observations by postulating that numerous distant loci contribute to each complex trait via effect propagation through intracellular regulatory networks. We formalize this conceptual framework by proposing the “quantitative omnigenic model” (QOM), a statistical model that combines prior knowledge of the regulatory network topology with genomic data. By applying our model to gene expression traits in yeast, we demonstrate that QOM achieves similar gene expression prediction performance to traditional GWAS with hundreds of times less parameters, while simultaneously extracting candidate causal and quantitative chains of effect propagation through the regulatory network for every individual gene. We estimate the fraction of heritable trait variance in cis- and in trans-, break the latter down by effect propagation order, assess the trans- variance not attributable to transcriptional regulation, and show that QOM correctly accounts for the low-dimensional structure of gene expression covariance. We furthermore demonstrate the relevance of QOM for systems biology, by employing it as a statistical test for the quality of regulatory network reconstructions, and linking it to the propagation of non-genetic, environmental effects. Significance statement Genetic variation leads to differences in traits implicated in health and disease. Identifying genetic variants associated with these traits is spearheaded by “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS) – statistically rigorous procedures whose power has grown with the number of genotyped samples. Nevertheless, GWAS have a substantial shortcoming: they are ill-equipped to detect the causal basis and reveal the complex systemic mechanisms of polygenic traits. Even a single genetic change can propagate throughout the entire genetic regulatory network causing a myriad of spurious detections, thereby significantly limiting GWAS usefulness. We tackle this challenge with a novel statistical approach that incorporates known regulatory network information to substantially boost the interpretability of state-of-the-art genomic analyses while simultaneously extracting novel systems biology insights.
Assessment of river flow with significant lateral inflow through reverse routing modeling

The discharge hydrograph estimation in rivers based on reverse routing modeling and using only water level data at two gauged sections is here extended to the most general case of significant lateral flow contribution, without needing to deploy rainfall–runoff procedures. The proposed methodology solves the Saint‐Venant equations in diffusive form also involving the lateral contribution using a “head‐driven” modeling approach where lateral inflow is assumed to be function of the water level at the tributary junction. The procedure allows to assess the discharge hydrograph at ends of a selected river reach with significant lateral inflow, starting from the stage recorded there and without needing rainfall data.
The role of hidden hearing loss in tinnitus: insights from early markers of peripheral hearing damage

Since the presence of tinnitus is not always associated with audiometric hearing loss, it has been hypothesized that hidden hearing loss may act as a potential trigger for increased central gain along the neural pathway leading to tinnitus perception. In recent years, the study of hidden hearing loss has improved with the discovery of cochlear synaptopathy and several objective diagnostic markers. This study investigated three potential markers of peripheral hidden hearing loss in subjects with tinnitus: extended high-frequency audiometric thresholds, the auditory brainstem response, and the envelope following response. In addition, speech intelligibility was measured as a functional outcome measurement of hidden hearing loss. To account for age-related hidden hearing loss, participants were grouped according to age, presence of tinnitus, and audiometric thresholds. Group comparisons were conducted to differentiate between age- and tinnitus-related effects of hidden hearing loss. All three markers revealed age-related differences, whereas no differences were observed between the tinnitus and non-tinnitus groups. However, the older tinnitus group showed improved performance on low-pass filtered speech in noise tests compared to the older non-tinnitus group. These low-pass speech in noise scores were significantly correlated with tinnitus distress, as indicated using questionnaires, and could be related to the presence of hyperacusis. Based on our observations, cochlear synaptopathy does not appear to be the underlying cause of tinnitus. The improvement in low-pass speech-in-noise could be explained by enhanced temporal fine structure encoding or hyperacusis. Therefore, we recommend that future tinnitus research takes into account age-related factors, explores low-frequency encoding, and thoroughly assesses hyperacusis.
No cardiac phase bias for threat perception under naturalistic conditions in immersive virtual reality

Previous studies have found that threatening stimuli are more readily perceived and more intensely experienced when presented during cardiac systole compared to diastole. Also, threatening stimuli are judged as physically closer than neutral ones. In a pre-registered study, we tested these effects and their interaction using a naturalistic (interactive, 3D) experimental design in immersive virtual reality: We briefly displayed threatening and non-threatening animals (four each) at varying distances (1.5–5.5 meters) to a group of young, healthy participants (n = 41), while recording their ECGs (electrocardiograms). Participants then pointed to the location where they had seen the animal (ca. 29k trials in total). Our pre-registered analyses indicated that perceived distances to both threatening and non-threatening animals did not differ significantly between cardiac phases – with Bayesian analysis supporting the null hypothesis. There was also no evidence for an association between subjective fear and perceived proximity to threatening animals. These results contrast with previous findings that used verbal or declarative distance measures in less naturalistic experimental conditions. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the cardiac phase-related variation in threat processing may not generalize across different paradigms and may be less relevant in naturalistic scenarios than under more abstract experimental conditions. Impact statement To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the influence of interoceptive cardiac signals on visual perception using naturalistic stimuli in immersive virtual reality. We based the design of our experiment on previous reports about threat processing biases and the role of the cardiac cycle but did not observe the expected effects. This poses the question of their generalizability from abstract settings to more naturalistic setups, featuring greater behavioral engagement and a richer sensory environment.
Harnessing prefrontal-hippocampal theta synchrony to enhance memory-guided

Working memory is correlated with prefrontal-hippocampal oscillatory synchrony, but whether endogenous patterns of synchronized brain rhythms can be used to bias future choice remains unknown. Here, we developed a brain machine interface that detected states of strong and weak theta synchrony for task and neural manipulation. States of strong prefrontal-hippocampal theta coherence were characterized by strengthened prefrontal theta rhythms and were used to enhance memory-guided choice. In follow up experiments and analyses, we show that strong prefrontal-hippocampal theta coherence was associated with task engagement, phase modulation of prefrontal neurons to ventral midline thalamic theta, and heightened excitability in a select group of neurons. Through optogenetic manipulation of the ventral midline thalamus, we produced prefrontal theta rhythms and enhanced prefrontal-hippocampal oscillatory synchrony. These experiments show that prefrontal-hippocampal oscillatory synchrony can be used to bias memory-guided choices and provide evidence in support of the communication through coherence hypothesis.
Changes in Gastric Smooth Muscle Cell Contraction during Pregnancy: Effect of Estrogen

It is well known that pregnancy is associated with frequent gastrointestinal (GI) disorders and symptoms. Moreover, previous reports have shown that estrogen, which changes in levels during pregnancy, participates in the regulation of GI motility and is involved in the pathogenesis of various functional disorders in the stomach. The aim of the current study was to explore the changes in the expression of estrogen receptors (ERs) and examine the effect of estrogen on nitric oxide- (NO-) cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) pathway and thus relaxation in gastric smooth muscle cells (GSMC) during pregnancy. Single GSMC from early-pregnant and late-pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were used. Protein and mRNA expression levels of ERs were measured via specifically designed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), respectively. NO and cGMP levels were measured via specifically designed ELISA kits. Effect of estrogen on acetylcholine- (ACh-) induced contraction of single GSMC was measured via scanning micrometry in the presence or absence of the NO synthase inhibitor, N-nitro-L-arginine (L-NNA), or guanylyl cyclase inhibitor, 1H-[1,2,4]oxadiazolo[4,3,-a]quinoxalin-1-one (ODQ). Estrogen increased both NO and cGMP levels and their levels were greater in early compared to late pregnancy. Expression of ERs was greater in early compared to late pregnancy. ACh induced greater contraction of GSMC in late pregnancy compared to early pregnancy. Estrogen inhibited ACh-induced contraction in both periods of pregnancy. Importantly, pretreatment of GSMC with either L-NNA or ODQ abolished estrogen inhibitory action on muscle contraction. In conclusion, GSMC contractile behavior undergoes drastic changes in response to estrogen during pregnancy and this might explain some of the pregnancy-associated gastric disorders.
Bed material transport estimate in large gravel‐bed rivers using the virtual velocity approach

This paper reports on a first attempt of using the virtual velocity approach to assess sediment mobility and transport in two wide and complex gravel‐bed rivers of northern Italy. Displacement length and virtual velocity of spray‐painted tracers were measured in the field. Also, the thickness of the sediment active layer during floods was measured using scour chains and post‐flood morphological changes as documented by repeated survey of channel cross‐sections. The effects of eight and seven floods were studied on the Tagliamento and Brenta Rivers, where 259 and 277 spray‐painted areas were surveyed, respectively. In the Tagliamento River 36% of the spray‐painted areas experienced partial transport, whereas in the Brenta River this accounted for 20%. Whereas, full removal/gravel deposition was observed on 37% and 26% of these areas on the Tagliamento and Brenta Rivers, respectively. The mean displacement length of particles, the thickness of the active layer and the extent of partial transport are well correlated with the dimensionless shear stress. The virtual velocity approach allowed calculation of bed material transport over a wide range of flood magnitudes. Annual coarse sediment transport was calculated up to 150 for the Tagliamento, and 30 × 103 m3 yr−1 for the Brenta. The outcomes of this work highlight the relevance of partial transport condition, as it could represent more than 70% of the total bed material transported during low‐magnitude floods, and up to 40% for near‐bankfull events. Results confirm that bed material load tends to be overestimated by traditional formulas. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Modelling Cardiac Rehabilitation Programs in Saudi Arabia

Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of mortality and morbidity in Saudi Arabia. This study explored cardiac rehabilitation programs identifying gaps in practice, barriers and enablers to attending programs by exploring patient experiences and views of healthcare providers working in public hospitals. The findings reveal staff were not aware of programs in their departments, lacked training and there were language and communication barriers. Gender, cultural and background differences were factors in discontinuity of care, compounded by distance and transport problems for patients. A cardiac rehabilitation program was modeled for the Saudi context recommending multifaceted and multidisciplinary approaches.