bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A computational analysis of poetic style
Authors: Kao Justine T. , Jurafsky Dan
Published: August 2021

How do standards of poetic beauty change as a function of time and expertise? Here we use computational methods to compare the stylistic features of 359 English poems written by 19th century professional poets, Imagist poets, contemporary professional poets, and contemporary amateur poets. Building upon techniques designed to analyze style and sentiment in texts, we examine elements of poetic craft such as imagery, sound devices, emotive language, and diction. We find that contemporary professional poets use significantly more concrete words than 19th century poets, fewer emotional words, and more complex sound devices. These changes are consistent with the tenets of Imagism, an early 20thcentury literary movement. Further analyses show that contemporary amateur poems resemble 19th century professional poems more than contemporary professional poems on several dimensions. The stylistic similarities between contemporary amateur poems and 19th century professional poems suggest that elite standards of poetic beauty in the past “trickled down” to influence amateur works in the present. Our results highlight the influence of Imagism on the modern aesthetic and reveal the dynamics between “high” and “low” art. We suggest that computational linguistics may shed light on the forces and trends that shape poetic style.
Detection and Resolution of Verb Phrase Ellipsis
Authors: McShane Marjorie , Babkin Petr
Published: August 2021

Verb phrase (VP) ellipsis is the omission of a verb phrase whose meaning can be reconstructed from the linguistic or real-world context. It is licensed in English by auxiliary verbs, often modal auxiliaries: She can go to Hawaii but he can’t [e]. This paper describes a system called ViPER (VP Ellipsis Resolver) that detects and resolves VP ellipsis, relying on linguistic principles such as syntactic parallelism, modality correlations, and the delineation of core vs. peripheral sentence constituents. The key insight guiding the work is that not all cases of ellipsis are equally difficult: some can be detected and resolved with high confidence even before we are able to build systems with human-level semantic and pragmatic understanding of text.
Many speakers, many worlds
Authors: Herbelot Aurélie , Vecchi Eva Maria
Published: August 2021

Quantification (see e.g. Peters and Westerståhl, 2006) is probably one of the most extensively studied phenomena in formal semantics. But because of the specific representation of meaning assumed by model-theoretic semantics (one where a true model of the world is a priori available), research in the area has primarily focused on one question: what is the relation of a quantifier to the truth value of a sentence? In contrast, relatively little has been said about the way the underlying model comes about, and its relation to individual speakers’ conceptual knowledge. In this paper, we make a first step in investigating how native speakers of English model relations between non-grounded sets, by observing how they quantify simple statements. We first give some motivation for our task, from both a theoretical linguistic and computational semantic point of view (§2). We then describe our annotation setup (§3) and follow on with an analysis of the produced dataset, conducting a quantitative evaluation which includes inter-annotator agreement for different classes of predicates (§4). We observe that there is significant agreement between speakers but also noticeable variations. We posit that in set-theoretic terms, there are as many worlds as there are speakers (§5), but the overwhelming use of underspecified quantification in ordinary language covers up the individual differences that might otherwise be observed.
From Abstract Syntax to Universal Dependencies
Authors: Kolachina Prasanth , Ranta Aarne
Published: August 2021

Abstract syntax is a semantic tree representation that lies between parse trees and logical forms. It abstracts away from word order and lexical items, but contains enough information to generate both surface strings and logical forms. Abstract syntax is commonly used in compilers as an intermediate between source and target languages. Grammatical Framework (GF) is a grammar formalism that generalizes the idea to natural languages, to capture cross-lingual generalizations and perform interlingual translation. As one of the main results, the GF Resource Grammar Library (GF-RGL) has implemented a shared abstract syntax for over 30 languages. Each language has its own set of concrete syntax rules (morphology and syntax), by which it can be generated from the abstract syntax and parsed into it. This paper presents a conversion method from abstract syntax trees to dependency trees. The method is applied for converting GF-RGL trees to Universal Dependencies (UD), which uses a common set of labels for different languages. The correspondence between GF-RGL and UD turns out to be good, and the relatively few discrepancies give rise to interesting questions about universality. The conversion also has potential for practical applications: (1) it makes the GF parser usable as a rule-based dependency parser; (2) it enables bootstrapping UD treebanks from GF treebanks; (3) it defines formal criteria to assess the informal annotation schemes of UD; (4) it gives a method to check the consistency of manually annotated UD trees with respect to the annotation schemes; (5) it makes information from UD treebanks available.
Modal Subordination in Type Theoretic Dynamic Logic
Authors: Qian Sai , De Groote Philippe , Amblard Maxime
Published: August 2021

Classical theories of discourse semantics, such as Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL), predict that an indefinite noun phrase cannot serve as antecedent for an anaphor if the noun phrase is, but the anaphor is not, in the scope of a modal expression. However, this prediction meets with counterexamples. The phenomenon modal subordination is one of them. In general, modal subordination is concerned with more than two modalities, where the modality in subsequent sentences is interpreted in a context ‘subordinate’ to the one created by the first modal expression. In other words, subsequent sentences are interpreted as being conditional on the scenario introduced in the first sentence. One consequence is that the anaphoric potential of indefinites may extend beyond the standard limits of accessibility constraints. This paper aims to give a formal interpretation on modal subordination. The theoretical backbone of the current work is Type Theoretic Dynamic Logic (TTDL), which is a Montagovian account of discourse semantics. Different from other dynamic theories, TTDL was built on classical mathematical and logical tools, such as λ-calculus and Church’s theory of types. Hence it is completely compositional and does not suffer from the destructive assignment problem. We will review the basic set-up of TTDL and then present Kratzer’s theory on natural language modality. After that, by integrating the notion of conversation background, in particular, the modal base usage, we offer an extension of TTDL (called Modal-TTDL, or M-TTDL in short) which properly deals with anaphora across modality. The formal relation between Modal-TTDL and TTDL will be discussed as well. We uncover the difficulty of specific sense distinctions by investigating distributional bias and reducing the sparsity of existing small-scale corpora used in prior work. We build a semantically enriched model for modal sense classification by designing novel features related to lexical, proposition-level and discourse-level semantic factors. Besides improved classification performance, closer examination of interpretable feature sets unveils relevant semantic and contextual factors in modal sense classification. Finally, we investigate genre effects on modal sense distribution and how they affect classification performance. Our investigations uncover the difficulty of specific sense distinctions and how they are affected by training set size and distributional bias. Our large-scale experiments confirm that semantically enriched models outperform models built on shallow feature sets. Cross-genre experiments shed light on differences in sense distributions across genres and confirm that semantically enriched models have high generalization capacity, especially in unstable distributional settings.
Complex predicates: Structure, potential structure and underspecification
Authors: Müller Stefan
Published: August 2021

This paper compares a recent TAG-based analysis of complex predicates in Hindi/Urdu with its HPSG analog. It points out that TAG combines actual structure while HPSG (and Categorial Grammar and other valence-based frameworks) specify valence of lexical items and hence potential structure. This makes it possible to have light verbs decide which arguments of embedded heads get realized, something that is not possible in TAG. TAG has to retreat to disjunctions instead. While this allows straight-forward analyses of active/passive alternations based on the light verb in valence-based frameworks, such an option does not exist for TAG and it has to be assumed that preverbs come with different sets of arguments.
Constructing Integrated Corpus and Lexicon Models for Multi-Layer Annotation in OWL DL
Authors: Burchardt Aljoscha , Padó Sebastian , Spohr Dennis , Frank Anette , Heid Ulrich
Published: August 2021

We present a general approach to formally modelling corpora with multi-layered annotation in a typed logical representation language, OWL DL. By defining abstractions over the corpus data, we can generalise from a large set of individual corpus annotations, thereby inducing a lexicon model. The resulting combined corpus and lexicon model can be interpreted as a graph structure that offers flexible querying functionality beyond current XML-based query languages. Its powerful methods for characterising and checking consistency can be used for incremental model refinement. In addition, the formalisation in a graph-based structure offers the means of defining flexible lexicon views over the corpus data. These views can be tailored for linguistic inspection or to define clean interfaces with other linguistic resources. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the syntactically and semantically annotated SALSA/TIGER corpus, a collection of German newspaper text.
Special Volume Introduction
Authors: Langendoen D. Terence , Bender Emily M.
Published: August 2021

Short introduction to the volume on Computational Linguistics: Implementation of Analyses against Data.
Visualizing Vowel Harmony
Authors: Mayer Thomas , Rohrdantz Christian , Butt Miriam , Plank Frans , Keim Daniel A.
Published: August 2021

This paper deals with vowel harmony from a cross-linguistic perspective, with the aim of visualizing the distribution of vowels in corpora so that languages with vowel harmony can be distinguished from those lacking it. For this purpose vowel successions within words are statistically analyzed and visualized in a quadratic matrix whose rows and columns are ordered according to their distribution in the text, with more similar vowels occurring closer together. The method has been tested on the basis of Bible corpora in a variety of languages including well-known harmonic languages such as Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish as well as non-harmonic languages.
Better tags give better trees – or do they?
Authors: Rehbein Ines , Hirschmann Hagen , Lüdeling Anke , Reznicek Marc
Published: August 2021

Parsing learner data poses a great challenge for standard tools, since non-canonical and unusual structures may lead to wrong interpretations on the part of the taggers and parsers. It is well known that providing a statistical parser with perfect part-of-speech (POS) tags is of great benefit for parsing accuracy, and that parsing results can decrease considerably when the parser has to predict its own POS tags. Therefore one might expect that even small improvements in POS accuracy have a positive effect on parsing performance. In this paper we test this assumption and assess the impact of POS tag accuracy on constituency parsing for German learner language. We compare different strategies to manual correction of the learner text and specific POS tags, and we measure the time requirements for each strategy. We show that tagging a canonical equivalent of the non-canonical learner text substantially improves POS tag accuracy. Correcting selected POS tags can only lead to parsing results comparable to a setting where all POS tags are corrected, while reducing annotation time substantially. However, the manual corrections of the POS tags do not result in a statistically significant improvement for parsing, giving evidence for the high quality of the automatically predicted parts-of-speech for the corrected learner data.
Detecting Semantic Ambiguity
Authors: Muhonen Kristiina , Purtonen Tanja
Published: August 2021

In this article, we investigate ambiguity in syntactic annotation. The ambiguity in question is inherent in a way that even human annotators interpret the meaning differently. In our experiment, we detect potential structurally ambiguous sentences with Constraint Grammar rules. In the linguistic phenomena we investigate, structural ambiguity is primarily caused by word order. The potentially ambiguous particle or adverbial is located between the main verb and the (participial) NP. After detecting the structures, we analyze how many of the potentially ambiguous cases are actually ambiguous using the double-blind method. We rank the sentences captured by the rules on a 1 to 5 scale to indicate which reading the annotator regards as the primary one. The results indicate that 67% of the sentences are ambiguous. Introducing ambiguity in the treebank/parsebank increases the informativeness of the representation since both correct analyses are presented.
Treebank Annotation in the Light of the Meaning-Text Theory
Authors: Mille Simon , Wanner Leo , Burga Alicia
Published: August 2021

A treebank may contain the annotation of different phenomena such as word order, morphological features, syntactic and semantic relations, etc., which are rather different in their nature. Quite often, the annotation of these phenomena is combined in a single structure, which leads to low-quality training results and is verifiably deficient from a theoretical (linguistic) perspective. We argue that the annotation of corpora requires a well-defined linguistic model which supports multi-level annotation, with one type of phenomenon per level. Our experience with dependency treebanks created or adjusted for surface-oriented natural language generation and based on the Meaning-Text Theory, a multi-level linguistic model, supports this argumentation.
Bootstrapping a Persian Dependency Treebank
Authors: Seraji Mojgan , Megyesi Beáta , Nivre Joakim
Published: August 2021

This paper presents an ongoing project whose goal is to create a freely available dependency treebank for Persian. The data is taken from the Bijankhan corpus, which is already annotated for parts of speech, and a syntactic dependency annotation based on the Stanford Typed Dependencies is added through a bootstrapping procedure involving the open-source dependency parser MaltParser. We report preliminary parsing experiments with promising results after training the parser on a manually annotated seed data set of 215 sentences.
Weakly-supervised Appraisal Analysis
Authors: Read Jonathon , Carroll John
Published: August 2021

This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or diminish their attitudes and engagements). To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory.
Synthetic Logic
Authors: Djalali Alex J.
Published: August 2021

The role of inference as it relates to natural language (NL) semantics has often been neglected. Recently, there has been a move away by some NL semanticists from the heavy machinery of, say, Montagovianstyle semantics to a more proof-based approach. Although researchers tend to study each type of system independently, MacCartney (2009) and MacCartney and Manning (2009) (henceforth M&M) recently developed an algorithmic approach to natural logic that attempts to combine insights from both monotonicity calculi and various syllogistic fragments to derive compositionally the relation between two NL sentences from the relations of their parts. At the heart of their system, M&M begin with seven intuitive lexicalsemantic relations that NL expressions can stand in, e.g., synonymy and antonymy, and then ask the question: if ' stands in some lexicalsemantic relation to ; and stands in (a possibly different) lexicalsemantic relation to ✓; what lexical-semantic relation (if any) can be concluded about the relation between ' and ✓? This type of reasoning has the familiar shape of a logical inference rule. However, the logical properties of their join table have not been explored in any real detail. The purpose of this paper is to give M&M’s table a proper logical treatment. As I will show, the table has the underlying form of a syllogistic fragment and relies on a sort of generalized transitive reasoning.
Traffic Control Scheme for Social Optimum Traffic Assignment with Dynamic Route Pricing for Automated Vehicles
Authors: Lu Qiong , Tettamanti Tamás
Published: August 2021

In transportation modeling, after defining a road network and its origin-destination (OD) matrix, the next important question is how to assign traffic among OD-pairs. Nowadays, advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) make it possible to realize the user equilibrium solution. Simultaneously, with the advent of the Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), it is possible to solve the traffic assignment problem in a system optimum way. As a potential traffic assignment method in the future transportation system for automated cars, the deterministic system optimum (DSO) is modeled and simulated to investigate the potential changes it may bring to the existing traditional traffic system. In this paper, stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) is used to simulate the conventional traffic assignment method. This work concluded that DSO has considerable advantages in reducing trip duration, time loss, waiting time, and departure delay under the same travel demand. What is more, the SUE traffic assignment has a more dispersed vehicle density distribution. Moreover, DSO traffic assignment helps the maximum vehicle density of each alternative path arrive almost simultaneously. Furthermore, DSO can significantly reduce or avoid the occurrence of excessive congestion.
Organic farming of spelt (Triticum spelta L.) and economic results
Authors: Rapčan Irena , Galić Subašić Daria , Ranogajec Ljubica , Hajduk Stjepan
Published: August 2021

Spelt is an excellent choice for organic farming due to better enduring worse agroecological conditions than wheat. This research on the the family farm "Klica" in Ernestinovo in the season 2014/2015 is an extension of the research of this culture (the cultivar "Frankenkorn") of the previous season in the agroecological conditions of eastern Slavonia on the same family farm. The average grain yield was 3.71 t ha-1, which is 1.08 t ha-1 more than the previous season. Realized revenues of HRK 10,419.92 ha-1 are also higher than in the previous season.
Statistical factors: What and how academic libraries count
Authors: Svergunova N. M.
Published: August 2021

Library statistics is an important and effective method of analyzing library activities and identifying problems, planning and forecasting. Reliability, accuracy, completeness and comparability of the data are the most significant provisions. In her earlier publication, the author identified several inaccuracies in annual statistical reports submitted by university libraries. To identify discrepancies in 2019 statistics, the comparative analysis was accomplished for Orel State academic libraries. The study demonstrated that sometimes the libraries didn’t provide accurate and precise statistics with lacking logical connection between the indicators presented in different report sections. Individual factors differ significantly despite similarity of other factors that influence the former ones. The author concludes on the necessity of measures to be taken by RLA university library section, library methodological divisions, and by the academic libraries themselves. For this purpose, the author suggests to develop methodological recommendations on calculating statistics, statistical surveying of academic libraries and implementing the methods into practice.
THE TEACHER QUALIFICATION SCHEME: A CASE OF ALBANIA
Authors: Abdurrahmani Tidita
Published: August 2021

The study aims to analyse the results of “Teacher Qualification Exam” in Albania, and to link these results with teacher preparation curricula taught in public universities. The methodology of research includes desk research on the literature about curricula and teacher continuous professional development, elaboration of the results of the testing of 3064 teachers, analysis of the university teacher preparation curricula in terms of skills development, the elaboration of the results of questionnaires developed by novice teachers, and in depth interviews with students graduating from the education departments. As a result, the research shows the relationships amongst the curricula developed in the teacher preparation faculties in Albania, the poor results of novice teachers involved in the induction scheme, and the comparatively low results of teachers pertaining to the third category of the Qualification Scheme (novice teachers having no more than 5 years of teaching experience) in Albania. It is advisable to adopt a better professional development scheme.
Key words: desk research, novice teachers, teacher qualification.
Bank Presence and Rural Development
Authors: Chen Guowen , Ma Weifeng
Published: August 2021

Rural development is critical to raise rural living standards and reduce income differences between urban and rural areas. Much literature has explored factors that could affect rural development, and we investigate the effects of bank presence in rural areas on rural income. Using Chinese provincial-level data from 2005 to 2017, we quantify the effects of bank presence on rural income. Specifically, we use the number of banks per town to measure bank presence and use rural income per capita of each province to measure rural income. With the ordinal least square model and dynamic panel estimation, we find that bank presence increases rural income. Rural income increases the same year with banks appear in town, and the effects of bank presence last for years on rural income. However, we do not find significant evidence that bank presence in rural areas also contributes to the reduction of the income difference between urban and rural areas.
The Use of Electronic Health Record Systems During COVID-19 at a Local Community Hospital on the West Coast
Authors: Krishnamurthi, Ph.D. Malini
Published: August 2021

The United States Federal government looks toward information technology to curtail health care costs while increasing the quality of patient care through the adoption of electronic health record (EHR)systems. This paper examined the experience of a hospital with its EHR system in the context of the pandemic. Results showed that the hospital maintains a state-of-the-art health care system to provide quality care to its community and was responsive to the recent crisis. The results were consistent with other comparable hospitals examined in this study. The hospitals were successful in adopting EHR systems. They were able to identify gaps that could be filled with technology add-ons from different software vendors to improve their functionality and thereby provide better & timely patient care. Managing large volumes of data generated in the normal process of EHR operation and ensuring data privacy and security were the significant challenges faced and are likely to continue in the future.
Terapi Kognitif Menurunkan Depresi Pada Lansia
Authors: Nathalia Vetri , Elvira Mariza
Published: August 2021

Lanjut usia adalah bagian dari proses kehidupan yang tidak dapat dihindarkan dan akan dialami oleh setiap individu. Dalam proses perkembangan lansia ini dapat terjadi beberapa perubahan alamiah yang menyangkut beberapa aspek yaitu fisik, psikologis dan sosial. Dengan adanya perubahan tersebut ditambah kurangnya kemampuan lansia dalam beradaptasi terhadap perubahan yang terjadi akan memicu timbulnya depresi pada lansia. Salah satu terapi untuk megatasi masalah depresi pada lansia adalah terapi kognitif.Tujuan yang ingin dicapai dalam penelitian ini untuk mengetahui pengaruh terapi kognitif terhadap tingkat depresi pada lansia di PSTW Kasih Sayang Ibu Batusangkar.Penelitian ini menggunakan desain penelitian “Quasi Experimental One GroupPretest-Postest” dengan intervensi terapi kognitif.Instrumen yang pakai untuk memperoleh data tingkat depresi lansia adalah GeriatricDepression Scale (GDS).Hasil uji statistik dengan menggunakan uji wilcoxson menunjukkan bahwa rata-rata depresi lansia ada penurunan sesudah dilakukan terapi kognitif. Berdasarkan hasil uji analisis terlihat nilai p-value = 0.001. Maka dapat disimpulkan ada perubahan yang signifikan antara tingkat depresi sebelum dan sesudah pemberian terapi kognitif pada lansia.
The Orphanage
Authors: Hertz-Ohmes Peter
Published: August 2021

‘The Orphanage’, by Peter Hertz-Ohmes, is a creative piece extracted from a longer work of the same name currently in completion. Voice and the play of memory are key aspects of a text richly concerned with the politics of exile, disaffiliation and naming.
Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman
Authors: Lvovich Natasha
Published: August 2021

This article analyses the novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013) by the American-Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine from the perspective of multilingual selfhood, echoing Borges's vision of ‘writing as translation’ as it expands to considerations of literary translingualism. The narrator/protagonist of the novel, Aaliya Saleh, is a translator whose main occupation is translation into Arabic from the existing English and French translations: from literary West into East. The significance of the author's creative choice of what is referred to as a twice-removed translator is explored with the following questions: How, while navigating between two languages, cultures, and identities, is the multilingual individual experiencing the balancing act between the ‘translation’ and the ‘original’? To what extent are characters, generated by writers' translingual imagination, indeed creative (re)incarnations of the author's fragmented self? Is there such a thing as the fidelity to an original' for an immigrant (the author)? What can we learn about this translingual polyphony of voices when it comes from the area of political conflict and deepening economic/humanitarian crisis?
Self-efficacy and its association with locus of control in diabetes in Turkey
Authors: KILIÇ Mustafa , ARSLAN Selda
Published: August 2021

Objective: This descriptive-relational study was conducted to determine self-efficacy levels of individuals with type 2 diabetes, relationship between these levels both some sociodemographic characteristics and health locus of control.

Methods: The sample of this study was occurred 325 patients with diabetes who applied to the health care center constituted. Data were collected via ‘Questionnaire Form’, ‘Self-efficacy in Diabetes Scale’ and ‘Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale’.

Results: The average age of participants was 53.3±8 years, 51.4% of participants were women. It was found that the diagnosis time 8.7±7.2 years, the level of HbA1c was 8.2±1.1. In the sub dimensions of Diabetes Self-efficacy Scale, the patients got points as follows; sub dimension of Diet+Foot Control 39,4±12,5, sub dimension of Medical Treatment 22,6±3,1, sub dimension of Physical Exercise 9,0±4,5. It was determined that in Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale, the patients got the highest points from the sub dimension of Powerful Others Locus of Control. A positive and weak level relation was determined between self-efficacy both total and subdimensions grades dimensions of health locus of control scale (p
Comparison of Profit-Based Multi-Objective Approaches for Feature Selection in Credit Scoring
Authors: Simumba Naomi , Okami Suguru , Kodaka Akira , Kohtake Naohiko
Published: August 2021

Feature selection is crucial to the credit-scoring process, allowing for the removal of irrelevant variables with low predictive power. Conventional credit-scoring techniques treat this as a separate process wherein features are selected based on improving a single statistical measure, such as accuracy; however, recent research has focused on meaningful business parameters such as profit. More than one factor may be important to the selection process, making multi-objective optimization methods a necessity. However, the comparative performance of multi-objective methods has been known to vary depending on the test problem and specific implementation. This research employed a recent hybrid non-dominated sorting binary Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm and compared its performance on multi-objective feature selection for credit scoring to that of two popular benchmark algorithms in this space. Further comparison is made to determine the impact of changing the profit-maximizing base classifiers on algorithm performance. Experiments demonstrate that, of the base classifiers used, the neural network classifier improved the profit-based measure and minimized the mean number of features in the population the most. Additionally, the NSBGOA algorithm gave relatively smaller hypervolumes and increased computational time across all base classifiers, while giving the highest mean objective values for the solutions. It is clear that the base classifier has a significant impact on the results of multi-objective optimization. Therefore, careful consideration should be made of the base classifier to use in the scenarios.
Beyond Digestion: Can Animals Shape the Landscape According to Their Species–Specific Salivary Secretions?
Authors: Cappai Maria Grazia , Aboling Sabine , Dall’Aglio Cecilia
Published: August 2021

Several functions are acknowledged for saliva secretion in different animal species following prehension and mastication of feed. Most of such are linked to the specific role of lubrication and softening of the bolus to allow taste perception and easy swallowing. Moreover, enzymatic components are produced in the saliva, some of which are destined to contribute to the digestion of different nutrients (to various extents according to animal species) and to exert antimicrobial activity (lysozyme). In addition, the buffering power and the virtuous recycle of water, electrolytes, and other metabolites are of particular importance for proper digestion and for nutrition–related aspects. Moreover, salivation appears to be involved in a number of other functions. Recent studies on salivary production and roles point to salivary glands as target organs of neuroendocrine regulation in response to many external stimuli coming from the outer world, for which feed still represents the chief external stimulus. Various animal species establish an adaptive strategy when coming into contact with different feeding stuffs and/or dietary substances by modifying both the composition and amount of saliva produced. In the light of recent updates, this review provides a focus on the functional roles of saliva secretions, showing the broad involvement of salivary response in several mechanisms beyond the digestive function and influencing feed selection.
Bio-Fertilizers Based on Digestate and Biomass Ash as an Alternative to Commercial Fertilizers—The Case of Tomato
Authors: Przygocka-Cyna Katarzyna , Barłóg Przemysław , Spiżewski Tomasz , Grzebisz Witold
Published: August 2021

The reutilization of agricultural wastes, as bio-fertilizers, is the key way to close the nutrient cycle and save mineral fertilizers. This hypothesis was verified in three consecutive seasons, treating tomato with three bio-fertilizers on the background of a standard rate of mineral fertilizer. The bio-fertilizers differed in their C:N ratio, which was 13:1, 21:1, and 6:1 for the A, B, and C fertilizers, respectively. They were applied at the rate of 200, 400, 800, and 1600 kg ha−1. The average fruit yield increased in the order: B < C < A. For the relevant fertilizer, the maximum commercial yield was 91, 87, and 101 t ha−1, for a respective rate of 1600, 200, and 400 kg ha−1. The number of fruits (CFN), as the dominant yield component, indirectly reflected the nitrogen (N) supply to plants. A shortage or excess of N on plots treated with the B or C fertilizers, resulted in a decreased CFN, leading to a yield decline. The year-to-year variability in the potassium (K) content reflected fairly well the variable weather conditions, responsible for water management by tomato. The conducted study showed that the tested bio-fertilizers can replace mineral fertilizer, as long as they are applied at well-defined rates.
Evaluation of Grain Quality-Based Simulated Selective Harvest Performed by an Autonomous Agricultural Robot
Authors: Villa-Henriksen Andrés , Edwards Gareth Thomas Charles , Green Ole , Sørensen Claus Aage Grøn
Published: August 2021

Grain price differences due to protein content can have economic effects on the farm as well as environmental effects when alternative protein sources are imported. Grain protein variability can vary from year to year due to environmental factors and can be addressed by site-specific management practices. Alternatively, it can be addressed at harvest time by selective harvest. Agricultural autonomous robots can accurately follow alternative harvesting routes that are subject to grain quality maps, making them suitable choices for selective harvest. This study addresses therefore the potential revenue of selective harvest performed by the route planner of an autonomous field robot. The harvest capacity and potential economic revenues of selective harvest in a Danish context were studied for a set of 20 winter wheat fields with four hypothetical scenarios. The results showed significant differences in harvest capacity between conventional and selective harvest. Even though in some scenarios selective harvest did not require notable additional harvest times, the cost–benefit analysis showed small economic returns of up to 46 DKK ha−1 for the best scenarios, and for most cases losses up to 464 DKK ha−1. Additionally, the location of the high protein content areas has great influence on the profitability of selective harvest.
Hybrid Bermudagrass and Tall Fescue Turfgrass Irrigation in Central California: II. Assessment of NDVI, CWSI, and Canopy Temperature Dynamics
Authors: Haghverdi Amir , Reiter Maggie , Singh Amninder , Sapkota Anish
Published: August 2021

As the drought conditions persist in California and water continues to become less available, the development of methods to reduce water inputs is extremely important. Therefore, improving irrigation water use efficiency and developing water conservation strategies is crucial for maintaining urban green infrastructure. This two-year field irrigation project (2018–2019) focused on the application of optical and thermal remote sensing for turfgrass irrigation management in central California. We monitored the response of hybrid bermudagrass and tall fescue to varying irrigation treatments, including irrigation levels (percentages of reference evapotranspiration, ETo) and irrigation frequency. The ground-based remote sensing data included NDVI and canopy temperature, which was subsequently used to calculate the crop water stress index (CWSI). The measurements were done within two hours of solar noon under cloud-free conditions. The NDVI and canopy temperature data were collected 21 times in 2018 and 10 times in 2019. For the tall fescue, a strong relationship was observed between NDVI and visual rating (VR) values in both 2018 (r = 0.92) and 2019 (r = 0.83). For the hybrid bermudagrass, there was no correlation in 2018 and a moderate correlation (r = 0.72) in 2019. There was a moderate correlation of 0.64 and 0.88 in 2018 and 2019 between tall fescue canopy minus air temperature difference (dt) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) for the lower CWSI baseline. The correlation between hybrid bermudagrass dt and VPD for the lower baseline was 0.69 in 2018 and 0.64 in 2019. Irrigation levels significantly impacted tall fescue canopy temperature but showed no significant effect on hybrid bermudagrass canopy temperature. For the same irrigation levels, increasing irrigation frequency slightly but consistently decreased canopy temperature without compromising the turfgrass quality. The empirical CWSI values violated the minimum expected value (of 0) 38% of the time. Our results suggest NDVI thresholds of 0.6–0.65 for tall fescue and 0.5 for hybrid bermudagrass to maintain acceptable quality in the central California region. Further investigation is needed to verify the thresholds obtained in this study, particularly for hybrid bermudagrass, as the recommendation is only based on 2019 data. No CWSI threshold was determined to maintain turf quality in the acceptable range because of the high variability of CWSI values over time and their low correlation with VR values.
Soybean Response to Seed Coating with Chitosan + Alginate/PEG and/or Inoculation
Authors: Jarecki Wacław
Published: August 2021

Inoculated or coated soybean seeds are often sown in agricultural practice. These treatments play a different role depending on the chemical composition of the preparation. The aim of the field experiment was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed coating (chitosan + alginate/PEG) and commercial inoculant (HiStick® Soy) applied alone or in combination to soybean seeds. Uncoated (control) seeds were sown for comparison. The research was carried out in 2018–2020 using the cultivar ‘Mavka’. The experiment was located in Makowisko, Podkarpackie Province, Poland. Coating composition was developed in a laboratory belonging to the Łukasiewicz Research Network—Institute of Biopolymers and Chemical Fibers in Łódź, Poland. The main role of the coating is to protect soybean seeds from low temperatures. HiStick® Soy inoculant contains Bradyrhizobium japonicum bacteria which increase nodulation on the roots. The conducted research demonstrated that sowing only coated seeds was not very effective, because the suitable number of nodules had not developed on soybean roots. The application of the inoculant alone positively affected the assessed traits compared to control, however, plant population was lower than expected. The highest seed yield was obtained after sowing coated seeds in combination with the inoculant (4.32 t·ha−1) and only inoculated seeds (4.23 t·ha−1) compared to control (3.64 t·ha−1). The test of the novel seed-coating agent showed that it had an good effect and efficacy, but only in combination with the inoculation procedure.
Identification of Drought Tolerance on the Main Agronomic Traits for Rice (Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica) Germplasm in China
Authors: Ahmad Muhammad Shafiq , Wu Bingrui , Wang Huaqi , Kang Dingming
Published: August 2021

Drought is a major abiotic factor restricting rice yield; therefore, to cope with this stress, 2030 japonica rice accessions from China and other countries were evaluated in Beijing in 2017 and 2018. This was the first time six agronomic traits in the large-scale germplasm of rice under lowland and upland conditions with an augmented randomized complete block design (ARCBD) were analysed. The genotypes revealing drought resistant grade (DRG) scores of 1, 1–3, 3 and 3–5 were considered drought-tolerant and comprised 10% of the assessed germplasm. These findings were consistent with the agglomerative hierarchical cluster (AHC) analysis that classified germplasm in nine clusters. The generated clusters were further grouped in A, B, C and D classes based on the stress response. Approximately half of the genotypes with an upland ecotype were distributed in drought-resistant class A (cluster VII and VI) and moderately resistant class B (VIII and IX). The majority of the genotypes from China, Korea and Japan fall in drought-susceptible classes C and D. Genotypes of DRG 1, 1–3 and 3 belonged to the clusters VII and VI. Finally, we screened out 42 elite genotypes including seven improved upland rice lines (D78, LB37-13, NSU77, Handao 385, Handao 306, SF83 and HF6-65-119), three upland released varieties (Liaogeng 27, Hanfeng 8 and IRAT109) and three traditional lowland cultivars (Hongmaodao, Weiguo 7 and Xiaohongbandao). These genotypes might be used as priority parents in drought-tolerant rice breeding programmes and some of them could be recommended directly to farmers in water-deficient rice areas of China.
Arsenic Accumulation in Rice Grain as Influenced by Water Management: Human Health Risk Assessment
Authors: Harine Israt Jahan , Islam Mohammad Rafiqul , Hossain Mahmud , Afroz Hasina , Jahan Rounok , Siddique Abu Bakkar , Uddin Shihab , Hossain Mohammad Anwar , Alamri Saud , Siddiqui Manzer H. , Henry Robert J.
Published: August 2021

Rice is a staple food for humans and a key source of soil arsenic (As) transfer to the human food chain. As a result, it is critical to develop ways for reducing As accumulation in rice. A pot experiment with seven different water management practices was done to examine the impacts of water management on rice (cv. BRRI dhan28) growth, yield, and As accumulation in rice grain. Any health risk due to As accumulation in rice grain was also determined. The soil used in the experiment was artificially contaminated with As and the source of As was sodium arsenate (Na2HAsO4 7H2O). Water management practices affect different plant growth and yield parameters including filled grains per panicle, unfilled grains per panicle, 1000-grain weight, grain yield and straw yield of rice. The number of filled grains per panicle and 1000-grain weight were found to be at their highest in the T7 (alternate wetting and drying) condition, whereas the number of unfilled grains per panicle was at its lowest in the same treatment. The T7 also demonstrated the highest grain yield (21.08 g/pot) and straw yield (22.02 g/pot), whereas the lowest values were noted in T1 (flooding throughout the growth period). The highest As concentration in rice grain (0.52 mg kg−1) was found in T1 and the lowest As concentration in grain (0.27 mg kg−1) was found in T7. Estimation of the human health risk revealed that the non-carcinogenic risks (HQ > 1) and carcinogenic risks (CR > 1.0 × 10−4) were greatly affected by different water regimes. The rice plant grown under alternate wetting and drying condition (T7) showed the lowest health risks compared to other water management practices. Thus, alternate wetting and drying conditions are a good water management strategy for increasing rice output while reducing arsenic buildup in rice grain.
Parasite Fauna of the Dusky Grouper (Epinephelus marginatus, Lowe 1834) from the Central Mediterranean Sea
Authors: De Benedetto Giovanni , Arfuso Francesca , Ferrara Maria Catena , Brianti Emanuele , Gaglio Gabriella
Published: August 2021

This study aimed to investigate parasite fauna of E. marginatus from the central Mediterranean Sea between Messina and Syracuse. In the present survey; parasite fauna of dusky grouper was investigated for two main reasons: the economic value of this species and the current lack of studies regarding the capture area. Seventy dusky groupers were caught from May 2018 to February 2020. Forty-seven out of the 70 specimens (67.2%) were infected with one or more parasite species. The most abundant species was Prosorhynchus caudovatus (42.9%), followed by Podocotyle temensis (28.6%), Didymodiclinus sp. (18.6%), Philometra jordanoi (5.7%), Anisakis Type II larvae (5.7%). Higher prevalence of infection of P. jordanoi and Contracaecum sp. was found in warm months (March to September), while P. caudovatus and P. temensis were mostly found during cold months. Weight and total length of E. marginatus were positively correlated with the parasitic load of P. jordanoi and Didymodiclinus sp. The different prevalence of parasite infection found between warm and cold months is probably related to the diet of the dusky grouper; which is characterized by mollusks that are intermediate hosts for parasite species found. None of the parasites found in the present survey is responsible for zoonosis
Rumen Fermentation, Digestive Enzyme Activity, and Bacteria Composition between Pre-Weaning and Post-Weaning Dairy Calves
Authors: Hao Yangyi , Guo Chunyan , Gong Yue , Sun Xiaoge , Wang Wei , Wang Yajing , Yang Hongjian , Cao Zhijun , Li Shengli
Published: August 2021

To better understand the transition of rumen function during the weaning period in dairy calves, sixteen Holstein dairy calves were selected and divided into two groups: pre-weaning (age = 56 ± 7 day, n = 8) and post-weaning (age = 80 ± 6 day, n = 8). The rumen fluid was obtained by an oral gastric tube. The rumen fermentation profile, enzyme activity, bacteria composition, and their inter-relationship were investigated. The results indicated that the post-weaning calves had a higher rumen acetate, propionate, butyrate, and microbial crude protein (MCP) than the pre-weaning calves (p < 0.05). The rumen pH in the post-weaning calves was lower than the pre-weaning calves (p < 0.05). The protease, carboxymethyl cellulase, cellobiohydrolase, and glucosidase in the post-weaning calves had a lower trend than the pre-weaning calves (0.05 < p < 0.1). There was no difference in α and β diversity between the two groups. Linear discriminant analysis showed that the phylum of Fibrobacteres in the post-weaning group was higher than the pre-weaning group. At the genus level, Shuttleworthia, Rikenellaceae, Fibrobacter, and Syntrophococcus could be worked as the unique bacteria in the post-weaning group. The rumen bacteria network node degree in the post-weaning group was higher than the pre-weaning group (16.54 vs. 9.5). The Shuttleworthia genus was highly positively correlated with MCP, propionate, total volatile fatty acid, glucosidase, acetate, and butyrate (r > 0.65, and p < 0.01). Our study provided new information about the rumen enzyme activity and its relationship with bacteria, which help us to better understand the effects of weaning on the rumen function.