title: New directions: The deconstructing 'Tis Pity?: Derrida, Barthes and Ford

authors: Houlahan, Mark

subjects: John Ford's tragedy

abstract: At the famous climax of `Tis Pity, Giovanni enters the last scene of the play and, as he knows, his life, `with a heart upon his dagger', with which he-hearted implement he stabs his enemy and brother-in-law Soranzo, before himself being fatally stabbed in the ensuing melée. The heart, it seems, is Annahella's, removed from her after Giovanni's loving, surgical sacrifice of his pregnant sister/wife in the scene before. The `seems' here is crucial, for at first this is not clear, neither to the onstage audience, waiting for Giovanni to arrive at the banquet, nor to an audience watching the play or those reading it. The eloquent Giovanni exults in providing the explanation to both groups.

text: New directions: The deconstructing 'Tis Pity?: Derrida, Barthes and Ford At the famous climax of `Tis Pity, Giovanni enters the last scene of the play and, as he knows, his life, `with a heart upon his dagger', with which he-hearted implement he stabs his enemy and brother-in-law Soranzo, before himself being fatally stabbed in the ensuing melée. The heart, it seems, is Annahella's, removed from her after Giovanni's loving, surgical sacrifice of his pregnant sister/wife in the scene before. The `seems' here is crucial, for at first this is not clear, neither to the onstage audience, waiting for Giovanni to arrive at the banquet, nor to an audience watching the play or those reading it. The eloquent Giovanni exults in providing the explanation to both groups.

year: 2010

title: Invasion Expansion: Time since introduction best predicts global ranges of marine invaders.

authors: Byers, James E.

abstract: Strategies for managing biological invasions are often based on the premise that characteristics of invading species and the invaded environment are key predictors of the invader's distribution. Yet, for either biological traits or environmental characteristics to explain distribution, adequate time must have elapsed for species to spread to all potential habitats. We compiled and analyzed a database of natural history and ecological traits of 138 coastal marine invertebrate species, the environmental conditions at sites to which they have been introduced, and their date of first introduction. We found that time since introduction explained the largest fraction (20%) of the variability in non-native range size, while traits of the species and environmental variables had significant, but minimal, influence on non-native range size. The positive relationship between time since introduction and range size indicates that non-native marine invertebrate species are not at equilibrium and are still spreading, posing a major challenge for management of coastal ecosystems.

text: Invasion Expansion: Time since introduction best predicts global ranges of marine invaders. Strategies for managing biological invasions are often based on the premise that characteristics of invading species and the invaded environment are key predictors of the invader's distribution. Yet, for either biological traits or environmental characteristics to explain distribution, adequate time must have elapsed for species to spread to all potential habitats. We compiled and analyzed a database of natural history and ecological traits of 138 coastal marine invertebrate species, the environmental conditions at sites to which they have been introduced, and their date of first introduction. We found that time since introduction explained the largest fraction (20%) of the variability in non-native range size, while traits of the species and environmental variables had significant, but minimal, influence on non-native range size. The positive relationship between time since introduction and range size indicates that non-native marine invertebrate species are not at equilibrium and are still spreading, posing a major challenge for management of coastal ecosystems.

year: 2015

title: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language

authors: Cocks, John

subjects: Māori

abstract: This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

text: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

year: 2012