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Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus
(2008)
The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.
The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) with a novel preview manipulation was used to examine the extent of parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. Words n+1 and n+2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation (prior to crossing the boundary location). In addition, the manipulation utilized either a high or low frequency word in word n+1 location on the assumption that it would be more likely that n+2 preview effects could be obtained when word n+1 was high frequency. The primary findings were that there was no evidence for a preview benefit for word n+2 and no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects when word n+1 is at least four letters long. We discuss implications for models of eye-movement control in reading.
The predictability of an upcoming word has been found to be a useful predictor in eye movement research, but is expensive to collect and subjective in nature. It would be desirable to have other predictors that are easier to collect and objective in nature if these predictors were capable of capturing the information stored in predictability. This paper contributes to this discussion by testing a possible predictor: conditional co-occurrence probability. This measure is a simple statistical representation of the relatedness of the current word to its context, based only on word co-occurrence patterns in data taken from the Internet. In the regression analyses, conditional co-occurrence probability acts like lexical frequency in predicting fixation durations, and its addition does not greatly improve the model fits. We conclude that readers do not seem to use the information contained within conditional co-occurrence probability during reading for meaning, and that similar simple measures of semantic relatedness are unlikely to be able to replace predictability as a predictor for fixation durations. Keywords: Co-occurrence probability, Cloze predictability, frequency, eye movement, fixation duration.
BACKGROUND: There is an increased need to replace materials derived from fossil sources by renewables. Sugar-cane derived carbohydrates are very abundant in Brazil and are the cheapest sugars available in the market, with more than 400 million tons of sugarcane processed in the year 2007. The objective of this work was to study the preparation of sugar acrylates from free sugars and free acrylic acid, thus avoiding the previous preparation of protected sugar derivatives, such as glycosides, or activated acrylates, such as vinyl acrylate. RESULTS: Lipase catalyzed esterification of three mono- and two disaccharides with acrylic acid, in the presence or absence of molecular sieves was investigated. The reactions were monitored by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and the products were analyzed by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry. The main products are mono- and diacrylates, while higher esters are formed as minor products. The highest conversion to sugar acrylates was observed for the D-glucose and D-fructose, followed by D-xylose and D-maltose. Molecular sieves had no pronounced effect on the conversion CONCLUSIONS: A feasible method is described to produce and to characterize sugar acrylates, including those containing more than two acrylate groups. The process for production of these higher esters could potentially be optimized further to produce molecules for cross-linking in acrylate polymerization and other applications. The direct enzymatic esterification of free carbohydrates with acrylic acid is unprecedented.
Growth of phytopathogenic fungi in the presence of partially acetylated chitooligosaccharides
(2008)
Four phytopathogenic fungi were cultivated up to six days in media containing chitooligosaccharide mixtures differing in average DP and FA. The three different mixtures were named Q3 (which contained oligosaccharides ofDP2–DP10, withDP2–DP7 asmain components), Q2 (which contained oligosaccharides of DP2–DP12, with DP2–DP10 as main components) and Q1 (which derived from Q2 and contained oligomers of DP5–DP8 with hexamer and a heptamer as the main components). The novel aspect of this work is the description of the effect of mixtures of oligosaccharides with different and known composition on fungal growth rates. The growth rate of Alternaria alternata and Rhizopus stolonifer was initially inhibited by Q3 and Q2 at higher concentrations. Q1 had a growth stimulating effect on these two fungi. Growth of Botrytis cinerea was inhibited by Q3 and Q2, while Q1 had no effect on the growth of this fungus. Growth of Penicillium expansum was only slightly inhibited by higher concentrations of sample Q3, while Q2 and Q1 had no effect. The inhibition of growth rates or their resistance toward chitooligosaccharides correlated with the absence or presence of chitinolytic enzymes in the culture media, respectively.
From the roots of the African plant Bulbine frutescens (Asphodelaceae), two unprecedented novel dimeric phenylanthraquinones, named joziknipholones A and B, possessing axial and centrochirality, were isolated, together with six known compounds. Structural elucidation of the new metabolites was achieved by spectroscopic and chiroptical methods, by reductive cleavage of the central bond between the monomeric phenylanthraquinone and -anthrone portions with sodium dithionite, and by quantum chemical CD calculations. Based on the recently revised absolute axial configuration of the parent phenylanthraquinones, knipholone and knipholone anthrone, the new dimers were attributed to possess the P-configuration (i.e., with the acetyl portions below the anthraquinone plane) at both axes in the case of joziknipholone A, whereas in joziknipholone B, the knipholone part was found to be M-configured. Joziknipholones A and B are active against the chloroquine resistant strain K1 of the malaria pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, and show moderate activity against murine leukemic lymphoma L5178y cells.
We present an approach to the correlated dynamics of many-electron systems. We show, that the twoelectron reduced density matrix (2RDM) can provide a suitable description of the real time evolution of a system. To achieve this, the hierarchy of equations of motion must be truncated in a practical way. Also, the computational effort, given that the 2RDM is represented by products of two-electron determinants, is discussed, and numerical model calculations are presented.
Background: To improve the understanding of consequences of climate change for annual plant communities, I used a detailed, grid-based model that simulates the effect of daily rainfall variability on individual plants in five climatic regions on a gradient from 100 to 800 mm mean annual precipitation (MAP). The model explicitly considers moisture storage in the soil. I manipulated daily rainfall variability by changing the daily mean rain (DMR, rain volume on rainy days averaged across years for each day of the year) by ± 20%. At the same time I adjusted intervals appropriately between rainy days for keeping the mean annual volume constant. In factorial combination with changing DMR I also changed MAP by ± 20%. Results: Increasing MAP generally increased water availability, establishment, and peak shoot biomass. Increasing DMR increased the time that water was continuously available to plants in the upper 15 to 30 cm of the soil (longest wet period, LWP). The effect of DMR diminished with increasing humidity of the climate. An interaction between water availability and density-dependent germination increased the establishment of seedlings in the arid region, but in the more humid regions the establishment of seedlings decreased with increasing DMR. As plants matured, competition among individuals and their productivity increased, but the size of these effects decreased with the humidity of the regions. Therefore, peak shoot biomass generally increased with increasing DMR but the effect size diminished from the semiarid to the mesic Mediterranean region. Increasing DMR reduced via LWP the annual variability of biomass in the semiarid and dry Mediterranean regions. Conclusion: More rainstorms (greater DMR) increased the recharge of soil water reservoirs in more arid sites with consequences for germination, establishment, productivity, and population persistence. The order of magnitudes of DMR and MAP overlapped partially so that their combined effect is important for projections of climate change effects on annual vegetation.
Content: 1 The Development of the Estonian Gender Policy Machinery 1.1 Initiation of Institutionalisation as a Result of International Commitments 1.2 Institutional Measures Facilitating EU Membership 1.3 Assessment of the Gender Equality Machinery 2 Conditions for Gender Mainstreaming in Estonia 2.1 Social Conditions 2.2 Administrative Conditions 3 Gender Mainstreaming Activities in the Estonian Public Administration 3.1 The Legal Foundations 3.2 Inter-ministerial Cooperation 3.3 Gender Mainstreaming Training 3.4 Knowledge Basis 3.5 Lack of Standards for data and Statistics 3.6 Non-adminsitrative Liaisons 4 Conclusion
Small livestock is an important resource for rural human populations in dry climates. How strongly will climate change affect the capacity of the rangeland? We used hierarchical modelling to scale quantitatively the growth of shrubs and annual plants, the main food of sheep and goats, to the landscape extent in the eastern Mediterranean region. Without grazing, productivity increased in a sigmoid way with mean annual precipitation. Grazing reduced productivity more strongly the drier the landscape. At a point just under the stocking capacity of the vegetation, productivity declined precipitously with more intense grazing due to a lack of seed production of annuals. We repeated simulations with precipitation patterns projected by two contrasting IPCC scenarios. Compared to results based on historic patterns, productivity and stocking capacity did not differ in most cases. Thus, grazing intensity remains the stronger impact on landscape productivity in this dry region even in the future.
A multitype Dawson-Watanabe process is conditioned, in subcritical and critical cases, on non-extinction in the remote future. On every finite time interval, its distribution is absolutely continuous with respect to the law of the unconditioned process. A martingale problem characterization is also given. Several results on the long time behavior of the conditioned mass process - the conditioned multitype Feller branching diffusion - are then proved. The general case is first considered, where the mutation matrix which models the interaction between the types, is irreducible. Several two-type models with decomposable mutation matrices are analyzed too .
The effect of moderate rates of nitrogen deposition on ground floor vegetation is poorly predicted by uncontrolled surveys or fertilization experiments using high rates of nitrogen (N) addition. We compared the temporal trends of ground floor vegetation in permanent plots with moderate (7–13 kg ha−1 year−1) and lower bulk N deposition (4–6 kg ha−1 year−1) in southern Sweden during 1982–1998. We examined whether trends differed between growth forms (vascular plants and bryophytes) and vegetation types (three types of coniferous forest, deciduous forest, and bog). Trends of site-standardized cover and richness varied among growth forms, vegetation types, and deposition regions. Cover in spruce forests decreased at the same rate with both moderate and low deposition. In pine forests cover decreased faster with moderate deposition and in bogs cover decreased faster with low deposition. Cover of bryophytes in spruce forests increased at the same rate with both moderate and low deposition. In pine forests cover decreased faster with moderate deposition and in bogs and deciduous forests there was a strong non-linear increase with moderate deposition. The trend of number of vascular plants was constant with moderate and decreased with low deposition. We found no trend in the number of bryophyte species. We propose that the decrease of cover and number with low deposition was related to normal ecosystem development (increased shading), suggesting that N deposition maintained or increased the competitiveness of some species in the moderate-deposition region. Deposition had no consistent negative effect on vegetation suggesting that it is less important than normal successional processes.