Institute for Bulgarian Language

The induction of an acute inflammatory response followed by the release of polypeptide cytokines and growth factors from peripheral blood monocytes has been implicated in mediating the response to vascular injury. Because the Cu2+-binding proteins IL-1alpha and fibroblast growth factor 1 are exported into the extracellular compartment in a stress-dependent manner by using intracellular Cu2+ to facilitate the formation of S100A13 heterotetrameric complexes and these signal peptideless polypeptides have been implicated as regulators of vascular injury in vivo, we examined the ability of Cu2+ chelation to repress neointimal thickening in response to injury. We observed that the oral administration of the Cu2+ chelator tetrathiomolybdate was able to reduce neointimal thickening after balloon injury in the rat. Interestingly, although immunohistochemical analysis of control neointimal sections exhibited prominent staining for MAC1, IL-1alpha, S100A13, and the acidic phospholipid phosphatidylserine, similar sections obtained from tetrathiomolybdate-treated animals did not. Further, adenoviral gene transfer of the IL-1 receptor antagonist during vascular injury also significantly reduced the area of neointimal thickening. Our data suggest that intracellular copper may be involved in mediating the response to injury in vivo by its ability to regulate the stress-induced release of IL-1alpha by using the nonclassical export mechanism employed by human peripheral blood mononuclear cells in vitro.

Psychopathy is a multifaceted construct that has been linked to aggression. Yet, few studies have explored the association between physical, verbal, and indirect aggression using the 4-facet model of psychopathy in community samples, and to date, no studies exist that test for male and female differences. The present study aimed to understand what facets of psychopathy predict aggressive behavior for men and women, while controlling for important risk factors, such as Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Drawing from a large Bulgarian community sample (N = 565), a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the use of the 4-facet model of the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV; Hart et al., ). Hierarchical linear regressions revealed that physical aggression was predicted by affective and antisocial psychopathic traits, and ASPD. Verbal aggression was predicted by the interpersonal facet, and indirect aggression was predicted by the antisocial psychopathy facet and ASPD. Sex significantly moderated the associations among facets of psychopathy and physical and indirect aggression. Specifically, the affective facet was positively associated with physical aggression only for women, whereas the antisocial facet was positively associated with indirect aggression only for men. Results suggest that the 4-facet model of psychopathy is sensitive to capture important similarities and differences between males and females when predicting forms of aggression in community samples. These findings underscore the importance of understanding how men and women differ in their risk-factors for aggressive behavior, which will better inform violence interventions based on sex-specific needs.

In recent years, the interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing because this technology bridges the gap between the physical and virtual world, by connecting different objects and people through communication networks, in order to improve the quality of life. New IoT wearable devices require new types of antennas with unique shapes, made on unconventional substrates, which can be unobtrusively integrated into clothes and accessories. In this paper, we propose a fully textile dual-band logo antenna integrated with a reflector for application in IoT wearable devices. The proposed antenna's radiating elements have been shaped to mimic the logo of South-West University "Neofit Rilski" for an unobtrusive integration in accessories. A reflector has been mounted on the opposite side of the textile substrate to reduce the radiation from the wearable antenna and improve its robustness against the loading effect from nearby objects. Two antenna prototypes were fabricated and tested in free space as well as on three different objects (human body, notebook, and laptop). Moreover, in the two frequency ranges of interest a radiation efficiency of 25-38% and 62-90% was achieved. Moreover, due to the reflector, the maximum local specific-absorption rate, which averaged over 10 g mass in the human-body phantom, was found to be equal to 0.5182 W/kg at 2.4 GHz and 0.16379 W/kg at 5.47 GHz. Additionally, the results from the performed measurement-campaign collecting received the signal-strength indicator and packet loss for an off-body scenario in real-world use, demonstrating that the backpack-integrated antenna prototype can form high-quality off-body communication channels.

The paper discusses several key concepts related to the development of corpora and reconsiders them in light of recent developments in NLP. On the basis of an overview of present-day corpora, we conclude that the dominant practices of corpus design do not utilise adequately the technologies and, as a result, fail to meet the demands of corpus linguistics, computational lexicology and computational linguistics alike.We proceed to lay out a data-driven approach to corpus design, which integrates the best practices of traditional corpus linguistics with the potential of the latest technologies allowing fast collection, automatic metadata description and annotation of large amounts of data. Thus, the gist of the approach we propose is that corpus design should be centred on amassing large amounts of mono- and multilingual texts and on providing them with a detailed metadata description and high-quality multi-level annotation.We go on to illustrate this concept with a description of the compilation, structuring, documentation, and annotation of the Bulgarian National Corpus (BulNC). At present it consists of a Bulgarian part of 979.6 million words, constituting the corpus kernel, and 33 Bulgarian-X language corpora, totalling 972.3 million words, 1.95 billion words altogether. The BulNC is supplied with a comprehensive metadata description, which allows us to organise the texts according to different principles. The Bulgarian part of the BulNC is automatically processed (tokenised and sentence split) and annotated at several levels: morphosyntactic tagging, lemmatisation, word-sense annotation, annotation of noun phrases and named entities. Some levels of annotation are also applied to the Bulgarian-English parallel corpus with the prospect of expanding multilingual annotation both in terms of linguistic levels and the number of languages for which it is available. We conclude with a brief evaluation of the quality of the corpus and an outline of its applications in NLP and linguistic research.

BACKGROUND: Bulgaria is a country with a wide range of medicinal plants, with uses in traditional medicine dating back for centuries. METHODS: Disc diffusion assay was used to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of the plant extracts. A cytopathic effect inhibition test was used for the assessment of the antiviral activity of the extracts. The virucidal activity of the extracts, their influence on the stage of viral adsorption, and their protective effect on uninfected cells were reported using the end-point dilution method, and Δlgs was determined as compared to the untreated controls. RESULTS: extracts in Gram-positive bacteria is more effective than in Gram-negative bacteria. When applied during the replication of HSV-1 and HCov-OC-43, only some of the extracts showed weak activity, with SI between 2 to 8.5. Almost all tested extracts inhibited the extracellular virions of the studied enveloped viruses (HSV-1 and HCov-OC-43) to a greater extent than of the non-enveloped viruses (PV-1 and HAdV-5). They inhibited the stage of viral adsorption (HSV-1) in the host cell (MDBK) to varying degrees and showed a protective effect on healthy cells (MDBK) before they were subjected to viral invasion (HSV-1). CONCLUSION: suggests their effectiveness as antimicrobial agents. All 13 extracts of the Bulgarian medicinal plants studied can be used to reduce viral yield in a wide range of viral infections.

In this work, we present the results of research for evaluating a methodology for extracting mathematical terms for precalculus using the techniques for semantically-oriented statistical search. We use the corpus-based approach and the combination of different statistically-based techniques for extracting keywords, collocations and co-occurrences incorporated in the Sketch Engine software. We evaluate the collocations candidate terms for the basic concept function(s) and approve the related methodology by precalculus domain conceptual terms definitions. Finally, we offer a conceptual terms hierarchical representation and discuss the results with respect to their possible applications.

The present article will focus on motivation in foreign language learning, digital technologies and creating an effective digital learning environment for supporting the process of learning and reaching desired outcomes. Besides that, the author will make an attempt to summarize personal experience of integrating digital tools and resources in teaching English as a foreign language through English through Literature Approach. A detailed description of the strategies for instruction and the learning modalities used in the 21st century classroom with 11th- grade students from Bulgaria is presented.

The paper presents complex teaching approach used for the course “Corpus Linguistics” which is a part of masters study program in Computational Linguistics currently tough at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridsky”. We propose a useful combination of theoretical issues, exercises and problem-solving tasks, and practical course work as a successful teaching strategy with multilingual application. The course uses extensively e-Learning tools for searching electronic text corpora. It is based on “learning by doing” methodology allowing students to discover linguistic phenomena and interpret them semantically. The final course work improves students’ ability to do independent research work by fostering their curiosity, discovery and developing their ability for reasoning.

New Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian phraseology and language corporaThis article examines phraseological innovations in the Bulgarian, Polish and Ukrainian languages. Particular attention is paid to trends in the development of phraseology and to the sources of the enrichment of the phraseology of the three studied languages. The role of corpus technologies in research on language dynamics is described. Nowa bułgarska, polska i ukraińska frazeologia a korpusy językoweW artykule zostały przeanalizowane innowacje frazeologiczne w językach bułgarskim, polskim i ukraińskim. Szczególną uwagę autorzy zwracają na tendencje rozwojowe frazeologii oraz źródła wzbogacania zasobu frazeologicznego w trzech analizowanych językach. W artykule została przedstawiona rola technologii korpusowych w dziedzinie badania dynamiki rozwoju języka.

Abstract This article presents the combined results of three international surveys that were carried out in the context of the Horizon 2020 European Lexicographic Infrastructure project (ELEXIS). The aim of these surveys was to gain more insight into lexicographic practices and the needs of lexicographers in Europe. The surveys were delivered via online platforms. Based on the combined results, we sketch a map of lexicographic practices in Europe, both for born-digital and retrodigitized resources, analyze current needs in terms of tools, functionalities and training, and identify emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the short and long term.

The paper analyses the application of grammar knowledge representation of Bulgarian inflectional morphology. We present the implementation of inflectional morphology of Bulgarian possessive and reflexive-possessive pronouns using the semantic networks interpretation. It is focused on modelling the inflectional morphology of Bulgarian possessive and reflexive-possessive pronouns using the Universal Networking Language (UNL). The formal analysis and related encodings take into account the specific morphological and syntactic properties of possessive and reflexive-possessive pronouns, and represent their inflectional morphology interpretation with respect to the feature of definiteness. The definitions of presented inflectional rules are given after the detailed analysis of both semantic and grammar features of the related pronouns. The evaluation of generated inflected forms is given by some example words. The analysis of basic problems of rule-based inflectional morphology grammar representation of Bulgarian possessive and reflexive-possessive pronouns is offered, and the semantic network using rule-based knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning in UNL framework with related encoding is presented. The particular model is explained in terms of its linguistic motivation.

Мария Китанова (София) АКСИОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ НЕКОТОРЫХ МОДЕЛЕЙ ЭВФЕМИЗАЦИИ В БОЛГАРСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ И ТРАДИЦИОННОЙ БОЛГАРСКОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ 1 Термин «эвфемизм» происходит от греческого εύφημος, что означает «похвальный, благоприятный» и состоит из ευ-(хорошо-, благо-) + φήμη (речь, молва).В современной лингвистике термин эвфемизм служит обозначением смягчающей речевой стратегии, которая позволяет говорящему учитывать правила речевого этикета, адекватно оценивать ситуацию и делать правильный выбор.Некоторые авторы исследуют эвфемизмы вместе с разными фигурами речи.Например, в «Словаре лингвистических терминов» О. С. Ахманова характеризует эвфемизм следующим образом: «троп, состоящий в непрямом прикрытом, вежливом, смягчающем обозначении какого-либо предмета или явления» (Ахманова 1969: 521).Другие авторы подчеркивают, что «с семантической точки зрения процесс эвфемизации основан на различии между позитивной или нейтральной коннотацией вторичного наименования и отрицательной коннотацией исходного понятия» (Тишина 2006: 6).В данном определении оценка, которая характерна для эвфемизации, выводится на передний план; именно этот аспект и будет акцентироваться в нашей статье.Ряд исследователей принимают, что эвфемизмывид речевых актов, поскольку имплицитность, которой они располагают, по существу является неформальным выражением прагматической информации, в них содержащейся (Ковшова 2007: 29-37).Об эвфемизмах и словах-табу еще в 1930 году писал Д. К. Зеленин в своей книге «Табу слов у народов восточной Европы и северной Азии»; 1 Исследование выполнено в рамках Проекта ДО 02/5 от 24.07.2018«Лингвистическая и этнокультурная динамика традиционных и нетрадиционных ценностей в славянском мире», Программа ERA.Net.RUS

Understanding the regulation of cardiac muscle contraction at a molecular level is crucial for the development of therapeutics for heart conditions. Despite the availability of atomic structures of the protein components of cardiac muscle thin filaments, detailed insights into their dynamics and response to calcium are yet to be fully depicted. In this study, we used molecular dynamics simulations of the core domains of the cardiac muscle protein troponin to characterize the equilibrium dynamics of its calcium‐bound and calcium‐free forms, with a focus on elements of cardiac muscle contraction activation and deactivation, that is, calcium binding to the cardiac troponin Ca 2+ ‐binding subunit (TnC) and the release of the switch region of the troponin inhibitory subunit (TnI) from TnC. The process of calcium binding to the TnC binding site is described as a three‐step process commencing with calcium capture by the binding site residues, followed by cooperative residue interplay bringing the calcium ion to the binding site, and finally, calcium–water exchange. Furthermore, we uncovered a set of TnC–TnI interdomain interactions that are critical for TnC N‐lobe hydrophobic pocket dynamics. Absence of these interactions allows the closure of the TnC N‐lobe hydrophobic pocket while the TnI switch region remains expelled, whereas if the interactions are maintained, the hydrophobic pocket remains open. Modification of these interactions may fine‐tune the ability of the TnC N‐lobe hydrophobic pocket to close or remain open, modulate cardiac contractility and present potential therapy‐relevant targets.

Abstract In this paper an iterative procedure for obtaining a minimum-fuel minimum-time control for a linear discrete system is suggested. The procedure suggested is based on the third form of the simplex method from linear programming and appears to be computationally more efficient than other known techniques.

The paper motivates a strategy for identification and annotation of derivational relations in the Bulgarian wordnet that aims at coping with the complex morphology of the language in an elegant way.Our method involves transfer of the Princeton WordNet (morpho)semantic relations into the Bulgarian wordnet, at the level of the synset, and further detection of derivational relations between literals in Bulgarian.Derivational relations have been annotated to reflect the complexity of Bulgarian morphology.Introduced literal relations improve the consistency and employability of the wordnet.

The paper compares how Paulicians were described in different types of medieval Slavonic sources by using the approach of the linguistic and culturological conceptualization of the alterity. By means of linguistic analysis, it tries to reach some essential dogmatic issues in the Paulician doctrine, and to focalize on the perception models towards Paulicians with their tangible semantic codes according to the specificities of the medieval world view. The two chosen texts the analysis is based on, are the legendary Bulgarian narrative Sermon about how the Paulicians have been conceived, and the Slavonic translation of 24th title of Panoplia Dogmatica by Euthymius Zigabenus. The analysis is followed by an English translation of the Sermon (insofar known in 8 copies), and a partial edition of the Slavonic translation of Zigabenus’s work upon the unique copy from the manuscript BAR 296, Library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in Bucharest, dated between 1410–1420. The text account from the Slavonic manuscript is published for the first time, giving supplementary details about the overall Slavonic translation.

The paper discusses the enrichment of WordNet data through merging of Word-Net concepts and Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) semantic types.The 253 CPA semantic types are mapped to the respective WordNet concepts.As a result of mapping, the hyponyms of a synset to which a CPA semantic type is mapped inherit not only the respective WordNet semantic primitive but also the CPA semantic type.

A lexicographical approach to the contrastive analysis of Bulgarian and Polish phraseologyThis article discusses the concept behind The Lexicon of Active Bulgarian and Polish Phraseology [Leksykon aktywnej frazeologii bułgarskiej i polskiej] and provides an overview of the key aspects of the methodology used for selecting and composing the dictionary’s entries. The authors outline the theoretical underpinnings of this project, touching on the issue of interlingual equivalence, and explain both the process of selecting and verifying phraseological material and the methodology of presenting lexicographical information in the Lexicon. The article includes various examples of active phraseological units from both languages. Konfrontacja językowa bułgarskiej i polskiej frazeologii – podejście leksykograficzneW artykule przedstawiono podstawowe założenia koncepcji i metodologii układania Leksykonu aktywnej frazeologii bułgarskiej i polskiej. Autorzy prezentują teoretyczne podstawy badania, poruszają problem ekwiwalencji międzyjęzykowej, zasad wyboru i weryfikacji prezentowanego materiału frazeologicznego, metodologii przedstawienia informacji leksykograficznej w Leksykonie. Materiał jest zilustrowany różnorodnymi przykładami aktywnych jednostek frazeologicznych w języku bułgarskim i polskim.

Modern translation QA tools are the latest attempt to overcome the inevitable subjective component of human revisers. This paper analyzes the current situation in the translation industry in respect to those tools and their relationship with CAT tools. The adoption of international standards has set the basic frame that defines "quality". Because of the clear impossibility to develop a universal QA tool, all of the existing ones have in common a wide variety of settings for the user to choose from. A brief comparison is made between most popular standalone QA tools. In order to verify their results in practice, QA outputs from two of those tools have been compared. Polls that cover a period of 12 years have been collected. Their participants explained what practices they adopted in order to guarantee quality.

The present study attempts to expand the Theory of the Electromagnetic Field to a more general Theory of the Field that also includes the gravitational field. It is known that Maxwell's laws (1864) are based on a single axiom which states that the even movement of a vector E leads to movement in a closed loop (div rot E = 0). The author replaces this axiom with a new one, according to which the uneven movement of a vector E leads to an open loop (div rot E 0) or an open uneven vortex (div Vor E 0). The derived 2 axioms and 10 laws lead to the following results: even movement is replaced with uneven movement (decelerating or accelerating); movement in a closed loop is replaced with movement in an open loop; movement in 2D leads to movement in 3D; during their movement decelerating vortices emit elementary vortices, while accelerating vortices suck in elementary vortices; a cross vortex generates a longitudinal vortex through special transformation and vice versa-a longitudinal vortex through another special transformation generates a cross vortex .