Langues, Textes, Traitements Informatiques, Cognition

BACKGROUND: Short implants present superior failure rates for everybody. PURPOSE: The aim of this theoretic study was to assess to what extent implant length and bicortical anchorage affect the way stress is transferred to implant components, the implant proper, and the surrounding bone. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Stress analysis was performed using finite element analysis. A three-dimensional linear elastic model was generated. All implants modeled were of the same diameter (3.75 mm) but varied in length, at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 mm (Brånemark System, Nobel Biocare AB, Gothenburg, Sweden). Each implant was modeled with a titanium abutment screw and abutment, a gold cylinder and prosthetic screw, and a ceramic crown. The implants were seated in a supporting bone structure consisting of cortical and cancellous bone. An occlusal load of 100 N was applied at a 30 degrees angle to the buccolingual plane. RESULTS: With the selected model and bone properties, the coronal cortical anchorage was dominating, and the bone stress concentrated to that area. CONCLUSIONS: The maximum bone stress was virtually constant, independent of implant length and bicortical anchorage. The maximum implant stress, however, increased somewhat with implant length and bicortical anchorage.

For the Affective Text task at SemEval-2007, University Paris 7's system first evaluates emotion and valence on all words of a news headline (using enriched versions of SentiWordNet and a subset of WordNet-Affect). We use a parser to find the head word, considering that it has a major importance. We also detect contrasts (between positive and negative words) that shift valence. Our knowledge-based system achieves high accuracy on emotion and valence annotation. These results show that working with linguistic techniques and a broad-coverage lexicon is a viable approach to sentiment analysis of headlines.

In pattern recognition, statistical modeling, or regression, the amount of data is a critical factor affecting the performance. If the amount of data and computational resources are unlimited, even trivial algorithms will converge to the optimal solution. However, in the practical case, given limited data and other resources, satisfactory performance requires sophisticated methods to regularize the problem by introducing a priori knowledge. Invariance of the output with respect to certain transformations of the input is a typical example of such a priori knowledge. We introduce the concept of tangent vectors, which compactly represent the essence of these transformation invariances, and two classes of algorithms, tangent distance and tangent propagation, which make use of these invariances to improve performance. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 11, 181–197, 2000

Sign linguistics has always had to deal with the notion of iconicity because sign languages are much more iconic than vocal languages. Formal sign linguists have often tried to explain iconicity apart from descriptions of sign language, considering it as contradictory to the arbitrariness that must rule language organization as a natural consequence of the autonomy and the separateness of language. More recently, functional sign linguists have highlighted the presence of iconicity as a function of the peculiar visual-gestural modality of sign languages. This article provides quantitative information on the incidence of iconicity in the lexicon of Italian Sign Language (LIS). It observes how the principles of arbitrariness govern the great amount of iconicity that occurs in the LIS lexicon. It also tries to interpret both the high incidence of iconicity and the necessary presence of arbitrariness as responses to a deep need for economy. In order to explain why the arbitrary organization of the LIS lexicon does not prevent a high incidence of iconicity, I propose a revisited notion of arbitrariness based on Saussure�s original formulation of arbitrariness.

The process of socialisation into the academic discourse community involves acquiring mastery of its established genres. While written academic genres have been intensively studied, spoken genres are relatively under-researched. This study focuses on one such spoken research genre, the scientific conference presentation (CP) in English, and specifically on the introduction section, a sub-genre which often poses particular problems for presenters. A move analysis of the CP introductions shows that their rhetorical structure is markedly different from that of the research article, and that these differences are closely related to the contextual and epistemological characteristics of the genre. The interpersonal relations set up by the allocation of speaker and addressee roles through the use of personal pronouns are also discussed. Through a contrastive analysis of the CP introductions and those of the corresponding proceedings papers, the article examines how speakers facilitate information processing and create rapport with the audience. The data comprise video recordings of 44 CPs from 3 scientific fields (geology, medicine, and physics) and a smaller corpus of 13 corresponding articles from the physics conference proceedings.

This paper presents an in-depth study of the semantics of the French discourse marker alors ‘at that time, then, so’. Its evolution from temporal adverbial with local anaphoric meaning to polysemous marker including conversation management uses in spoken French is traced through a systematic diachronic corpus analysis. Of particular interest in this perspective is the relationship between the different meanings of alors and the position it occupies in the sentence. Our main hypothesis is that the semantic evolution of alors goes hand in hand with grammatical and functional changes leading to new discourse functions, viz. from sentence adverbial to discourse structuring marker. We show that semantic meaning is driven by syntactic position changes which gradually evolve over time.

The analysis of prosodic patterns in French spontaneous speech, which is presented here, is based on the hypothesis that intonation, far from being the reflection of syntactical organisation only, also depends on its informative structure. Two levels of constraints have been taken into account : (i) the first one concerns the phonetic variations of prosodic parameters and their phonological representation in terms of phonological features (§ 1), (ii) the second one is focused on the functional interpretation of the syntactical and information structure (§2).

In the area of large speech corpora, there is a definite need for common prosodic notation system based on efficient (semi)automating tools of prosodic segmentation and labelling.In this context, we present the software program ANALOR, developed in order to process semi-automatically prosodic data.From a text-sound alignment, this computer tool detects major prosodic units, on the basis of global and local melodic variations.That leads to the segmentation of an utterance in prosodic periods.Inside those prosodic periods, prominent syllables are then automatically detected.

International audience

International audience

BACKGROUND: With the lack of effective therapy, chemoprevention, and vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, focusing on the immediate repurposing of existing drugs gives hope of curbing the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent unbiased genomics-guided tracing of the SARS-CoV-2 targets in human cells identified vitamin D among the three top-scoring molecules manifesting potential infection mitigation patterns. Growing pre-clinical and epidemiological observational data support this assumption. We hypothesized that vitamin D supplementation may improve the prognosis of COVID-19. The aim of this trial is to compare the effect of a single oral high dose of cholecalciferol versus a single oral standard dose on all-cause 14-day mortality rate in COVID-19 older adults at higher risk of worsening. METHODS: The COVIT-TRIAL study is an open-label, multicenter, randomized controlled superiority trial. Patients aged ≥ 65 years with COVID-19 (diagnosed within the preceding 3 days with RT-PCR and/or chest CT scan) and at least one worsening risk factor at the time of inclusion (i.e., age ≥ 75 years, or SpO2 ≤ 94% in room air, or PaO2/FiO2 ≤ 300 mmHg), having no contraindications to vitamin D supplementation, and having received no vitamin D supplementation > 800 IU/day during the preceding month are recruited. Participants are randomized either to high-dose cholecalciferol (two 200,000 IU drinking vials at once on the day of inclusion) or to standard-dose cholecalciferol (one 50,000 IU drinking vial on the day of inclusion). Two hundred sixty participants are recruited and followed up for 28 days. The primary outcome measure is all-cause mortality within 14 days of inclusion. Secondary outcomes are the score changes on the World Health Organization Ordinal Scale for Clinical Improvement (OSCI) scale for COVID-19, and the between-group comparison of safety. These outcomes are assessed at baseline, day 14, and day 28, together with the serum concentrations of 25(OH)D, creatinine, calcium, and albumin at baseline and day 7. DISCUSSION: COVIT-TRIAL is to our knowledge the first randomized controlled trial testing the effect of vitamin D supplementation on the prognosis of COVID-19 in high-risk older patients. High-dose vitamin D supplementation may be an effective, well-tolerated, and easily and immediately accessible treatment for COVID-19, the incidence of which increases dramatically and for which there are currently no scientifically validated treatments. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04344041 . Registered on 14 April 2020 TRIAL STATUS: Recruiting. Recruitment is expected to be completed in April 2021.

Après avoir explicité les notions de topicalisation et de focalisation, on montrera la nécessité — soulignée par la prise en compte du français médiéval — de distinguer ces opérations (d’ordre pragmatique) des moyens permettant de les réaliser (d’ordre syntaxique, prosodique…), en s’attachant particulièrement aux constructions détachées. On envisagera enfin, parmi celles-ci, quelques cas qui conduisent à s’interroger sur les limites de la topicalisation.

International audience

International audience

This article deals with some adverbs and adverbial constructions expressing epistemic modality in Italian. These forms are commonly considered as fully lexical. It will be shown, though, that they can be compared to grammatical forms, at least to an extent. In fact, on the one hand they are organized in a closed lexical paradigm characterized by semantic complementarity and seemingly eas y to be combined with the paradigm opposing the grammatical epistemic forms. On the other hand each of these adverbs preferentially correlates with a discourse configuration, i.e. a portion of discourse characterized by a particular geometry, comparable to a large-scope construction. These facts suggest including epistemic adverbs and adverbial construction in the analysis of the

Cet article envisage trois démarches différentes pour la caractérisation d’un genre scientifique spécifique : la communication orale de congrès. Nous mettons en évidence certains problèmes méthodologiques soulevés par une telle analyse, et nous traitons des avantages et des inconvénients des trois démarches pour appréhender ce genre scientifique important. La première démarche se fonde sur une analyse microscopique du discours et s'attache à l'étude de certaines particularités syntaxiques de la communication scientifique orale qui résultent des motivations particulières du contexte communicatif du congrès scientifique. La deuxième démarche est macroscopique : il s'agit d'explorer les possibilités d’analyser l’organisation rhétorique de la communication de congrès à l’aide d’un move analysis. Toutefois, ces deux démarches n’éclairent pas la dimension multimodale de la communication orale de congrès. Nous soulignons donc dans une troisième partie certains aspects importants d'une analyse véritablement multimodale.

Five healthy rhesus monkeys were ventilated with intermittent mandatory ventilation and 20 torr positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) for 8 hours. PEEP was increased to 25 torr and the monkeys were ventilated for 4 more hours. Lactated Ringer's solution and human salt-poor albumin were used to expand plasma and extracellular fluid volume throughout the entire period of study. Homologous blood was administered to maintain hematocrit at control levels and maintenance fluids were infused to maintain transmural pulmonary capillary wedge pressure at 5 to 15 torr. Although cardiac output, mean aortic blood pressure, oxygen consumption, venous admixture, transmural pulmonary capillary wedge pressure, HCO3- and in-vivo base excess were not changed when intermittent mandatory ventilation was employed, cardiac output and blood pressure were significantly depressed by brief periods of controlled mechanical ventilation when alternated with intermittent mandatory ventilation. Sporadic increases in arterial-venous oxygen content difference occurred. Arterial carbon dioxide tension was elevated moderately, with a concomitant depression of arterial pH. No pneumothorax occurred. High PEEP was well tolerated with intermittent manditory ventilation, intravascular volume expansion, and careful cardiovascular monitoring.

Polysemy is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. Lexical words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) hardly have a unique meaning. More commonly, a word can be associated with a large set of different related meanings, and the most frequent items are generally also the most polysemous. The same remark applies to grammatical markers (tense markers, prepositions, modal verbs, etc.). Therefore polysemy cannot be considered as a marginal drawback in human languages. On the contrary, it is an important quality whose efficiency must be explained. In most of the classical approaches, the process of understanding a sentence is reduced to a simple bottom-up computation, governed by the principle of compositionality. At the basic level, the meaning of simple phrases is computed from the meaning of the units, and the process is iterated along the syntactic tree, the meaning of each phrase at a higher level being computed from the meaning of its phrase components at the immediately lower level. But such a process is not cognitively plausible: polysemy would be an important cognitive burden in this case, since all the meanings of a polysemous unit would have to be tried out before locating the right one, and this would lead to an unbearable computational increase. Taking into full account the phenomenon of polysemy, we suggest a different conception of the process of meaning construction, called Gestalt compositionality. The meaning of a polysemous unit is not determined at the beginning of the process. It depends upon the meaning of the other linguistic units within the sentence (the so-called 'co-text'). The global meaning of the sentence is therefore the result of a dynamical process, in which linguistic units interact, leading to a more or less precise meaning for each unit as well as a global meaning for the whole sentence.

Time is generally recognised as a ubiquitous component in the way discourse is organised: the discourse-level analysis of time has led to numerous studies, mostly focused on verb tense and temporal adverbials. The discourse role of space seems less obvious: not only is space not systematically marked in the sentence, but it does not lead in itself to any discourse relation.

Cet article s’attache à décrire l’évolution de l’une des marques linguistiques de l’ « oral représenté » en français médiéval (Marchello-Nizia 2012) : l’incise. S’appuyant sur un corpus de 6 textes d’ancien et de moyen français (vers et prose, et domaines discursifs différents), notre recherche vise à rendre compte de l’évolution des propriétés formelles et fonctionnelles de l’incise, envisagée dans ses différents contextes d’occurrence. L’étude montre que l’incise a dans les premiers textes une double fonction : elle participe au marquage de l’entrée dans l’épisode d’oral représenté ainsi qu’à la signalisation des changements de tours de parole. A la fin du Moyen Âge, la forme et la fonction de l’incise semblent s’être modifiées : spécialisée dans le marquage de l’alternance des locuteurs, elle se trouve rarement en début de séquence et ne se combine plus avec l’annonce. Sa forme s’est également transformée : le passé simple a succédé au présent et le pronom personnel sujet a cédé la place aux expressions nominales qui permettent une meilleure identification du référent locuteur.