PERSON NAMES COLLOCATION AS THE DETERMINATION FACTOR OF THEIR REFERENTIAL STATUS (based on English and Tatar languages material)

In the article, the analysis of person names in terms of their collocation with some verbs groups as the determination factor of their referential status is carried out. The empirical base of the research work involves statements from the national corpuses of English and Tatar languages. The study object is English and Tatar statements representing peculiarities of person names collocation and realization of their event nomination function. It is found out that person names can act as the implicit event nomination. This phenomenon can be partially considered as the semantic-syntactic metonymy. The referential status in this case is ambiguous. Language-independent investigation of person names allows defining their specific-referential status. Thanks to their situation representing ability person names can be considered as abstract event nomination and their referential status as interpretative.

Self–other risk perception bias: Functions of event abstractness and social distance

We developed a platform to consider both optimism and pessimism biases in the same context using construal level theory as a basis, and gained the following key results: An increase in event abstractness increased differences in self–other risk perception (Experiment 1). Perceived level of social distance determined whether optimism or pessimism bias occurred (Experiment 2). Compared with their closest other, people displayed more pessimism bias when estimating the risk of a concrete, compared to an abstract, event. In contrast, when comparing themselves with their most distant other, people displayed less optimism bias when estimating the risk of a concrete event relative to an abstract event, illustrating that the occurrence and extent of optimism or pessimism depends on an interactive effect between social distance and event abstractness (Experiment 3). Our results suggest that people should consider both risk target and risk characteristics when estimating risk.

Between Abstract Event and Individualized Crime: Genocidal Intent in the Case of Croatia

The International Court of Justice's (ICJ) decision in the case of Croatia v. Serbia raises fundamental questions about the nature of genocidal intent. While the Court was careful not to make a clear departure from established case law on the matter, its emphasis on elements such as ‘pattern’ and ‘scale’ – at the expense of the role of individual intent – indicates that the majority on the bench adopted an interpretation which brings the legal concept of genocide closer to an abstract event of mass atrocity than to an act capable of commission even by select individuals. That, however, is an understanding which is not only alien to the traditional interpretation adopted by international criminal tribunals, but also unjustifiable under the established law of state responsibility. This article considers various aspects in the judgment which invite critique in that regard, but also analyses the way in which the ICJ has dealt with the coexistence of intent and certain motives – a crucial aspect of the case which has already been object of some controversy.

Unsupervised Discovery of Biographical Structure from Text

We present a method for discovering abstract event classes in biographies, based on a probabilistic latent-variable model. Taking as input timestamped text, we exploit latent correlations among events to learn a set of event classes (such as Born, Graduates High School, and Becomes Citizen), along with the typical times in a person’s life when those events occur. In a quantitative evaluation at the task of predicting a person’s age for a given event, we find that our generative model outperforms a strong linear regression baseline, along with simpler variants of the model that ablate some features. The abstract event classes that we learn allow us to perform a large-scale analysis of 242,970 Wikipedia biographies. Though it is known that women are greatly underrepresented on Wikipedia—not only as editors (Wikipedia, 2011) but also as subjects of articles (Reagle and Rhue, 2011)—we find that there is a bias in their characterization as well, with biographies of women containing significantly more emphasis on events of marriage and divorce than biographies of men.

Comparison of event landslide inventories: the Pogliaschina catchment test case, Italy

Event landslide inventory maps document the extent of populations of landslides caused by a single natural trigger, such as an earthquake, an intense rainfall event, or a rapid snowmelt event. Event inventory maps are important for landslide susceptibility and hazard modelling, and prove useful to manage residual risk after a landslide-triggering event. Standards for the preparation of event landslide inventory maps are lacking. Traditional methods are based on the visual interpretation of stereoscopic aerial photography, aided by field surveys. New and emerging techniques exploit remotely sensed data and semi-automatic algorithms. We describe the production and comparison of two independent event inventories prepared for the Pogliaschina catchment, Liguria, Northwest Italy. The two inventories show landslides triggered by an intense rainfall event on 25 October 2011, and were prepared through the visual interpretation of digital aerial photographs taken 3 days and 33 days after the event, and by processing a very-high-resolution image taken by the WorldView-2 satellite 4 days after the event. We compare the two inventories qualitatively and quantitatively using established and new metrics, and we discuss reasons for the differences between the two landslide maps. We expect that the results of our work can help in deciding on the most appropriate method to prepare reliable event inventory maps, and outline the advantages and the limitations of the different approaches.

Comparison of event landslide inventories: the Pogliaschina catchment test case, Italy

Event landslide inventory maps document the extent of populations of landslides caused by a single natural trigger, such as an earthquake, an intense rainfall event, or a rapid snowmelt event. Event inventory maps are important for landslide susceptibility and hazard modelling, and prove useful to manage residual risk after a landslide-triggering event. Standards for the preparation of event landslide inventory maps are lacking. Traditional methods are based on the visual interpretation of stereoscopic aerial photography, aided by field surveys. New and emerging techniques exploit remotely sensing data and semi-automatic algorithms. We describe the production of two event inventories prepared for the Pogliaschina catchment, Liguria, NW Italy. The two inventories show landslides triggered by an intense rainfall event on 25 October 2011, and were prepared through the visual interpretation of digital aerial photographs taken three days and thirty-three days after the event, and processing a very high resolution image taken by the WorldView II satellite four days after the event. We compare the two inventories qualitatively and quantitatively, using established and new metrics, and we discuss reasons for the differences and the similarities between the landslide maps. We expect that the results of our work can help deciding on the most appropriate method to prepare reliable event inventory maps, and to outline advantages and the limitations of the different methods.