DA 2011 Grp 46
Complex Examples
Text
History: In 1470 the Columbus Family moved to Savona, where Domenico took over a tavern. In
the same year, Columbus was on a Genoese ship hired in the service of René I of Anjou to
support his attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Naples. In 1473 Columbus began his
apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione, Di Negro and Spinola families of
Genoa. Later he allegedly made a trip to Chios, a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea. In May
1476, he took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry a valuable cargo to northern
Europe. He docked in Bristol, Galway, in Ireland and was possibly in Iceland in 1477. In 1479
Columbus reached his brother Bartolomeo in Lisbon, keeping on trading for the Centurione
family. He married Filipa Moniz Perestrello, daughter of the Porto Santo governor, the
Portuguese nobleman of Genoese origin Bartolomeu Perestrello. In 1479 or 1480, his son Diego
was born.
(FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus)
News: March 1, 2011 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- A baby has been hospitalized after an apartment fire
on Chicago's West Side.
Police say it was set by someone who lit a firework. Police are questioning a suspect.
The baby girl was taken to the hospital in critical condition.
Firefighters rescued up to 100 people from the building on the 700-block of North Central.
While some firefighters ran in to lead the residents to safety, other firefighters used ladders to
help people trapped in their upper-floor apartments.
"We pulled up on the scene, and it was people hanging from the windows. Me and my partner
grabbed the ladder. We threw it up to the third floor. The guy was yelling that he had a
prosthetic leg so he couldn't walk," said Eddie Galloza, Chicago Fire Dept.
Firefighters say their rescue efforts saved more people from harm.
"Nice job by our group. These guys, they saved a lot of lives with fast action," said John
Sheehan, Chicago Fire Dept.
As for the investigation, police are questioning a man they say lit fireworks in a second-floor
apartment during a domestic disturbance.
"I heard, like, a piece of dynamite. It was 'boom.' My door was locked, and it popped open. It
was crazy. Everybody go outside and everybody was, like, running through the building going
crazy," said Corey Coakley, resident.
Several people say they may have to move somewhere else because of the extensive damage.
The Red Cross is working with people who have been displaced.
Editorial: Sorry isn’t good enough. Toronto Community Housing Corp. requires a new governing
board in the wake of two shattering reports by Auditor General Jeff Griffiths detailing dubious
procurement practices and flagrant spending on perks and luxuries. Mayor Rob Ford was
entirely correct in calling for a new board on Monday.
Three of four city councillors on the public housing panel have been recently changed as a
result of the election that brought Ford to power. Now he has asked for the board’s seven
“citizen” members to go as well.
“Folks, there’s a serious, serious problem,” Ford said. He’s right.
A thorough sweep of the boardroom would help to restore accountability and public trust in
the management of Canada’s largest public housing corporation. Toronto is sorely in need of
such assurance.
Board chair David Mitchell seemed well-intentioned and said all the right things after receiving
Griffiths’ findings. He did not mince words in expressing his disappointment with a previous
executive team that had allowed abuses to occur. Mitchell declared himself “angry and
indignant” and explained that “people in whom I put my trust were not deserving of that trust.”
Basic Genre Label
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at
that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan
Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St.
Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is
called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry
Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the
adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village
tavern on market days. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley
or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A
small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional
whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon
the uniform tranquillity.
I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall
walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all
nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath
stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish
for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away
the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.
(The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving)
Seprafilm® Adhesion Barrier (Seprafilm) is a sterile, bioresorbable, translucent membrane
composed of two chemically modified anionic polysaccharides, sodium hyaluronate (HA) and
carboxymethylcellulose (CMC). Seprafilm is intended as an adjunct in abdominal, pelvic, and
thoracic surgery for reducing the incidence, extent and severity of postoperative adhesions at
the site of placement.
Preparation
• Open the foil pouch and drop the plastic sleeve on a dry, sterile field.
• Carefully remove the Tyvek® holder from the plastic sleeve.
• Keep membrane dry in the holder prior to application.
• While membrane remains in the holder, cut to desired size with scissors.
• Expose 2 cm of membrane through open end of the holder.
Placement
 Apply Seprafilm immediately prior to closure of the abdominopelvic or thoracic cavity.....
(http://www.genzyme.co.uk/prod/docs/uk_pdf_hcp_Seprafilm_IFU.pdf)
While the first generation systems were limited to the random generation of grammatically
correct sentences, the field has experienced a very rapid growth over the past ten years, both
as a research area bringing a unique perspective on fundamental issues in artificial intelligence,
cognitive science, and human-computer interaction, and as an emerging technology capable of
partially automating routine document creation. In this sense, as practical systems became
more sophisticated, it was necessary to provide a good understanding of the notion of
“textuality” and all the factors involved in the creation of different text types. In this context, it
was only natural that corpora started to be used as the empirical basis both for the theoretical
investigation of textual phenomena, and as part of the requirement analysis phase for NLG
systems. As a result, the use of corpora has now been integrated as part of the standard
methodology for NLG, both in theoretically-oriented research and in the development of
concrete generation systems.
In this paper, we report on the use of bilingual corpora for the construction of a computational
grammar of Spanish, contrastive with English, in the application context of Multilingual Natural
Language Generation (MLG), concentrating on the textual phenomenon of thematicity and its
relationship with the related notion of focus as an illustration. Section 2 describes the two
corpora selected and the criteria for concentrating on two comparable samples as the empirical
basis for computational specifications. Section 3 presents the theoretical framework selected
for this study and the issues which must be explored contrastively with respect to the textual
phenomena mentioned before. Section 4 describes the corpus analysis phase of the bilingual
samples. Section 5 presents a computational specification of the results of the analysis as
resources for generation. The specification is based on the notion of functional typology as
developed in SFL and implemented in the KPML development environment. Finally, section 6
provides a summary and discusses the implications of these results for corpus-based MLG.