Teixeira, Helena, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal Azevedo, Andreia S., Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal Figueiredo, Céu, I3S, Portugal
Almeida, Carina, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal Azevedo, Nuno F., Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Understanding how the microbial communities drive diseases or health could be the key to improve therapeutic strategies to combat or prevent gastric diseases, and for that, a technology that provides information about the spatial organization of the microbiota within stomach is paramount. As the number of microorganisms that can be discriminated by conventional Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) technique is usually limited to three targets, another new technology, called Combinatorial Labeling and Spectral Imaging-FISH (CLASI-FISH), is developing. The CLASI-FISH technique is able to discriminate many microorganisms simultaneously, since the methodology allows the identification of fluorophores with overlapping spectra.
In a first stage of this project, FISH technique using an universal Eubacteria LNA/2´OMe probe (EUB388) coupled to 11 different fluorophores (Pacific Blue, Alexa Fluor 405, Alexa Fluor 488, Alexa Fluor 514, ATTO 532, ATTO 550, Rhodamine RedX, Alexa Fluor 594, DY 615, ATTO 633 and ATTO 655) was applied to Escherichia coli. We have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to distinguish fluorophores with highly overlapping emission spectra by combining both excitation and emission spectral data in a single linear unmixing algorithm. The results demonstrated that, using spectral imaging on Leica TCS SP5 Confocal, we can discriminate 8 fluorochromes (Alexa Fluor 405, Alexa Fluor 488, Alexa Fluor 514, ATTO 532, ATTO 550, Alexa Fluor 594, ATTO 633 and ATTO 655) in a multiplex assay (simultaneous detection in a single sample).
Hence, we believe that this technique holds great promise for the analysis of spatial organization of microbiotas.
15151 | Semantic readings of the Simple Present in radio news (oral) and online
newspapers (written)
José Carlos Miranda Barbosa, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
The Simple Present in European Portuguese is a tense that can be used to refer to the past, to the present itself and also to the future. In both oral and written registers, this is one of the most used tenses. Even though these are versatile times, we can see that there isn't a great number of studies about it and its semantic values. Some of the existing studies about this matter are from Lopes (1995), Silvano (2002), Tavares (2005), Baldé (2013) e Dala (2013). Throughout this study we will analyse the semantic values of the Simple Present in radio news (oral) and in news from online newspapers (written). The main goals are, on the one hand, to contribute to the semantic characterization of this verbal tense and, on the other hand, to verify if there are differences in the use of this tense within the same genre, the journalistic one, but in different records, both oral and written.
The collected corpus constituted by radio (collected from Radio Renascença, TSF and Antena 1) and by online newspapers (collected from Diario de Notícias, Jornal de Notícias and Público). Inicially I proceeded with the accounting of all existing verb tenses in the corpus and I gathered the ones that I found in the present simple making an analysis of its semantic values.
This research allowed us to conclude that in the analysed data the most frequent interpretations of the Simple Present are of Pré-Presente and Presente Real, seldom occurring the interpretations of Futurate Present, a Present with a future value, of Habitual Present and of Generic Present. We can also observe other values which are not described in the literature: a Present with an interpretation typical of a Progressive Present, a Present with an interpretation that resembles that of the Pretérito Perfeito Composto (`Present Perfect´) and a Present that which situations in different time intervals.
15152 | Incremental Tensor Factorization for Recommender Systems
Ramalho, Miguel S., Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Nowadays, most platforms, tools and content sharing applications have content that is specifically relevant for some users. As such, there is a general concern for making the right content available to the right users. This is a tricky problem and it is typically solved by collecting some initial user behavioural data and then, by establishing either explicit or implicit similarity relations between like-minded users, recommending content that is, hopefully, relevant and adequate. The novel challenge resides in both achieving proper recommendations as well as doing it with speed, in an ever-faster world of data streams and Big Data. The current work focuses on proposing a new incremental recommendation algorithm based on tensor factorization and comparing its results an adaptability to large streams with those of incremental matrix co-factorization algorithms. The aim is to find ideal settings for both approaches, such as number of dimensions, the rank of the chosen variables among others and be able to determine which approach is, indeed, better for what circumstance. Preliminary results show that matrix co-factorization is adequate for higher level user attributes than tensor approaches.
15154 | Language used in police interviews in cases of domestic violence
Ferreira, Sofia, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Domestic violence (DV), which is intimately connected with the feminine/masculine duality, has long existed and, in Portugal, statistics show a 19,2% rise between 2015 and 2017 (APAV). Gender inequality has established so that women obeying men is seen as only `natural´. However, as they gained awareness, victims started delating the repressive behaviour of their oppressors. Acts of DV, subsequent actions to delate it and the ensuing police interviews are all expressed through language. Previous research, e.g. Holt & Johnson (2010), unveiled that the questions formulated by the police often reveal inherent linguistic issues, e.g. syntactic complexity. Thus, as the identification of those issues and subsequent suggestions for improvement can contribute to enhancing the procedure, research into interviews with victims of DV is a highly relevant topic for linguistics. This study aims to analyse if the language used in police interviews with victims of DV shows the required features of simplicity, directiveness and impartiality. It focuses on syntax (e.g. embeddings and adverbs of manner) used in the questions asked by enforcement agents in cases of DV, collected in 2017. Our analysis of the questions´ formulation corroborates the findings reported by research in English-speaking contexts: as will be shown, questions are overly complex, conservative and subjective. Another problem is the generalization of the cases: all victims must answer the same 20 questions, no matter their origin or the specificities of the event. Also, transcribing oral data is a problem, as during this process data may (inadvertently) be changed, affecting evidence integrity (Haworth, 2010). The presentation concludes with a discussion of the intricacies of the interviewing procedure, and of how the written statement is a result of retelling the same story many times (foregrounding crucial details for the outcome of each case), and points to future directions for forensic linguistic analysis.