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A combined archaeobotanical and micro-refuse analysis is being implemented at two Early Neolithic tells currently under excavation in the Pelagonia Valley: Vrbjanska Čuka and Veluška Tumba. The first results suggest similarities with Greek sites that show a relatively broad crop spectrum.

This article describes a joint approach to lexical tagging in Serbian, combining three fundamental natural language processing tasks: part-of-speech tagging, compound and named entity recognition. The proposed system relies on conditional random fields that are trained from a newly released annotated corpus and finite-state lexical resources used in an existing symbolic Serbian tagging system. Experimental results show that a joint strategy is more robust than pipeline ones and that the use of lexical resources has a significant positive impact on tagging, in particular on out-of-domain texts.

International audience; Named Entity Recognition has been a hot topic in Natural Language Processing for more than fifteen years. A number of systems for various languages have been developed using different approaches and based on different named entity schemes and tagging strategies. We present the NERosetta web application that can be used for comparison of these various approaches applied to aligned texts (bitexts). In order to illustrate its functionalities, we have used one literary text, its 7 bi-texts involving 5 languages and 5 different NER systems. We present some preliminary results and give guidelines for further development.

Bayesian statistical frameworks have been used to calculate explicit, quantified estimates for site chronologies, and have been especially useful for resolving the complex probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates to the level of individual prehistoric lifetimes and generations. Here the technique is applied to the Neolithic tell of Vinca-Belo Brdo in order to answer long-standing questions about the timing and circumstances of its demise. Modelled date estimates place the end of the site in the second half of the forty-sixth century cal BC. Two successive horizons of closely spaced houses each suffered extensive burning; the interval between them was placed at a maximum of 25 years, with the last house probably used for less than 15 years. The evidence suggests that these house burnings were deliberate, and opens new considerations for the causes of the end of the tell-based system in south-east Europe.

Recently, the coupling of ion traps with VUV beamlines has allowed performing activation of large biomolecular ions formed by electrospray. We discuss the potential of this new field along with the set up of an ion trap at the DESIRS beamline at SOLEIL. Study of primary structure of proteins becomes now possible at synchrotron facilities.

Children are often under-represented in excavated populations due to the poor survival of their bones. Using a group of medieval burials from Serbia, our researchers examine the differential survival of children and of different parts of the body within the same terrain, and rightly urge us to take these factors into consideration before attempting demographic, ritual or social interpretations.

Why were infants buried beneath house-floors at the Mesolithic and early Neolithic site of Lepenski Vir? Undertaking a new analysis of the neonate remains at Vlasac and Lepenski Vir the authors reject the idea of sacrificial infanticide, and demonstrate a consistency of respect in these burials. They suggest that the deaths were mourned and the dead, like the living, were given protection by the houses they were buried in. The treatment of mothers and children suggests increasing social cohesion from the Mesolithic at Vlasac to the early Neolithic at Lepenski Vir.

Text processing in Serbian is based on the Intex format system of electronic dictionaries. Although lexical recognition is successful for 75% to 90% of word forms (depending on the type of text), some categories of words remain unrecognized. In this paper we present two aspects of e-dictionary enhancement that provide for additional recognition of two important categories of words: named entities and words generally not recorded in traditional dictionaries. We first describe the structure and content of dictionaries of proper names, both personal and geographic, developed to recognize the corresponding classes of named entities. Then we present a set of lexical transducers expressing morphological rules governing word formation, developed for the recognition of unknown words. The resources presented significantly improve the lexical recognition process.