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Gottfried Wilhelm Osann (1796–1866) was a German scientist most renowned for his work in chemistry and physics. However, inspired by Goethe’s work on color, he published a paper on simultaneous color contrast in 1833 using a method that is similar to that of later authors: reflection of an achromatic spot from an angled piece of glass. He wrote at least four more papers on color contrasts, in 1836 using essentially the same method as credited to others. We provide a description and translation of Osann’s 1833 paper and the relevant part of his 1836 paper, say why these papers are interesting and important, give some biographical information about Osann, comment on the fate of Osann’s papers, and describe Osann’s other papers on color.

Multilingual question answering tasks typically assume answers exist in the same language as the question. Yet in practice, many languages face both information scarcity -- where languages have few reference articles -- and information asymmetry -- where questions reference concepts from other cultures. This work extends open-retrieval question answering to a cross-lingual setting enabling questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. We construct a large-scale dataset built on questions from TyDi QA lacking same-language answers. Our task formulation, called Cross-lingual Open Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), includes 40k information-seeking questions from across 7 diverse non-English languages. Based on this dataset, we introduce three new tasks that involve cross-lingual document retrieval using multi-lingual and English resources. We establish baselines with state-of-the-art machine translation systems and cross-lingual pretrained models. Experimental results suggest that XOR QA is a challenging task that will facilitate the development of novel techniques for multilingual question answering. Our data and code are available at https://nlp.cs.washington.edu/xorqa. Comment: Published as a conference paper at NAACL-HLT 2021 (long)

Grounded semantics is typically learnt from utterance-level meaning representations (e.g., successful database retrievals, denoted objects in images, moves in a game). We explore learning word and utterance meanings by continuous observation of the actions of an instruction follower (IF). While an instruction giver (IG) provided a verbal description of a configuration of objects, IF recreated it using a GUI. Aligning these GUI actions to sub-utterance chunks allows a simple maximum entropy model to associate them as chunk meaning better than just providing it with the utterance-final configuration. This shows that semantics useful for incremental (word-by-word) application, as required in natural dialogue, might also be better acquired from incremental settings.

Abstract In ‘Blindness’ José Saramago transports us into a society in which an unexpected epidemic of blindness spreads quickly, disseminating chaos between citizens and institutions. This new reality acts as a magnifying glass highlighting the weaknesses and (few) forces of individuals and community. From this masterpiece we can learn many insights useful to understand the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Despite considerable research interest, it is still an open issue as to how morphologically complex words such as "car+s" are represented and processed in the brain. We studied the neural correlates of the processing of inflected nouns in the morphologically rich Finnish language. Previous behavioral studies in Finnish have yielded a robust inflectional processing cost, i.e., inflected words are harder to recognize than otherwise matched morphologically simple words. Theoretically this effect could stem either from decomposition of inflected words into a stem and a suffix at input level and/or from subsequent recombination at the semantic-syntactic level to arrive at an interpretation of the word. To shed light on this issue, we used magnetoencephalography to reveal the time course and localization of neural effects of morphological structure and frequency of written words. Ten subjects silently read high- and low-frequency Finnish words in inflected and monomorphemic form. Morphological complexity was accompanied by stronger and longer-lasting activation of the left superior temporal cortex from 200 ms onwards. Earlier effects of morphology were not found, supporting the view that the well-established behavioral processing cost for inflected words stems from the semantic-syntactic level rather than from early decomposition. Since the effect of morphology was detected throughout the range of word frequencies employed, the majority of inflected Finnish words appears to be represented in decomposed form and only very high-frequency inflected words may acquire full-form representations.

ABSTRACTIn June of 2018, AMC debuted the series Dietland, a television show about a woman of size named Plum who plans to have weight loss surgery until she begins a journey of self-acceptance. Whi...

While recurrent neural networks have found success in a variety of natural language processing applications, they are general models of sequential data. We investigate how the properties of natural language data affect an LSTM's ability to learn a nonlinguistic task: recalling elements from its input. We find that models trained on natural language data are able to recall tokens from much longer sequences than models trained on non-language sequential data. Furthermore, we show that the LSTM learns to solve the memorization task by explicitly using a subset of its neurons to count timesteps in the input. We hypothesize that the patterns and structure in natural language data enable LSTMs to learn by providing approximate ways of reducing loss, but understanding the effect of different training data on the learnability of LSTMs remains an open question. Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; accepted to ACL 2018 RepL4NLP workshop

In current mental health care psychiatric conditions are defined as compilations of symptoms. These symptom-based disease categories have been severely criticised as contingent and boundless, facilitating the rise to epidemic proportions of such conditions as depression. In this article we look beyond symptoms and stress the role of epidemiology in explaining the current situation. By analysing the parallel development of cardiovascular disease and depression management in Finland, we argue, firstly, that current mental health care shares with the medicine of chronic somatic conditions an attachment to risk factor epidemiology, which accentuates risk and prevention in disease management. However, secondly, due to the symptom-based definitions of psychiatric conditions, depression management cannot differentiate properly between symptoms, signs and risk factors such as, for example, cardiovascular medicine, but treats symptoms as signs or risk factors in contexts of treatment and prevention. Consequently, minor at-risk conditions have become difficult to separate from proper cases of depression.

This column is traditionally given to BJM's Student Midwife of the Year. As this year's award was presented posthumously, Lucy's friends and colleagues have been invited to share their memories

The fact that the body changes following death must have been known for the whole history of mankind. But myth and superstition surrounded the changes. This led to such entities as the ordeal of the bier being used as criminal proof, even though other forms of trial by ordeal had long been abandoned. The scientific literature in the English language did not start until the late 18th century and was still surrounded with ignorance and some superstition. The main concern of the early writers was the correct determination of death. In the 19th century, an understanding of postmortem changes developed and the first attempts to accurately classify sequences of putrefaction were made. This paper analyzes the early forensic medicine writing and the progress of knowledge to the later 19th century, through examination of forensic medicine textbooks published in the English language.