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1. Mermaid Constructions in Lexical Functional Grammar

   Chihiro Taguchi (January 2022, Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference)

   This paper provides a cross-linguistic analysis of Mermaid Constructions in terms of Lexical Functional Grammar. Mermaid Constructions, coined by Tsunoda (2020), are grammaticalized monoclausal constructions in which a verb and a noun, sometimes with a copula, form a compound predicate. However, the work was chiefly descriptive, and the morphosyntactic nature of Mermaid Constructions in theoretical terms has not yet been explained. In this work, in opposition to Tsunoda’s (2020) hypothesis, the following points are shown: (1) Mermaid Constructions are not monoclausal but biclausal; (2) Mermaid Constructions do not comprise a compound predicate, but are control and raising with a nominal predicate; (3) these findings hold cross-linguistically. 

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2. Assembler artifacts include misassembly because of unsafe unitigs and underassembly because of bidirected graphs

   https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.276601.122  

   Rahman, Amatur; Medvedev, Paul (September 2022, Genome Research)

   Recent assemblies by the T2T and VGP consortia have achieved significant accuracy but required a tremendous amount of effort and resources. More typical assembly efforts, on the other hand, still suffer both from misassemblies (joining sequences that should not be adjacent) and from underassemblies (not joining sequences that should be adjacent). To better understand the common algorithm-driven causes of these limitations, we investigated the unitig algorithm, which is a core algorithm at the heart of most assemblers. We prove that, contrary to popular belief, even when there are no sequencing errors, unitigs are not always safe (i.e., they are not guaranteed to be substrings of the sequenced genome). We also prove that the unitigs of a bidirected de Bruijn graph are different from those of a doubled de Bruijn graph and, contrary to our expectations, result in underassembly. Using experimental simulations, we then confirm that these two artifacts exist not only in theory but also in the output of widely used assemblers. In particular, when coverage is low, then even error-free data result in unsafe unitigs; also, unitigs may unnecessarily split palindromes in half if special care is not taken. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to theoretically predict the existence of these assembler artifacts and confirm and measure the extent of their occurrence in practice. 

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3. CAT s are Fuzzy PETs : A Corpus and Analysis of Potentially Euphemistic Terms

   Gavidia, M.; Lee, P.; Feldman, A.; Peng, J. (January 2022, arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02728.)

   Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language change, but also because humans may not agree on what is a euphemism and what is not. Nevertheless, the first step to tackling the issue is to collect and analyze examples of euphemisms. We present a corpus of potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) along with example texts from the GloWbE corpus. Additionally, we present a subcorpus of texts where these PETs are not being used euphemistically, which may be useful for future applications. We also discuss the results of multiple analyses run on the corpus. Firstly, we find that sentiment analysis on the euphemistic texts supports that PETs generally decrease negative and offensive sentiment. Secondly, we observe cases of disagreement in an annotation task, where humans are asked to label PETs as euphemistic or not in a subset of our corpus text examples. We attribute the disagreement to a variety of potential reasons, including if the PET was a commonly accepted term (CAT). 

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4. Brain microRNAs among social and solitary bees

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200517  

   Kapheim, Karen M.; Jones, Beryl M.; Søvik, Eirik; Stolle, Eckart; Waterhouse, Robert M.; Bloch, Guy; Ben-Shahar, Yehuda (July 2020, Royal Society Open Science)

   Evolutionary transitions to a social lifestyle in insects are associated with lineage-specific changes in gene expression, but the key nodes that drive these regulatory changes are unknown. We examined the relationship between social organization and lineage-specific microRNAs (miRNAs). Genome scans across 12 bee species showed that miRNA copy-number is mostly conserved and not associated with sociality. However, deep sequencing of small RNAs in six bee species revealed a substantial proportion (20–35%) of detected miRNAs had lineage-specific expression in the brain, 24–72% of which did not have homologues in other species. Lineage-specific miRNAs disproportionately target lineage-specific genes, and have lower expression levels than shared miRNAs. The predicted targets of lineage-specific miRNAs are not enriched for genes with caste-biased expression or genes under positive selection in social species. Together, these results suggest that novel miRNAs may coevolve with novel genes, and thus contribute to lineage-specific patterns of evolution in bees, but do not appear to have significant influence on social evolution. Our analyses also support the hypothesis that many new miRNAs are purged by selection due to deleterious effects on mRNA targets, and suggest genome structure is not as influential in regulating bee miRNA evolution as has been shown for mammalian miRNAs. 

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5. Perspective: The Power (Dynamics) of Open Data in Citizen Science

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.637037  

   Cooper, Caren B.; Rasmussen, Lisa M.; Jones, Elizabeth D. (July 2021, Frontiers in Climate)

   null (Ed.)

   In citizen science, data stewards and data producers are often not the same people. When those who have labored on data collection are not in control of the data, ethical problems could arise from this basic structural feature. In this Perspective, we advance the proposition that stewarding data sets generated by volunteers involves the typical technical decisions in conventional research plus a suite of ethical decisions stemming from the relationship between professionals and volunteers. Differences in power, priorities, values, and vulnerabilities are features of the relationship between professionals and volunteers. Thus, ethical decisions about open data practices in citizen science include, but are not limited to, questions grounded in respect for volunteers: who decides data governance structures, who receives attribution for a data set, which data are accessible and to whom, and whose interests are served by the data use/re-use. We highlight ethical issues that citizen science practitioners should consider when making data governance decisions, particularly with respect to open data. 

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