These three discussions, including one jointly written with Judith Rousseau and one written jointly with Gilles Celeux, Florence Forbes and Mike Titterington, are associated with three papers related to Bayesian model choice. This area of Bayesian statistics is still the object of intense and antagonistic debates and our vision of the field is reflected by these three texts.

We consider the functions that formulae perform in two types of written texts which maintain close links to oral forms: Old English epic poetry and blogs. Five oralityrelated functions of formulae are identified in both datasets: discourse-structuring, filler, epithetic, gnomic, and tonic. A sixth type of formulaic function, theacronymic, necessarily tied to the written medium, is also found in...

Genomes follow laws resembling celestial orbits. In a recent publication on Nature Scientific Reports[1] two computer scientists (V. Manca and V. Bonnici) discovered strong mathematical regularities in the structure of genomes. These regularities can be expressed in terms of simple laws based on ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas. But the geometrical forms do not cope with spatial movements, ra...

Both as a corpus and as a source of texts for corpora the Web offers significant benefits in its virtually comprehensive coverage of major languages, content domains and written text types, yet its usefulness is limited by the generally unknown origin and reliability of online texts and by the sheer amount of “noise” on the Web. This paper describes and evaluates linguistic methods and computin...

Genomes follow laws resembling celestial orbits. In a recent publication on Nature Scientific Reports[1] two computer scientists (V. Manca and V. Bonnici) discovered strong mathematical regularities in the structure of genomes. These regularities can be expressed in terms of simple laws based on ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas. But the geometrical forms do not cope with spatial movements, ra...

The Swiss avalanche bulletin is produced twice a day in four languages. Due to the lack of time available for manual translation, a fully automated translation system is employed, based on a catalogue of predefined phrases and predetermined rules of how these phrases can be combined to produce sentences. Because this catalogue of phrases is limited to a small sublanguage, the system is able to ...

Research in information retrieval has traditionally concentrated on making assumptions about the content of documents based on very shallow semantic analysis through word occurrence statistics of various kinds. But texts are more than bags of words, and the semantic analysis information retrieval systems typically used is overly simple. There is ample reason to try to broaden the view of what t...

Moving in line with the postulation that metadiscourse (MD) markers help transform a dry and tortuous piece of text into a coherent and reader-friendly one, the researchers in the current study attempted to investigate the effect different metadiscourse markers might have on Iranian EFL learners’ perception of written texts. To this end, 120 undergraduate English students were given three diffe...