There are people who leave their mark in field. Without doubt, Pier Luigi Nimis (for the registry office, Pierluigi; for friends, Pier; family members, Pil; me and a few colleagues, PL) is such person. On threshold of retirement but no less active than ever, about to begin new phase his life, life dedicated entirely science and, particular, lichenology.

The basic concepts in Centering Theory, such as utterance, ranking and R1-pronouns, are purposely left unspecified to concrete tasks. The proper setting of these parameters in Chinese anaphoric resolution is examined in this study. Six resolution algorithms are designed to examine the effectiveness of the instantiations of different parametric settings. The results reveal that utterances, when ...

Centering, positioning an object within specified bounds, is a common computer task, for example making selections using a touch screen or positioning icons relative to each other. The experiments measured times for participants (n = 155) to position a circular cursor with diameter, p = 40 pixel or approximately 10 mm, completely within circular targets with a variety of diameters, w. The analy...

One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit center-updating utterance units and how to process complex utterances consisting of multiple clauses. In this paper, I will explore the extent to which a str...

The centering inference p & q, therefore if p then q is important in reasoning research because it is logically valid for some accounts of conditionals (e. g. the material and the probability conditionals), but not for others (e. g. the inferential conditional, according to which a conditional is true if and only if there is an inferential connection between p and q). We tested participants' ac...

A new application of the mean centering of ratio spectra method is proposed for estimation of the rate constants of second order reactions, using kinetic-spectrophotometric data. The method is based on the mean centering of the ratio spectra to obtain a kinetic profile of the product. Using computational fitting, the rate constant can be obtained without any ambiguity. An interesting feature of...

Flow in river bends is associated with generation of secondary flows that leads to a rather complicated flow pattern around bridge piers located the bend. In this study, patterns rectangular and oblong models collar at 90o angle 180-degree sharp bend an experimental plume were investigated. The 3D velocity data collected using Vectrino velocimeter. results indicated presence pier caused more in...