Dans la foulée des scandales financiers ayant secoué le milieu des affaires ces dernières années, l’efficacité des pratiques de régie d’entreprise, et, en particulier celles liées à l’indépendance des administrateurs, a été passée au crible. L’administrateur désigné par une partie pour la représenter est un type d’administrateur que l’on rencontre fréquemment au sein des conseils d’administration des entreprises. Toutefois, l’on peut se questionner sur l’indépendance réelle de ces administrateurs, considérant leur loyauté envers la personne les ayant désignés, laquelle détient habituellement un intérêt à titre d’actionnaire ou de partie prenante dans l’entreprise visée. En outre, alors que les principes légaux requièrent que les administrateurs agissent dans le meilleur intérêt de l’entreprise, la réalité pratique est parfois toute autre: aux prises avec les instructions ou les souhaits de la personne les ayant nommés, les administrateurs désignés se retrouvent placés en situation inhérente de conflit d’intérêts. Ce texte vise à offrir une analyse détaillée au sujet de l’administrateur désigné et du conflit d’intérêts résultant de cette double exigence de loyauté. L’objectif est de présenter un examen approfondi des diverses difficultés résultant de la nomination d’un administrateur désigné ou associées à celle-ci, ainsi que des réponses judiciaires et législatives liées à cette problématique. Cette réflexion mènera à une exploration de certains systèmes législatifs et légaux, en particulier ceux du Royaume-Uni, de l’Australie et de la Nouvelle-Zélande, afin d’obtenir une meilleure compréhension et d’offrir une perspective éclairée quant aux enjeux analysés par la présente. / Following the wave of corporate scandals that have surfaced over the past decade, significant attention has been showered on the efficiency of corporate governance practices, with particular scrutiny on the issue of director independence. One specific category of directors frequently nominated to sit on corporate boards is the nominee director. However, these directors often lack veritable independence given their extraneous loyalty towards their appointer, usually either a shareholder or stakeholder of the corporation. Furthermore, while legal principle requires that all company directors exercise their statutory duties with a view to the best interests of the corporation, in practice nominee directors are expected to follow the instructions or wishes of their appointer, resulting in their inherent position of conflict. This text focuses on the nominee director and the conflict of interest resulting from such director’s position of dual loyalty. Its objective is to provide a comprehensive examination of the various difficulties arising from, and associated with the appointment of nominee directors as well as the judicial and legislative responses to these difficulties. In examining the various complications associated with nominee directors, the legal framework in several foreign jurisdictions, particularly the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand is also explored throughout this text to provide further insight and perspective on the different issues analysed herein.

2010年12月25日在臺灣的地方自治史上產生了前所未有的重大變革，也就是五大直轄市的形成，同時也使馬英九總統在2008年總統大選期間，所提出的「三都十五縣」的政見破局。但這樣的結果，對改制前的臺北縣而言，可說是完成追逐了30年，但卻仍遙不可及的夢想，也結束了長期淪為次等公民的不平等待遇。 升格後的新北市與臺北市在地方自治的體制上雖可說已是並駕齊驅，但是就兩者的發展歷史而言，新北市目前仍處於初始的立基階段，尤其是新北市的29個行政區，起源於改制前臺北縣29個鄉鎮市的自治體。在改制之初29個行政區，除了在人口密度、土地面積上有相當大的差異之外，最主要的是地理環境的先天條件，使得29個行政區呈現不同的城鄉風貌。 新北市首要面臨的課題，就是進行29個行政區的重整工作，在過去臺北縣發展一鄉一特色的基礎上，各行政區原具有社區產業的發展條件，但在過去鄉鎮市自治時期，難免因為各自政治立場的不同而分立，形成政治地理，以致造成政府當局資源整合不易。再者，原有的行政區疆界雖因為都市開發，產生地域疆界不明的現況，但在過去鄉鎮市自治時代，行政區域調整容易引發藩籬割據的疑慮，所以新北市行政區歷經了40年未曾調整。 升格後的新北市在五都之中，是人口最多的直轄市，在區域經濟崛起及國際城市競爭的氛圍中，各直轄市無不致力發展各自潛能，期以提升國際能見度。然而城市發展首重基礎的建設，行政區劃是新北市行政資源分配的基礎，各行政區發展皆屬新北市政府全權統籌規劃，如何以最適的行政區劃調整藍圖，勾勒未來新北市發展的願景與區域發展特色，是市政府重要的課題。行政區劃調整工作需有妥善完整的規劃與配套，應考量民意的趨勢，要有一次劃定，革除行政區界劃定不明的決心。 本研究指出根據公共選擇理論，以及區域治理、公共服務及廣域行政的概念，新北市應以現有公務機關服務轄區分布現況、市議員及立委選舉區劃分、生活圈、歷史、地理環境等現況來研擬未來新北市行政區藍圖，並探索最適的行政區劃藍圖，供市政府做為行政區劃時的參考，更有助於新北市行政區劃調整共識的形成。 / A revolutionary change of local self-governance in Taiwan history has occurred since December 25, 2010; that is the formation of five municipalities. This formation broke President Ma Ying-Jeou’s policy of “three cities fifteen counties” raised in Presidential Election of 2008. However, to pre-reformed Taipei County, the formation made its reachless dream which had been pursued for thirty years realized. The formation also ended the long-term unfair treatment of being the second-grade citizens. Upgraded New Taipei City is running neck to neck with Taipei City in terms of local self-governance. Regarding the histories of the two, however, the former is still under the fundamental stage, especially the 29 administrative areas of New Taipei City, which used to be 29 regional municipalities of the townships of pre-reformed Taipei County. In the beginning of the reformation for the 29 administrative areas, it was the precondition of geography that made them have different countryside landscapes in addition to a big difference of population density and land area. The first lesson New Taipei City will undergo is the work of administrative area adjustment for the 29 administrative areas. Upon “one township one feature” policy on which pre-formed Taipei County had made an effort, each administrative area had its own strength of developing community industry. During the past self-governance period of the townships, nonetheless, it was inevitable to see the area separation due to political diversity. Political geography had thus occurred and made it more difficult for the government to make resource integration. Furthermore, although there was boundary ambiguity in the original boundaries of the administrative areas on account of urban development, to avoid the problem of opposition to the splittism against administrative area adjustment, the administrative areas of New Taipei City had not been adjusted for forty years during the past self-governance period of the townships. Upgraded New Taipei City is the one with the highest population among the five municipalities. Affected by the rise of regional economic and international urban competition, none of the municipalities slacks on developing its potential in an attempt to enhance its international visibility. With respect to urban development, infrastructure is firstly emphasized and administrative division is considered to be the fundamental work to New Taipei City when administrative resource allocation is being made. It is New Taipei City government that has full authority to make an overall plan of the development of each administrative area. Therefore, the question “how to sketch the forthcoming version of the development of New Taipei City and the features of regional development on the most appropriate blueprint of administrative division?” becomes an important issue to the city government. The work of administrative division adjustment needs to be well planned and go with corresponding measures. Public opinion should be taken into account and the determination of “once only” and eliminating boundary ambiguity is also required. This study points out that, based on public choice theory and the concepts of regional governance, public service and cooperative administration, New Taipei City should make a blueprint of forthcoming administrative areas according to the present distribution of the service districts under jurisdiction of official departments, the division of the constituencies of city councilors and legislative committees, living domains, histories, and geographical surroundings. Meanwhile, to provide as references for the city government to make administrative division, the most appropriate blueprint of administrative division needs to be sought. It also helps on coming to a mutual understanding of the administrative division adjustment for New Taipei City.

Using English and the West-African creole language Krio as the objects of investigation, this study proposes an analysis in which verbs and the paradigms pertaining to verbs are conceived of as being the only direct carriers of linguistic time encoding. The fundamental assumption is that nominals encode substance, be it concrete or abstract, and that verbals encode abstract substance with time.The theoretical backdrop is provided by Derek Bickerton's Roots of Language (1981) and "The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis" (1984) in which he proposes a set of conceptually fundamental distinctions. These distinctions: the state/process; the durative/punctual; the realis/irrealis; and the anterior/non-anterior; are discussed in relation to four dynamicity values of verbal nuclei: stative; processive; eventive; and telic. These are proposed by the present author, but draw on Bernard Comrie's aspectual analysis in Aspect (1976).Three different layers of analysis are put forward: (1) the nucleic, which consists of the verbal carrying the meaning core of a situation; (2) the verbal constituency, in which we find all TMA encoding, that is, the tense, mood and aspect of the situation; and (3) the (verbal) situation, which is conceived of as a superordinate, maximum unit of description.It is argued that the dynamicity value of the verbal nucleus to a large extent determines and limits the possible aspectual, modal and temporal interpretations of the situation. / digitalisering@umu

立法委員因連任動機及選區壓力，使國會議場的立法參與成為選區服務的延伸。立委會將陳情民眾的意見轉化為法律提案，以便向選民宣稱功勞；為展現立法績效，並會以「搭便車」或「加碼」等方式，積極追逐立法數量。若立委選區的立場，與政黨政策方向不一致，立委可能以「切割」立場、表達異議的肢體語言，向選民表態。立委或政黨雙方各自堅持立場，甚至政黨以黨紀懲罰，仍是另一種形式的妥協，立委也藉此免於選民究責。原則上，雙方會權衡得失，在政黨包容立委選區的壓力下，避免完全撕裂關係。 　　本文以農業法案為例，用意在分析農業區與非農業區立委，於農業立法參與度的差異。觀察對象從立法院第一屆增額立委時期至第七屆，參與度的測量針對首提案、共同提案及發言次數累加，但考慮提案的付出相對較高，故予以加權計算。統計結果，農業區立委相對於非農業區、民進黨相較於其他政黨，在農業立法參與度比較高，國民黨則是黨際競爭激烈的農業區立委較積極。此外，第二屆的國會全面改選及第七屆選制改為單一選區，對立法參與度皆有顯著影響。 　　在方法的運用上，本研究測量農業立法參與度，以量化（立法紀錄編碼）為主，並藉質性資料（公報、報紙、訪談）輔助解釋。立委因選區考量促成的行為態樣，包括競逐立法績效及突顯異議立場的分析，則以質性資料的案例檢證為主，且以數據資料輔助佐證。 / Legislative participation in congress by legislators who want reelection and feel pressure from constituency is extension of servicing constituents. Legislators propose bills that transform from petitions of constituents in order to claim credit, and propose more bills to raise legislative performance by “free riding” and “raising the stakes.” Besides, legislators may “segment” position or express objection to conforming constituency if legislators and their party have different opinions. At this situation, legislators and their party maybe stand each position or party enforces punishment to maintain discipline that is another compromise, and legislators can avoid charge from constituency. In principle, party will tolerate legislators who feel pressure from constituency and each will avoid to tear both sides. 　　The dissertation applies case of agricultural bills aims to compare degree of legislative participation in agricultural and non-agricultural district. The range of observation is from First(additional members) to Seventh Legislative Yuan. The degree to measure include first and joint proposal, speaking. However, the proposals had weighted for more devotion than speaking. As a result of statistics, legislators’ degree in agricultural district was more high than non-agricultural, DPP’s degree was more high than other party, and KMT legislators in marginal agricultural district still actively participate in legislation. Furthermore, the Second’s democratization and the Seventh’s single member district had more influence on legislative participation. 　　In research methods, the degree to measure legislative participation in agricultural bills mainly applies quantitative analysis(to code legislative records). Further, legislative behavior of raising legislative performance and standing objection position mainly applies qualitative analysis(bulletin, newspaper, interview).

Dans la foulée des scandales financiers ayant secoué le milieu des affaires ces dernières années, l’efficacité des pratiques de régie d’entreprise, et, en particulier celles liées à l’indépendance des administrateurs, a été passée au crible. L’administrateur désigné par une partie pour la représenter est un type d’administrateur que l’on rencontre fréquemment au sein des conseils d’administration des entreprises. Toutefois, l’on peut se questionner sur l’indépendance réelle de ces administrateurs, considérant leur loyauté envers la personne les ayant désignés, laquelle détient habituellement un intérêt à titre d’actionnaire ou de partie prenante dans l’entreprise visée. En outre, alors que les principes légaux requièrent que les administrateurs agissent dans le meilleur intérêt de l’entreprise, la réalité pratique est parfois toute autre: aux prises avec les instructions ou les souhaits de la personne les ayant nommés, les administrateurs désignés se retrouvent placés en situation inhérente de conflit d’intérêts. Ce texte vise à offrir une analyse détaillée au sujet de l’administrateur désigné et du conflit d’intérêts résultant de cette double exigence de loyauté. L’objectif est de présenter un examen approfondi des diverses difficultés résultant de la nomination d’un administrateur désigné ou associées à celle-ci, ainsi que des réponses judiciaires et législatives liées à cette problématique. Cette réflexion mènera à une exploration de certains systèmes législatifs et légaux, en particulier ceux du Royaume-Uni, de l’Australie et de la Nouvelle-Zélande, afin d’obtenir une meilleure compréhension et d’offrir une perspective éclairée quant aux enjeux analysés par la présente. / Following the wave of corporate scandals that have surfaced over the past decade, significant attention has been showered on the efficiency of corporate governance practices, with particular scrutiny on the issue of director independence. One specific category of directors frequently nominated to sit on corporate boards is the nominee director. However, these directors often lack veritable independence given their extraneous loyalty towards their appointer, usually either a shareholder or stakeholder of the corporation. Furthermore, while legal principle requires that all company directors exercise their statutory duties with a view to the best interests of the corporation, in practice nominee directors are expected to follow the instructions or wishes of their appointer, resulting in their inherent position of conflict. This text focuses on the nominee director and the conflict of interest resulting from such director’s position of dual loyalty. Its objective is to provide a comprehensive examination of the various difficulties arising from, and associated with the appointment of nominee directors as well as the judicial and legislative responses to these difficulties. In examining the various complications associated with nominee directors, the legal framework in several foreign jurisdictions, particularly the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand is also explored throughout this text to provide further insight and perspective on the different issues analysed herein.

Le découpage électoral est marqué par le mythe du gerrymandering, ou du « charcutage électoral ». Gouvernements et majorités l’utiliseraient dans l’objectif d’établir une carte électorale favorable par la délimitation de circonscriptions visant produire des gains électoraux. Il serait un outil électoraliste utilisé à des fins partisanes. En France, cette perception prédomine notamment en raison du peu de travaux consacrés au découpage électoral qui est, pourtant, un objet important au sein de la littérature politiste internationale. La thèse propose une étude du découpage des circonscriptions législatives sous la Ve République selon deux axes. Le premier, relatif au processus, interroge le rôle et l’action du gouvernement. Grâce à une analyse pluridisciplinaire, il apparaît que le découpeur est soumis à de fortes contraintes, et que les députés y occupent un rôle majeur. Le second porte sur les conséquences des délimitations. Après l’élaboration d’une méthode permettant d’appréhender l’aspect politique des découpages, l’étude empirique – statistique et cartographique – établit que les circonscriptions sont découpées en fonction des députés – sortants –, avant d’être favorables aux partis politiques, ou à la majorité qui y procède. S’il apparaît également que les changements de délimitations ne produisent pas toujours les effets escomptés, ils disposent de conséquences structurelles qui se vérifient sur la compétition électorale. Sous la Ve République, les découpages électoraux peuvent être qualifiés d’interparlementaires et d’intrapartisans. In fine, ni le processus, ni les conséquences des découpages électoraux ne correspondent à sa représentation cognitive classique. / The myth of the gerrymandering overshadows the redistricting. Governments allegedly use it to draw a favorable electoral map aiming electoral profits. Thus, it is supposed to be an electioneering mechanism used for partisan motives. In France, few studies have been devoted to redistricting which is also an important object within the international political scientist literature. The thesis puts forward a study of the legislative redistricting under the Fifth Republic following two axes. The first one, the analysis of the policy process, questions the role and the actions of the government. Through a multidisciplinary analysis, it appears that the government is strongly constrained and that MPs have a main function. The second one relates to the consequences of redistricting. After developing a method to understand the politics of limits, the empirical study – statistical and cartographic – shows that districts are made according to deputies – incumbents –, before favoring political parties, or the majority making the redistricting. It also appears that if the constituency boundaries are not decisive, they still have structural consequences on the electoral competition. Under the Fifth Republic, redistricting can be described as interparliamentary and intrapartisan. To sum up, neither the redistricting process nor its electoral consequences match the "classic" cognitive representation of the redistricting.

Master’s thesis describes theoretical basics, solution design, and implementation of constituency (phrasal) parser for Czech language, which is based on a part of speech association into phrases. Created program works with manually built and annotated Czech sample corpus to generate probabilistic context free grammar within runtime machine learning. Parser implementation, based on extended CKY algorithm, then for the input Czech sentence decides if the sentence can be generated by the created grammar and for the positive cases constructs the most probable derivation tree. This result is then compared with the expected parse to evaluate constituency parser success rate.

Le débat entre connexionnisme et symbolisme est l'une des forces majeures qui animent le développement de l'Intelligence Artificielle. L'apprentissage profond et la linguistique théorique sont les domaines d'études les plus représentatifs pour les deux écoles respectivement. Alors que la méthode d'apprentissage profond a fait des percées impressionnantes et est devenue la principale raison de la récente prospérité de l'IA pour l'industrie et les universités, la linguistique et le symbolisme occupent quelque domaines importantes, notamment l'interprétabilité et la fiabilité. Dans cette thèse, nous essayons de construire une connexion entre les deux écoles en introduisant des biais inductifs linguistiques pour les modèles d'apprentissage profond. Nous proposons deux familles de biais inductifs, une pour la structure de circonscription et une autre pour la structure de dépendance. Le biais inductif de circonscription encourage les modèles d'apprentissage profond à utiliser différentes unités (ou neurones) pour traiter séparément les informations à long terme et à court terme. Cette séparation fournit un moyen pour les modèles d'apprentissage profond de construire les représentations hiérarchiques latentes à partir d'entrées séquentielles, dont une représentation de niveau supérieur est composée et peut être décomposée en une série de représentations de niveau inférieur. Par exemple, sans connaître la structure de vérité fondamentale, notre modèle proposé apprend à traiter l'expression logique en composant des représentations de variables et d'opérateurs en représentations d'expressions selon sa structure syntaxique. D'autre part, le biais inductif de dépendance encourage les modèles à trouver les relations latentes entre les mots dans la séquence d'entrée. Pour le langage naturel, les relations latentes sont généralement modélisées sous la forme d'un graphe de dépendance orienté, où un mot a exactement un nœud parent et zéro ou plusieurs nœuds enfants. Après avoir appliqué cette contrainte à un modèle de type transformateur, nous constatons que le modèle est capable d'induire des graphes orientés proches des annotations d'experts humains, et qu'il surpasse également le modèle de transformateur standard sur différentes tâches. Nous pensons que ces résultats expérimentaux démontrent une alternative intéressante pour le développement futur de modèles d'apprentissage profond. / The debate between connectionism and symbolism is one of the major forces that drive the development of Artificial Intelligence. Deep Learning and theoretical linguistics are the most representative fields of study for the two schools respectively. While the deep learning method has made impressive breakthroughs and became the major reason behind the recent AI prosperity for industry and academia, linguistics and symbolism still holding some important grounds including reasoning, interpretability and reliability. In this thesis, we try to build a connection between the two schools by introducing syntactic inductive biases for deep learning models. We propose two families of inductive biases, one for constituency structure and another one for dependency structure. The constituency inductive bias encourages deep learning models to use different units (or neurons) to separately process long-term and short-term information. This separation provides a way for deep learning models to build the latent hierarchical representations from sequential inputs, that a higher-level representation is composed of and can be decomposed into a series of lower-level representations. For example, without knowing the ground-truth structure, our proposed model learns to process logical expression through composing representations of variables and operators into representations of expressions according to its syntactic structure. On the other hand, the dependency inductive bias encourages models to find the latent relations between entities in the input sequence. For natural language, the latent relations are usually modeled as a directed dependency graph, where a word has exactly one parent node and zero or several children nodes. After applying this constraint to a transformer-like model, we find the model is capable of inducing directed graphs that are close to human expert annotations, and it also outperforms the standard transformer model on different tasks. We believe that these experimental results demonstrate an interesting alternative for the future development of deep learning models.

It is well-known that the early assignment of prominence in sequences like THIRteen MEN vs. thirTEEN, (defined as the Rhythm Rule, or post-lexical stress shift), is an optional phenomenon. This dissertation examines some of the factors that encourage the application of stress shift in English and how it is phonetically realised. The aim is to answer two sets of questions related to why and how stress shift occurs in English: 1a) Does prosodic boundary strength influence stress shift? 1b) Does the adjacency of prominences above the level of the segmental string encourage stress shift? 2) How is stress shift realized? a) Is stress shift only a perceptual phenomenon? and b) Which syllables, if any, change acoustically when stress shift is perceived? To answer these questions, four experiments were designed. The first three experiments test whether the strength of the prosodic boundaries before and after the target word (e.g., canteen) influence stress shift. The effect of the strength of the left-edge prosodic boundary was investigated by comparing perceived stress patterns of the target (e.g., canteen) as produced in isolation where it is preceded by an utterance- and a phrase- initial prosodic boundary (the Isolated condition) with its rendition when embedded in a frame sentence (e.g., Say canteen again) where the left prosodic boundary before canteen is weaker (the Embedded condition). Results show a very clear tendency towards late phrasal prominence on the final accentable syllable (e.g., -teen in canteen) in the Embedded condition while in the Isolated condition this pattern appeared in less than half of the targets, showing that the stronger left boundary increased the incidence of stress shift. Two more experiments manipulated the strength of the boundary to the right of the target (#) respectively by changing the syntactic parse of the critical phrase (e.g. canteen cook) in sequences like (1) and by manipulating constituent length as in (2). Results showed that the syntactic manipulation significantly affected the strength of the prosodic boundary between the clashing words which was stronger in (1b) relative to (1a), and affected the incidence of stress shift, which was higher in (1a) relative to (1b). The length manipulation also affected the rate of stress shift, which was significantly higher in the phrase with the shorter word, e.g., soups (2a) relative to phrase with the longer word, e.g., supervisors (2b). (1) Example from the Syntax Experiment a. Who is the canteen (#) cook these days? (Pre-modifier + Noun) b. How do the canteen (#) cook these days? (NP + VP) (2) Example from the Length Experiment a. It should include the canteen (#) soups again. (Shorter constituent) b. It should include the canteen (#) supervisors again. (Longer constituent) Whilst we knew from the literature that the grouping of the clashing words within one Intonational Phrase (IP) encourages stress shift, results from the Syntax and Length experiments indicate that this (i.e., the phrasing of the clashing words within same IP) is not sufficient condition for the occurrence of stress shift, and that fine-grained degrees of boundary strength below the Intonational Phrase can drive changes in prominence pattern. The fact that higher rates of stress shift (and associated significant acoustic changes) were driven by manipulations of constituent length --for sequences with the same syntactic structure-- provides support for the idea that prosodic (rather than syntactic) boundaries directly influence stress shift. The fourth experiment tests the definition of stress clash in English in cases like fourteen candles where the two main lexical prominences are strictly adjacent along the time dimension, in fourteen canoes where the prominences are not adjacent in time, but adjacent at the higher levels of the metrical hierarchy, and in fourteen canteens where the main lexical prominences are not adjacent, and do not clash. This experiment highlighted and resolved an unacknowledged disagreement about what clash status sequences with one weak intervening syllable (e.g., fourTEEN caNOES). The fourTEEN caNOES type were shown to behave like metrically clashing sequences (e.g., fourteen CANdles) in attracting stress shift, and differently from the non-metrically-clashing sequences (e.g., fourteen CANTEENS) in discouraging it. These results provide empirical support for the Standard Metrical Theory (e.g. Selkirk, 1984; Nespor & Vogel, 1989) claim that 1) stress clash matters in triggering stress shift and that 2) stress clash in English is defined at the higher prosodic levels and not restricted to the level of the segmental string as indirectly assumed in a growing body of research (e.g., Vogel, Bunnel & Hoskins, 1995; Tomlinson, Liu & Fox Tree, 2014). Along with the establishment of prosodic boundary strength as one of the predictors influencing stress shift, another important contribution of the thesis is providing empirical evidence that the English Rhythm Rule is not solely a perceptual phenomenon and that it is associated with acoustic correlates. The main correlates of perceived stress shift consistently appearing across experiments is the decrease in the duration of the main lexical prominence of the target (e.g., -teen in canteen) and the increase of fundamental frequency and Sound Pressure Level peaks and on the initial syllable (e.g., canin canteen), when followed by a main clashing phrasal prominence. The acoustic analysis shows that the first accentable syllable also contributes in the perception of stress shift. This latter result does not lend support to the deletion formulation of the Rhythm Rule (Gussenhoven, 1991) which stipulates that the impressions of stress shift are solely associated with changes of prominence in the last accentable syllable of the target (e.g. -teen in canteen). Along with the determination of the acoustic correlates of perceived stress shift in English, the present research 1) indicates that fine-grained gradations of prosodic boundary strength can influence stress shift, 2) shows that while stress clash can increase the incidence of stress shift, stress shift can take place even in environments completely free of stress clash, and 3) provides evidence that stress clash should not be construed simply as the concatenation of two main lexical prominences along the time dimension.

Title: Hybrid Deep Question Answering Author: Ahmad Aghaebrahimian Institute: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Supervisor: RNDr. Martin Holub, Ph.D., Institute of Formal and Applied Lin- guistics Abstract: As one of the oldest tasks of Natural Language Processing, Question Answering is one of the most exciting and challenging research areas with lots of scientific and commercial applications. Question Answering as a discipline in the conjunction of computer science, statistics, linguistics, and cognitive science is concerned with building systems that automatically retrieve answers to ques- tions posed by humans in a natural language. This doctoral dissertation presents the author's research carried out in this discipline. It highlights his studies and research toward a hybrid Question Answering system consisting of two engines for Question Answering over structured and unstructured data. The structured engine comprises a state-of-the-art Question Answering system based on knowl- edge graphs. The unstructured engine consists of a state-of-the-art sentence-level Question Answering system and a word-level Question Answering system with results near to human performance. This work introduces a new Question An- swering dataset for answering word- and sentence-level questions as well. Start- ing from a...