The diploma thesis is dealing with a description, emplacement and function of the causal adverbial complement in the contemporary French and Czech language. This paper is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. In the theoretical part, the topic of causality is elucidated and the notion of causal adverbial complement in the French and Czech linguistic terminology is defined. Further, it works with syntactic and semantic features of causal adverbial complement, observes the possible valence understanding of this sentence member, and deals with the question of its extra-predicative and intra-predicative emplacement, as well. Furthermore, the attention is drawn to the position of causal adverbial complement in a relationship to the functional sentence perspective. The practical part is dedicated to corpus analysis of the chosen causal utterances, which implement the causal adverbial complements. The main focus is given to their emplacement in the French and Czech sentence.

Yes / This study estimates output market power in the Chinese banking industry using the multi-output Lerner index. We propose a minimum distance cost function approach, which allows us to determine not only the level of market power but also the non-profit maximizers and efficiency level of Chinese banks. Following the first-stage analysis, we employ the generalized method of moment system estimator to evaluate the impacts of bank innovation and trade openness on market power in a multi-output banking context. In particular, we innovatively propose a causal structure analysis based on Wang and Blei (2019) to validate and verify the robustness of our results. We also assess this relationship for different types of bank ownership in China. The findings suggest that Chinese banks exhibit high market power in loans. Furthermore, the results show that bank innovation and trade openness have a significant negative impact on market power in loans, but a significant positive impact on market power in securities. The results also indicate a significantly negative impact of trade openness on overall market power. We find that higher levels of innovation among state-owned and joint-stock commercial banks improve the overall level of market power. The results suggest that, for all bank ownership types, trade openness has a significant negative impact on market power in loans but a significant positive impact on market power in securities. The impact on the overall level of market power is consistently significant and negative. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 11 Aug 2025.

A presente tese tem como objeto regulamentar as situações em que a interferência de terceiro dificulta ou impossibilita o cumprimento das obrigações, especialmente as contratuais. Inicialmente, são analisados os casos em que a legislação regulamenta expressamente a matéria. Delineado o tratamento do tema no ordenamento jurídico e identificado o objeto da pesquisa, foram feitas incursões no direito estrangeiro com o intuito de aproveitar os esforços doutrinários e jurisprudenciais em temas como: oponibilidade (França); nexo de causalidade, com especial destaque para o estudo dos casos paradigmáticos Superga e Meroni (Itália) e teoria do abuso de direito (Portugal). Também foi tratada com minúcia a regulamentação do tema no Draft Common Frame of Reference, de modo que se possibilite a verificação do posicionamento atual não só em vários ordenamentos estrangeiros, mas também no âmbito de esforço europeu de unificação. Após o estudo do direito estrangeiro, trata-se sobre a fundamentação da responsabilidade de terceiro por interferência na relação obrigacional no direito brasileiro. Em termos de teoria geral do direito contratual, destaca-se a diferenciação entre relatividade dos efeitos contratuais, oponibilidade e responsabilidade civil de terceiro. Na sequência, indicam-se os pressupostos para responsabilização de terceiro por violação ao direito de crédito, sempre com a preocupação de fixar parâmetros para aplicação dos artigos 186 e 927 do Código Civil. Após essas passagens centrais, são abordados temas paralelos, mas não de menor importância como: os momentos de aplicação da responsabilidade de terceiro, a solidariedade entre contratante inadimplente e terceiro, bem como os limites de aplicação de cláusula penal e compromissória nos contratos descumpridos. Com a configuração de todo o arcabouço teórico, conclui-se a tese com a análise de casos paradigmáticos. / The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the regulation of situations in which the interference of a third party creates difficulty for or renders impossible the performance of obligations, particularly the contractual ones. Initially, it is analyzed legal provisions that expressly regulates the matter. Once outlined the treatment of the matter by the legislation and identified the situations for which there are no express provisions, the foreign legislation is assessed with the purpose of taking hold from the matured doctrine and case laws on the following matters: effects against third parties (France); causation, with special highlight for the study of paradigmatic cases of Superga and Meroni (Italy) and the theory of abuse of right (Portugal). It is also addressed in detail the regulation of the subject in the Draft Common Frame of Reference, in order to verify the current understanding about the matter, not only in various foreign legal systems but also within the context of a collective effort for unification of the European regulation. After studying foreign legal systems, it is also analyzed the Brazilian Law on the third party responsibility due to its interference in a contractual relationship. In terms of general theory of contractual law, it is studied the difference between the relativity of the contractual effects, the effects against third party and the civil liability of a third party. Afterwards, it is pointed out the requirements for holding a third party liable, always having in mind the concern of establishing parameters for the application of the Civil Code provisions (Articles 186 and 927). Additionally, parallel but equally important themes are also addressed, as it follows: the moment of applying the liability of the third party, the joint responsability between a principal that is in default and a third party, as well as the limits of applying liquidated-damages clause and of an arbitration clause when provided in breached contracts. Once the entire theoretical structure is presented, this thesis is concluded with the assessement of some paradigmatic cases on the matter.

The overwhelming amount of online news presents a challenge called news information overload. To mitigate this challenge we propose a system to generate a causal network of news topics. To extract this information from distributed news sources, a system called Forest was developed. Forest retrieves documents that potentially contain causal information regarding a news topic. The documents are processed at a sentence level to extract causal relations and news topic references, these are the phases used to refer to a news topic. Forest uses a machine learning approach to classify causal sentences, and then renders the potential cause and effect of the sentences. The potential cause and effect are then classified as news topic references, these are the phrases used to refer to a news topics, such as “The World Cup” or “The Financial Meltdown”. Both classifiers use an algorithm developed within our working group, the algorithm performs better than several well known classification algorithms for the aforementioned tasks. In our evaluations we found that participants consider causal information useful to understand the news, and that while we can not extract causal information for all news topics, it is highly likely that we can extract causal relation for the most popular news topics. To evaluate the accuracy of the extractions made by Forest, we completed a user survey. We found that by providing the top ranked results, we obtained a high accuracy in extracting causal relations between news topics.

The overwhelming amount of online news presents a challenge called news information overload. To mitigate this challenge we propose a system to generate a causal network of news topics. To extract this information from distributed news sources, a system called Forest was developed. Forest retrieves documents that potentially contain causal information regarding a news topic. The documents are processed at a sentence level to extract causal relations and news topic references, these are the phases used to refer to a news topic. Forest uses a machine learning approach to classify causal sentences, and then renders the potential cause and effect of the sentences. The potential cause and effect are then classified as news topic references, these are the phrases used to refer to a news topics, such as “The World Cup” or “The Financial Meltdown”. Both classifiers use an algorithm developed within our working group, the algorithm performs better than several well known classification algorithms for the aforementioned tasks. In our evaluations we found that participants consider causal information useful to understand the news, and that while we can not extract causal information for all news topics, it is highly likely that we can extract causal relation for the most popular news topics. To evaluate the accuracy of the extractions made by Forest, we completed a user survey. We found that by providing the top ranked results, we obtained a high accuracy in extracting causal relations between news topics.

The issue of causality in the suits for damages The subject of this thesis is the issue of causality in disputes relating to compensation for damage to health. Causation is a considerably miscellaneous institute, therefore, this paper deals with various aspects of this topic and its context. The writing focuses on cases in which damage was caused to health through providing health services, as this legal field is characterized by many specifics from other areas of liability. Firstly, the thesis aims at explanation of the concept of causation, its importance and development not only in law but also in other areas of human activity. Subsequently, the attention is focused on the significance of causation in law; after theories of causation are compared, its substantial features are described in comparison to the other elements of liability. Consequently, the work concentrates on processes through which the causal link is determined, on the selection of relevant causes and consequences and the relationship between them in cases involving their plurality. It does not forget to mention the importance of causation in the context of strict liability, particularly in its specific cases relating to the provision of health services. The core of this work is the issue of causation in disputes in which the...

Relations that hold between causes and their effects are fundamental for a wide range of different sectors. Automatically finding sentences that express such relations may for example be of great interest for the economy or political institutions. However, for many languages other than English, a lack of training resources for this task needs to be dealt with. In recent years, large, pretrained transformer-based model architectures have proven to be very effective for tasks involving cross-lingual transfer such as cross-lingual language inference, as well as multilingual named entity recognition, POS-tagging and dependency parsing, which may hint at similar potentials for causality detection. In this thesis, we define causality detection as a binary labelling problem and use cross-lingual transfer to alleviate data scarcity for German and Swedish by using three different classifiers that make either use of multilingual sentence embeddings obtained from a pretrained encoder or pretrained multilingual language models. The source languages in most of our experiments will be English, for Swedish we however also use a small German training set and a combination of English and German training data.  We try out zero-shot transfer as well as making use of limited amounts of target language data either as a development set or as additional training data in a few-shot setting. In the latter scenario, we explore the impact of varying sizes of training data. Moreover, the problem of data scarcity in our situation also makes it necessary to work with data from different annotation projects. We also explore how much this would impact our result. For German as a target language, our results in a zero-shot scenario expectedly fall short in comparison with monolingual experiments, but F1-macro scores between 60 and 65 in cases where annotation did not differ drastically still signal that it was possible to transfer at least some knowledge. When introducing only small amounts of target language data, already notable improvements were observed and with the full German training data of about 3,000 sentences combined with the most suitable English data set, the performance for German in some scenarios even almost matches the state of the art for monolingual experiments on English. The best zero-shot performance on the Swedish data was even outperforming the scores achieved for German. However, due to problems with the additional Swedish training data, we were not able to improve upon the zero-shot performance in a few-shot setting in a similar manner as it was the case for German.

Les données portant sur des événements abondent dans notre société technologique. Une façon intéressante de présenter des données temporelles réelles pour faciliter leur interprétation est un récit généré automatiquement. La compréhension de récits implique la construction d'un réseau causal par le lecteur. Les systèmes de data-to-text narratifs semblent reconnaître l'importance des relations causales. Cependant, celles-ci jouent un rôle secondaire dans leurs planificateurs de document et leur identification repose principalement sur des connaissances du domaine. Cette thèse propose un modèle d'interprétation assistée de données temporelles par génération de récits structurés à l'aide d'un mélange de règles d'association automatiquement extraites et définies manuellement. Les associations suggèrent des hypothèses au lecteur qui peut ainsi construire plus facilement une représentation causale des événements. Ce modèle devrait être applicable à toutes les données temporelles répétitives, comprenant de préférence des actions ou activités, telles que les données d'activités de la vie quotidienne. Les règles d'association séquentielles sont choisies en fonction des critères de confiance et de signification statistique tels que mesurés dans les données d'entraînement. Les règles d'association basées sur les connaissances du monde et du domaine exploitent la similitude d'un certain aspect d'une paire d'événements ou des patrons causaux difficiles à détecter statistiquement. Pour interpréter une période à résumer déterminée, les paires d'événements pour lesquels une règle d'association s'applique sont associées et certaines associations supplémentaires sont dérivées pour former un réseau associatif. L'étape la plus importante du pipeline de génération automatique de texte (GAT) est la planification du document, comprenant la sélection des événements et la structuration du document. Pour la sélection des événements, le modèle repose sur la confiance des associations séquentielles pour sélectionner les faits les plus inhabituels. L'hypothèse est qu'un événement qui est impliqué par un autre avec une probabilité relativement élevée peut être laissé implicite dans le texte. La structure du récit est appelée le fil associatif ramifié, car il permet au lecteur de suivre les associations du début à la fin du texte. Il prend la forme d'un arbre couvrant sur le sous-réseau associatif précédemment sélectionné. Les associations qu'il contient sont sélectionnées en fonction de préférences de type d'association et de la distance temporelle relative. Le fil associatif ramifié est ensuite segmenté en paragraphes, phrases et syntagmes et les associations sont converties en relations rhétoriques. L'étape de microplanification définit des patrons lexico-syntaxiques décrivant chaque type d'événement. Lorsque deux descriptions d'événement doivent être assemblées dans la même phrase, un marqueur discursif exprimant la relation rhétorique spécifiée est employé. Un événement principal et un événement principal précédent sont déterminés pour chaque phrase. Lorsque le parent de l'événement principal dans le fil associatif n'est pas l'événement principal précédent, un anaphorique est ajouté au marqueur discursif frontal de la phrase. La réalisation de surface peut être effectuée en anglais ou en français grâce à des spécifications lexico-syntaxiques bilingues et à la bibliothèque Java SimpleNLG-EnFr. Les résultats d'une évaluation de la qualité textuelle montrent que les textes sont compréhensibles et les choix lexicaux adéquats. / Data about events abounds in our technological society. An attractive way of presenting real-life temporal data to facilitate its interpretation is an automatically generated narrative. Narrative comprehension involves the construction of a causal network by the reader. Narrative data-to-text systems seem to acknowledge causal relations as important. However, they play a secondary role in their document planners and their identification relies mostly on domain knowledge. This thesis proposes an assisted temporal data interpretation model by narrative generation in which narratives are structured with the help of a mix of automatically mined and manually defined association rules. The associations suggest causal hypotheses to the reader who can thus construct more easily a causal representation of the events. This model should be applicable to any repetitive temporal data, preferably including actions or activities, such as Activity of Daily Living (ADL) data. Sequential association rules are selected based on the criteria of confidence and statistical significance as measured in training data. World and domain knowledge association rules are based on the similarity of some aspect of a pair of events or on causal patterns difficult to detect statistically. To interpret a specific period to summarize, pairs of events for which an association rule applies are associated. Some extra associations are then derived. Together the events and associations form an associative network. The most important step of the Natural Language Generation (NLG) pipeline is document planning, comprising event selection and document structuring. For event selection, the model relies on the confidence of sequential associations to select the most unusual facts. The assumption is that an event that is implied by another one with a relatively high probability may be left implicit in the text. The structure of the narrative is called the connecting associative thread because it allows the reader to follow associations from the beginning to the end of the text. It takes the form of a spanning tree over the previously selected associative sub-network. The associations it contains are selected based on association type preferences and relative temporal distance. The connecting associative thread is then segmented into paragraphs, sentences, and phrases and the associations are translated to rhetorical relations. The microplanning step defines lexico-syntactic templates describing each event type. When two event descriptions need to be assembled in the same sentence, a discourse marker expressing the specified rhetorical relation is employed. A main event and a preceding main event are determined for each sentence. When the associative thread parent of the main event is not the preceding main event, an anaphor is added to the sentence front discourse marker. Surface realization can be performed in English or French thanks to bilingual lexico-syntactic specifications and the SimpleNLG-EnFr Java library. The results of a textual quality evaluation show that the texts are understandable and the lexical choices adequate.

Le préjudice est une notion qui appartient classiquement à la matière civile. Figuretraditionnelle et incontournable de cette discipline, le préjudice suscite aujourd’hui l’engouement desspécialistes de la matière. Face à ce phénomène, les pénalistes sont légitimes à s’interroger sur laplace du préjudice en droit pénal. Si le concept est peu utilisé dans cette matière, il n’est toutefois pastotalement inconnu. Cependant, l’étude du préjudice en droit pénal devra révéler l’absence de placepour cette notion en droit répressif. Cette différence entre le droit civil et le droit pénal s’explique parles finalités distinctes qui animent les deux disciplines. Alors que le droit civil a pour objectif laréparation des préjudices soufferts individuellement, le droit pénal est guidé par l’impératif deprotection de l’intérêt général par le maintien de l’ordre public.Ainsi, le préjudice n’a, d’une part, pas de place dans la théorie de l’infraction. Il n’est pris encompte ni dans le processus de création des incriminations, ni dans celui de leur qualification. Lepréjudice n’est pas un élément constitutif de l’infraction, et n’équivaut ainsi pas au résultatinfractionnel. D’autre part, le préjudice n’a qu’une place limitée dans la théorie de l’action en droitpénal. S’il apparaît comme une condition de recevabilité de l’action civile exercée devant lesjuridictions répressives, c’est parce que celle-ci se présente comme une action en responsabilitécivile, à vocation uniquement réparatrice. En revanche, le préjudice n’est pas une condition de l’actionpénale en répression de l’infraction. / The notion of prejudice habitually falls within the boundaries of civil law. As a traditionaland inescapable feature of this discipline, prejudice is today sparking off heated debates amongspecialists. Confronted with this new trend, criminal law experts can rightfully wonder about the placeof prejudice in criminal law. If the concept is little used in this law area, it is nonetheless not totallyunknown. However, the study of prejudice in criminal law will have to prove the irrelevance of thisnotion in that regard. This difference between civil and criminal law can be accounted for by thedistinct purposes of these two areas of the law. Whereas civil law aims at seeking redress for harminflicted on individuals, criminal law is guided by the imperative need to protect general interestthrough the maintenance of law and order.Thus, prejudice does not fall within the scope of the criminal offence theory. It is neither taken intoaccount in the process of defining offences by the lawmaker nor in the classification of the offence bythe trial court. Prejudice is not a constituent part of the infringement and thus is not tantamount to itsoutcome. Furthermore, the notion of prejudice plays a limited role in the theory of criminal lawprocedure. If prejudice appears as a condition governing the admissibility of a civil action brought incourt it is because it is perceived as a legal action for damages, for the sole purpose of monetarycompensation. On the other hand, prejudice is not a condition for criminal proceedings with thepurpose of punishing the offence.