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The topic of the long narrative poem Jamerika – trip by Masa Kolanovic is a family trip to America, a place previously known to the main female character only through popular Western culture. The first word of the title is the Dalmatian dialectal name for America, where the character's ancestors went in their search for a better life. The second word is the English word for travel, which also stands for a hallucination that is confirmed by the atmosphere of the long poem. The travel in this book primarily takes place in the sphere of language, which is actualised on several levels: in the interaction of Croatian and English language (and Central European culture and the culture of the West at the same time) ; in the citation of Croatian literary heritage and the texts of Croatian and American popular music ; in Marx's citation mystification, which reminds of Croatia's socialist past and in the ironized relocation of socialist slogans in the context of the travel around America. Along with the linguistic medium, the art medium is also explicitly expressed on every page of the book. Citation procedures and art collages confirm that the other culture is not only what is discovered on travels, but one's own culture is also viewed in a new context. The end brings the judgment on America. In the apocalyptic tone, which ironizes biblical commonplaces, it is presented as a country burdened by consumerism and fear of terrorism, which is why the main character equates the delusion of American dream with that of socialism. The initial position of infantile narrator outgrows into a critical deconstruction of the myth of America as the promised land.

Summary This article examines the role of African chiefs in the administration of colonial medicine in rural south-western Nigeria, emphasising the adaptive ways they navigated a difficult position between colonial medical authorities and indigenous medical legitimacy. Whereas colonial authorities expected chiefs to enforce medical policies and to encourage their subjects to use medical facilities, Africans wanted chiefs to defend and promote Yoruba medical and religious practices that colonial authorities and missionaries usually undermined. By supporting established African healing systems, chiefs stood to gain political mileage and favour with traditional healers. Furthermore, we argue that although African chiefs cooperated with the government in implementing health policies, they had a difficult relationship with sanitary inspectors who enforced sanitary regulations in ways that bred resentment. In the 1940s, Yoruba chiefs advocated for more rural health services, perhaps to pacify the rising nationalist movement that would have made them irrelevant had they not cooperated.

Our interviewee is one of the most prominent personalities of Romanian academic and cultural life. Starting as one of Constantin Noica’s disciples, he begun his carrier as a philosopher, but in time he grew more and more acquainted with psychoanalysis, so that he finally came to embrace it as a full-time profession, not only as a professor, but also as analyst and director of the main psychoanalytical publishing house in Romania . His research activity spreads out on more than 30 years, during which he worked in the research institutes of the Romanian Academy (The Philosophy Institute, The Anthropology Institute) and in several faculties of psychology, philosophy and educational sciences within the University of Bucharest and “Titu Maiorescu” University. As philosopher, psychoanalyst, professor and researcher, Vasile Dem Zamfirescu is a vivid example of professional and academic excellence and also an active model for younger generations, in a cultural area profoundly marked by the inevitable side-effects of about half a century of communism.

Abstract In this study, the land use around the Churches of Moldavia, UNESCO WH (World Heritage) sites, has been analysed using photo interpretation and GIS. The cartographic analysis used historical maps and modern orthophotos to highlight the main changes that took place over the last century in the area surrounding the sites, which has been extended to 1 km buffer. Historical maps and orthophotos of the years 1917, 2005, and 2016 have been processed to identify the present and historical changes in one of the most well-known historical areas of Eastern Europe. Monuments have a significant universal, national, and local value, contributing to the touristic development of the area. The most important processes that can affect the integrity of the monuments are the deforestations and the anthropogenic environmental changes. Significant changes took place around Probota, Humor, Patrauti and Arbore churches, while Sucevita, Voronet and Moldovita churches still preserve the natural landscape specific to the Bukovina historical area; Suceava church is part of a strongly urbanised landscape.

This paper explores an unsupervised approach to learning a compositional representation function for multi-word expressions (MWEs), and evaluates it on the Tratz dataset, which associates two-word expressions with the semantic relation between the compound constituents (e.g. the label employer is associated with the noun compound government agency) (Tratz, 2011). The composition function is based on recurrent neural networks, and is trained using the Skip-Gram objective to predict the words in the context of MWEs. Thus our approach can naturally leverage large unlabeled text sources. Further, our method can make use of provided MWEs when available, but can also function as a completely unsupervised algorithm, using MWE boundaries predicted by a single, domain-agnostic part-of-speech pattern. With pre-defined MWE boundaries, our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art performance on the coarse-grained evaluation of the Tratz dataset (Tratz, 2011), with an F1 score of 50.4%. The unsupervised version of our method approaches the performance of the supervised one, and even outperforms it in some configurations.

This paper outlines major directions in the reception of Knut Hamsun in the Romanian cultural printed press. The research is based on a plethora of articles in Romanian cultural periodicals spanning the years 1902–1989. The results shall be encompassed in a doctoral thesis on the same subject. The structure of the paper follows a chronological overview of the phases of his reception. Because the interwar period has been discussed in detail in other previous papers, focus shall be put on the communist era. The first oscillations occur between the years 1940–1947. As a result of the Stalinist regime, Hamsun is only portrayed in terms of his political views. Communism thus reduces his authorship to a minimum. A renewed interest emerges in the 1980s through a new series of translations and articles. This interest is then compounded with the founding of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures in Cluj in 1991 and continues to the present. Articles from all of these time periods are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to acquire a holistic image of how Hamsun is received by Romanian culture. 

A mastodon tooth has been found at Husnicioara coal open pit, in Mehedinţi district (southwestern Romania). It originates from the Lower Pliocene (Dacian) gravel and sand deposits lying just above the coal bed IV, mined in this quarry. The tooth exposing zygodont features undoubtedly belongs to Mammut borsoni (“Borson’s mastodont”). Although this species is very common in the Pliocene vertebrate faunas from this part of Europe, until now it was missing from the Lower Pliocene (Dacian) assemblage’s lists in our country.

This paper presents the work done towards developing a speech corpus for Romanian, for automatic speech recognition for the banking domain. This work is done in the context of the Speech2Process project, which aims at creating a system which allows interaction between customers and agents in the contact center much easier. The application to use the banking corpus will provide automatic response to client requests, received through voice communication protocols, in costumer support services.

Due to the diversity of language interpretation capacities, the computational natural language understanding (NLU) systems should be able to recognize semantic complex situations. In terms of natural language processing (NLP), computational humor detection is still one of the major challenges, having several applications, especially on social media. In order to observe how easily it is to create humor out of a serious title, in this paper, we aim at the development and comparison of machine learning and neural network models on the humor prediction task in news headlines, using the dataset provided by SemEval-2020. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to improve the humor detection performance, generated by applying short edits to headlines.