• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
• /
• v.28
• /
• pp.7.1-7.9
• /
• 2013

Objectives We investigated the particle mass size distribution and chemical properties of air pollution particulate matter (PM) in the urban area and its capacity to induce cytotoxicity in human bronchial epithelial (BEAS-2B) cells. Methods To characterize the mass size distributions and chemical concentrations associated with urban PM, PM samples were collected by a 10-stage Micro-Orifice Uniform Deposit Impactor close to nearby traffic in an urban area from December 2007 to December 2009. PM samples for in vitro cytotoxicity testing were collected by a mini-volume air sampler with $PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$ inlets. Results The PM size distributions were bi-modal, peaking at 0.18 to 0.32 and 1.8 to $3.2{\mu}m$. The mass concentrations of the metals in fine particles (0.1 to $1.8{\mu}m$) accounted for 45.6 to 80.4% of the mass concentrations of metals in $PM_{10}$. The mass proportions of fine particles of the pollutants related to traffic emission, lead (80.4%), cadmium (69.0%), and chromium (63.8%) were higher than those of other metals. Iron was the dominant transition metal in the particles, accounting for 64.3% of the $PM_{10}$ mass in all the samples. We observed PM concentration-dependent cytotoxic effects on BEAS-2B cells. Conclusions We found that exposure to $PM_{2.5}$ and $PM_{10}$ from a nearby traffic area induced significant increases in protein expression of inflammatory cytokines (IL-6 and IL-8). The cell death rate and release of cytokines in response to the $PM_{2.5}$ treatment were higher than those with $PM_{10}$. The combined results support the hypothesis that ultrafine particles from vehicular sources can induce inflammatory responses related to environmental respiratory injury.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.157-175
• /
• 2010

Understanding dialogue participant's emotion is important as well as decoding the explicit message in human communication. It is well known that non-verbal elements are more suitable for conveying speaker's emotions than verbal elements. Written texts, however, contain a variety of linguistic units that express emotions. This study aims at analyzing components for constructing an emotion ontology, that provides us with numerous applications in Human Language Technology. A majority of the previous work in text-based emotion processing focused on the classification of emotions, the construction of a dictionary describing emotion, and the retrieval of those lexica in texts through keyword spotting and/or syntactic parsing techniques. The retrieved or computed emotions based on that process did not show good results in terms of accuracy. Thus, more sophisticate components analysis is proposed and the linguistic factors are introduced in this study. (1) 5 linguistic types of emotion expressions are differentiated in terms of target (verbal/non-verbal) and the method (expressive/descriptive/iconic). The correlations among them as well as their correlation with the non-verbal expressive type are also determined. This characteristic is expected to guarantees more adaptability to our ontology in multi-modal environments. (2) As emotion-related components, this study proposes 24 emotion types, the 5-scale intensity (-2~+2), and the 3-scale polarity (positive/negative/neutral) which can describe a variety of emotions in more detail and in standardized way. (3) We introduce verbal expression-related components, such as 'experiencer', 'description target', 'description method' and 'linguistic features', which can classify and tag appropriately verbal expressions of emotions. (4) Adopting the linguistic tag sets proposed by ISO and TEI and providing the mapping table between our classification of emotions and Plutchik's, our ontology can be easily employed for multilingual processing.

• Korean Journal of Logic
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.217-241
• /
• 2015

Brandom upholds the anaphoric theory of reference. On this theory, reference is a relation of anaphoric dependence between linguistic items rather than a substantial relation between linguistic items and non-linguistic objects. In addition, 'refers' is a pronoun-forming operator, which is used to form anaphorically indirect descriptions such as 'the one referred to as "Leibniz"'. Recently, Arbid $B{\aa}ve$ raises three objections against this theory. First, the anaphoric theory distinguishes between ordinary descriptions and anaphorically indirect descriptions in terms of iterability. But this condition is not an adequate ground for asserting that anaphorically indirect descriptions form a distinctive semantic category. Second, sentences containing a pronoun such as 'he' and sentences containing an anaphorically indirect description such as 'the one referred to as "Leibniz"' have different modal statuses. Consequently, indirect descriptions are semantically different from paradigmatic anaphors. Third, on the anaphoric theory, expressions of the form 'a' and the corresponding indirect descriptions of the form 'the one referred to as "a"' are intersubstitutable. But we can make an equivalent claim by using the more general semantic concepts such as equivalence and intersubstitutability, instead of using notions such as 'anaphor' and 'antecedent'. So the anaphoric theory is explanatorily idle. In this paper I argue that these objections do not pose a serious problem for the anaphoric theory of reference. I argue thereby that the anaphoric theory of reference is a promising theory which provides us with the right understanding of the expression 'refers'.