Saint Petersburg State University

Amphibian species have the largest genome size enriched with repetitive sequences and relatively similar karyotypes. Moreover, many amphibian species frequently hybridize causing nuclear and mitochondrial genome introgressions. In addition, hybridization in some amphibian species may lead to clonality and polyploidization. All such events were found in water frogs from the genus Pelophylax. Among the species within the genus Pelophylax, P. esculentus complex is the most widely distributed and well-studied. This complex includes two parental species, P. ridibundus and P. lessonae, and their hybrids, P. esculentus, reproducing hemiclonally. Parental species and their hybrids have similar but slightly polymorphic karyotypes, so their precise identification is still required. Here, we have developed a complete set of 13 chromosome painting probes for two parental species allowing the precise identification of all chromosomes. Applying chromosomal painting, we identified homologous chromosomes in both parental species and orthologous chromosomes in their diploid hemiclonal hybrids. Comparative painting did not reveal interchromosomal exchanges between the studied water frog species and their hybrids. Using cross-specific chromosome painting, we detected unequal distribution of the signals along chromosomes suggesting the presence of species-specific tandem repeats. Application of chromosomal paints to the karyotypes of hybrids revealed differences in the intensity of staining for P. ridibundus and P. lessonae chromosomes. Thus, both parental genomes have a divergence in unique sequences. Obtained chromosome probes may serve as a powerful tool to unravel chromosomal evolution in phylogenetically related species, identify individual chromosomes in different cell types, and investigate the elimination of chromosomes in hybrid water frogs.

The synthesis of photothermal carbon/hydroxyapatite composites poses challenges due to the binding modes and relatively low photothermal conversion efficiency. To address these challenges, the calcium ions chelated by photothermal carbon dots (PTC-CDs) served as the calcium source for the synthesis of photothermal carbon dots chelated hydroxyapatite (PTC-HA) filler via the coprecipitation method. The coordination constant K and chelation sites of PTC-HA were 7.20 × 102 and 1.61, respectively. Compared to PTC-CDs, the coordination constant K and chelation sites of PTC-HA decreased by 88 and 35% due to chelating to hydroxyapatite, respectively. PTC-HA possesses fluorescence and photothermal performance with a 62.4% photothermal conversion efficiency. The incorporation of PTC-HA filler significantly enhances as high as 76% the adhesion performance of the adhesive hydrogel. PTC-HA with high photothermal conversion efficiency and enhancing adhesion performance holds promise for applications in high photothermal conversion efficiency, offering tissue adhesive properties and fluorescence capabilities to the hydrogel. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.3c11957 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.3c11957

The structure of the 2-((E)-((Z)-3-(((4-hydroxyphenyl)amino)methylene)-4-oxocyclohexa-1,5-dien-1-yl)diazenyl)benzoic acid (H3L) was confirmed by single crystal X-ray diffraction and Hirshfeld surface analysis was used further to quantify the intermolecular interactions. It crystallized in monoclinic space group P21/c. The observed bond distances evidence that the structure exists predominately in azo-enamine tautomeric form in the solid state. A novel dibutyltin(IV) complex, [(Bu2SnHL)2] (1) was synthesized from H3L. The complex was then characterized by studying different techniques including elemental analysis, FT-IR, and NMR (1H, 13C, and 119Sn) spectroscopy. In solution state, the molar mass of the compound was confirmed by Mass spectrometry. Spectroscopy study guides to predict the structure of the complex which is supposed to be a cyclic dimer [(Bu2SnHL)2] and Sn(IV) adopts a six-coordinated geometry. However, in solution Sn(IV) adopts four coordinated distorted tetrahedral geometry which was supported by 119Sn NMR spectroscopy (δSn(119), 126.34 ppm) and EI-MS results of the complex ion ([C28H32N3O4Sn]+,m/z 593.1). Further, the structures in solid and solution state were supported by developing their optimized structures and IR data from the DFT calculation. The crystal structure of the ligand is in azo-enamine tautomeric form and in accordance with DFT study, its dibutyltin(IV) complex is a cyclic dimer, (Bu2SnHL)2, which becomes monomer in solution.

The paper presents the results of perceptual experiments (by humans) and automatic recognition of the emotional states of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Intellectual Disabilities (ID) by video, audio and text modalities. The participants of the study were 50 children aged 5 - 15 years: 25 children with ASD, 25 children with ID, and 20 adults - the participants of the perceptual experiment. Automatic analysis of facial expression by video was performed using FaceReader software runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and convolutional neural network. Automatic recognition of the emotional states of children by speech was carried out using a recurrent neural network. This study was conducted in accordance with the design developed in the study of the recognition of the emotional states of children with Down syndrome by facial expression, voice, and text. The results of the perceptual experiment showed a greater accuracy in recognizing the emotional states of children with ASD and ID in comparison with automatic classification. The emotions of children with ASD are more accurately recognized by the video modality, children with ID - by the text modality. The novelty of the research is the comparative results for groups of children with similar and overlapping symptoms of ASD and ID, and in setting tasks related to the analysis of the emotional sphere of children with atypical development.

Recognition of highly emotional speech remains a challenging case of automatic speech recognition task. The aim of this article is to carry out experiments on highly emotional speech recognition by investigating oral history archives provided by the Yad Vashem foundation. The material consists of elderly peoples’ emotional speech full of accents and common language. We analyze and preprocess 26 h of publicly available video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Our objective was to develop a system able to perform emotional speech recognition based on deep neural network models. We present and evaluate the obtained results that contribute to the research field of oral history archives.

The paper presents the results of perceptual experiment by Indian and Russian experts for recognition of the emotional states of Russian children by video and audio modalities. The participants of the study were 64 Russian children (32 – boys & 32 – girls) aged 5–16 years and 26 adults. Video and audio recordings of child’s emotion expression were made in the laboratory condition in a testing of the Child Emotional Development Method (CEDM), in tasks to depict “joy – neutral (calm state) – sadness – anger” in facial expressions and in voice, pronouncing words and phrases that reflect different emotional states. The design of the dataset is presented, the research procedure is described, video and audio fragments correctly recognized by Russian and Indian experts are analyzed. It was shown that Indian and Russian experts are able to recognize the basic emotions “joy – sadness – anger” and neutral state by facial expression, voice, and speech of Russian children. Experts better recognize joy and sadness from video, anger and sadness from audio. Both Indian & Russian experts recognize emotional states of girls by video and audio better vs. emotional states of boys. Universal and specific feature of both the cultures for recognizing the children’s emotions are revealed. The paper described limitation and depicted the future research.

The paper makes use of the annotated task-oriented corpus of Holocaust testimonies in Russian (ruOHQA) to train a question-answer neural network model. We start from data preprocessing, present statistical analysis of the collected corpus for approximately 1500 pairs of questions and answers and describe its strengths and limitations. Also, we carry out experiments on automatic processing of the ruOHQA corpus using pre-trained transformer-based neural network models. Finally, we explore the capability of several models to generate simplified high-quality answers to questions and compare their results. The kind of research we present allows us to extract knowledge from oral history archives more productively.

The article provides a description of the most frequent bigrams and trigrams obtained using the n-gram analysis technique on a representative sample of Russian spoken language. N-gram analysis allows identifying frequent lists of sequences consisting of n graphical words, which is important for describing corpus material in various theoretical and applied aspects. The source data for applying this technique was a sample of 388 episodes of everyday speech communication from the ORD corpus (about 110 hours of audio). The results of the n-gram analysis in the form of frequency lists of word sequences allow constructing a typology of the most common bigrams and trigrams in Russian oral communication and lead the study equally to the levels of grammar, pragmatics, lexicon, and phraseology. The list of the most frequent bigrams and trigrams contains grammatical structures (U TEBYA, YA NE PONIMAYU, MNE KAZHETSYA), idioms (in a broad sense of the term) (VSYO RAVNO, TO ZHE SAMOE), introductory units (TAK SKAZAT’, S DRUGOY STORONY), as well as a number of sequences typical only for oral speech, such as one-word pragmatic markers (NU VOT, KAK BY, NU V OBSHCEM), amplifications (DA-DA, TAK-TAK-TAK), and hesitations-vocalizations (E-E, M-M-M). The obtained frequency lists can be useful for solving many modern applied natural language processing tasks.

The study examines the outcomes of automatic speech recognition (ASR) applied to field recordings of daily Russian speech. Everyday conversations, captured in real-life communicative scenarios, pose quite a complex subject for ASR. This is due to several factors: they can contain speech from a multitude of speakers, the loudness of the conversation partners’ speech signals fluctuates, there’s a substantial volume of overlapping speech from two or more speakers, and significant noise interferences can occur periodically. The presented research compares transcripts of these recordings produced by two recognition systems: the NTR Acoustic Model and OpenAI’s Whisper. These transcripts are then contrasted with expert transcription of the same recordings. The comparison of three frequency lists (the expert transcription, the acoustic model, and Whisper) reveals that each model has its unique characteristics at the lexical level. At the same time, both models perform worse in recognizing the following groups of words typical for spontaneous unprepared dialogues: discursive words, pragmatic markers, backchannel responses, interjections, conversational reduced word forms, and hesitations. These findings aim to foster improvements in ASR systems designed to transcribe conversational speech, such as work meetings and daily life dialogues.

The article considers sound prolongations as one of the most typical hesitation phenomena of spontaneous spoken speech in any language. The material for the analysis was 40 monologues-descriptions, partly taken from the corpus of Russian monologue speech “Balanced Annotated Text Library”, and partly recorded specifically for this study. The monologues were recorded from 4 groups of speakers: 10 Russians and 30 Chinese, of whom 10 described the comic strip in Russian and Chinese, and another 10 only in Chinese. The analysis showed that the appearance of prolongations correlates with the language factor: bilinguals use them more often than monolinguals. More prolongations were found in full-fledged words (not pragmatic markers), but most of them are function words and pronouns. In Russian speech, the percentage of prolongations is also high in pragmatic markers, especially in the word vot, which appears in spoken discourse most often as a hesitative boundary marker. Thus, it turned out that even language proficiency does not make the Russian colloquial speech of the Chinese as natural as one of the native speakers. Prolongations predominate in vowels and sonorants; they are frequent at the end of a word and in single-letter words. Often prolongations become a component of an extended hesitation chain that includes other hesitative units (physical hesitation pauses, breaks, repetitions, vocalizations, etc.). The data obtained can be useful in all aspects of applied linguistics: from linguodidactics and linguistic expertise to automatic speech processing systems and the creation of artificial intelligence.

Introduction. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the complexity and multidimensionality of the phenomenon of corruption and its negative impact on all aspects of modern society. The literature review shows that corruption has been analyzed from different angles, although no comparisons were found between countries such as Russia and Argentina. The comparison of corrupt behavior in these two societies presents academic interest because they share common features, do not belong to liberal-Western countries, but at the same time differ greatly in such factors as economic and political stability. Methodology and sources. From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the research is based on the scientific works of R. Merton, P. Bourdieu and M. Zaloznaya devoted to the issues of deviant behavior, motivation of action, practical sense and corrupt behavior. This article identifies, analyzes and compares corrupt behaviors in everyday life in Russia and Argentina, based on data provided by Russian and Argentinean young people in virtual interviews conducted in 2020 (N25) and in focus groups (N2) implemented before the pandemic, and media materials. Atlas-ti qualitative data analysis program is used. Results and discussion. In Argentina, corrupt behavior is highlighted to improve material living conditions in the context of constraints and in relation to institutions, Argentines mention more the police. While in Russia it is more related to the purpose of speeding up time, getting better services, graduating or avoiding a change of life project. Regarding institutions, universities and hospitals are mentioned. Conclusion. The study shows that neither in Russia nor in Argentina can the logic of corrupt behavior be reduced to the logic of economic behavior, as there are different motives, such as fear, custom, and assertion of right. The idea that certain situations are solved by money is widespread among young people in both societies.

Introduction. The language situation in Russia is unique with a fair number of languages spoken on its territory and all of them having different status and scope of use. This implies the relevance of the study that focuses on the analysis of code-switching in the spoken language of the bilinguals speaking Komi and Russian and Karelian and Russian. The novelty of the study is implied by the analysis of the code-switching in the language pairs mentioned above. This contributes to the development of the code-switching theory. Methodology and sources. The methods of language data collection and processing are sociolinguistic methods of interviewing, questionnaire, observation, quantitative and descriptive methods. The research material are scripted dialogues with bilinguals as well as the “Komi mu” and “Parma gor” 2022 issues. Results and discussion. The study of the Komi-Russian and Karelian-Russian code-switching was conducted using P. Muysken’s topology of code-mixing. P. Muysken sees code-switching as alternation, insertion, and congruent lexicalization according to the degree of the foreign word assimilation in the matrix language. The features of the spoken language of the Komi-Russian bilinguals are the frequent use of Russian discursive and introductory lexical items and adverbs; the nouns and the adjectives usually following the grammatical rules of Komi; the respondents giving preference to Russian versions when using numerals. For the spoken language of the Karelian-Russian bilinguals it is typical to address to Russian vocabulary, especially when mentioning dates, numbers, and using introductory words and phrases; Russian words are also being quite easily transformed according to the Karelian grammar through its case system. Conclusion. Spontaneous speech of the bilingual interviewees contains a great number of code-switching, that could be a convincing demonstration of the language shift and is conditioned by a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors, such as language prestige, language functionality, language situation, the native language of the interlocutor, and the willing of the respondent to use a certain language.

Introduction. The article presents the result of the diachronical research of HAPPINESS concept nominative field. The research was conducted on the basis of English explanatory dictionaries and texts of corpus databases, using the methods of corpus linguistics. The relevance of the research is due to the insufficient development of the theoretical foundations for studying the evolution of nominations and components of the concept under study, and the development of corpus linguistics as one of the most relevant ways of studying concepts. Methodology and sources. The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is formed by cognitive linguistics studies by N.N. Boldyrev, Y.S. Stepanov, E.S. Kubryakova, E.A. Nielsen, Z.D. Popova, I.A. Sternin; conceptology studies, in particular, emotional concepts, and emotiology studies by N.A. Krasavsky, V.I. Shakhovsky and O.E. Filimonova. The empirical material of the study is based on the texts of English corpus databases, as well as articles of English explanatory and etymological dictionaries. Results and discussion. Based on the method of constructing the nominative field described by Popova and Sternin and using the material of English explanatory dictionaries for the Middle and Modern English, the core of HAPPINESS concept is revealed. Based on the texts of English corpus databases, using corpus linguistics methods, as well as the collocation search model compiled by the author, the concept’s nominative field’s peripheral components are identified. Based on the analysis, the proposed changes in the composition of the nominative field of the concept in diachrony are revealed. Conclusion. In conclusion, the results of the analysis of the nominative field of HAPPINESS concept are presented, and the provisions on the nature of the development of the concept in diachrony are put forward.