Symmetric products of a semistable degeneration of surfaces
  We explicitly construct a $V$-normal crossing Gorenstein canonical model of the relative symmetric products of a local semistable degeneration of surfaces without a triple point by means of toric geometry. Using this model, we calculate the stringy $E$-polynomial of the relative symmetric product. We also construct a minimal model of degeneration of Hilbert schemes explicitly. 
Yasunari Nagai
math.AG