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Satzarten unterscheiden - Kann das der Computer? Syntaktische Explorationen anhand von COSMAS II
Näf, Anton
Full Text Available Is the computer capable of recognizing different sentence types in a linguistic corpus such as COSMAS II (Mannheim, which has not been previously treated by a tagger or a parser? The answer is in fact no. However, in the present article it is shown that under certain circumstances an automatic distinction is nevertheless possible. Making use of a procedure that we have called Anfragezuspitzung (literally: making a query pointed; encirclement of a grammatical phenomenon by a combination of several specific queries, and taking as a starting point philological prior knowledge that has been gathered "by hand", it proves to be perfectly possible to arrive at a satisfactory result. With the example of sentence types in German, in particular the distinction between interrogative and exclamatory sentences, we demonstrate in this article that such a distinction can be carried out automatically with a high degree of accuracy, e.g. the distinction between War das eine gute Idee? (Was this a good idea? and War das eine gute Idee! (What a good idea this was!.
A universal multilingual weightless neural network tagger via quantitative linguistics.
Carneiro, Hugo C C; Pedreira, Carlos E; França, Felipe M G; Lima, Priscila M V
In the last decade, given the availability of corpora in several distinct languages, research on multilingual part-of-speech tagging started to grow. Amongst the novelties there is mWANN-Tagger (multilingual weightless artificial neural network tagger), a weightless neural part-of-speech tagger capable of being used for mostly-suffix-oriented languages. The tagger was subjected to corpora in eight languages of quite distinct natures and had a remarkable accuracy with very low sample deviation in every one of them, indicating the robustness of weightless neural systems for part-of-speech tagging tasks. However, mWANN-Tagger needed to be tuned for every new corpus, since each one required a different parameter configuration. For mWANN-Tagger to be truly multilingual, it should be usable for any new language with no need of parameter tuning. This article proposes a study that aims to find a relation between the lexical diversity of a language and the parameter configuration that would produce the best performing mWANN-Tagger instance. Preliminary analyses suggested that a single parameter configuration may be applied to the eight aforementioned languages. The mWANN-Tagger instance produced by this configuration was as accurate as the language-dependent ones obtained through tuning. Afterwards, the weightless neural tagger was further subjected to new corpora in languages that range from very isolating to polysynthetic ones. The best performing instances of mWANN-Tagger are again the ones produced by the universal parameter configuration. Hence, mWANN-Tagger can be applied to new corpora with no need of parameter tuning, making it a universal multilingual part-of-speech tagger. Further experiments with Universal Dependencies treebanks reveal that mWANN-Tagger may be extended and that it has potential to outperform most state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers if better word representations are provided. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
How (not) to train a dependency parser: The curious case of jackknifing part-of-speech taggers
Agic, Zeljko; Schluter, Natalie
In dependency parsing, jackknifing taggers is indiscriminately used as a simple adaptation strategy. Here, we empirically evaluate when and how (not) to use jackknifing in parsing. On 26 languages, we reveal a preference that conflicts with, and surpasses the ubiquitous ten-folding. We show no cl...
Evaluating stance-annotated sentences from the Brexit Blog Corpus: A quantitative linguistic analysis
Simaki Vasiliki
Full Text Available This paper offers a formally driven quantitative analysis of stance-annotated sentences in the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC. Our goal is to identify features that determine the formal profiles of six stance categories (contrariety, hypotheticality, necessity, prediction, source of knowledge and uncertainty in a subset of the BBC. The study has two parts: firstly, it examines a large number of formal linguistic features, such as punctuation, words and grammatical categories that occur in the sentences in order to describe the specific characteristics of each category, and secondly, it compares characteristics in the entire data set in order to determine stance similarities in the data set. We show that among the six stance categories in the corpus, contrariety and necessity are the most discriminative ones, with the former using longer sentences, more conjunctions, more repetitions and shorter forms than the sentences expressing other stances. necessity has longer lexical forms but shorter sentences, which are syntactically more complex. We show that stance in our data set is expressed in sentences with around 21 words per sentence. The sentences consist mainly of alphabetical characters forming a varied vocabulary without special forms, such as digits or special characters.
objective value of things), it can also be said that at the base of every sin there is not only pride, but a type of self-deception as well, which causes the (false) belief that one can decide the value of things. VI. A development of Augustine's analysis of self-deception With this conception of self-deception in mind, I contend that the application of the hierarchical-normative scheme to the functions of memory would provide benefits for Augustine's account of self-deception. For now one we are in a position to argue that, just like reason can be sometimes enslaved by its subordinate faculties (the senses and the inner sense, which submit to it the perception of lovely objects), the judging part of memory, the understanding, can also be sometimes enslaved by its subordinate faculties in memory (the will and the memory in a strict sense). The three functions of memory that have been distinguished enable us to identify, in turn, two different senses of what it means to forget something. In the first sense, an instance of forgetting a memory means that the memory in question has been completely swallowed up by forgetfulness; the image is then no longer contained in the storehouse. In the second sense, however, the memory is still present in the storehouse; the problem is that the will is not able to retrieve it. In these cases, it may be that the memory is so deeply hidden that it is simply impossible for the will to retrieve it. However, there is also the possibility that the will, although capable of retrieving that memory, does not do it, perhaps because the person's desire to remember is outweighed by other desires. This can happen when the memory the person is trying to recall is unpleasant or painful. The will then directs the understanding towards something other than the truth. It could be argued, then, that such thing is what happens when a person tries to recall a certain image, feeling, or piece of knowledge, but what reaches her mind (her understanding) is not
Roberto Parra Dorantes
The main objective of this paper is to argue that Augustine's analysis of the concept of memory in Confessions, Book X, would greatly benefit from the hierarchical argumentative and explanatory schema he himself employs in other works to discuss the relation between the senses, the inner sense, and reason in perception. A brief overview of Augustine's account of memory in the Confessions is presented, followed by a discussion of two argumentative and explanatory schemata Augustine often emplo...
ChemicalTagger: A tool for semantic text-mining in chemistry.
Hawizy, Lezan; Jessop, David M; Adams, Nico; Murray-Rust, Peter
The primary method for scientific communication is in the form of published scientific articles and theses which use natural language combined with domain-specific terminology. As such, they contain free owing unstructured text. Given the usefulness of data extraction from unstructured literature, we aim to show how this can be achieved for the discipline of chemistry. The highly formulaic style of writing most chemists adopt make their contributions well suited to high-throughput Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches. We have developed the ChemicalTagger parser as a medium-depth, phrase-based semantic NLP tool for the language of chemical experiments. Tagging is based on a modular architecture and uses a combination of OSCAR, domain-specific regex and English taggers to identify parts-of-speech. The ANTLR grammar is used to structure this into tree-based phrases. Using a metric that allows for overlapping annotations, we achieved machine-annotator agreements of 88.9% for phrase recognition and 91.9% for phrase-type identification (Action names). It is possible parse to chemical experimental text using rule-based techniques in conjunction with a formal grammar parser. ChemicalTagger has been deployed for over 10,000 patents and has identified solvents from their linguistic context with >99.5% precision.
ChemicalTagger: A tool for semantic text-mining in chemistry
Hawizy Lezan
Full Text Available Abstract Background The primary method for scientific communication is in the form of published scientific articles and theses which use natural language combined with domain-specific terminology. As such, they contain free owing unstructured text. Given the usefulness of data extraction from unstructured literature, we aim to show how this can be achieved for the discipline of chemistry. The highly formulaic style of writing most chemists adopt make their contributions well suited to high-throughput Natural Language Processing (NLP approaches. Results We have developed the ChemicalTagger parser as a medium-depth, phrase-based semantic NLP tool for the language of chemical experiments. Tagging is based on a modular architecture and uses a combination of OSCAR, domain-specific regex and English taggers to identify parts-of-speech. The ANTLR grammar is used to structure this into tree-based phrases. Using a metric that allows for overlapping annotations, we achieved machine-annotator agreements of 88.9% for phrase recognition and 91.9% for phrase-type identification (Action names. Conclusions It is possible parse to chemical experimental text using rule-based techniques in conjunction with a formal grammar parser. ChemicalTagger has been deployed for over 10,000 patents and has identified solvents from their linguistic context with >99.5% precision.
The first leg transplant for the treatment of a cancer by Saints Cosmas and Damian.
Androutsos, G; Diamantis, A; Vladimiros, L
The most renowned of all medically inclined saints must have been St. Cosmas and St. Damian. They became the special patrons of surgery, due to their miraculous operations. On one occasion, they amputated a cancerous leg and replaced it with another, taken from a Moor who had just died. This dramatic cure was meat and drink for artists, and has been portrayed many times.
Combining shallow and deep processing for a robust, fast, deep-linguistic dependency parser
Schneider, G
This paper describes Pro3Gres, a fast, robust, broad-coverage parser that delivers deep-linguistic grammatical relation structures as output, which are closer to predicate-argument structures and more informative than pure constituency structures. The parser stays as shallow as is possible for each task, combining shallow and deep-linguistic methods by integrating chunking and by expressing the majority of long-distance dependencies in a context-free way. It combines statistical and rule-base...
The Dangling model in the construction of compound sentences with regard to verb tenses
Mahmoud Mehravaran
Full Text Available Abstract A sentence is the most complete syntactic unit of a language. The construction of a sentence is the most comprehensive, controversial and fascinating syntactic issue in the language grammar. The message or intention is usually conveyed through a sentence. In fact, the communicative function of a language is carried out via a sentence. A sentence can be classified in to different categories from different perspectives: semantically, constructively or performatively either with a verb or without a verb and also with regard to the construction. With regard to the construction, a sentence is either simple or compound. A simple sentence is the one with a complete meaning which only has one verb. It must be born in mind that a sentence is a complete unit whit meaning and there can be a hesitation after that. There for units of speech that have a verb without a complete meaning and there can be no silence or hesitation after them cannot be regarded as a sentence. Since they are dependent upon another sentence to be completed. They are called phrases. Such phrases can be incorporated in compound sentences make main and subordinate clauses. Compound sentences are widely discussed whit in grammatical constructions, but their types and that how have been built their various constructions are less adequately discussed. With regard to the manner of construction of compound sentences, the widest linguistic amenities can be observed in the sentences. There is not such complexity or disagreement over simple sentences but compound sentences have been less adequately investigated and there is room for more discussion and debate. Because, in some grammars, without considering the construction criteria, all sentences that are connected to one another, whit connectives are called compound sentences. This paper has precisely investigated compound sentences and has elaborated on the construction criteria of compound sentences. The study has also pointed to
The Dangling model in the construction of compound sentences with regard to verb tenses
Mahmoud Mehravaran
Full Text Available Abstract A sentence is the most complete syntactic unit of a language. The construction of a sentence is the most comprehensive, controversial and fascinating syntactic issue in the language grammar. The message or intention is usually conveyed through a sentence. In fact, the communicative function of a language is carried out via a sentence. A sentence can be classified in to different categories from different perspectives: semantically, constructively or performatively either with a verb or without a verb and also with regard to the construction. With regard to the construction, a sentence is either simple or compound. A simple sentence is the one with a complete meaning which only has one verb. It must be born in mind that a sentence is a complete unit whit meaning and there can be a hesitation after that. There for units of speech that have a verb without a complete meaning and there can be no silence or hesitation after them cannot be regarded as a sentence. Since they are dependent upon another sentence to be completed. They are called phrases. Such phrases can be incorporated in compound sentences make main and subordinate clauses. Compound sentences are widely discussed whit in grammatical constructions, but their types and that how have been built their various constructions are less adequately discussed. With regard to the manner of construction of compound sentences, the widest linguistic amenities can be observed in the sentences. There is not such complexity or disagreement over simple sentences but compound sentences have been less adequately investigated and there is room for more discussion and debate. Because, in some grammars, without considering the construction criteria, all sentences that are connected to one another, whit connectives are called compound sentences. This paper has precisely investigated compound sentences and has elaborated on the construction criteria of compound sentences. The study has also pointed to
Development of a new Soft Muon Tagger for the identification of $b$-jets in ATLAS
Sciandra, Andrea; The ATLAS collaboration
$b$-tagging plays a fundamental role at LHC, as it helps in the identification of heavy particles that decay to bottom quarks, as the top quark and the Higgs boson or heavy exotic particles. The Soft Muon Tagger (SMT) allows to identify jets from $b$-quarks taking advantage of the presence of a muon coming from semileptonic decays of $b$-hadrons. The development of this new $b$-tagger is described, showing that, despite the low efficiency of the jet-muon association based on the angular distance, the discriminating power of the associated muon variables is remarkable to reject light jets. An enhanced performance has been reached for all light jet rejection working points by adding the SMT output to the best performing multivariate $b$-tagger in ATLAS (MV2). A good modeling of input and output variables is shown, comparing simulation with Run 2 data.
Interaction as 'involvement' in writing for students: a corpus linguistic ...
Interaction as 'involvement' in writing for students: a corpus linguistic analysis of a key readability feature. E Hilton Hubbard. Abstract. The rapid change in the demographics of South Africa's tertiary level student population over the last decade — and most specifically the huge increase in those who have to study at a ...
Storing files in a parallel computing system based on user-specified parser function
Faibish, Sorin; Bent, John M; Tzelnic, Percy; Grider, Gary; Manzanares, Adam; Torres, Aaron
Techniques are provided for storing files in a parallel computing system based on a user-specified parser function. A plurality of files generated by a distributed application in a parallel computing system are stored by obtaining a parser from the distributed application for processing the plurality of files prior to storage; and storing one or more of the plurality of files in one or more storage nodes of the parallel computing system based on the processing by the parser. The plurality of files comprise one or more of a plurality of complete files and a plurality of sub-files. The parser can optionally store only those files that satisfy one or more semantic requirements of the parser. The parser can also extract metadata from one or more of the files and the extracted metadata can be stored with one or more of the plurality of files and used for searching for files.
Has (downturn-)austerity really been 'constitutionalized' in europe? On the ideological dimension of such a claim
Kaupa, Clemens
In current debate, it is frequently argued that EU law requires or facilitates the implementation of 'downturn-austerity', that is, spending cuts, wage deflation, and tax increases during an economic downturn. More specifically, this 'thesis of the constitutionalization of downturn- austerity in
Lazy functional parser combinators in Java
Swierstra, D.S.; Dijkstra, A.
A parser is a program that checks if a text is a sentence of the language as described by a grammar. Traditionally, the program text of a parser is generated from a grammar description, after which it is compiled and subsequently run. The language accepted by such a parser is, by the nature of
Asyndetic sentences with a concretiser
Tanasić Sreto Z.
Full Text Available The paper discusses asyndetic sentences, compound sentences without a conjunction between the clauses. Slavic scholars pay considerable attention to these sentences. They predominantly consider asyndetic sentences to be a model of compound sentences, apart from the model of compound conjunctional sentences, and plead that they should be described separately. Asyndetic sentences in contemporary Serbian have not been studied sufficiently. There are few specific papers dedicated to asyndetic sentences, and one can say that there are virtually no papers giving them an in-depth treatment. Therefore, we are so far left without a full insight into how widespread that compound sentence model is in contemporary Serbian and in what variants it occurs, not to mention our even lesser knowledge of its distribution in certain functional styles. This paper describes one type of asyndetic sentences in the contemporary Standard Serbian language. It includes such sentences that have a word or a phrase functioning as the verifier of the semantic relation between the clauses of asyndetic sentences. The paper demonstrates that such sentences take up a sizeable portion of the asyndetic sentence corpus, and that a large number of concretisers occur functioning as the verifiers of different meanings which are established between the clauses. The concretisers, similarly to conjunctions in syndetic sentences, serve the purpose of reducing the typical polysemy of asyndetic sentences to monosemy by assigning a monosemic relation between the clauses while foregrounding one of the possible meanings, and suppressing the others. The paper indicates that coordinate asyndetic sentences express a number of different semantic relations between the clauses. Some of them are expressed in complex sentences, some in compound sentences, and there are also those that can be expressed in both types of conjunctional sentences. The paper presents examples of sentences which have in their
A neural jet charge tagger for the measurement of the B/s0 anti-B/s0 oscillation frequency at CDF
Lecci, Claudia; Karlsruhe U., EKP
A Jet Charge Tagger algorithm for b-flavour tagging for the measurement of Δm s at CDF has been presented. The tagger is based on a b-track probability variable and a b-jet probability variable, both obtained by combining the information available in b(bar b) events with a Neural Network. The tagging power measured on data is 0.917 ± 0.031% e+SVT sample; 0.938 ± 0.029% μ+SVT sample which is ∼30% larger than the cut based Jet Charge Tagger employed for the B s 0 mixing analysis presented by CDF at the Winter Conferences 2005. The improved power of the tagger is due to the selection of the b-jet with a Neural Network variable, which uses correlated jet variables in an optimal way. The development of the track and jet probability has profited from studies performed on simulated events, which allowed to understand better the features of b(bar b) events. For the first time in the CDF B group a Monte Carlo sample comprising flavour creation and additional b(bar b) production processes has been examined and compared to Run II data. It has been demonstrated that a Monte Carlo sample with only flavour creation b(bar b) production processes is not sufficient to describe b(bar b) data collected at CDF. The sample with additional processes introduced in this thesis is thus essential for tagging studies. Although the event description is satisfactory, the flavour information in the Monte Carlo sample differs with respect to data. This difference needs to be clarified by further studies. In addition, the track and the jet probabilities are the first official tools based on Neural Networks for B-Physics at CDF. They have proven that the simulation is understood to such an advanced level that Neural Networks can be employed. Further work is going on in this direction: a Soft Electron and a Soft Muon Tagger based on Neural Networks are under development as of now. Several possible tagger setups have been studied and the Jet Charge Tagger reached a high level of optimization
A generic method for the evaluation of interval type-2 fuzzy linguistic summaries.
Boran, Fatih Emre; Akay, Diyar
Linguistic summarization has turned out to be an important knowledge discovery technique by providing the most relevant natural language-based sentences in a human consistent manner. While many studies on linguistic summarization have handled ordinary fuzzy sets [type-1 fuzzy set (T1FS)] for modeling words, only few of them have dealt with interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FS) even though IT2FS is better capable of handling uncertainties associated with words. Furthermore, the existent studies work with the scalar cardinality based degree of truth which might lead to inconsistency in the evaluation of interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) linguistic summaries. In this paper, to overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel probabilistic degree of truth for evaluating IT2F linguistic summaries in the forms of type-I and type-II quantified sentences. We also extend the properties that should be fulfilled by any degree of truth on linguistic summarization with T1FS to IT2F environment. We not only prove that our probabilistic degree of truth satisfies the given properties, but also illustrate by examples that it provides more consistent results when compared to the existing degree of truth in the literature. Furthermore, we carry out an application on linguistic summarization of time series data of Europe Brent Spot Price, along with a comparison of the results achieved with our approach and that of the existing degree of truth in the literature.
A Protocol for Annotating Parser Differences. Research Report. ETS RR-16-02
Bruno, James V.; Cahill, Aoife; Gyawali, Binod
We present an annotation scheme for classifying differences in the outputs of syntactic constituency parsers when a gold standard is unavailable or undesired, as in the case of texts written by nonnative speakers of English. We discuss its automated implementation and the results of a case study that uses the scheme to choose a parser best suited…
ULTRA: Universal Grammar as a Universal Parser.
Medeiros, David P
A central concern of generative grammar is the relationship between hierarchy and word order, traditionally understood as two dimensions of a single syntactic representation. A related concern is directionality in the grammar. Traditional approaches posit process-neutral grammars, embodying knowledge of language, put to use with infinite facility both for production and comprehension. This has crystallized in the view of Merge as the central property of syntax, perhaps its only novel feature. A growing number of approaches explore grammars with different directionalities, often with more direct connections to performance mechanisms. This paper describes a novel model of universal grammar as a one-directional, universal parser. Mismatch between word order and interpretation order is pervasive in comprehension; in the present model, word order is language-particular and interpretation order (i.e., hierarchy) is universal. These orders are not two dimensions of a unified abstract object (e.g., precedence and dominance in a single tree); rather, both are temporal sequences, and UG is an invariant real-time procedure (based on Knuth's stack-sorting algorithm) transforming word order into hierarchical order. This shift in perspective has several desirable consequences. It collapses linearization, displacement, and composition into a single performance process. The architecture provides a novel source of brackets (labeled unambiguously and without search), which are understood not as part-whole constituency relations, but as storage and retrieval routines in parsing. It also explains why neutral word order within single syntactic cycles avoids 213-like permutations. The model identifies cycles as extended projections of lexical heads, grounding the notion of phase. This is achieved with a universal processor, dispensing with parameters. The empirical focus is word order in noun phrases. This domain provides some of the clearest evidence for 213-avoidance as a cross-linguistic
The elaborate plumage in peacocks is not such a drag.
Askew, Graham N
One of the classic examples of an exaggerated sexually selected trait is the elaborate plumage that forms the train in male peafowl Pavo cristatus (peacock). Such ornaments are thought to reduce locomotor performance as a result of their weight and aerodynamic drag, but this cost is unknown. Here, the effect that the train has on take-off flight in peacocks was quantified as the sum of the rates of change of the potential and kinetic energies of the body (P(CoM)) in birds with trains and following the train's removal. There was no significant difference between P(CoM) in birds with and without a train. The train incurs drag during take-off; however, while this produces a twofold increase in parasite drag, parasite power only accounts for 0.1% of the total aerodynamic power. The train represented 6.9% of body weight and is expected to increase induced power. The absence of a detectable effect on take-off performance does not necessarily mean that there is no cost associated with possessing such ornate plumage; rather, it suggests that given the variation in take-off performance per se, the magnitude of any effect of the train has little meaningful functional relevance. © 2014. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.
A corpus of full-text journal articles is a robust evaluation tool for revealing differences in performance of biomedical natural language processing tools.
Verspoor, Karin; Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel; Lanfranchi, Arrick; Warner, Colin; Johnson, Helen L; Roeder, Christophe; Choi, Jinho D; Funk, Christopher; Malenkiy, Yuriy; Eckert, Miriam; Xue, Nianwen; Baumgartner, William A; Bada, Michael; Palmer, Martha; Hunter, Lawrence E
We introduce the linguistic annotation of a corpus of 97 full-text biomedical publications, known as the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus. We further assess the performance of existing tools for performing sentence splitting, tokenization, syntactic parsing, and named entity recognition on this corpus. Many biomedical natural language processing systems demonstrated large differences between their previously published results and their performance on the CRAFT corpus when tested with the publicly available models or rule sets. Trainable systems differed widely with respect to their ability to build high-performing models based on this data. The finding that some systems were able to train high-performing models based on this corpus is additional evidence, beyond high inter-annotator agreement, that the quality of the CRAFT corpus is high. The overall poor performance of various systems indicates that considerable work needs to be done to enable natural language processing systems to work well when the input is full-text journal articles. The CRAFT corpus provides a valuable resource to the biomedical natural language processing community for evaluation and training of new models for biomedical full text publications.
Improved part-of-speech prediction in suffix analysis.
Mario Fruzangohar
Full Text Available MOTIVATION: Predicting the part of speech (POS tag of an unknown word in a sentence is a significant challenge. This is particularly difficult in biomedicine, where POS tags serve as an input to training sophisticated literature summarization techniques, such as those based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM. Different approaches have been taken to deal with the POS tagger challenge, but with one exception--the TnT POS tagger--previous publications on POS tagging have omitted details of the suffix analysis used for handling unknown words. The suffix of an English word is a strong predictor of a POS tag for that word. As a pre-requisite for an accurate HMM POS tagger for biomedical publications, we present an efficient suffix prediction method for integration into a POS tagger. RESULTS: We have implemented a fully functional HMM POS tagger using experimentally optimised suffix based prediction. Our simple suffix analysis method, significantly outperformed the probability interpolation based TnT method. We have also shown how important suffix analysis can be for probability estimation of a known word (in the training corpus with an unseen POS tag; a common scenario with a small training corpus. We then integrated this simple method in our POS tagger and determined an optimised parameter set for both methods, which can help developers to optimise their current algorithm, based on our results. We also introduce the concept of counting methods in maximum likelihood estimation for the first time and show how counting methods can affect the prediction result. Finally, we describe how machine-learning techniques were applied to identify words, for which prediction of POS tags were always incorrect and propose a method to handle words of this type. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Java source code, binaries and setup instructions are freely available at http://genomes.sapac.edu.au/text_mining/pos_tagger.zip.
A memory-based shallow parser for spoken Dutch
Canisius, S.V.M.; van den Bosch, A.; Decadt, B.; Hoste, V.; De Pauw, G.
We describe the development of a Dutch memory-based shallow parser. The availability of large treebanks for Dutch, such as the one provided by the Spoken Dutch Corpus, allows memory-based learners to be trained on examples of shallow parsing taken from the treebank, and act as a shallow parser after
Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel? Evidence from event-related brain potentials.
Hopf, Jens-Max; Bader, Markus; Meng, Michael; Bayer, Josef
In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery from a misparse. A key distinction can be made between parsers that compute all alternative syntactic structures in parallel (parallel parsers) and parsers that compute only a single preferred analysis (serial parsers). To distinguish empirically between parallel and serial parsing models, we compare ERP responses to garden-path sentences with ERP responses to truly ungrammatical sentences. Garden-path sentences contain a temporary and ultimately curable ungrammaticality, whereas truly ungrammatical sentences remain so permanently--a difference which gives rise to different predictions in the two classes of parsing architectures. At the disambiguating word, ERPs in both sentence types show negative shifts of similar onset latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution in an initial time window between 300 and 500 ms. In a following time window (500-700 ms), the negative shift to garden-path sentences disappears at right central parietal sites, while it continues in permanently ungrammatical sentences. These data are taken as evidence for a strictly serial parser. The absence of a difference in the early time window indicates that temporary and permanent ungrammaticalities trigger the same kind of parsing responses. Later differences can be related to successful reanalysis in garden-path but not in ungrammatical sentences. Copyright 2003 Elsevier Science B.V.
Hero or has-been: is there a future for altruism in medical education?
Bishop, Jeffrey P; Rees, Charlotte E
The term 'altruism' is often used without definition, leading to contradictions in what we expect from medical students. In this reflection paper, we critique the concept of 'altruism' from the perspective of moral philosophy and social psychology and challenge its unquestioned usage within the medical education literature, especially that emerging from the USA. We will argue that 'altruism' is a social construction with a particular history, stemming from Kantian philosophy and perpetuated within newer disciplines such as social psychology. As it currently stands, 'altruism' seems to mean utter self-sacrifice--a position contradictory to recent recommendations by regulatory bodies in the UK, which suggest that graduates should look after the 'self' and achieve a work-life balance. In this article, we argue that it is undesirable to have 'altruism' as a learning outcome for medical students and we also argue that 'altruism' is not an observable behavior that can be measured. Instead, we suggest that medical educators should employ a more balanced term, borrowed from the social psychology literature i.e. pro-social behavior. We argue that whilst 'pro-social behavior' focuses on actions that benefit others, it does not do so at the expense of the self. In addition, it focuses on students' observable behaviors rather than their inner motivations, so is measurable. We conclude our article by discussing the formation of physicians based upon a virtue ethics, where society and the profession are in dialogue about the telos of medicine and its virtues, and where the character of the young physician is formed within the crucible of that dialogue. Thus, central to this pro-social behavior is the concept of phronesis or prudence, including the balancing of self-interest such as self-care, and the interests of the other.
Options for Energy Upgrade of the Hall B Tagger
H. Crannell; D. Sober
Four options for an energy upgrade of the present Hall-B Tagger have been considered. These are: (1) Boost the magnetic field in the present Tagger; (2) Replace the Tagger with a new Tagger system; (3) Install a pre-Tagger magnetic chacain, and (4) Use the present Tagger as part of the beam dump. In this document each of these options is described briefly, the advantages and disadvantages of each are presented, and a very rough cost of implementation is suggested
A new Soft Muon Tagger for ATLAS Run 2
Sciandra, Andrea; The ATLAS collaboration
b-tagging plays a fundamental role at LHC, as it helps in the identification of heavy particles that decay to bottom quarks, such as the top quark, Higgs boson or heavy exotic particles. The Soft Muon Tagger (SMT) allows jets from b-quarks to be identified, taking advantage of the presence of a muon coming from semileptonic decays of b-hadrons. The development of this new b-tagger in ATLAS will be described, showing that, despite the low efficiency of the jet-muon association (based on the angular distance), the discriminating power of the associated muon variables is sufficient to reject light jets. An enhanced performance has been reached for all light jet rejection working points by adding the SMT output to the best performing multivariate b-tagger in ATLAS (MV2). A good modeling of input and output variables is shown, comparing simulation with Run 2 data.
Study of burden distribution characteristics (IV): the development of a distribution predicting model in which coke collapse has been taken into account
Kamisaka, E; Okuno, Y; Irita, T; Matsuzaki, M; Isoyama, T; Kunitomo, K
Using results quoted in a previous report (see Tetsu To Hagane, Vol. 68, page S 701, 1982), coke collapse has been quantified by means of landslide theory, according to which the stability of the burden is given by a safety factor which equals resistance moment/sliding moment. This has enabled coke collapse to be introduced in a model for predicting burden distribution. Application of this model has resulted in more accurate predictions of burden distribution, the computed values being in close agreement with the results of distribution experiments. 1 reference.
The CALBC Silver Standard Corpus for Biomedical Named Entities - A Study in Harmonizing the Contributions from Four Independent Named Entity Taggers
D. Rebholz-Schuhmann (Dietrich); A.J. Jimeno-Yepes (Antonio José); E.M. van Mulligen (Erik); N. Kang (Ning); J.A. Kors (Jan); D. Milward (David); P. Corbett (Peter); E. Buyko (Ekaterina); Tomanek (Katrin); E. Beisswanger (Elena); U. Hahn (Udo)
textabstractThe production of gold standard corpora is time-consuming and costly. We propose an alternative: the 'silver standard corpus' (SSC), a corpus that has been generated by the harmonisation of the annotations that have been delivered from a selection of annotation systems. The systems have
Corpus linguistics, systemic functional grammar and literary meaning: a critical analysis of harry potter and the philosopher's stone Corpus linguistics, systemic functional grammar and literary meaning: a critical analysis of harry potter and the philosopher's stone
Andrew Goatly
Full Text Available The research reported in this paper has two aims. First, to show how corpus linguistics, using word frequency and concordance data, which is then analysed according to transitivity systems of systemic functional grammar (SFG, can be useful to the enterprise of critical linguistics. Second, to investigate to what extent this critical corpus linguistics (CCL gives a valid representation of the meanings and ideologies of a literary text. The hypothesis tested is that semiotic models of communication, in this case of popular children's literature, with their emphasis on the encoding and decoding of meanings, lend themselves to a corpus linguistics approach. But that, in fact, these mutually reinforcing approaches (SFG and CCL with their reliance on what is encoded as text cannot entirely succeed in accounting for how literature, in particular, is understood and interpreted, and how ideology works within it and behind it. For a richer critical discourse analysis we need a pragmatic account, for example an analysis of presupposition, inference and propositional attitude. The issues here will be discussed in the light of recent debate between Michael Stubbs and Henry Widdowson on the strengths and limitations of corpus linguistics in critical discourse analysis. The research reported in this paper has two aims. First, to show how corpus linguistics, using word frequency and concordance data, which is then analysed according to transitivity systems of systemic functional grammar (SFG, can be useful to the enterprise of critical linguistics. Second, to investigate to what extent this critical corpus linguistics (CCL gives a valid representation of the meanings and ideologies of a literary text. The hypothesis tested is that semiotic models of communication, in this case of popular children's literature, with their emphasis on the encoding and decoding of meanings, lend themselves to a corpus linguistics approach. But that, in fact, these
Designing a Constraint Based Parser for Sanskrit
Kulkarni, Amba; Pokar, Sheetal; Shukl, Devanand
Verbal understanding (śā bdabodha) of any utterance requires the knowledge of how words in that utterance are related to each other. Such knowledge is usually available in the form of cognition of grammatical relations. Generative grammars describe how a language codes these relations. Thus the knowledge of what information various grammatical relations convey is available from the generation point of view and not the analysis point of view. In order to develop a parser based on any grammar one should then know precisely the semantic content of the grammatical relations expressed in a language string, the clues for extracting these relations and finally whether these relations are expressed explicitly or implicitly. Based on the design principles that emerge from this knowledge, we model the parser as finding a directed Tree, given a graph with nodes representing the words and edges representing the possible relations between them. Further, we also use the Mīmā ṃsā constraint of ākā ṅkṣā (expectancy) to rule out non-solutions and sannidhi (proximity) to prioritize the solutions. We have implemented a parser based on these principles and its performance was found to be satisfactory giving us a confidence to extend its functionality to handle the complex sentences.
'Tagger' - a Mac OS X Interactive Graphical Application for Data Inference and Analysis of N-Dimensional Datasets in the Natural Physical Sciences.
Morse, P. E.; Reading, A. M.; Lueg, C.
Pattern-recognition in scientific data is not only a computational problem but a human-observer problem as well. Human observation of - and interaction with - data visualization software can augment, select, interrupt and modify computational routines and facilitate processes of pattern and significant feature recognition for subsequent human analysis, machine learning, expert and artificial intelligence systems.'Tagger' is a Mac OS X interactive data visualisation tool that facilitates Human-Computer interaction for the recognition of patterns and significant structures. It is a graphical application developed using the Quartz Composer framework. 'Tagger' follows a Model-View-Controller (MVC) software architecture: the application problem domain (the model) is to facilitate novel ways of abstractly representing data to a human interlocutor, presenting these via different viewer modalities (e.g. chart representations, particle systems, parametric geometry) to the user (View) and enabling interaction with the data (Controller) via a variety of Human Interface Devices (HID). The software enables the user to create an arbitrary array of tags that may be appended to the visualised data, which are then saved into output files as forms of semantic metadata. Three fundamental problems that are not strongly supported by conventional scientific visualisation software are addressed:1] How to visually animate data over time, 2] How to rapidly deploy unconventional parametrically driven data visualisations, 3] How to construct and explore novel interaction models that capture the activity of the end-user as semantic metadata that can be used to computationally enhance subsequent interrogation. Saved tagged data files may be loaded into Tagger, so that tags may be tagged, if desired. Recursion opens up the possibility of refining or overlapping different types of tags, tagging a variety of different POIs or types of events, and of capturing different types of specialist
Towards automated processing of clinical Finnish: sublanguage analysis and a rule-based parser.
Laippala, Veronika; Ginter, Filip; Pyysalo, Sampo; Salakoski, Tapio
In this paper, we present steps taken towards more efficient automated processing of clinical Finnish, focusing on daily nursing notes in a Finnish Intensive Care Unit (ICU). First, we analyze ICU Finnish as a sublanguage, identifying its specific features facilitating, for example, the development of a specialized syntactic analyser. The identified features include frequent omission of finite verbs, limitations in allowed syntactic structures, and domain-specific vocabulary. Second, we develop a formal grammar and a parser for ICU Finnish, thus providing better tools for the development of further applications in the clinical domain. The grammar is implemented in the LKB system in a typed feature structure formalism. The lexicon is automatically generated based on the output of the FinTWOL morphological analyzer adapted to the clinical domain. As an additional experiment, we study the effect of using Finnish constraint grammar to reduce the size of the lexicon. The parser construction thus makes efficient use of existing resources for Finnish. The grammar currently covers 76.6% of ICU Finnish sentences, producing highly accurate best-parse analyzes with F-score of 91.1%. We find that building a parser for the highly specialized domain sublanguage is not only feasible, but also surprisingly efficient, given an existing morphological analyzer with broad vocabulary coverage. The resulting parser enables a deeper analysis of the text than was previously possible.
Unsupervised grammar induction of clinical report sublanguage.
Kate, Rohit J
Clinical reports are written using a subset of natural language while employing many domain-specific terms; such a language is also known as a sublanguage for a scientific or a technical domain. Different genres of clinical reports use different sublaguages, and in addition, different medical facilities use different medical language conventions. This makes supervised training of a parser for clinical sentences very difficult as it would require expensive annotation effort to adapt to every type of clinical text. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method which automatically induces a grammar and a parser for the sublanguage of a given genre of clinical reports from a corpus with no annotations. In order to capture sentence structures specific to clinical domains, the grammar is induced in terms of semantic classes of clinical terms in addition to part-of-speech tags. Our method induces grammar by minimizing the combined encoding cost of the grammar and the corresponding sentence derivations. The probabilities for the productions of the induced grammar are then learned from the unannotated corpus using an instance of the expectation-maximization algorithm. Our experiments show that the induced grammar is able to parse novel sentences. Using a dataset of discharge summary sentences with no annotations, our method obtains 60.5% F-measure for parse-bracketing on sentences of maximum length 10. By varying a parameter, the method can induce a range of grammars, from very specific to very general, and obtains the best performance in between the two extremes.
Sentence processing and grammaticality in functional linguistics
Poulsen, Mads
finding from research on sentence processing that sentences are processed incrementally. Empirical methods for establishing grammaticality status are discussed and applied in relation to non-WH extraction phenomena in Danish. In Chapter 2, I discuss the use of the notions of grammaticality......The dissertation presents a functional linguistic model of grammaticality and investigates methods for applying this notion in empirical work. The use of the notion of grammaticality in generative grammar has been criticized by functionalists (Harder, 1996; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), but attempts...... grammaticality. It is concluded that the intuitions of linguists should in principle be considered hypotheses of grammaticality, and that such hypotheses need to be tested with independent data. Such data can for example take the form of corpus data or acceptability judgment experiments. It is furthermore argued...
A Study of the Speed of Understanding Sentences as a Function of Sentence Structure. Final Report.
Halamandaris, Pandelis G.
On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…
Resilience in families in which a member has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Bishop, M; Greeff, A P
Due to the extensive focus of the literature on the burden placed on families in which a member has been diagnosed with a mental illness such as schizophrenia, there is a need to identify factors that may help these families to be resilient and adapt to their crisis. The aim of this study was to identify family resilience qualities in families in which a member has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study comprised 42 families, represented by 33 parents and 9 siblings of the diagnosed family member. Families were recruited from three support groups within the Cape Metropolitan area, Western Cape, South Africa. Qualitative data were obtained through an open-ended question and quantitative data were collected with seven self-report questionnaires. The following family resilience qualities were identified: family income; finding support in their community; family togetherness; family communication style during crises; affirming and supportive communication patterns; family hardiness; commitment to the family; reframing crises as a challenge; and an internal locus of control within the family. The findings may be used by professionals and support group facilitators to enhance the resilience and functioning of families living with a member with schizophrenia. With approximately 1% of the world's population diagnosed with schizophrenia, it is clear that many families are affected when a member has been diagnosed. There is a need to identify factors that may help these families to be resilient. The aim of this study was to identify family resilience qualities in families in which a member has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The following family resilience qualities were identified as resources that helped them to adapt to the many challenges put to them: family income, finding support in their community, the availability of hospitals, churches and professionals, family togetherness, family communication, family hardiness, commitment to the family, reframing crises
The power and limits of a rule-based morpho-semantic parser.
Baud, R H; Rassinoux, A M; Ruch, P; Lovis, C; Scherrer, J R
The venue of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) implies an increasing amount of medical texts readily available for processing, as soon as convenient tools are made available. The chief application is text analysis, from which one can drive other disciplines like indexing for retrieval, knowledge representation, translation and inferencing for medical intelligent systems. Prerequisites for a convenient analyzer of medical texts are: building the lexicon, developing semantic representation of the domain, having a large corpus of texts available for statistical analysis, and finally mastering robust and powerful parsing techniques in order to satisfy the constraints of the medical domain. This article aims at presenting an easy-to-use parser ready to be adapted in different settings. It describes its power together with its practical limitations as experienced by the authors.
Phenomenology is not Phenomenalism. Is there such a thing as phenomenology of sport?
Jan Halák
Full Text Available Background: The application of the philosophical mode of investigation called "phenomenology" in the context of sport. Objective: The goal is to show how and why the phenomenological method is very often misused in sport-related research. Methods: Interpretation of the key texts, explanation of their meaning. Results: The confrontation of concrete sport-related texts with the original meaning of the key phenomenological notions shows mainly three types of misuse - the confusion of phenomenology with immediacy, with an epistemologically subjectivist stance (phenomenalism, and with empirical research oriented towards objects in the world. Conclusions: Many of the discussed authors try to take over the epistemological validity of phenomenology for their research, which itself is not phenomenological, and it seems that this is because they are lacking such a methodological foundation. We believe that an authentically phenomenological analysis of sport is possible, but it must respect the basic distinctions that differentiate phenomenology from other styles of thinking.
Machine Learning from Garden Path Sentences: The Application of Computational Linguistics
Jiali Du
Full Text Available This paper discusses the application of computational linguistics in the machine learning (ML system for the processing of garden path sentences. ML is closely related to artificial intelligence and linguistic cognition. The rapid and efficient processing of the complex structures is an effective method to test the system. By means of parsing the garden path sentence, we draw a conclusion that the integration of theoretical and statistical methods is helpful for the development of ML system.
Long-Range Correlations in Sentence Series from A Story of the Stone.
Yang, Tianguang; Gu, Changgui; Yang, Huijie
A sentence is the natural unit of language. Patterns embedded in series of sentences can be used to model the formation and evolution of languages, and to solve practical problems such as evaluating linguistic ability. In this paper, we apply de-trended fluctuation analysis to detect long-range correlations embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone, one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature. We identified a weak long-range correlation, with a Hurst exponent of 0.575±0.002 up to a scale of 104. We used the structural stability to confirm the behavior of the long-range correlation, and found that different parts of the series had almost identical Hurst exponents. We found that noisy records can lead to false results and conclusions, even if the noise covers a limited proportion of the total records (e.g., less than 1%). Thus, the structural stability test is an essential procedure for confirming the existence of long-range correlations, which has been widely neglected in previous studies. Furthermore, a combination of de-trended fluctuation analysis and diffusion entropy analysis demonstrated that the sentence series was generated by a fractional Brownian motion.
Long-Range Correlations in Sentence Series from A Story of the Stone.
Tianguang Yang
Full Text Available A sentence is the natural unit of language. Patterns embedded in series of sentences can be used to model the formation and evolution of languages, and to solve practical problems such as evaluating linguistic ability. In this paper, we apply de-trended fluctuation analysis to detect long-range correlations embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone, one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature. We identified a weak long-range correlation, with a Hurst exponent of 0.575±0.002 up to a scale of 104. We used the structural stability to confirm the behavior of the long-range correlation, and found that different parts of the series had almost identical Hurst exponents. We found that noisy records can lead to false results and conclusions, even if the noise covers a limited proportion of the total records (e.g., less than 1%. Thus, the structural stability test is an essential procedure for confirming the existence of long-range correlations, which has been widely neglected in previous studies. Furthermore, a combination of de-trended fluctuation analysis and diffusion entropy analysis demonstrated that the sentence series was generated by a fractional Brownian motion.
When novel sentences spoken or heard for the first time in the history of the universe are not enough: toward a dual-process model of language.
Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana
Although interest in the language sciences was previously focused on newly created sentences, more recently much attention has turned to the importance of formulaic expressions in normal and disordered communication. Also referred to as formulaic expressions and made up of speech formulas, idioms, expletives, serial and memorized speech, slang, sayings, clichés, and conventional expressions, non-propositional language forms a large proportion of every speaker's competence, and may be differentially disturbed in neurological disorders. This review aims to examine non-propositional speech with respect to linguistic descriptions, psycholinguistic experiments, sociolinguistic studies, child language development, clinical language disorders, and neurological studies. Evidence from numerous sources reveals differentiated and specialized roles for novel and formulaic verbal functions, and suggests that generation of novel sentences and management of prefabricated expressions represent two legitimate and separable processes in language behaviour. A preliminary model of language behaviour that encompasses unitary and compositional properties and their integration in everyday language use is proposed. Integration and synchronizing of two disparate processes in language behaviour, formulaic and novel, characterizes normal communicative function and contributes to creativity in language. This dichotomy is supported by studies arising from other disciplines in neurology and psychology. Further studies are necessary to determine in what ways the various categories of formulaic expressions are related, and how these categories are processed by the brain. Better understanding of how non-propositional categories of speech are stored and processed in the brain can lead to better informed treatment strategies in language disorders.
Subluxation and semantics: a corpus linguistics study.
Budgell, Brian
The purpose of this study was to analyze the curriculum of one chiropractic college in order to discover if there were any implicit consensus definitions of the term subluxation. Using the software WordSmith Tools, the corpus of an undergraduate chiropractic curriculum was analyzed by reviewing collocated terms and through discourse analysis of text blocks containing words based on the root 'sublux.' It was possible to identify 3 distinct concepts which were each referred to as 'subluxation:' i) an acute or instantaneous injurious event; ii) a clinical syndrome which manifested post-injury; iii) a physical lesion, i.e. an anatomical or physiological derangement which in most instances acted as a pain generator. In fact, coherent implicit definitions of subluxation exist and may enjoy broad but subconscious acceptance. However, confusion likely arises from failure to distinguish which concept an author or speaker is referring to when they employ the term subluxation.
Assessment of disease named entity recognition on a corpus of annotated sentences.
Jimeno, Antonio; Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto; Lee, Vivian; Gaudan, Sylvain; Berlanga, Rafael; Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich
In recent years, the recognition of semantic types from the biomedical scientific literature has been focused on named entities like protein and gene names (PGNs) and gene ontology terms (GO terms). Other semantic types like diseases have not received the same level of attention. Different solutions have been proposed to identify disease named entities in the scientific literature. While matching the terminology with language patterns suffers from low recall (e.g., Whatizit) other solutions make use of morpho-syntactic features to better cover the full scope of terminological variability (e.g., MetaMap). Currently, MetaMap that is provided from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the state of the art solution for the annotation of concepts from UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) in the literature. Nonetheless, its performance has not yet been assessed on an annotated corpus. In addition, little effort has been invested so far to generate an annotated dataset that links disease entities in text to disease entries in a database, thesaurus or ontology and that could serve as a gold standard to benchmark text mining solutions. As part of our research work, we have taken a corpus that has been delivered in the past for the identification of associations of genes to diseases based on the UMLS Metathesaurus and we have reprocessed and re-annotated the corpus. We have gathered annotations for disease entities from two curators, analyzed their disagreement (0.51 in the kappa-statistic) and composed a single annotated corpus for public use. Thereafter, three solutions for disease named entity recognition including MetaMap have been applied to the corpus to automatically annotate it with UMLS Metathesaurus concepts. The resulting annotations have been benchmarked to compare their performance. The annotated corpus is publicly available at ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/software/textmining/corpora/diseases and can serve as a benchmark to other systems. In addition, we found
As metáforas do presidente lula na perspectiva da linguística de corpus: o caso do desenvolvimento President Lula's metaphors in a corpus linguistic perspective: The case of 'development'
Tony Berber Sardinha
Full Text Available Um dos grandes fenômenos linguísticos da vida política brasileira recente é o que a mídia vem chamando de 'metáforas do presidente Lula'. O ponto de partida deste trabalho é o fato de que deve haver muitas metáforas que passam despercebidas no discurso do presidente e que podem ser descobertas por meio de pesquisa com corpora eletrônicos. Investigamos a presença de metáforas conceptuais relacionadas a 'desenvolvimento' em um corpus composto por pronunciamentos emitidos ao longo de três anos pelo presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. Os resultados indicam que há uso sistemático de três conceitos metafóricos que definem a noção de desenvolvimento do chefe de Estado: VIAGEM, CONSTRUÇÃO e ORGANISMO. Esses três conceitos, em geral, equacionam desenvolvimento com um processo longo, construído, planejado e gerado pelo governo.One of the main linguistic phenomena in recent Brazilian politics is what the media has called 'President Lula's metaphors'. The starting point for the present investigation is that there must be lots of metaphors that go unnoticed in the president's discourse and that these may be uncovered by corpus-based research. We looked at the presence of conceptual metaphors related to 'development' in a corpus of three years of official presidential speeches. The results indicated the systematic use of three metaphorical concepts that together define the notion of development for the head of State: JOURNEY, BUILDING and ORGANISM. These three concepts together equate development with a long process that is generated, planned and carried out by the government.
Developing a tagset and tagger for the African languages of South ...
annotations in the form of linguistic tags and annotations. That is, the annotations are used to direct the searches to specific grammatical and lexical phenomena in a corpus. In this article, we propose a corpus-based approach and a tagset to be used on a corpus of spoken language for the African languages of South Africa.
29 CFR 101.24 - Final disposition of a charge which has been held pending investigation of the petition.
... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Final disposition of a charge which has been held pending investigation of the petition. 101.24 Section 101.24 Labor Regulations Relating to Labor NATIONAL LABOR...)(7) and 9(c) of the Act § 101.24 Final disposition of a charge which has been held pending...
How a Corpus-Based Study of the Factors which Influence Collocation Can Help in the Teaching of Business English
Walker, Crayton
In this paper I use two case studies to show how corpus linguistics can be used to help in the teaching of business English. Senior managers in global companies often find themselves having to do their job in a foreign language. Given that language is one of the key tools of management, the senior managers are normally very keen to develop a…
Describing linguistic information in a behavioural framework: Possible or not?
De Cooman, G. [Universiteit Gent, Zwijnaarde (Belgium)
The paper discusses important aspects of the representation of linguistic information, using imprecise probabilities with a behavioural interpretation. We define linguistic information as the information conveyed by statements in natural language, but restrict ourselves to simple affirmative statements of the type {open_quote}subject-is-predicate{close_quote}. Taking the behavioural stance, as it is described in detail, we investigate whether it is possible to give a mathematical model for this kind of information. In particular, we evaluate Zadeli`s suggestion that we should use possibility measures to this end. We come to tile conclusion that, generally speaking, possibility measures are possibility models for linguistic information, but that more work should be done in order to evaluate the suggestion that they may be the only ones.
MASCOT HTML and XML parser: an implementation of a novel object model for protein identification data.
Yang, Chunguang G; Granite, Stephen J; Van Eyk, Jennifer E; Winslow, Raimond L
Protein identification using MS is an important technique in proteomics as well as a major generator of proteomics data. We have designed the protein identification data object model (PDOM) and developed a parser based on this model to facilitate the analysis and storage of these data. The parser works with HTML or XML files saved or exported from MASCOT MS/MS ions search in peptide summary report or MASCOT PMF search in protein summary report. The program creates PDOM objects, eliminates redundancy in the input file, and has the capability to output any PDOM object to a relational database. This program facilitates additional analysis of MASCOT search results and aids the storage of protein identification information. The implementation is extensible and can serve as a template to develop parsers for other search engines. The parser can be used as a stand-alone application or can be driven by other Java programs. It is currently being used as the front end for a system that loads HTML and XML result files of MASCOT searches into a relational database. The source code is freely available at http://www.ccbm.jhu.edu and the program uses only free and open-source Java libraries.
Learning a POS tagger for AAVE-like language
Jørgensen, Anna; Hovy, Dirk; Søgaard, Anders
tagger for subtitles, lyrics, and tweets associated with African-American Vernacular English from a previously released and manually annotated Twitter corpus. Our approach is to learn from a mixture of this data and unlabeled data, which was automatically and partially labeled using mined tag...
CytometryML: a data standard which has been designed to interface with other standards
Leif, Robert C.
Because of the differences in the requirements, needs, and past histories including existing standards of the creating organizations, a single encompassing cytology-pathology standard will not, in the near future, replace the multiple existing or under development standards. Except for DICOM and FCS, these standardization efforts are all based on XML. CytometryML is a collection of XML schemas, which are based on the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) datatypes. The CytometryML schemas contain attributes that link them to the DICOM standard and FCS. Interoperability with DICOM has been facilitated by, wherever reasonable, limiting the difference between CytometryML and the previous standards to syntax. In order to permit the Resource Description Framework, RDF, to reference the CytometryML datatypes, id attributes have been added to many CytometryML elements. The Laboratory Digital Imaging Project (LDIP) Data Exchange Specification and the Flowcyt standards development effort employ RDF syntax. Documentation from DICOM has been reused in CytometryML. The unity of analytical cytology was demonstrated by deriving a microscope type and a flow cytometer type from a generic cytometry instrument type. The feasibility of incorporating the Flowcyt gating schemas into CytometryML has been demonstrated. CytometryML is being extended to include many of the new DICOM Working Group 26 datatypes, which describe patients, specimens, and analytes. In situations where multiple standards are being created, interoperability can be facilitated by employing datatypes based on a common set of semantics and building in links to standards that employ different syntax.
Extracting Various Classes of Data From Biological Text Using the Concept of Existence Dependency.
Taha, Kamal
One of the key goals of biological natural language processing (NLP) is the automatic information extraction from biomedical publications. Most current constituency and dependency parsers overlook the semantic relationships between the constituents comprising a sentence and may not be well suited for capturing complex long-distance dependences. We propose in this paper a hybrid constituency-dependency parser for biological NLP information extraction called EDCC. EDCC aims at enhancing the state of the art of biological text mining by applying novel linguistic computational techniques that overcome the limitations of current constituency and dependency parsers outlined earlier, as follows: 1) it determines the semantic relationship between each pair of constituents in a sentence using novel semantic rules; and 2) it applies a semantic relationship extraction model that extracts information from different structural forms of constituents in sentences. EDCC can be used to extract different types of data from biological texts for purposes such as protein function prediction, genetic network construction, and protein-protein interaction detection. We evaluated the quality of EDCC by comparing it experimentally with six systems. Results showed marked improvement.
A Highly Conserved GEQYQQLR Epitope Has Been Identified in the Nucleoprotein of Ebola Virus by Using an In Silico Approach
Mohammad Tuhin Ali
Full Text Available Ebola virus (EBOV is a deadly virus that has caused several fatal outbreaks. Recently it caused another outbreak and resulted in thousands afflicted cases. Effective and approved vaccine or therapeutic treatment against this virus is still absent. In this study, we aimed to predict B-cell epitopes from several EBOV encoded proteins which may aid in developing new antibody-based therapeutics or viral antigen detection method against this virus. Multiple sequence alignment (MSA was performed for the identification of conserved region among glycoprotein (GP, nucleoprotein (NP, and viral structural proteins (VP40, VP35, and VP24 of EBOV. Next, different consensus immunogenic and conserved sites were predicted from the conserved region(s using various computational tools which are available in Immune Epitope Database (IEDB. Among GP, NP, VP40, VP35, and VP30 protein, only NP gave a 100% conserved GEQYQQLR B-cell epitope that fulfills the ideal features of an effective B-cell epitope and could lead a way in the milieu of Ebola treatment. However, successful in vivo and in vitro studies are prerequisite to determine the actual potency of our predicted epitope and establishing it as a preventing medication against all the fatal strains of EBOV.
A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences
Ming Che Lee
Full Text Available This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.
A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences
Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng
This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure. PMID:24982952
A grammar-based semantic similarity algorithm for natural language sentences.
Lee, Ming Che; Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng
This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.
A need for closer examination of FASD by the criminal justice system: has the call been answered?
Gagnier, Karina Royer; Moore, Timothy E; Green, Melvyn
Individuals with FASD exhibit deficits in many domains that can include memory, learning, behavioural inhibition, executive functioning, interpersonal skills, and language. These deficits have serious implications for affected persons when they become engaged in the legal system. In 2004, Moore and Green reviewed case law and psychological literature which suggested that FASD-related deficits placed affected individuals at a significant disadvantage in the justice system. According to them, this disadvantage stemmed from the limited awareness and knowledge of FASD demonstrated by key players in the justice system, as well as the scarcity of effective interventions in place to rehabilitate affected defendants. The aim of the current paper is to assess the extent to which awareness of FASD-related issues in the Canadian justice system has advanced since the publication of Moore and Green's conclusions. First, the deficits associated with FASD and their implications for the justice system are described. Next, recent case law and psychological evidence are reviewed as we consider issues of witness reliability and false confessions. The significance of FASD for sentencing, fitness to stand trial, and the Not Criminally Responsible by Reason of Mental Disorder defence are also briefly discussed. Finally, emerging system wide responses to FASD-related issues are presented. Overall, it appears that the call for closer examination of FASD by the justice system has been answered, but a need for increased education and awareness remains.
The monoclonal antibody SM5-1 recognizes a fibronectin variant which is widely expressed in melanoma
Guo Yajun
Full Text Available Abstract Background Previously we have generated the monoclonal antibody SM5-1 by using a subtractive immunization protocol of human melanoma. This antibody exhibits a high sensitivity for primary melanomas of 99% (248/250 tested and for metastatic melanoma of 96% (146/151 tested in paraffin embedded sections. This reactivity is superior to the one obtained by HMB-45, anti-MelanA or anti-Tyrosinase and is comparable to anti-S100. However, as compared to anti-S100, the antibody SM5-1 is highly specific for melanocytic lesions since 40 different neoplasms were found to be negative for SM5-1 by immunohistochemistry. The antigen recognized by SM5-1 is unknown. Methods In order to characterize the antigen recognized by mAb SM5-1, a cDNA library was constructed from the metastatic human melanoma cell line SMMUpos in the Uni-ZAP lambda phage and screened by mAb SM5-1. The cDNA clones identified by this approach were then sequenced and subsequently analyzed. Results Sequence analysis of nine independent overlapping clones (length 3100–5600 bp represent fibronectin cDNA including the ED-A, but not the ED-B region which are produced by alternative splicing. The 89aa splicing variant of the IIICS region was found in 8/9 clones and the 120aa splicing variant in 1/9 clones, both of which are included in the CS1 region of fibronectin being involved in melanoma cell adhesion and spreading. Conclusion The molecule recognized by SM5-1 is a melanoma associated FN variant expressed by virtually all primary and metastatic melanomas and may play an important role in melanoma formation and progression. This antibody is therefore not only of value in immunohistochemistry, but potentially also for diagnostic imaging and immunotherapy.
Introduction to HOBIT, a b-jet identification tagger at the CDF experiment optimized for light Higgs boson searches
Freeman, J.; Junk, T.; Kirby, M.; Oksuzian, Y.; Phillips, T. J.; Snider, F. D.; Trovato, M.; Vizan, J.; Yao, W. M.
We present the development and validation of the Higgs Optimized b Identification Tagger (HOBIT), a multivariate b-jet identification algorithm optimized for Higgs boson searches at the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron. At collider experiments, b taggers allow one to distinguish particle jets containing B hadrons from other jets; these algorithms have been used for many years with great success at CDF. HOBIT has been designed specifically for use in searches for light Higgs bosons decaying via H ! b\\bar{b}. This fact combined with the extent to which HOBIT synthesizes and extends the best ideas of previous taggers makes HOBIT unique among CDF b-tagging algorithms. Employing feed-forward neural network architectures, HOBIT provides an output value ranging from approximately -1 ("light-jet like") to 1 ("b-jet like"); this continuous output value has been tuned to provide maximum sensitivity in light Higgs boson search analyses. When tuned to the equivalent light jet rejection rate, HOBIT tags 54% of b jets in simulated 120 GeV/c2 Higgs boson events compared to 39% for SecVtx, the most commonly used b tagger at CDF. We present features of the tagger as well as its characterization in the form of b-jet finding efficiencies and false (light-jet) tag rates.
Performance of a Lexical and POS Tagger for Sanskrit
Hellwig, Oliver
Due to the phonetic, morphological, and lexical complexity of Sanskrit, the automatic analysis of this language is a real challenge in the area of natural language processing. The paper describes a series of tests that were performed to assess the accuracy of the tagging program SanskritTagger. To our knowlegde, it offers the first reliable benchmark data for evaluating the quality of taggers for Sanskrit using an unrestricted dictionary and texts from different domains. Based on a detailed analysis of the test results, the paper points out possible directions for future improvements of statistical tagging procedures for Sanskrit.
A new tagger for the charge identification of b-jets
The ATLAS collaboration
A newly developed algorithm called the jet vertex charge tagger, aimed at identifying the sign of the charge of jets containing $b$-hadrons, referred to as $b$-jets, is presented in this note. In addition to the well established track-based jet charge determination, this algorithm introduces the so-called jet vertex charge reconstruction, which exploits the charge information associated to the displaced vertices within the jet. Furthermore, the charge of a soft muon contained in the jet is taken into account when available. All available information is combined into a multivariate discriminator produced using an artificial neural network method. The algorithm has been developed on jets matched to truth level $b$-hadrons provided by $t\\bar{t}$ events simulated at $\\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV using the full ATLAS detector simulation and reconstruction.
K. K. Boyarsky
Full Text Available The paper deals with the principle of operation for SemSin semantic and syntactic parser creating a dependency tree for the Russian language sentences. The parser consists of 4 blocks: a dictionary, morphological analyzer, production rules and lexical analyzer. An important logical part of the parser is pre-syntactical module, which harmonizes and complements morphological analysis results, separates the text paragraphs into individual sentences, and also carries out predisambiguation. Characteristic feature of the presented parser is an open type of control – it is done by means of a set of production rules. A varied set of commands provides the ability to both morphological and semantic-syntactic analysis of the sentence. The paper presents the sequence of rules usage and examples of their work. Specific feature of the rules is the decision making on establishment of syntactic links with simultaneous removal of the morphological and semantic ambiguity. The lexical analyzer provides the execution of commands and rules, and manages the parser in manual or automatic modes of the text analysis. In the first case, the analysis is performed interactively with the possibility of step-by-step execution of the rules and scanning the resulting parse tree. In the second case, analysis results are filed in an xml-file. Active usage of syntactic and semantic dictionary information gives the possibility to reduce significantly the ambiguity of parsing. In addition to marking the text, the parser is also usable as a tool for information extraction from natural language texts.
Advantages and Disadvantages in the Use of Internet as a Corpus
Tarp, Sven; Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A.
This paper initially discusses some of the consequences which the technological development has for lexicography, especially in terms of the different types of empirical basis which can be used in dictionary projects. The most important advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet as a corpus...
Advantages and disadvantages in the use of internet as a corpus ...
This paper initially discusses some of the consequences which the technological development has for lexicography, especially in terms of the different types of empirical basis which can be used in dictionary projects. The most important advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet as a corpus are then listed and ...
Liberal, ecumenical, revolutionary and pluralistic Protestantism in Brazil – a project that has not been extinguished as yet
Carlos Eduardo Brandão Calvani
Full Text Available In recent years, Protestant churches in Brazil have become intolerant to pluralism, opposed to ecumenism and immune to theological criticism. The profile of the current leadership of Brazilian Protestant churches in no way resembles the generation of Protestant intellectuals from the 30's to the 50's and even less the generation of ecumenical and revolutionary Protestants of the 60's and 70's. These two generations, within their limits and possibilities, helped build in Brazil a kind of Protestantism that, in spite of being a minority group, brought many contributions not only to their churches, but also to society. However, this type of Protestantism seems to be disappearing in the waves of a conservative model, not much given to theological reflection and uninterested in the new demands of social inclusion and in the rights of minorities. Apparently, we experience the end of this type of Protestantism in Brazil. That Protestantism tempered by the ideals of modernity seems to have failed. The text recovers some memories of these two generations, highlighting their opposition to fundamentalist advances that have found fertile ground in Brazil, and pays tribute to the heroes of resistance, sharing the same ideals and the same hope: may the Brazilian Protestantism be more liberal, ecumenical and pluralistic.
BC4GO: a full-text corpus for the BioCreative IV GO task.
Van Auken, Kimberly; Schaeffer, Mary L; McQuilton, Peter; Laulederkind, Stanley J F; Li, Donghui; Wang, Shur-Jen; Hayman, G Thomas; Tweedie, Susan; Arighi, Cecilia N; Done, James; Müller, Hans-Michael; Sternberg, Paul W; Mao, Yuqing; Wei, Chih-Hsuan; Lu, Zhiyong
Gene function curation via Gene Ontology (GO) annotation is a common task among Model Organism Database groups. Owing to its manual nature, this task is considered one of the bottlenecks in literature curation. There have been many previous attempts at automatic identification of GO terms and supporting information from full text. However, few systems have delivered an accuracy that is comparable with humans. One recognized challenge in developing such systems is the lack of marked sentence-level evidence text that provides the basis for making GO annotations. We aim to create a corpus that includes the GO evidence text along with the three core elements of GO annotations: (i) a gene or gene product, (ii) a GO term and (iii) a GO evidence code. To ensure our results are consistent with real-life GO data, we recruited eight professional GO curators and asked them to follow their routine GO annotation protocols. Our annotators marked up more than 5000 text passages in 200 articles for 1356 distinct GO terms. For evidence sentence selection, the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) results are 9.3% (strict) and 42.7% (relaxed) in F1-measures. For GO term selection, the IAAs are 47% (strict) and 62.9% (hierarchical). Our corpus analysis further shows that abstracts contain ∼ 10% of relevant evidence sentences and 30% distinct GO terms, while the Results/Experiment section has nearly 60% relevant sentences and >70% GO terms. Further, of those evidence sentences found in abstracts, less than one-third contain enough experimental detail to fulfill the three core criteria of a GO annotation. This result demonstrates the need of using full-text articles for text mining GO annotations. Through its use at the BioCreative IV GO (BC4GO) task, we expect our corpus to become a valuable resource for the BioNLP research community. Database URL: http://www.biocreative.org/resources/corpora/bc-iv-go-task-corpus/. Published by Oxford University Press 2014. This work is written by US
Is the comprehension of idiomatic sentences indeed impaired in paranoid Schizophrenia? A window into semantic processing deficits
Pesciarelli, Francesca; Gamberoni, Tania; Ferlazzo, Fabio; Lo Russo, Leo; Pedrazzi, Francesca; Melati, Ermanno; Cacciari, Cristina
Schizophrenia patients have been reported to be more impaired in comprehending non-literal than literal language since early studies on proverbs. Preference for literal rather than figurative interpretations continues to be documented. The main aim of this study was to establish whether patients are indeed able to use combinatorial semantic processing to comprehend literal sentences and both combinatorial analysis, and retrieval of pre-stored meanings to comprehend idiomatic sentences. The study employed a sentence continuation task in which subjects were asked to decide whether a target word was a sensible continuation of a previous sentence fragment to investigate idiomatic and literal sentence comprehension in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Patients and healthy controls were faster in accepting sensible continuations than in rejecting non-sensible ones in both literal and idiomatic sentences. Patients were as accurate as controls in comprehending literal and idiomatic sentences, but they were overall slower than controls in all conditions. Once the contribution of cognitive covariates was partialled out, the response times (RTs) to sensible idiomatic continuations of patients did not significantly differ from those of controls. This suggests that the state of residual schizophrenia did not contribute to slower processing of sensible idioms above and beyond the cognitive deficits that are typically associated with schizophrenia. PMID:25346676
A Balanced and Representative Corpus: The Effects of Strict Corpus ...
Theoretically the Northern Sotho language is made up of almost 30 dialects while practically it is not so, because the standard language was formed from very few of its dialects. As a result, even today the language has no corpus which is balanced or representative owing to the fact that almost all of the available corpora ...
Resolving Lexical Ambiguity in a Deterministic Parser
Milne, Robert W.
This work is an investigation into part of the human sentence parsing mechanism (HSPM), where parsing implies syntactic and non-syntactic analysis. It is hypothesised. that the HSPM consists of at least two processors. We will call the first processor the syntactic processor, and the second will be known as the non-syntactic processor. For normal sentence processing, the two processors are controlled by a 'normal component", whilst when an error occurs, they are controlled by a...
Unsupervised grammar induction of clinical report sublanguage
Kate Rohit J
Full Text Available Abstract Background Clinical reports are written using a subset of natural language while employing many domain-specific terms; such a language is also known as a sublanguage for a scientific or a technical domain. Different genres of clinical reports use different sublaguages, and in addition, different medical facilities use different medical language conventions. This makes supervised training of a parser for clinical sentences very difficult as it would require expensive annotation effort to adapt to every type of clinical text. Methods In this paper, we present an unsupervised method which automatically induces a grammar and a parser for the sublanguage of a given genre of clinical reports from a corpus with no annotations. In order to capture sentence structures specific to clinical domains, the grammar is induced in terms of semantic classes of clinical terms in addition to part-of-speech tags. Our method induces grammar by minimizing the combined encoding cost of the grammar and the corresponding sentence derivations. The probabilities for the productions of the induced grammar are then learned from the unannotated corpus using an instance of the expectation-maximization algorithm. Results Our experiments show that the induced grammar is able to parse novel sentences. Using a dataset of discharge summary sentences with no annotations, our method obtains 60.5% F-measure for parse-bracketing on sentences of maximum length 10. By varying a parameter, the method can induce a range of grammars, from very specific to very general, and obtains the best performance in between the two extremes.
A case for the sentence in reading comprehension.
Scott, Cheryl M
This article addresses sentence comprehension as a requirement of reading comprehension within the framework of the narrow view of reading that was advocated in the prologue to this forum. The focus is on the comprehension requirements of complex sentences, which are characteristic of school texts. Topics included in this discussion are (a) evidence linking sentence comprehension and syntax with reading, (b) syntactic properties of sentences that make them difficult to understand, (c) clinical applications for the assessment of sentence comprehension as it relates to reading, and (d) evidence and methods for addressing sentence complexity in treatment. Sentence complexity can create comprehension problems for struggling readers. The contribution of sentence comprehension to successful reading has been overlooked in models that emphasize domain-general comprehension strategies at the text level. The author calls for the evaluation of sentence comprehension within the context of content domains where complex sentences are found.
Computational principles of syntax in the regions specialized for language: integrating theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging.
Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L
The nature of computational principles of syntax remains to be elucidated. One promising approach to this problem would be to construct formal and abstract linguistic models that parametrically predict the activation modulations in the regions specialized for linguistic processes. In this article, we review recent advances in theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging in the following respects. First, we introduce the two fundamental linguistic operations: Merge (which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure) and Search (which searches and establishes a syntactic relation of two words or phrases). We also illustrate certain universal properties of human language, and present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the brain. Hypothesis I is that the Degree of Merger (DoM), i.e., the maximum depth of merged subtrees within a given domain, is a key computational concept to properly measure the complexity of tree structures. Hypothesis II is that the basic frame of the syntactic structure of a given linguistic expression is determined essentially by functional elements, which trigger Merge and Search. We then present our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, demonstrating that the DoM is indeed a key syntactic factor that accounts for syntax-selective activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Hypothesis III is that the DoM domain changes dynamically in accordance with iterative Merge applications, the Search distances, and/or task requirements. We confirm that the DoM accounts for activations in various sentence types. Hypothesis III successfully explains activation differences between object- and subject-relative clauses, as well as activations during explicit syntactic judgment tasks. A future research on the computational principles of syntax will further deepen our understanding of uniquely human mental faculties.
What is being heard is not necessarily the same as what has been said
KraIj, Metka
Public and especially young people opinion polls in Slovenia indicate a rather high tolerance to the existing nuclear power plant but low acceptance of new nuclear facilities, including a waste disposal facility. Radioactivity and radioactive waste is generally considered a very problematic issue. Although more than 50% Slovenes declared that they do not need additional information about these issues and therefore expressed they were satisfied with the knowledge they had, the arguments against nuclear facilities expressed in public discussions and even in the media, differ from the scientific and technological accuracy in many cases. Public attitudes in Slovenia often reflect ideas that can be found in 'para-scientific' literature such as new age and alternative health, where terms 'energy' and 'radiation' are used in a metaphorical and quiet different sense than in the information materials about nuclear energy. This makes the communication between the public and nuclear professionals very difficult and even conflicting because both sides speak in fact a different language and are not even aware of this. The quality of and scientific accuracy information on web pages retrieved by the key words 'energy', 'radiation' and 'radioactivity' were analysed. In Slovenian language, the key word 'energy' produced the greatest number of hits, but the pages dealing with 'bioenergy', 'life energy', 'positive and negative energy', and the like were twice as frequent as the pages dealing with energy in a physical science sense. Under the key word r adiation approximately half of the pages could be classified as 'new age' pages and the other half gave an adequate physical explanation. Searching with the key word 'radioactivity' gave only a few pages but they contained exact physical explanations, mainly on measurements and radioactive decay but not on the effects of radioactive materials on human health which is the main interest of the public. The situation was similar on web
Tracking Anglicisms in Domains by the Corpus-Linguistic Method
Mousten, Birthe; Laursen, Anne Lise
Lay investors and semi-professionals lean on professional stock bloggers and stock analysts for advice on stock investments; semi-professionals and professionals write about investments globally, and stock information has to be available in many local markets. Using the correct terminology......'s critical sense is not enough to make the right choices. Our corpus-linguistic tool can be a help in this specialized field....
INTRODUCTION A National park is an area set aside by a national government for the preservation of the natural environment. The World Conservation Union defines a National park as a natural area designated to protect the ecological integrity of one or more ecosystems for present and future generations. In Pakistan, the earlier ecological studies were generally observational. The earlier studies, generally appeared in 1950's, were confined to visual description of the vegetation, and no attempts were made to recognize community types and to correlate them with the relevant environmental factors. On the contrary, advanced multivariate techniques of ordination and cluster analysis had been routinely used in Europe and other parts of the world. There are numerous ordination methods accessible in plant bionetwork, some of which have been extensively used, e.g. Principal Component Analysis (PCA and Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA (Hill & Gauch, 1980, whereas some others only sporadically used (Zhang, 2004. A series of studies using different ordination techniques were carried out in Pakistan by Ahmad et al., 2009; Ahmad, 2009; Jabeen & Ahmad, 2009; Pirzada et al., 2009; Ahmad et al., 2010a, b; Ahmad, 2011. In Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA the floristic statistics and the environmental variables can be assimilated within the ordination (Kashian et al., 2003. Within the Ayubia National Park, the study area was the moist temperate forest in Rawalpindi, NE-Pakistan (Fig. 1, showing a high diversity of susceptible plant and animal species. The geographical location of the park is 330° 52' N and 730° 90' E (Farooque, 2002. The aim of this research was to quantify the vegetation in Ayubia National Park using ordination techniques and to determine the soilvegetation relationship to provide basic awareness for preservation of nationally significant native flora. A list of plant species present in the study area is provided in Table 1. Apart from their
Qurat Ul Ann
Full Text Available The relationship between species diversity and overall community assemblage was identified in two differentzones in Ayubia National Park (Rawalpindi, NE-Pakistan which is recognized as protected area. CanonicalCorrespondence Analysis (CCA was used to find correlation of environmental variables with speciesabundance/richness. Results showed that in Zone 1 species were rather scattered due to the less availability oforganic matter and soil moisture as they occupy the less dense forest cover. Whereas Zone 2 showed theopposite trends. Finally the overall zones showed that maximum number of quadrats included Zone 2 speciesdue to a great forest cover with excess amount of organic matter and soil moisture. The study highlighted theimportance of dynamic nature and composition of vegetation and stressed the need of conservation of nativeflora for future generations.
Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.
Pechenick, Eitan Adam; Danforth, Christopher M; Dodds, Peter Sheridan
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900 s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800-2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.
Who is who? Interpretation of multiple occurrences of the Chinese reflexive: evidence from real-time sentence processing.
Lan Shuai
Full Text Available Theoretical linguists claim that the notorious reflexive ziji 'self' in Mandarin Chinese, if occurring more than once in a single sentence, can take distinct antecedents. This study tackles possibly the most interesting puzzle in the linguistic literature, investigating how two occurrences of ziji in a single sentence are interpreted and whether or not there are mixed readings, i.e., these zijis are interpretively bound by distinct antecedents. Using 15 Chinese sentences each having two zijis, we conducted two sentence reading experiments based on a modified self-paced reading paradigm. The general interpretation patterns observed showed that the majority of participants associated both zijis with the same local antecedent, which was consistent with Principle A of the Standard Binding Theory and previous experimental findings involving a single ziji. In addition, mixed readings also occurred, but did not pattern as claimed in the theoretical linguistic literature (i.e., one ziji is bound by a long-distance antecedent and the other by a local antecedent. Based on these results, we argue that: (i mixed readings were due to manifold, interlocking and conflicting perspectives taken by the participants; and (ii cases of multiple occurrences of ziji taking distinct antecedents are illicit in Chinese syntax, since the speaker, when expressing a sentence, can select only one P(erspective-Center that referentially denotes the psychological perspective in which the sentence is situated.
Calibration of the ZEUS 6 m tagger
Schroeder, Matthias
In the last period of the HERA running, data were taken with the ZEUS detector to measure directly the longitudinal structure function of the proton and to determine the total photoproduction cross section. The identification of electrons from photoproduction events, in which an electron interacts with a proton and is scattered at very small angles, is essential for both the measurements. The electrons were detected using a small electromagnetic calorimeter, the 6 m tagger, which as located near the beam pipe at {approx} 6m from the ep interaction point. A method for the calibration and reconstruction of electromagnetic showers in the 6m tagger was developed and the energy acceptance range and the resolution of the 6 m tagger was measured. Furthermore, the photon acceptance and the energy resolution of a different electromagnetic calorimeter used for the luminosity measurement at ZEUS were analyzed using the 6 m tagger. (orig.)
Calibration of the ZEUS 6 m tagger
Schroeder, Matthias
In the last period of the HERA running, data were taken with the ZEUS detector to measure directly the longitudinal structure function of the proton and to determine the total photoproduction cross section. The identification of electrons from photoproduction events, in which an electron interacts with a proton and is scattered at very small angles, is essential for both the measurements. The electrons were detected using a small electromagnetic calorimeter, the 6 m tagger, which as located near the beam pipe at ∼ 6m from the ep interaction point. A method for the calibration and reconstruction of electromagnetic showers in the 6m tagger was developed and the energy acceptance range and the resolution of the 6 m tagger was measured. Furthermore, the photon acceptance and the energy resolution of a different electromagnetic calorimeter used for the luminosity measurement at ZEUS were analyzed using the 6 m tagger. (orig.)
A Corpus of Writing, Pronunciation, Reading, and Listening by Learners of English as a Foreign Language
Kotani, Katsunori; Yoshimi, Takehiko; Nanjo, Hiroaki; Isahara, Hitoshi
In order to develop effective teaching methods and computer-assisted language teaching systems for learners of English as a foreign language who need to study the basic linguistic competences for writing, pronunciation, reading, and listening, it is necessary to first investigate which vocabulary and grammar they have or have not yet learned.…
Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing: A Corpus-Based Comparison
Aull, Laura L.; Lancaster, Zak
This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argumentative essays written by incoming first-year university students in comparison with the writing of upper-level undergraduate students and published academics. The findings reveal linguistic stance markers shared across the first-year essays despite…
John ZEMKE
Full Text Available The study of the world's verbal arts offers an opportunity to consider ways that computational analysis and modeling of narratives may lead to new understandings of how they are constructed, their dynamics and relationships. Similarly, as corpus linguistics operations must define metrics, it offers an occasion to review basic interpretive concepts such as "units of analysis, context, and genre." My essay begins with an admittedly cursory overview from a novice perspective of what capabilities corpus linguistics currently possesses for the analysis and modeling of narratives. Consideration is given to the epistemological issue in the social sciences with the positivistic prescription or empiricist description of units of analysis and the potential pitfalls or advantages corpus linguistics encounters in searching for adequate equivalent terms. This review leads naturally to reflection on the crucial determinative action of context on meaning and the extent to which current computational interfaces are able to account for and integrate into global analysis of linguistic and performance dimensions such as performer, intonation, gesture, diction, idioms and figurative language, setting, audience, time, and occasion. As a tentative conclusion from this review, it can be stated that artificial intelligence for modeling narratives or devising narrative algorithms must develop capacities to account for performance dimensions in order to fulfill their analytical potential.
The Syntactic Analysis of Pronoun Homofunction Considering Verb Structure and the Function of Connected Pronouns in Passive-Emotional Sentences
Mohammad Irani
All these sentences express a kind of passive and emotional reaction; hence, it must certainly be considered to get the meaning of such sentences. Khābash gereft, for example, means he fell asleep.In the other hand, paying attention to the meaning will notably be effective in determining the verb type in structure and the grammatical role of the words in such sentences. According to the authors of this research, unlike some ideas, the verb structure is not compounded in these sentences, but is a nominal/adjectival component before the homo-function, recognized to be a part of the compound verb by some grammarians and linguists, has a subject role; and the homo-function is also a simple verb completely agreeing in suffix with the subject. The role of the pronoun suffixes, also, must be determined paying special attention to their role in traditional grammar because we think sometimes proposing ideas on some grammatical points might not bring about acceptable results regardless of their background and historic relations. Since pronoun suffixes occur only as objects, complements and genitives, the joint pronouns in these sentences are not an exception and have the same roles. The accompanying noun or adjective is the subject. The disjoint initial noun or pronoun, the "pronoun homo-role", can be replaced by the pronoun suffix in some sentences, but makes the sentence ungrammatical in most cases.
Full Text Available Typically, the decentralization process is extremely complicated and involves many challenges, if we were to take into account local conflicts, the interests of the central government and the complexity of simultaneous decentralization in administrative, political and economic plan. The financial crisis has added another dimension to the complexity of this phenomenon, misbalancing the economy and creating a fiscal pressure both at central and local level. In this context it rises the problem whether the management of the financial crisis can be better realised within a decentralized system or whether it may lay pressure on the return to the centralized government form.
Linguistic Levels of Translation: A Generic Exploration of Translation Difficulties in Literary Textual Corpus
Magda Madkour
Full Text Available This case study research was based on a generic exploration of the translation problems that graduate students face in literary translation. Literary translation is fundamental to translation programs at higher education due to the upsurge that has occurred in publishing classical and modern literary works from various cultures. However, literary texts have special characteristics that make the process of transferring them from one language into another a daunting task. Translating literary texts is difficult even for professional translators because misinterpreting the messages of the source texts can lead to distorting the aesthetic aspects of the literary work. Students need to learn various linguistic levels of literary translation as well as strategies and methods of translation. Learning the linguistics levels of translation necessitates providing adequate training that is based on enhancing students' cognitive abilities. Cognitive-based translation training helps students learn the procedures of solving the problems of translating sound and literary devices. Cognitive approaches are relevant to the translation process since cognition implies mental activities that students can use to understand and synthesize the literary text, and reconstruct it creatively. Therefore, the current study aimed at examining the relationship between cognitive teaching methodologies and students' performance in literary translation. To examine this relationship, qualitative and quantitative data was collected from graduate students at the College of Languages and Translation at Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic University (IMAMU University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In addition, corpus data was gathered from authentic literary texts including, novels, short stories, and poetry, to investigate the effect of linguistic analysis and cognitive strategies on the quality of literary translation. Quantitative data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the
Studies of top tagging identification methods and development of a new heavy object tagger
Lapsien, Tobias
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), precision tests of the standard model of particle physics and searches for new phenomena are performed. To make optimal use of the proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC and its increasing collision rate, both the detectors and the reconstruction algorithms have to be optimized. The identification of heavy quarks is a key component in many measurements. This thesis describes a hardware and a software project which both aim at improving the identification of heavy quarks. In the first part of this thesis, the Phase 1 upgrade of the CMS pixel detector is introduced. One of the main motivations of the replacement of the Pixel detector is the improved b jet identification at large collision rates. The Phase 1 upgrade involves several production and calibration steps. An X-ray calibration procedure has been developed and the corresponding experimental setup is described. Measurements show that the calibration of the pixel modules is temperature independent and can be performed at room temperature. The stability of the setup is tested in order to fulfill the requirements for mass production of the pixel modules. A method to stabilize the calibration is introduced which is shown to reduce the systematic uncertainty. In the second part, algorithms to identify heavily boosted top quarks (''top tagger'') are described and their performance is compared. The OptimalR HEP top tagger and the shower deconstruction tagger show a better performance than existing tagging algorithms. They can be used in Run II with increased centre-of-mass energies of 13 and 14 TeV. It is also shown that existing top tagging algorithms can be improved by the usage of multivariate analysis methods. New algorithms are commissioned using CMS data with a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb -1 . In order to validate these new algorithms in data, two selections are made to measure the efficiency
A Corpus Luteum Is Not a Prerequisite for the Expression of Progesterone Induced Blocking Factor by T-Lymphocytes a Week After Implantation
Check, Jerome H.; Szekeres-Bartho, Julia; Nazari, Parvin; Katz, Youval; Check, Matthew L.
Purpose: To determine if production of the immunomodulatory protein, progesterone induced blocking factor (PIBF), requires merely progesterone or whether other factors made by the corpus luteum are required.
The ADEME has been cautious by not publishing its '100 per cent renewable in 2050' scenario - Towards a 100 per cent renewable energy mix in 2050 - Final report
Tamain, Bernard; Nifenecker, Herve; Fournie, Laurent; Chiche, Alice; Faure, Nathalie; Bardet, Regis; Alais, Jean-Christophe; Girard, Robin; Bossavy, Arthur; Le Gars, Loic; Biau, Jean-Baptiste; Piqueras, Ugo; Peyrusse, Colombe
In a recent study which has not been published but could have been read by the authors, the ADEME tries to establish that, in 2050, it will be possible, in the sector of electricity production, to do without fossil and nuclear energies, and indicates that such a solution based on 100 per cent of renewable energies is economically viable. In this paper, the authors show that the renewable costs indicated by the ADEME in its '100 per cent renewable' scenario are significantly underestimated. They more precisely discuss the costs of roof-mounted or ground-based photovoltaic energy, ground-based and offshore wind energy, and of energy storage. They discuss issues related to grids, to intermittency management which they consider as an underestimated issue (constraints, imports, electric consumption, storage issues are addressed). The text of the ADEME study is also provided. This study aims at identifying the constraints under which it is possible to provide a 100 per cent renewable electricity, at determining the optimal energy mixes associated with different predictions of technological evolutions, consumption, and so on, at identifying the geographical distribution of the different renewable production means, and at determining the economic impacts of a 100 per cent renewable mix
Infarction of the entire corpus callosum as a complication in subarachnoid hemorrhage: A case report
Satoru Takahashi, M.D.
Full Text Available The corpus callosum is the major commissural pathway connecting the cerebral hemispheres. This pathway receives its blood supply from anterior communicating artery, pericallosal artery, and posterior pericallosal artery. However, in some cases, the entire corpus callosum is supplied by median callosal artery; thus, occlusion of this artery can lead to infarction of the entire corpus callosum. Few reports have described this type of infarction, and no reports after subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH exist. Here, we report on a 42-year-old female who was diagnosed with SAH after two aneurysms were discovered in bifurcation of left anterior cerebral artery (A1-A2. After successful clipping was performed, the patient was alert and had no neurological deficits; moreover, the computed tomography images that were acquired after the operation showed no evidence of infarction. Nine days after admittance to the hospital, drowsiness and weakness of the left limbs with brain swelling appeared and decompressive hemi-craniectomy was performed. Diagnostic cerebral angiography revealed vasospasms in both anterior and middle cerebral arteries, thus fasudil hydrochloride was administered intra-arterially. While blood flow in all arteries improved, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging detected infarction along the entire length of the corpus callosum and in the medial region of the right frontal lobe. We believe this infarction was due to secondary ischemia of median callosal artery. This case reminded us of the anatomical variation wherein median callosal artery is the sole blood supply line for the corpus callosum and demonstrated that infarction of the entire corpus callosum is possible.
A atualidade do conceito de gerações de Karl Mannheim
Wivian Weller
Full Text Available O conceito de gerações vem sendo retomado nas análises sociológicas que apontam não somente para as diferenças de classe, mas também para as desigualdades de gênero, étnico-raciais, culturais e geracionais. No entanto, "gerações" aparece como uma espécie de conceito guarda-chuva ou como categoria pouco teorizada. Embora o conceito de gerações de Mannheim represente, para muitos autores, a mais completa tentativa de explicação do tema, o mesmo tem sido, muitas vezes, citado por se tratar de um "clássico": as potencialidades de análise do conceito proposto pelo autor ainda são muitas. O presente artigo apresenta, por um lado, uma reconstrução deste "famoso" ensaio que até hoje não chegou a ser integralmente traduzido e publicado no Brasil e, por outro, discute a atualidade e pertinência do artigo escrito por Mannheim em 1928 para os estudos contemporâneos sobre gerações e suas interfaces com outros campos.The concept of generations has been incorporated into sociological analysis, which points class differences but also gender, ethnic, racial, cultural and generational inequalities. However "generations" seems to be a kind of umbrella concept or category that have been little theorized. Though the concept of generations of Mannheim represent, for many authors, the most comprehensive attempt to explain the issue, it has been frequently quoted since it is a "classic". The possibilities of analysis of the concept proposed by the author still are many. This article presents, first, a reconstruction of this 'famous' essay which has not yet come to be fully translated and published in Brazil, and secondly, discusses the relevance and appropriateness of the article written by Mannheim in 1928 for the contemporary studies of generation and their interfaces with other fields.
Linguistic complex networks as a young field of quantitative linguistics. Comment on "Approaching human language with complex networks" by J. Cong and H. Liu
Köhler, Reinhard
We have long been used to the domination of qualitative methods in modern linguistics. Indeed, qualitative methods have advantages such as ease of use and wide applicability to many types of linguistic phenomena. However, this shall not overshadow the fact that a great part of human language is amenable to quantification. Moreover, qualitative methods may lead to over-simplification by employing the rigid yes/no scale. When variability and vagueness of human language must be taken into account, qualitative methods will prove inadequate and give way to quantitative methods [1, p. 11]. In addition to such advantages as exactness and precision, quantitative concepts and methods make it possible to find laws of human language which are just like those in natural sciences. These laws are fundamental elements of linguistic theories in the spirit of the philosophy of science [2,3]. Theorization effort of this type is what quantitative linguistics [1,4,5] is devoted to. The review of Cong and Liu [6] has provided an informative and insightful survey of linguistic complex networks as a young field of quantitative linguistics, including the basic concepts and measures, the major lines of research with linguistic motivation, and suggestions for future research.
Additive effect of rikkunshito, an herbal medicine, on chemotherapy-induced nausea, vomiting, and anorexia in uterine cervical or corpus cancer patients treated with cisplatin and paclitaxel: results of a randomized phase II study (JORTC KMP-02).
Ohnishi, Shunsuke; Watari, Hidemichi; Kanno, Maki; Ohba, Yoko; Takeuchi, Satoshi; Miyaji, Tempei; Oyamada, Shunsuke; Nomura, Eiji; Kato, Hidenori; Sugiyama, Toru; Asaka, Masahiro; Sakuragi, Noriaki; Yamaguchi, Takuhiro; Uezono, Yasuhito; Iwase, Satoru
Rikkunshito, an herbal medicine, is widely prescribed in Japan for the treatment of anorexia and functional dyspepsia, and has been reported to recover reductions in food intake caused by cisplatin. We investigated whether rikkunshito could improve chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) and anorexia in patients treated with cisplatin. Patients with uterine cervical or corpus cancer who were to receive cisplatin (50 mg/m² day 1) and paclitaxel (135 mg/m² day 0) as first-line chemotherapy were randomly assigned to the rikkunshito group receiving oral administration on days 0-13 with standard antiemetics, or the control group receiving antiemetics only. The primary endpoint was the rate of complete control (CC: no emesis, no rescue medication, and no significant nausea) in the overall phase (0-120 hours). Two-tailed panorexia. Copyright © 2017. Asian Society of Gynecologic Oncology, Korean Society of Gynecologic Oncology
Gabriel de Ávila Othero
Full Text Available In this paper, we present the results of our work with automatic morphological annotation of excerpts from a corpus of spoken language – belonging to the VARSUL project – using the free morphosyntatic tagger Aelius. We present 20 texts containing 154,530 words, annotated automatically and corrected manually. This paper presents the tagger Aelius and our work of manual review of the texts, as well as our suggestions for improvements of the tool, concerning aspects of oral texts. We verify the performance of morphosyntactic tagging a spoken language corpus, an unprecedented challenge for the tagger. Based on the errors of the tagger, we try to infer certain patterns of annotation to overcome limitations presented by the program, and we propose suggestions for implementations in order to allow Aelius to tag spoken language corpora in a more effective way, specially treating cases such as interjections, apheresis, onomatopeia and conversational markers.
Language configurations of degree-related denotations in the spoken production of a group of Colombian EFL university students: A corpus-based study
Wilder Yesid Escobar
Full Text Available Recognizing that developing the competences needed to appropriately use linguistic resources according to contextual characteristics (pragmatics is as important as the cultural-imbedded linguistic knowledge itself (semantics and that both are equally essential to form competent speakers of English in foreign language contexts, we feel this research relies on corpus linguistics to analyze both the scope and the limitations of the sociolinguistic knowledge and the communicative skills of English students at the university level. To such end, a linguistic corpus was assembled, compared to an existing corpus of native speakers, and analyzed in terms of the frequency, overuse, underuse, misuse, ambiguity, success, and failure of the linguistic parameters used in speech acts. The findings herein describe the linguistic configurations employed to modify levels and degrees of descriptions (salient sematic theme exhibited in the EFL learners´ corpus appealing to the sociolinguistic principles governing meaning making and language use which are constructed under the social conditions of the environments where the language is naturally spoken for sociocultural exchange.
The Ndebele Language Corpus: A Review of Some Factors Influencing the Content of the Corpus*
Samukele Hadebe
Full Text Available
Abstract: The Ndebele language corpus described here is that compiled by the ALLEX Project (now ALRI at the University of Zimbabwe. It is intended to reflect as much as possible the Ndebele language as spoken in Zimbabwe. The Ndebele language corpus was built in order to provide much-needed material for the study of the Ndebele language with a special focus on dictionarymaking and research. Like most corpora, the Ndebele language corpus may in future be used for other purposes not thought of at the time of its inception. It has been designed to meet generally acceptable standards so that it can be adaptable to various possible uses by various researchers. The article wants to outline the building process of the Ndebele language corpus with special emphasis on the challenges that faced compilers, and possible solutions. It is assumed that some of these challenges might not be peculiar to Ndebele alone but could also affect related African languages in a more or less similar situation. The main focus of the discussion will be the composition of the Ndebele language corpus, i.e. the type of texts that constitute the corpus. The corpus is composed of published texts, unpublished texts and oral material gathered from Ndebele-speaking districts of Zimbabwe. It will be argued that the use of the corpus and its reliability for research depends among other factors on its contents. It will also be shown that the contents of a corpus depend on a number of factors, some of which include sociolinguistic, political and economic considerations. These considerations have implications on both the content and quality of published and oral texts that constitute the Ndebele language corpus.
Keywords: CORPUS, ORAL MATERIALS, CODE-MIXING, CODE-SWITCHING, MOTHER- TONGUE, NDEBELE
Opsomming: Die Ndebeletaalkorpus: 'n Oorsig van sommige faktore wat die inhoud van die korpus be?nvloed. Die Ndebeletaalkorpus wat hier beskryf word, is di? saamgestel deur die
The Genome of a Tortoise Herpesvirus (Testudinid Herpesvirus 3) Has a Novel Structure and Contains a Large Region That Is Not Required for Replication In Vitro or Virulence In Vivo
Gandar, Frédéric; Wilkie, Gavin S.; Gatherer, Derek; Kerr, Karen; Marlier, Didier; Diez, Marianne; Marschang, Rachel E.; Mast, Jan; Dewals, Benjamin G.
ABSTRACT Testudinid herpesvirus 3 (TeHV-3) is the causative agent of a lethal disease affecting several tortoise species. The threat that this virus poses to endangered animals is focusing efforts on characterizing its properties, in order to enable the development of prophylactic methods. We have sequenced the genomes of the two most studied TeHV-3 strains (1976 and 4295). TeHV-3 strain 1976 has a novel genome structure and is most closely related to a turtle herpesvirus, thus supporting its classification into genus Scutavirus, subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae, family Herpesviridae. The sequence of strain 1976 also revealed viral counterparts of cellular interleukin-10 and semaphorin, which have not been described previously in members of subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae. TeHV-3 strain 4295 is a mixture of three forms (m1, m2, and M), in which, in comparison to strain 1976, the genomes exhibit large, partially overlapping deletions of 12.5 to 22.4 kb. Viral subclones representing these forms were isolated by limiting dilution assays, and each replicated in cell culture comparably to strain 1976. With the goal of testing the potential of the three forms as attenuated vaccine candidates, strain 4295 was inoculated intranasally into Hermann's tortoises (Testudo hermanni). All inoculated subjects died, and PCR analyses demonstrated the ability of the m2 and M forms to spread and invade the brain. In contrast, the m1 form was detected in none of the organs tested, suggesting its potential as the basis of an attenuated vaccine candidate. Our findings represent a major step toward characterizing TeHV-3 and developing prophylactic methods against it. IMPORTANCE Testudinid herpesvirus 3 (TeHV-3) causes a lethal disease in tortoises, several species of which are endangered. We have characterized the viral genome and used this information to take steps toward developing an attenuated vaccine. We have sequenced the genomes of two strains (1976 and 4295), compared their growth in
Method of and apparatus for examining a body by radiation such as x or gamma radiation
Hounsfield, G.N.
Apparatus is disclosed for examining a body by means of radiation such as X or γ radiation. The body to be examined is inserted in an aperture in a scanning and locating structure, which structure supports a source of the radiation and detector means therefor on opposite sides of the aperture. The source and detector means are moveable to and fro on the structure so as to scan the radiation laterally across the body in a plane and the structure is rotatable around the body about an axis perpendicular to the plane. Disposed between the source and detector means is an attenuator means which extends laterally in said plane to the full extent of the lateral scanning motion and rotates with the structure
Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II (MOPD II) syndrome previously diagnosed as Seckel syndrome: report of a novel mutation of the PCNT gene.
Piane, Maria; Della Monica, Matteo; Piatelli, Gianluca; Lulli, Patrizia; Lonardo, Fortunato; Chessa, Luciana; Scarano, Gioacchino
We report on a 3-year-old boy with prenatal onset of proportionate dwarfism, postnatal severe microcephaly, high forehead with receded hairline, sparse scalp hair, beaked nose, mild retrognathia and hypotonia diagnosed at birth as Seckel syndrome. At age 3 years, he became paralyzed due to a cerebrovascular malformation. Based on the clinical and radiological features showing evidence of skeletal dysplasia, the diagnosis was revised to Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II (MOPD II) syndrome. Western blot analysis of the patient's lymphoblastoid cell line lysate showed the absence of the protein pericentrin. Subsequent molecular analysis identified a novel homozygous single base insertion (c.1527_1528insA) in exon 10 of the PCNT gene, which leads to a frameshift (Treo510fs) and to premature protein truncation. PCNT mutations must be considered diagnostic of MOPD II syndrome. A possible role of pericentrin in the development of cerebral vessels is suggested. Copyright 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Saying What You're Looking For: Linguistics Meets Video Search.
Barrett, Daniel Paul; Barbu, Andrei; Siddharth, N; Siskind, Jeffrey Mark
We present an approach to searching large video corpora for clips which depict a natural-language query in the form of a sentence. Compositional semantics is used to encode subtle meaning differences lost in other approaches, such as the difference between two sentences which have identical words but entirely different meaning: The person rode the horse versus The horse rode the person. Given a sentential query and a natural-language parser, we produce a score indicating how well a video clip depicts that sentence for each clip in a corpus and return a ranked list of clips. Two fundamental problems are addressed simultaneously: detecting and tracking objects, and recognizing whether those tracks depict the query. Because both tracking and object detection are unreliable, our approach uses the sentential query to focus the tracker on the relevant participants and ensures that the resulting tracks are described by the sentential query. While most earlier work was limited to single-word queries which correspond to either verbs or nouns, we search for complex queries which contain multiple phrases, such as prepositional phrases, and modifiers, such as adverbs. We demonstrate this approach by searching for 2,627 naturally elicited sentential queries in 10 Hollywood movies.
On the concept of a linguistic variable
Kerre, E.
The concept of a linguistic variable plays a crucial role in the representation of imprecise knowledge in information sciences. A variable is called linguistic as soon as its values are linguistic terms rather than numerical ones. The power of daily communication and common sense reasoning lies in the use of such linguistic values. Even when exact numerical values are available, experts tend to transform these values into linguistic ones. A physician will usually translate a numerical measurement of a blood pressure into linguistic specifications such as normal, very high, too low... Zadeh has argued that the set of values for a linguistic variable assumes a more-or-less fixed structure. Starting from an atomic value and its antonym all remaining values are constructed using logical connectives on the one hand and linguistic hedges on the other hand. In this paper we will describe how to represent the value set of a linguistic variable in general and of linguistic hedges in particular
Field – Football Expressions Dictionary: a lexicographic resource based on the theoretical-methodological approach of frame semantics and corpus linguistics
Rove Luiza de Oliveira Chishman
Full Text Available The present article aims at problematizing the relevance of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982 in the development of Field – Dictionary of Football Expressions – which the configuration allows the access to football language through expressions or through scenarios – or semantic frames. Frame Semantics, a theory developed in the realm of Cognitive Linguistics, is based on empirical data collected from the analysis of electronic corpora. The extraction of the data presented in this study was done with the Sketch Engine concordance, while their analysis was relegated to Frame Semantics. Among the results, it is possible to point out at the manner in which Fillmore´s theory contributes to the analysis of polysemy, presenting the different senses of a lexical unit considering different situations – or different frames – in which they appear. This article also emphasizes the pertinence of corpus linguistics and the processing of corpora as resources that allow the analysis of linguistic constructs present in the texts. It is also important to emphasize the applicability of Frame Semantics to a resource devoted to a non-specialized public, once the theory makes the contextualization of language possible through the everyday routine of the speakers.
A randomised, double-blind, cross-over trial to evaluate bread, in which gluten has been pre-digested by prolyl endoprotease treatment, in subjects self-reporting benefits of adopting a gluten-free or low-gluten diet.
Rees, Dinka; Holtrop, Grietje; Chope, Gemma; Moar, Kim M; Cruickshank, Morven; Hoggard, Nigel
The aim of the present study was to determine if the enzyme Aspergillus niger prolyl endoprotease (ANPEP), which degrades the immunogenic proline-rich residues in gluten peptides, can be used in the development of new wheat products, suitable for gluten-sensitive (GS) individuals. We have carried out a double-blind, randomised, cross-over trial with two groups of adults; subjects, self-reporting benefits of adopting a gluten-free or low-gluten diet (GS, n 16) and a control non-GS group (n 12). For the trial, volunteers consumed four wheat breads: normal bread, bread treated with 0·8 or 1 % ANPEP and low-protein bread made from biscuit flour. Compared with controls, GS subjects had a favourable cardiovascular lipid profile - lower LDL (4·0 (sem 0·3) v. 2·8 (sem 0·2) mmol/l; P=0·008) and LDL:HDL ratio (3·2 (sem 0·4) v. 1·8 (sem 0·2); P=0·005) and modified haematological profile. The majority of the GS subjects followed a low-gluten lifestyle, which helps to reduce the gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms severity. The low-gluten lifestyle does not have any effect on the quality of life, fatigue or mental state of this population. Consumption of normal wheat bread increased GI symptoms in GS subjects compared with their habitual diet. ANPEP lowered the immunogenic gluten in the treated bread by approximately 40 %. However, when compared with the control bread for inducing GI symptoms, no treatment effects were apparent. ANPEP can be applied in the production of bread with taste, texture and appearance comparable with standard bread.
An On-Line Computational Model of Human Sentence Interpretation: A Theory of the Representation and Use of Linguistic Knowledge
unit in a grammar was assumed by the American Structuralists, and can even be found in Saussure . For example, Saussure (1915/1966:125) notes that "To...maintain that on the contrary Saussure considered syntax to be part of parole (see Chomsky (1965), Pollard & Sag (1987), Sampson (1980)), it is quite...it belongs to speaking, not to language."(p 124)), but it seems clear that by 'sentence', Saussure means 'utterance', and not the more abstract
Boosted H->bb Tagger In Run II
Sahinsoy, Merve; The ATLAS collaboration
Several searches for Higgs bosons decaying to bquark pairs benefit from the increased Run II centreofmass energy by exploiting the large transversmomentum (boosted) Higgs boson regime, where the two bjets are merged into one largeradius jet. ATLAS uses a boosted H>bb tagger algorithm to separate the Higgs signal from the background processes (QCD, W and Z bosons, top quarks). The tagger takes as input a largeR=1.0 jet calibrating the pseudorapidity, energy and mass scale. The tagger employs btagging, Higgs candidate mass, and substructure information. The performance of several operating points in Higgs boson signal and QCD and ttbar allhadronic backgrounds are presented. Systematic uncertainties are evaluated so that this tagger can be used in analyses.
Telugu dependency parsing using different statistical parsers
B. Venkata Seshu Kumari
Full Text Available In this paper we explore different statistical dependency parsers for parsing Telugu. We consider five popular dependency parsers namely, MaltParser, MSTParser, TurboParser, ZPar and Easy-First Parser. We experiment with different parser and feature settings and show the impact of different settings. We also provide a detailed analysis of the performance of all the parsers on major dependency labels. We report our results on test data of Telugu dependency treebank provided in the ICON 2010 tools contest on Indian languages dependency parsing. We obtain state-of-the art performance of 91.8% in unlabeled attachment score and 70.0% in labeled attachment score. To the best of our knowledge ours is the only work which explored all the five popular dependency parsers and compared the performance under different feature settings for Telugu.
Mihailo Antović
Full Text Available This paper aims to join marking the fiftieth anniversary of generativelinguistics by focusing on some principal contributions the field has given to science in general. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the issue of 'modern linguistics', as it is widely taught in local universities, and examine the importance of the generative school in this notion of modernity. In the second part, I analyze the fundamental conceptions and epistemological framework of this school in the study of language, pinpointing fifteen legacies it seems to have already left to human thought, as follows: breakup withbehaviourism; reinstitution of the hypothetico-deductive method; elaboration of the mind-body issue; revival of the thesis that the only true reality is that of the human mind; reintroduction and extension of the term 'cognitive'; participation in rapidterminological changes in the social sciences; return to the problem of language universals with a strong focus on the genetic origins of language faculty; extended usage of the term 'grammar'; contribution to the deletion of clear boundaries between the natural and social sciences, especially in psychology; rise of reductionism in formalsciences; return to the once forgotten Gestalt principles of perception; radical breakup between lexical and sentence semantics; neo-Darwinism; rise of neuroscience; impetus to the foundation of new fields, often multidisciplinary ones. Reconciliation of cognitiveand generative linguistics in the future is anticipated.
A corpus for plant-chemical relationships in the biomedical domain.
Choi, Wonjun; Kim, Baeksoo; Cho, Hyejin; Lee, Doheon; Lee, Hyunju
Plants are natural products that humans consume in various ways including food and medicine. They have a long empirical history of treating diseases with relatively few side effects. Based on these strengths, many studies have been performed to verify the effectiveness of plants in treating diseases. It is crucial to understand the chemicals contained in plants because these chemicals can regulate activities of proteins that are key factors in causing diseases. With the accumulation of a large volume of biomedical literature in various databases such as PubMed, it is possible to automatically extract relationships between plants and chemicals in a large-scale way if we apply a text mining approach. A cornerstone of achieving this task is a corpus of relationships between plants and chemicals. In this study, we first constructed a corpus for plant and chemical entities and for the relationships between them. The corpus contains 267 plant entities, 475 chemical entities, and 1,007 plant-chemical relationships (550 and 457 positive and negative relationships, respectively), which are drawn from 377 sentences in 245 PubMed abstracts. Inter-annotator agreement scores for the corpus among three annotators were measured. The simple percent agreement scores for entities and trigger words for the relationships were 99.6 and 94.8 %, respectively, and the overall kappa score for the classification of positive and negative relationships was 79.8 %. We also developed a rule-based model to automatically extract such plant-chemical relationships. When we evaluated the rule-based model using the corpus and randomly selected biomedical articles, overall F-scores of 68.0 and 61.8 % were achieved, respectively. We expect that the corpus for plant-chemical relationships will be a useful resource for enhancing plant research. The corpus is available at http://combio.gist.ac.kr/plantchemicalcorpus .
"RecognizeCane" : The new concept of a cane which recognizes the most common objects and safety clues.
Scherlen, Anne-Catherine; Dumas, Jean Claude; Guedj, Benjamin; Vignot, Alexandre
This paper introduces the new concept of an electronic cane for blind people. While some systems inform the subject only of the presence of the object and its relative distance, RecognizeCane is also able to recognize most common objects and environment clues to increase the safety and confidence of the navigation process. The originality of RecognizeCane is the use of simple sensors, such as infrared, brilliance or water sensors to inform the subject of the presence, for example, of a stairway, a water puddle, a zebra crossing or a trash can. This cane does not use an embedded vision system. RecognizeCane is equipped with several sensors and microprocessors to collect sensor data and extract the desired information about the close environment by means of a dynamic analysis of output signals.
Silexan, an essential oil from flowers of Lavandula angustifolia, is not recognized as benzodiazepine-like in rats trained to discriminate a diazepam cue.
Silenieks, Leo B; Koch, Egon; Higgins, Guy A
Recently, an essential oil of selected quality produced from the flowering tops of Lavandula angustifolia Mill. by steam distillation (Silexan) has been approved in Germany for the treatment of restlessness in case of anxious mood. Based on the observed clinical effects, it has been speculated that lavender oil may exert benzodiazepine-like action including the known dependence and abuse potential of this class of drugs. Although no evidence for such an activity was generated during the long-standing medicinal use of lavender oil, further preclinical investigations were now conducted to evaluate this potential side effect in more detail. Twelve adult, male, Sprague-Dawley rats were trained to discriminate the benzodiazepine drug diazepam (2 mg/kg i.p.) from saline using a two-lever operant procedure. After approximately 40 training sessions the majority of rats learned the discrimination and pre-treatment with ascending doses of diazepam (0.3-2 mg/kg i.p.) produced a dose related generalization to the diazepam cue. In these same animals Silexan was administered to see if animals recognized the drug as "diazepam-like" i.e. generalized to diazepam or "saline-like". Silexan tested at doses 3-30 mg/kg i.p. produced almost exclusively (>90%) saline-like responding. Also there was no effect of Silexan on response rate, i.e. rate of lever pressing, at any dose suggesting that the test article is well tolerated and does not exert a sedating effect. In sum, Silexan has no diazepam-like interoceptive property in adult, male rats. This suggests that Silexan does not share the potential of benzodiazepines to induce the development of tolerance, dependence and addiction. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
Microsyntactic Annotation of Corpora and its Use in Computational Linguistics Tasks
Iomdin Leonid
Full Text Available Microsyntax is a linguistic discipline dealing with idiomatic elements whose important properties are strongly related to syntax. In a way, these elements may be viewed as transitional entities between the lexicon and the grammar, which explains why they are often underrepresented in both of these resource types: the lexicographer fails to see such elements as full-fledged lexical units, while the grammarian finds them too specific to justify the creation of individual well-developed rules. As a result, such elements are poorly covered by linguistic models used in advanced modern computational linguistic tasks like high-quality machine translation or deep semantic analysis. A possible way to mend the situation and improve the coverage and adequate treatment of microsyntactic units in linguistic resources is to develop corpora with microsyntactic annotation, closely linked to specially designed lexicons. The paper shows how this task is solved in the deeply annotated corpus of Russian, SynTagRus.
Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian.
Kazanina, Nina
In Russian negative sentences the verb's direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific "genitive-of-negation" phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers' active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.
A radioligand immunoassay for 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 receptors using monoclonal antibody: detection of a phenotypic receptor variant in vitamin D-dependency rickets (type II) which does not bind hormone
Pike, J.W.; Dokoh, Shigeharu; Liberman, U.A.; Eil, C.; Haussler, M.R.; Marx, S.J.
Vitamin D-dependency rickets, type II (VDDRII), is a well recognized heritable disorder characterized by peripheral target organ resistance to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D 3 (1,25(OH) 2 D 3 ), the hormonally active form of the vitamin. Recently, cultured skin fibroblasts obtained from a number of patients with VDDRII have been utilized to characterize the underlying molecular defects associated with this malady. Recently monoclonal antibodies to the vitamin D receptor have been generated, and a radioligand immunoassay (RLIA) for the detection of this molecule has been developed which is independent of its hormone-binding capacity. This report describes the application of the immunoassay in the detection of receptor-like molecules in fibroblasts derived from patients with VDDRII. The results indicate that the molecule is generally present in all patients, and provides a mechanism for individual responsiveness to pharmacologic treatment with vitamin D 3 metabolites. 8 refs.; 3 figs.; 1 table
How effective has tobacco tax increase been in the Gambia? A case study of tobacco control
Nargis, Nigar; Manneh, Yahya; Krubally, Bakary; Jobe, Baboucarr; Ouma, Ahmed E Ogwell; Tcha-Kondor, Noureiny; Blecher, Evan H
Objectives The objective of the present study was to evaluate how effective tobacco tax increase has been in increasing price of tobacco products and reducing tobacco consumption in the Gambia. In addition, it tests the hypothesis that tobacco tax revenue grows while tobacco consumption decreases as a result of tax and price increase. Setting The study is designed at the macroeconomic level to examine the import of tobacco products and revenue collected from tobacco taxation in a low-income setting. Participants The participants of this study are the government officials employed in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs (MoFEA), the Gambia and the Gambia Revenue Authority, who are in charge of planning and implementing the tobacco tax policy in the Gambia. Interventions The study includes 2 consecutive interventions in tobacco tax policy in the Gambia. The first intervention was moving the tax base for the uniform specific excise tax on cigarettes from weight to pack of cigarettes in 2013. The second intervention involved increasing the excise and the environmental tax on tobacco products in 2014. Primary and secondary outcome measures The primary outcome measures were the cost, insurance and freight value and the price of tobacco products. The secondary outcome measures included the import of tobacco products and tobacco tax revenue. Results In 2013–2014, the Gambia MoFEA raised the specific excise rate, which increased price, reduced consumption and generated significantly more government revenue from tobacco products. This is a clear evidence of the win-win outcome of raising tobacco tax. In addition, the Gambia has set the example of harmonising tax rates between tobacco products that reduces the substitution between tobacco products. Conclusions The Gambia presents the best practice in tobacco taxation. There is need for documenting more country-specific evidence on the win-win outcome of raising tobacco tax. PMID:27566626
A Study of the Central Auditory Function in Stutters by Masking Level Difference and Synthetic Sentence Identification Tests
Afsaneh Rajab
Full Text Available Background and Aim: There are evidences that indicate a relationship between auditory processing disor¬ders and stuttering,¬ and any disorder in the central auditory function can be at least one of the underly¬ing causes of stuttering. Even though, using the most state of the art radiographic technologies, i.e. MRI, no definitive answer has been given in relative to this question. In this research, using Mask-ing Level Difference (MLD and Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI tests, the central auditory func¬tion of stutters and normal group was evaluated.Materials and Methods: In this study was analytic cross-sectional, fifteen male patients with stutter-ing and 15 male normal cases with the age range from 16 to 40 years (average age 26.78 year were evalu¬ated. SSI-ICM, SSI-CCM and MLD tests were performed. The results were compared in both groups.Results: Although stutterers mean MLD was less than that of normal group, the different was not signifi¬cant between stutters and normal group in SSI test in right ear at negative MCRs. There was a signifi¬cant difference in ICM state, but in CCM state, there was no significant difference between the aver¬age score of two groups in various MCRs.Conclusion: The findings of this research is compatible with those of similar researches about the SSI test and the pattern of results, probably indicates a partial dysfunction of brainstem in some of the stutters.
Structure before meaning: sentence processing, plausibility, and subcategorization.
Kizach, Johannes; Nyvad, Anne Mette; Christensen, Ken Ramshøj
Natural language processing is a fast and automatized process. A crucial part of this process is parsing, the online incremental construction of a syntactic structure. The aim of this study was to test whether a wh-filler extracted from an embedded clause is initially attached as the object of the matrix verb with subsequent reanalysis, and if so, whether the plausibility of such an attachment has an effect on reaction time. Finally, we wanted to examine whether subcategorization plays a role. We used a method called G-Maze to measure response time in a self-paced reading design. The experiments confirmed that there is early attachment of fillers to the matrix verb. When this attachment is implausible, the off-line acceptability of the whole sentence is significantly reduced. The on-line results showed that G-Maze was highly suited for this type of experiment. In accordance with our predictions, the results suggest that the parser ignores (or has no access to information about) implausibility and attaches fillers as soon as possible to the matrix verb. However, the results also show that the parser uses the subcategorization frame of the matrix verb. In short, the parser ignores semantic information and allows implausible attachments but adheres to information about which type of object a verb can take, ensuring that the parser does not make impossible attachments. We argue that the evidence supports a syntactic parser informed by syntactic cues, rather than one guided by semantic cues or one that is blind, or completely autonomous.
Structure before meaning: sentence processing, plausibility, and subcategorization.
Johannes Kizach
Full Text Available Natural language processing is a fast and automatized process. A crucial part of this process is parsing, the online incremental construction of a syntactic structure. The aim of this study was to test whether a wh-filler extracted from an embedded clause is initially attached as the object of the matrix verb with subsequent reanalysis, and if so, whether the plausibility of such an attachment has an effect on reaction time. Finally, we wanted to examine whether subcategorization plays a role. We used a method called G-Maze to measure response time in a self-paced reading design. The experiments confirmed that there is early attachment of fillers to the matrix verb. When this attachment is implausible, the off-line acceptability of the whole sentence is significantly reduced. The on-line results showed that G-Maze was highly suited for this type of experiment. In accordance with our predictions, the results suggest that the parser ignores (or has no access to information about implausibility and attaches fillers as soon as possible to the matrix verb. However, the results also show that the parser uses the subcategorization frame of the matrix verb. In short, the parser ignores semantic information and allows implausible attachments but adheres to information about which type of object a verb can take, ensuring that the parser does not make impossible attachments. We argue that the evidence supports a syntactic parser informed by syntactic cues, rather than one guided by semantic cues or one that is blind, or completely autonomous.
When "growth" is not such a good thing…
The Medical Service is launching a campaign to make people aware of the negative effects of sedentary lifestyles and poorly balanced diets and encourage them to change their habits. Take your health into your own hands: eat healthily and keep fit! At times of economic crisis, growth is welcomed as a positive development but when it's the average BMI (body mass index or weight in kg/size in m2) of the personnel that's expanding the news is not so good for a company's health. "The average BMI has been regularly increasing in most countries for the last ten years, and CERN is unfortunately no exception to the rule", says Dr Reymond of the CERN Medical Service (GS-ME). The percentage of members of the personnel with a BMI over 30 has risen by 3% in three years, which is why we've decided to launch a health campaign this year." The initiative has the support of the Management, the Staff Association, the CERN Fitness Club, the three...
Towards a Computable Data Corpus of Temporal Correlations between Drug Administration and Lab Value Changes.
Axel Newe
Full Text Available The analysis of electronic health records for an automated detection of adverse drug reactions is an approach to solve the problems that arise from traditional methods like spontaneous reporting or manual chart review. Algorithms addressing this task should be modeled on the criteria for a standardized case causality assessment defined by the World Health Organization. One of these criteria is the temporal relationship between drug intake and the occurrence of a reaction or a laboratory test abnormality. Appropriate data that would allow for developing or validating related algorithms is not publicly available, though.In order to provide such data, retrospective routine data of drug administrations and temporally corresponding laboratory observations from a university clinic were extracted, transformed and evaluated by experts in terms of a reasonable time relationship between drug administration and lab value alteration.The result is a data corpus of 400 episodes of normalized laboratory parameter values in temporal context with drug administrations. Each episode has been manually classified whether it contains data that might indicate a temporal correlation between the drug administration and the change of the lab value course, whether such a change is not observable or whether a decision between those two options is not possible due to the data. In addition, each episode has been assigned a concordance value which indicates how difficult it is to assess. This is the first open data corpus of a computable ground truth of temporal correlations between drug administration and lab value alterations.The main purpose of this data corpus is the provision of data for further research and the provision of a ground truth which allows for comparing the outcome of other assessments of this data with the outcome of assessments made by human experts. It can serve as a contribution towards systematic, computerized ADR detection in retrospective data. With
"There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons": A qualitative study of son preference and fetal sex selection among Indian immigrants in the United States.
Puri, Sunita; Adams, Vincanne; Ivey, Susan; Nachtigall, Robert D
In response to concerns from feminists, demographers, bioethicists, journalists, and health care professionals, the Indian government passed legislation in 1994 and 2003 prohibiting the use of sex selection technology and sex-selective abortion. In contrast, South Asian families immigrating to the United States find themselves in an environment where reproductive choice is protected by law and technologies enabling sex selection are readily available. Yet there has been little research exploring immigrant Indian women's narratives about the pressure they face to have sons, the process of deciding to utilize sex selection technologies, and the physical and emotional health implications of both son preference and sex selection. We undertook semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 65 immigrant Indian women in the United States who had pursued fetal sex selection on the East and West coasts of the United States between September 2004 and December 2009. Women spoke of son preference and sex selection as separate though intimately related phenomena, and the major themes that arose during interviews included the sociocultural roots of son preference; women's early socialization around the importance of sons; the different forms of pressure to have sons that women experienced from female in-laws and husbands; the spectrum of verbal and physical abuse that women faced when they did not have male children and/or when they found out they were carrying a female fetus; and the ambivalence with which women regarded their own experience of reproductive "choice." We found that 40% of the women interviewed had terminated prior pregnancies with female fetuses and that 89% of women carrying female fetuses in their current pregnancy pursued an abortion. These narratives highlight the interaction between medical technology and the perpetuation of this specific form of violence against women in an immigrant context where women are both the assumed beneficiaries of reproductive choice
The Precautionary Principle Has Not Been Shown to Be Incoherent: A Reply to Peterson : Response
Boyer-Kassem, Thomas
In this journal, I have objected to Peterson's 2006 claim that the precautionary principle is an incoherent decision rule. I defend my objections to Peterson's recent replies, and I still claim that the precautionary principle has not been shown to be incoherent.
The Precautionary Principle Has Not Been Shown to Be Incoherent: A Reply to Peterson.
Boyer-Kassem, Thomas
In this journal, I have objected to Peterson's 2006 claim that the precautionary principle is an incoherent decision rule. I defend my objections to Peterson's recent replies, and I still claim that the precautionary principle has not been shown to be incoherent. © 2017 Society for Risk Analysis.
A review of estuarine fish research in South America: what has been achieved and what is the future for sustainability and conservation?
Blaber, S J M; Barletta, M
Estuarine fish research in South America began in the early 20th Century, but it is only within the last 40 years that detailed studies have been undertaken. This review firstly summarizes research results from South American estuaries by geographic area, starting with the temperate south-east, then the temperate-sub-tropical transition zone in Brazil, then the semi-arid and tropical estuaries of north and north-east Brazil including the Amazon complex, then the north and Caribbean coasts and finally down the Pacific coast of the continent. They include almost all types of estuarine systems, from large open systems (e.g. the temperate Rio de La Plata and tropical Amazon) to extensive coastal lakes (e.g. the temperate Patos Lagoon and tropical Cienega Grande de Santa Marta). They encompass a broad range of climatic and vegetation types, from saltmarsh systems in the south-east and fjords in the south-west to both arid and humid tropical systems, dominated by mangroves in the north. Their tidal regimes range from microtidal (e.g. Mar Chiquita, Argentina) through mesotidal (e.g. Goiana, Brazil) to macrotidal in the Amazon complex where they can exceed 7 m. The review uses where possible the recent standardization of estuarine fish categories and guilds, but the ways that fishes use tropical South American systems may necessitate further refinements of the categories and guilds, particularly in relation to freshwater fishes, notably the Siluriformes, which dominate many north and north-east South American systems. The extent to which South American studies contribute to discussions and paradigms of connectivity and estuarine dependence is summarized, but work on these topics has only just begun. The anthropogenic issue of pollution, particularly in relation to heavy metals and fishes and fisheries in estuaries is more advanced, but the possible effects of climate change have barely been addressed. Studies around conservation and management are briefly reviewed and
Full Text Available This paper seeks to describe some crucial importance of corpus and text processing. Corpus is a projection of how language is used by its speakers. Technology support has improved corpus for easier maintenance, made it space-saving, and it may electronically structure its data. The latest offers much freedom for corpus users to access and exploit it for language teaching, analysis or other specified tasks. This paper will demonstrate how to use open-access corpus on internet such as Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA and British National Corpus (BNC. Besides how to use a corpus, another crucial importance that this paper seeks to describe is how to build a corpus. In this paper, the writer will use UNITEX, a corpus (text-based processing software. This software will demonstrate steps of corpus building, ranging from text collection, annotation, electronic dictionary application to some natural language based operations ranging from pattern matching, concordance, to simple extraction. It will show how graph technology may outperform regular expression, a retrieval method exploited by other corpus processor, in terms of writing output.
How Can We Confidently Judge the Extent to Which Student Voice in Higher Education Has Been Genuinely Amplified? A Proposal for a New Evaluation Framework
Seale, Jane
This article aims to contribute to the development of frameworks for evaluating student voice projects in higher education by offering a critically evaluative account of two student voice projects. Although both projects had been underpinned by the principles of participatory (inclusive) research, one appeared to be more successful than the other…
The Comparative Power of Type/Token and Hapax legomena/Type Ratios: A Corpus-based Study of Authorial Differentiation
Sundus Muhsin Ali
Full Text Available This paper presents an attempt to verify the comparative power of two statistical features: Type/Token, and Hapax legomena/Token ratios (henceforth TTR and HTR. A corpus of ten novels is compiled. Then sixteen samples (each is 5,000 tokens in length are taken randomly out of these novels as representative blocks. The researchers observe the way TTR and HTR behave in discriminating four novelists: Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway. When compared to the traditional statistical features (e.g. word length average, Sentence length average, etc., TTR and HTR are by far more competent in comparing the distinctive quantitative behavior of each novelist. It turns out that TTR and HTR contribute more or less in creating a sort of statistical identity which can be used in giving a vivid comparison and discrimination of the four novelists involved in this paper. Nevertheless, HTR sounds more viable in achieving the discriminating task than TTR.
[Nutrition and exercise of schoolchildren. Results of a cross-sectional study at the Lessing Gymnasium (secondary) school in Mannheim, Germany].
Neumann, H; Neumann, P
During the last few years there have been many articles in various newspapers about the unhealthy nutrition of children. It was the aim of this study to find out about the state of nutrition and exercise among the children at our school, a Gymnasium (secondary or grammar school) in Mannheim, Germany. We distributed questionnaires to 729 fellow pupils at the school to get some data/information about their exercise, nutrition and leisure activities. We developed a point-based system to record the quality of the food eaten; the time spent on sports, playing musical instruments; looking at television (TV) etc. or using the computer; and other leisure activities (e.g. reading, meeting friends, playing games). 84% of completed questionnaires were returned (98% of those sent to pupils in the lower forms). Food served at our school was reasonably good, but could have been improved by having a proper dining room or cafeteria. The situation regarding exercise tended to get worse in the younger pupils, because the school day has been lengthened. We found gender-related differences between school marks and other parameters. There was a positive relationship between good marks and a low [normal?] body mass index (BMI) and a negative effect on nutrition/exercise of hours spent watching TV or on the computer (PC). We also found a strong correlation in girls between school marks and their leisure. The number of points for wholesome meals, how much time the pupils spent on sports and music led to better school marks. Pupils of the lower grades exercised much less than older ones. Body weight index and their TV/computer time had similar effects in girls and boys. A low BMI correlated with better school marks, while high TV/PC time worsened them At our school relatively few pupils were overweight. Good nutrition and good amounts of exercise correlated positively with good marks. The amount of exercise taken by the pupils decreased as they advanced to the higher grades.
Comparison of the effect of different intensity exercise on a bicycle ergometer on postprandial lipidemia in type II diabetic patients
Narges Argani
Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Postprandial lipid clearance failure and lipoprotein disorders, which are independent risk factors for cardiovascular diseases are well-recognized in type II diabetes. Reduction of fats through exercise has been proved, though the mechanism is not well-defined, and the effects of different intensity exercise on postprandial lipidemia in diabetes type II is unknown. This study aims to find these effects using a cycle ergometer. METHODS: On three different days, 15 type II diabetics (10 women and 5 men, with a mean age 42.07 ± 6.05 years, weight 94.64 ± 4.37 kg, height 159.78 ± 9.09 cm, and body mass index 29.83 ± 3.93 kg/m2, consumed a full fat breakfast (750-800 kcal, 85% fat, and 150 min later, blood samples were taken from them to measure their lipid profile. The 1st day was the control day, without any exercises. Seven days later, 90 min after enriched breakfast, they did 30 min of exercise on the cycle ergometer with intensity of 55-70% of maximum heart rate (HRmax, and 14 days later, 90 min after enriched breakfast, they did 30 min of exercise with intensity of 70-85% of HRmax. RESULTS: According to Friedman non-parametric test, high-density lipoprotein (HDL cholesterol serum level significantly increased after 30 min of moderate intensity exercise (P > 0.05, from 39.4 ± 5.2 to 48.6 ± 9.3, while this increase was insignificant after a higher intensity exercise. Neither intensity levels had any significant effects on triglyceride or on low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. CONCLUSION: Results showed that moderate intensity exercise was more effective in increasing HDL cholesterol level in type II diabetics. Keywords: Postprandial Lipidemia, Resistance Exercise, Bicycle Ergometer, Type II Diabetes
A note on reproductive performance of tagger goat in the Gezira, Sudan
Elimam, M. E.; Ombabi, Y. A.
The objective of this study was to determine the effects of improved management and nutrition on the reproductive performance of flock of tagger goats from Eldaleng area, the Nuba Mountains. It was conducted at Wad Medani, Sudan, from June 2006 to July 2008. The goats were mainly grazed on farm and well managed. Individual records were kept for each animal, and the data were statistically analysed for reproductive characteristics. Kidding percentage was 100% in the two years and was mainly in summer. Sex ratio (males and females) was 57.14 :42.86 in the first year and 54.05: 45.95 in second year. Twinning rate increased from 17.39% in the first year to 48.0% in the second year, and number of kids born/doe increased from 1.17% in the first year to 1.48% in the second year. Mean age at first kidding was 365.67 days (285-438) and mean kidding interval was 258.85 days (169-380). The overall birth weight was 1.73, 1.69 and 1.70 kg for the first, second and third parities, respectively. Seasons had no significant effects on overall birth weight, and it was highest in summer (1.74) followed by autumn (1.71) and then winter (1.63). There were differences between years in Birth weight and was generally higher in the first year. Singles were heavier at birth than twins. Birth weight had significant correlation with doe weight at kidding. Doe age had significant correlation with doe body condition core and doe weight at kidding. The results showed that tagger reproductive performance was improved in the Gezira area, especially in the second year, than in Eldaleng area.(Author)
Olga Pavlovna Puchinina
Full Text Available The author studies the peculiarities of repetition, being one of the ways to build syntactic relations in the represented speech structure, based on the prose by Marina Tsvetaeva. The article describes the different types of repetitions, their distinctive features and frequency of usage in the studied tests. The author describes different types of repetitions in the studied cases of represented speech from the point of view of their position. Repetition occurs at the beginning, end of sentences, beginning and end of a statement or paragraph, end of a statement and beginning of the next one; lexical items may be repeated in the middle of a statement. The morphology of repetitions, i.e., the way by what parts of speech the repeated words and structures are expressed, is of interest from the point of view of functional grammar. The author notes that Tsvetaeva repeats different parts of speech: conjunctions, prepositions, particles, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, numerals, verbs, modal words or a combination of two words. Moreover, due to her special intention, Tsvetaeva intensifies repetition through particular phonetic devices, such as alliteration, rhyme and rhythm, which make her prosaic works sound poetic. Purpose. The article is devoted to the topic of rendering another person's speech, as it continues to be one of the most important issues of modern linguistics. The subject of analysis is repetition and its different types in the structure of represented speech on the material of prose texts by Marina Tsvetaeva. The author's aims is to reveal the way these types of repetition (lexical, syntactic, semantic ones function in the structure of represented speech and what effect is achieved with their help. Methodology. The research has been conducted using the continuous sampling method and the quantitative estimation method, aimed to identify the frequency of using different types of repetition and repeated parts of speech and constructions in the
The development of an automated sentence generator for the assessment of reading speed
Legge Gordon E
Full Text Available Abstract Reading speed is an important outcome measure for many studies in neuroscience and psychology. Conventional reading speed tests have a limited corpus of sentences and usually require observers to read sentences aloud. Here we describe an automated sentence generator which can create over 100,000 unique sentences, scored using a true/false response. We propose that an estimate of the minimum exposure time required for observers to categorise the truth of such sentences is a good alternative to reading speed measures that guarantees comprehension of the printed material. Removing one word from the sentence reduces performance to chance, indicating minimal redundancy. Reading speed assessed using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP of these sentences is not statistically different from using MNREAD sentences. The automated sentence generator would be useful for measuring reading speed with button-press response (such as within MRI scanners and for studies requiring many repeated measures of reading speed.
Does a summative portfolio foster the development of capabilities such as reflective practice and understanding ethics? An evaluation from two medical schools.
O'Sullivan, Anthony J; Howe, Amanda C; Miles, Susan; Harris, Peter; Hughes, Chris S; Jones, Philip; Scicluna, Helen; Leinster, Sam J
Portfolios need to be evaluated to determine whether they encourage students to develop in capabilities such as reflective practice and ethical judgment. The aims of this study were (i) to determine whether preparing a portfolio helps promote students' development in a range of capabilities including understanding ethical and legal principles, reflective practice and effective communication, and (ii) to determine to what extent the format of the portfolio affected the outcome by comparing the experiences of students at two different medical schools. A questionnaire was designed to evaluate undergraduate medical students' experiences of completing a portfolio at two medical schools. A total of 526 (45% response rate) students answered the on-line questionnaire. Students from both medical schools gave the highest ranking for the portfolio as a trigger for reflective practice. 63% of students agreed their portfolio helped them develop reflective practice skills (p portfolios helped them understand ethical and legal principles whereas 29% disagreed (p portfolio helped them to develop effective communication. Students perceive portfolio preparation as an effective learning tool for the development of capabilities such as understanding ethical and legal principles and reflective practice, whereas other capabilities such as effective communication require complementary techniques and other modes of assessment.
Organic chemistry as a language and the implications of chemical linguistics for structural and retrosynthetic analyses.
Cadeddu, Andrea; Wylie, Elizabeth K; Jurczak, Janusz; Wampler-Doty, Matthew; Grzybowski, Bartosz A
Methods of computational linguistics are used to demonstrate that a natural language such as English and organic chemistry have the same structure in terms of the frequency of, respectively, text fragments and molecular fragments. This quantitative correspondence suggests that it is possible to extend the methods of computational corpus linguistics to the analysis of organic molecules. It is shown that within organic molecules bonds that have highest information content are the ones that 1) define repeat/symmetry subunits and 2) in asymmetric molecules, define the loci of potential retrosynthetic disconnections. Linguistics-based analysis appears well-suited to the analysis of complex structural and reactivity patterns within organic molecules. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
A Simulation of a Virtual Qubits on a Classical Computer has Been Developed Recently
Yaremi M. García Zavala
Full Text Available Una simulación en términos de un número infinito de señales analógicas de los qubits virtuales generados aleatoriamente es hecha. Las compuertas cuánticas asociadas con la computadora cuántica aleatoria son simuladas con amplificadores operacionales. La simulación satisface los cinco criterios de Di Vincenzo impuestos a una computadora cuántica operativa. La medición cuántica y entrelazamiento son explicados perfectamente. Dentro de nuestro enfoque, decoherencia no es un problema ya que el tiempo de ejecución de una compuerta es menor que el tiempo de calibración del amplificador operacional. En suma, la presente simulación de una computadora cuántica en señales y sistemas de Electrónica, es completa y proporciona información importante acerca de los detalles de decoherencia.
IIIB or not IIIB: a previously unanswered question.
Thibodeau, Jennifer T; Mishkin, Joseph D; Patel, Parag C; Mammen, Pradeep P A; Markham, David W; Drazner, Mark H
The term New York Heart Association (NYHA) class IIIB has been used increasingly in clinical medicine, including as an inclusion criteria for many clinical trials assessing left ventricular assist devices (LVADs). Indeed, NYHA class IIIB is incorporated in the Food and Drug Administration's approved indication for the Heartmate II. However, on review of the medical literature, we found that there is no consensus definition of NYHA class IIIB. Until the ambiguity is resolved, we suggest that this designation not be used in clinical practice or by investigators leading clinical trials assessing therapies which convey substantial risk to patients and therefore require clarity in describing the enrolled patient population. With ongoing improvements in LVADs, this therapy will increasingly be considered in patients less sick than those who require inotropic support, providing urgency to establish a consensus system of classifying such patients who nevertheless fall within the spectrum of advanced heart failure. Herein we propose a modification of the standard NYHA classification system which can be used to fill this void. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Analysing Culture and Interculture in Saudi EFL Textbooks: A Corpus Linguistic Approach
Almujaiwel, Sultan
This paper combines corpus processing tools to investigate the cultural elements of Saudi education of English as a foreign language (EFL). The latest Saudi EFL textbooks (2016 onwards) are available in researchable PDF formats. This helps process them through corpus search software tools. The method adopted is based on analysing 20 cultural…
Sentence processing in anterior superior temporal cortex shows a social-emotional bias.
Mellem, Monika S; Jasmin, Kyle M; Peng, Cynthia; Martin, Alex
The anterior region of the left superior temporal gyrus/superior temporal sulcus (aSTG/STS) has been implicated in two very different cognitive functions: sentence processing and social-emotional processing. However, the vast majority of the sentence stimuli in previous reports have been of a social or social-emotional nature suggesting that sentence processing may be confounded with semantic content. To evaluate this possibility we had subjects read word lists that differed in phrase/constituent size (single words, 3-word phrases, 6-word sentences) and semantic content (social-emotional, social, and inanimate objects) while scanned in a 7T environment. This allowed us to investigate if the aSTG/STS responded to increasing constituent structure (with increased activity as a function of constituent size) with or without regard to a specific domain of concepts, i.e., social and/or social-emotional content. Activity in the left aSTG/STS was found to increase with constituent size. This region was also modulated by content, however, such that social-emotional concepts were preferred over social and object stimuli. Reading also induced content type effects in domain-specific semantic regions. Those preferring social-emotional content included aSTG/STS, inferior frontal gyrus, posterior STS, lateral fusiform, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala, regions included in the "social brain", while those preferring object content included parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortex, and caudate, regions involved in object processing. These results suggest that semantic content affects higher-level linguistic processing and should be taken into account in future studies. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Linguistics and the digital humanities
Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard
Corpus linguistics has been closely intertwined with digital technology since the introduction of university computer mainframes in the 1960s. Making use of both digitized data in the form of the language corpus and computational methods of analysis involving concordancers and statistics software......, corpus linguistics arguably has a place in the digital humanities. Still, it remains obscure and figures only sporadically in the literature on the digital humanities. This article provides an overview of the main principles of corpus linguistics and the role of computer technology in relation to data...... and method and also offers a bird's-eye view of the history of corpus linguistics with a focus on its intimate relationship with digital technology and how digital technology has impacted the very core of corpus linguistics and shaped the identity of the corpus linguist. Ultimately, the article is oriented...
What is said or how it is said makes a difference: role of the right fronto-parietal operculum in emotional prosody as revealed by repetitive TMS.
van Rijn, Sophie; Aleman, André; van Diessen, Eric; Berckmoes, Celine; Vingerhoets, Guy; Kahn, René S
Emotional signals in spoken language can be conveyed by semantic as well as prosodic cues. We investigated the role of the fronto-parietal operculum, a somatosensory area where the lips, tongue and jaw are represented, in the right hemisphere to detection of emotion in prosody vs. semantics. A total of 14 healthy volunteers participated in the present experiment, which involved transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with frameless stereotaxy. As predicted, compared with sham stimulation, TMS over the right fronto-parietal operculum differentially affected the reaction times for detection of emotional prosody vs. emotional semantics, showing that there is a dissociation at a neuroanatomical level. Detection of withdrawal emotions (fear and sadness) in prosody was delayed significantly by TMS. No effects of TMS were observed for approach emotions (happiness and anger). We propose that the right fronto-parietal operculum is not globally involved in emotion evaluation, but sensitive to specific forms of emotional discrimination and emotion types.
Stowe, Laurie A; Kaan, Edith; Sabourin, Laura; Taylor, Ryan C
Current sentence processing research has focused on early effects of the on-line incremental processes that are performed at each word or constituent during processing. However, less attention has been devoted to what happens at the end of the clause or sentence. More specifically, over the last decade and a half, a lot of effort has been put into avoiding measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at the final word of a sentence, because of the possible effects of sentence wrap-up. This article reviews the evidence on how and when sentence wrap-up impacts behavioral and ERP results. Even though the end of the sentence is associated with a positive-going ERP wave, thus far this effect has not been associated with any factors hypothesized to affect wrap-up. In addition, ERP responses to violations have not been affected by this positivity. "Sentence-final" negativities reported in the literature are not unique to sentence final positions, nor do they obscure or distort ERP effects associated with linguistic manipulations. Finally, the empirical evidence used to argue that sentence-final ERPs are different from those recorded at sentence-medial positions is weak at most. Measuring ERPs at sentence-final positions is therefore certainly not to be avoided at all costs, especially not in cases where the structure of the language under investigation requires it. More importantly, researchers should follow rigorous method in their experimental design, avoid decision tasks which may induce ERP confounds, and ensure all other possible explanations for results are considered. Although this article is directed at a particular dogma from a particular literature, this review shows that it is important to reassess what is regarded as "general knowledge" from time to time. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Tradução, padrões e nuances: um estudo de Linguística de Corpus sobre diferentes prosódias semânticas na língua fonte e na língua alvo Translation, patterns and nuance: a study based on Corpus Linguistics about different semantic prosodies found in the source and target languages
Maria Cecília Lopes
Full Text Available Neste artigo propomos uma discussão sobre a importância da prosódia semântica em traduções. Para tanto, estudamos sete itens lexicais analisados anteriormente por Coterril (2001, em inglês, que também ocorreram nos 162 textos jornalísticos do corpus paralelo desta pesquisa, formado por dados originalmente escritos em inglês (língua fonte e traduzidos para o português (língua-alvo. As ferramentas Alinhador, Concordanciador Paralelo (CEPRIL, LAEL, PUC-SP e WordSmith Tools 4 (SCOTT, 2004 foram usadas para a organização e o processamento dos dados. Como corpus de referência usou-se o Corpus do Português (DAVIES; FERREIRA, 2008. A análise mostrou resultados diferentes entre as prosódias semânticas de itens usados na língua fonte e na língua-alvo sugerindo que as escolhas tradutórias não imprimem o mesmo sentido do original. Concluimos este artigo sinalizando para a importância de estudos bilíngues que descrevam padrões lexicogramaticais, como a prosódia semântica, de maneira a contribuir para o estudo e a prática de tradução.This article aims to discuss the importance of semantic prosody in translation. Therefore, we present the analysis of seven lexical items previously studied in English by Coterril (2001 which also occurred in our parallel corpus (English-Portuguese composed by 162 journalistic texts. The methodology included data submitted to Alinhador Paralelo, Concordanciador Paralelo (CEPRIL, LAEL, PUC-SP and WordSmith Tools 4 (SCOTT, 2004. Corpus do Português (DAVIES; FERREIRA, 2008 was used as a reference corpus. The results showed different semantic prosody when comparing the itens used in the source and target languages (English-Portuguese. In our conclusion we offer some suggestions for future research considering two languages when investigating lexicogrammatical patterns such as the semantic prosody for Translation studies and practice.
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Deep-learning top taggers or the end of QCD?
Kasieczka, Gregor [Institute for Particle Physics, ETH Zürich,Otto-Stern-Weg 5, Zürich (Switzerland); Plehn, Tilman [Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg,Philosophenweg 16, Heidelberg (Germany); Russell, Michael [School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow,Glasgow G12 8QQ, Glasgow (United Kingdom); Schell, Torben [Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg,Philosophenweg 16, Heidelberg (Germany)
Machine learning based on convolutional neural networks can be used to study jet images from the LHC. Top tagging in fat jets offers a well-defined framework to establish our DeepTop approach and compare its performance to QCD-based top taggers. We first optimize a network architecture to identify top quarks in Monte Carlo simulations of the Standard Model production channel. Using standard fat jets we then compare its performance to a multivariate QCD-based top tagger. We find that both approaches lead to comparable performance, establishing convolutional networks as a promising new approach for multivariate hypothesis-based top tagging.
Deep-learning top taggers or the end of QCD?
Kasieczka, Gregor; Plehn, Tilman; Russell, Michael; Schell, Torben
Machine learning based on convolutional neural networks can be used to study jet images from the LHC. Top tagging in fat jets offers a well-defined framework to establish our DeepTop approach and compare its performance to QCD-based top taggers. We first optimize a network architecture to identify top quarks in Monte Carlo simulations of the Standard Model production channel. Using standard fat jets we then compare its performance to a multivariate QCD-based top tagger. We find that both approaches lead to comparable performance, establishing convolutional networks as a promising new approach for multivariate hypothesis-based top tagging.
Vertebrate Development in Space: Gravity Is a Drag (and Has Been for Eons and Eons)
Keefe, J. R.
Brief sketches of developmental biology studies during spaceflight presented are intended to be complete in scope and to provide the reader with an overview of the present status of such studies. Means of evaluating both the direct role of gravity on all processes of mammalian reproduction and development as well as defining the means of assessing indirect transplacemental aspects are considered. The potential present in the development of a spaceflight system/program specifically designed to provide chronic exposure of a representative variety of mammalian species with periodic sampling for multiple generations to fully assess the potential impact of an altered gravitational vector on general mammalian development is also considered.
As marcas da cidade: a dinâmica da pixação em São Paulo The city's marks: the taggers dynamics in São Paulo
Alexandre Barbosa Pereira
Full Text Available O artigo tem como foco os pixadores na cidade de São Paulo. Trata-se de jovens que percorrem as ruas da cidade deixando inscrita em muros, prédios e viadutos a sua marca. Tal prática, porém, não é vista com bons olhos pela população paulistana, que vê na pixação uma forma de degradação da paisagem urbana. Aborda também o modo particular com que estes jovens se apropriam do espaço urbano pelo estabelecimento de pontos de encontro, os seus points. Os pixadores têm uma maneira de conceber o centro e a periferia de São Paulo que dialoga com a dinâmica da metrópole. Embora se identifiquem com a periferia de onde são oriundos, eles têm o centro como importante local de atuação. A pesquisa revelou como eles estabelecem relações de troca, aliança e conflito entre si na cidade.The article has as focus the taggers in the city of São Paulo, who covers the streets of the city to leave written in walls, buildings and viaducts their marks. Such practice, however, is not seen with good eyes by the paulistana population who sees in this writing a degradation of the urban landscape. The article also approaches the particular way by which these young appropriate themselves of the urban space through the establishment of meeting points. The taggers have a way to conceive the center and the periphery of São Paulo that dialogues with the dynamics of the metropolis. Although they are identified with the periphery where they are from, they have the center as an important performance place. The research disclosed how they establish exchange relations, alliances and conflicts between them in the city.
Note related to the elaboration of a coding by key sentences for the programming of a document automatic selection system
Leroy, A.; Braffort, P.
This note deals with the providing of CEA documentalists with a tool for coding studies. The authors first discuss issues related to code selection criteria (author classification, topic classification, and so on), and propose an overview and a discussion of linguistic models. They also comment how diagrams illustrating relationships between words are built up, and propose a diagram representation example which includes different concepts such as conditions, properties, object, tools or processes (for example hardness for a steel, batch processing for a condition, or sintering for a process), and also the introduction of negation. Then, the authors address how basic concepts can be highlighted, describe how key sentences can be built up, and propose an example analysis in the case of a published article dealing with nuclear reactors (in this case, the study of a liquid-metal neutron absorber for the control of a gas-cooled power reactor). Perspectives of evolution are finally discussed
Parsley: a Command-Line Parser for Astronomical Applications
Deich, William
Parsley is a sophisticated keyword + value parser, packaged as a library of routines that offers an easy method for providing command-line arguments to programs. It makes it easy for the user to enter values, and it makes it easy for the programmer to collect and validate the user's entries. Parsley is tuned for astronomical applications: for example, dates entered in Julian, Modified Julian, calendar, or several other formats are all recognized without special effort by the user or by the programmer; angles can be entered using decimal degrees or dd:mm:ss; time-like intervals as decimal hours, hh:mm:ss, or a variety of other units. Vectors of data are accepted as readily as scalars.
The Discourse of a Historian and Administrator in Yevgeny Feoktistov's Notes from What Has Been Heard and Seen
Yelena N. Penskaya
Full Text Available There is no unambiguous perspective on Russia'a cultural and political processes of the second half of the 19th century. Their patterns are largely approached through the lens of the key figures that had a determining influence at a relevant period. Yevgeny Feoktistov was a writer, a journalist, a staff member of the magazines Sovremennik and Otechestvennye Zapiski, the editor of Russkaya Rech and Journal of the Ministry of National Enlightenment (1871–1883, later a censor, the privy councillor (since January 1, 1883, the head of the Central Administration for Printing Press for almost 13 years (1883–1896 (Russia's censor-in-chief, a senator (from May 23, 1896 until his death, and part of Russia's administrative elite. He came an impressive way of personal growth that brought him from the ranks of active liberals and Otechestvennye Zapiski journalists to the position of Russia's censor-in-chief, who signed the order to close that same magazine twenty years later. His biography is partly captured in Ivan Goncharov's novel The Same Old Story. This article investigates the modifications of linguistic peculiarities in Feoktistov's essays and statements and draws his linguistic portrait, which doesn't only explain the patterns of his behavior and everyday style but also sheds light on the shady sides of the events that Russia witnessed in the 1860s–1890s and shapes new optics of the elite circles Feoktistov was part of.
Seals for sealing a pressure vessel such as a nuclear reactor vessel or the like
Bruns, H.J.; Huelsermann, K.H.
A description is given of seals for sealing a pressure vessel such as a nuclear reactor vessel, steam boiler vessel, or any other vessel which is desirably sealed against pressure of the type including a housing and a housing closure that present opposed vertical sealing surfaces which define the sides of a channel. The seals of the present invention comprise at least one sealing member disposed in the channel, having at least one stop face, a base portion and two shank portions extending from the base portion to form a groove-like recess. The shank portions are provided with sealing surfaces arranged to mate with the opposed vertical pressure vessel sealing surfaces. A shank-spreading wedge element also disposed in the channel has at least one stop face and is engaged in the groove-like recess with the sealing member and wedge element stop face adjacent to each other
Types of Sentences in EFL Students' Paragraph Assignments: A Quantitative Study on Teaching and Learning Writing at Higher Education Level
Syayid Sandi Sukandi
Full Text Available This research investigates Indonesian EFL students writing four types of English sentences in their paragraph writing assignments that were posted online in Writing 1 course of English Education at STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat. The analysed types of sentences are Simple Sentence (code: S.S., Compound Sentence (code: C.S.1, Complex Sentence (code: C.S.2, and Compound-Complex Sentence (code: C.C.S. The percentage of each type of sentences that appears in the students' writings within each five genres represents the students' syntactical composition. Moreover, this research focuses on quantitatively analysing the above five types of sentences that appeared in students' assignments in each type of following genres: argumentative, descriptive, process, cause-effect, and comparison-contrast. Data are taken from 10% samples of all population. The finding shows that writing Simple Sentence in paragraphs is a common type of sentence that is used by the students. It indicates that the guiding process to teaching students about writing paragraphs with varied sentence types is important for further development of teaching process of writing.
Process of heat-treating fuels of a bituminous nature, such as shale
Bergh, S V
A process is described of heat treating any kind of material of a bituminous nature usable as fuel, like shale, mineral coal, peat, etc., whereby the fuel undergoes in a retort or the like a distillation for recovering from it the total amount or the greatest part of gaseous or vaporous distillation products. The warm distillation residue is burned, characterized by the retorts, containing the fuel going through, being wholly or partly surrounded by materials to be heated. These materials and the warm distillation residue resulting from the distillation during the burning are moved forward independently one of the other.
Corpus methods and their reflection in linguistic theories of the 20th century
Simon Krek
Full Text Available In the 20th century structuralism established itself as the central linguistic theory, in the first half mainly through its originator Ferdinand de Saussure, and in the second half with the figure of Noam Chomsky. The latter consistently refused to acknowledge analysis of extensive quantity of texts as a valuable method, and favoured linguistic intuition of a native speaker instead. In parallel with structuralism other trends in linguistics emerged which pointed to the inadequateness of the prevailing linguistic paradigm and to theoretical insights which were only possible after the systematic analysis of large quantities of texts. The paper discusses some of the dilemmas stemming from this dichotomy and places corpus linguistics in a broader linguistic context.
Mining of relations between proteins over biomedical scientific literature using a deep-linguistic approach.
Rinaldi, Fabio; Schneider, Gerold; Kaljurand, Kaarel; Hess, Michael; Andronis, Christos; Konstandi, Ourania; Persidis, Andreas
The amount of new discoveries (as published in the scientific literature) in the biomedical area is growing at an exponential rate. This growth makes it very difficult to filter the most relevant results, and thus the extraction of the core information becomes very expensive. Therefore, there is a growing interest in text processing approaches that can deliver selected information from scientific publications, which can limit the amount of human intervention normally needed to gather those results. This paper presents and evaluates an approach aimed at automating the process of extracting functional relations (e.g. interactions between genes and proteins) from scientific literature in the biomedical domain. The approach, using a novel dependency-based parser, is based on a complete syntactic analysis of the corpus. We have implemented a state-of-the-art text mining system for biomedical literature, based on a deep-linguistic, full-parsing approach. The results are validated on two different corpora: the manually annotated genomics information access (GENIA) corpus and the automatically annotated arabidopsis thaliana circadian rhythms (ATCR) corpus. We show how a deep-linguistic approach (contrary to common belief) can be used in a real world text mining application, offering high-precision relation extraction, while at the same time retaining a sufficient recall.
A summary of the low angle x-ray atomic scattering factors which have been measured by the critical voltage effect in High Energy Electron Diffraction (HEED)
Fox, A.G.; Fisher, R.M.
A tabulated summary of all the accurate (/approximately/0.1%) low-angle x-ray atomic scattering (form) factors which have been determined by the systematic critical voltage technique in HEED is presented. For low atomic number elements (Z/approx lt/40) the low angle form factors can be significantly different to best free atom values, and so the best band structure calculated and/or x-ray measured form factors consistent with the critical voltage measurements are also indicated. At intermediate atomic numbers Z≅40→50 only the very low-angle form factors appear to be different to the best free atom values, and even then only by a small amount. For heavy elements (Z/approx lt/70) the best free atom form factors appear to agree very closely with the critical voltage measured values and so, in this case, critical voltage measurements give very accurate measurements of Debye-Waller factors. 48 refs
Darwin's legacy: why biology is not physics, or why evolution has not become a common sense.
Singh, Rama S
Cosmology and evolution together have enabled us to look deep into the past and comprehend evolution-from the big bang to the cosmos, from molecules to humans. Here, I compare the nature of theories in biology and physics and ask why physical theories get accepted by the public without necessarily comprehending them but biological theories do not. Darwin's theory of natural selection, utterly simple in its premises but profound in its consequences, is not accepted widely. Organized religions, and creationists in particularly, have been the major critic of evolution, but not all opposition to evolution comes from organized religions. A great many people, between evolutionary biologists on one hand and creationists on the other, many academics included, who may not be logically opposed to evolution nevertheless do not accept it. This is because the process of and the evidence for evolution are invisible to a nonspecialist, or the theory may look too simple to explain complex traits to some, or because people compare evolution against God and find evolutionary explanations threatening to their beliefs. Considering how evolution affects our lives, including health and the environment to give just two examples, a basic course in evolution should become a required component of all our college and university educational systems.
GBParsy: A GenBank flatfile parser library with high speed
Kim Yeon-Ki
Full Text Available Abstract Background GenBank flatfile (GBF format is one of the most popular sequence file formats because of its detailed sequence features and ease of readability. To use the data in the file by a computer, a parsing process is required and is performed according to a given grammar for the sequence and the description in a GBF. Currently, several parser libraries for the GBF have been developed. However, with the accumulation of DNA sequence information from eukaryotic chromosomes, parsing a eukaryotic genome sequence with these libraries inevitably takes a long time, due to the large GBF file and its correspondingly large genomic nucleotide sequence and related feature information. Thus, there is significant need to develop a parsing program with high speed and efficient use of system memory. Results We developed a library, GBParsy, which was C language-based and parses GBF files. The parsing speed was maximized by using content-specified functions in place of regular expressions that are flexible but slow. In addition, we optimized an algorithm related to memory usage so that it also increased parsing performance and efficiency of memory usage. GBParsy is at least 5 - 100× faster than current parsers in benchmark tests. Conclusion GBParsy is estimated to extract annotated information from almost 100 Mb of a GenBank flatfile for chromosomal sequence information within a second. Thus, it should be used for a variety of applications such as on-time visualization of a genome at a web site.
The modality-switch effect: Visually and aurally presented prime sentences activate our senses
Elisa eScerrati
Full Text Available Verifying different sensory modality properties for concepts results in a processing cost known as the Modality-Switch Effect. It has been argued that this cognitive cost is the result of a perceptual simulation. This paper extends this argument and reports an experiment investigating whether the effect is the result of an activation of sensory information which can also be triggered by perceptual linguistically described stimuli. Participants were first exposed to a prime sentence describing a light or a sound's perceptual property (e.g. The light is flickering, The sound is echoing, then required to perform a property-verification task on a target sentence (e.g. Butter is yellowish, Leaves rustle. The content modalities of the prime and target sentences could be compatible (i.e. in the same modality: e.g. visual-visual or not (i.e. in different modalities. Crucially, we manipulated the stimuli's presentation modality such that half of the participants was faced with written sentences while the other half was faced with aurally presented sentences. Results show a cost when two different modalities alternate, compared to when the same modality is repeated with both visual and aural stimuli presentations. This result supports the embodied and grounded cognition view which claims that conceptual knowledge is grounded into the perceptual system. Specifically, this evidence suggests that sensory modalities can be pre-activated through the simulation of either read or listened linguistic stimuli describing visual or acoustic perceptual properties.
When "Safe" Means "Dangerous": A Corpus Investigation of Risk Communication in the Media
Tang, Chris; Rundblad, Gabriella
The mass media has an important role in informing the general public about emerging health risks. Content-based studies of risk communication in the media have revealed a tendency to exaggerate risks or simplify science, but linguistic studies in this area are still scarce. This paper outlines a corpus based investigation of media reporting on the…
Exploring the Types of SMEs Which Could use Blogs as a Marketing Tool: a Proposed Future Research Agenda
Adeline Phaik Harn Chua
Full Text Available Blogs appear to be gaining momentum as a marketing tool which can be used by organisations for such strategies and processes as branding, managing reputation, developing customer trust and loyalty, niche marketing, gathering marketing intelligence and promoting their online presence. There has been limited academic research in this area, and most significantly concerning the types of small and medium enterprises (SMEs for which blogs might have potential as a marketing tool. In an attempt to address the knowledge gap, this paper presents a future research agenda (in the form of research questions which can guide the eBusiness research community in conducting much needed studies in this area. This paper is particularly novel in that it aims to demonstrate how the heterogeneity of SMEs and their specific business uses of eBusiness technology such as blogs can form the central plank of a future research agenda. This is important because the existing eBusiness literature tends to treat eBusiness collectively rather than focusing on the specific business uses of different eBusiness technologies, and to treat SMEs as a homogeneous group. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this research agenda can form the basis of studies which use a range of different research methods, and how this "big picture" agenda approach might help the eBusiness research community build theory which better explains SME adoption and use of eBusiness.
Oxytocin-induced antinociception in the spinal cord is mediated by a subpopulation of glutamatergic neurons in lamina I-II which amplify GABAergic inhibition
Schlichter Rémy
Full Text Available Abstract Background Recent evidence suggests that oxytocin (OT, secreted in the superficial spinal cord dorsal horn by descending axons of paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVN neurons, produces antinociception and analgesia. The spinal mechanism of OT is, however, still unclear and requires further investigation. We have used patch clamp recording of lamina II neurons in spinal cord slices and immunocytochemistry in order to identify PVN-activated neurons in the superficial layers of the spinal cord and attempted to determine how this neuronal population may lead to OT-mediated antinociception. Results We show that OT released during PVN stimulation specifically activates a subpopulation of lamina II glutamatergic interneurons which are localized in the most superficial layers of the dorsal horn of the spinal cord (lamina I-II. This OT-specific stimulation of glutamatergic neurons allows the recruitment of all GABAergic interneurons in lamina II which produces a generalized elevation of local inhibition, a phenomenon which might explain the reduction of incoming Aδ and C primary afferent-mediated sensory messages. Conclusion Our results obtained in lamina II of the spinal cord provide the first clear evidence of a specific local neuronal network that is activated by OT release to induce antinociception. This OT-specific pathway might represent a novel and interesting therapeutic target for the management of neuropathic and inflammatory pain.
Evidence in clinical reasoning: a computational linguistics analysis of 789,712 medical case summaries 1983-2012.
Seidel, Bastian M; Campbell, Steven; Bell, Erica
Better understanding of clinical reasoning could reduce diagnostic error linked to 8% of adverse medical events and 30% of malpractice cases. To a greater extent than the evidence-based movement, the clinical reasoning literature asserts the importance of practitioner intuition—unconscious elements of diagnostic reasoning. The study aimed to analyse the content of case report summaries in ways that explored the importance of an evidence concept, not only in relation to research literature but also intuition. The study sample comprised all 789,712 abstracts in English for case reports contained in the database PUBMED for the period 1 January 1983 to 31 December 2012. It was hypothesised that, if evidence and intuition concepts were viewed by these clinical authors as essential to understanding their case reports, they would be more likely to be found in the abstracts. Computational linguistics software was used in 1) concept mapping of 21,631,481 instances of 201 concepts, and 2) specific concept analyses examining 200 paired co-occurrences for 'evidence' and research 'literature' concepts. 'Evidence' is a fundamentally patient-centred, intuitive concept linked to less common concepts about underlying processes, suspected disease mechanisms and diagnostic hunches. In contrast, the use of research literature in clinical reasoning is linked to more common reasoning concepts about specific knowledge and descriptions or presenting features of cases. 'Literature' is by far the most dominant concept, increasing in relevance since 2003, with an overall relevance of 13% versus 5% for 'evidence' which has remained static. The fact that the least present types of reasoning concepts relate to diagnostic hunches to do with underlying processes, such as what is suspected, raises questions about whether intuitive practitioner evidence-making, found in a constellation of dynamic, process concepts, has become less important. The study adds support to the existing corpus of
Old and New World arenaviruses share a highly conserved epitope in the fusion domain of the glycoprotein 2, which is recognized by Lassa virus-specific human CD4+ T-cell clones
Meulen, Jan ter; Badusche, Marlis; Satoguina, Judith; Strecker, Thomas; Lenz, Oliver; Loeliger, Cornelius; Sakho, Mohamed; Koulemou, Kekoura; Koivogui, Lamine; Hoerauf, Achim
Data from human studies and animal experiments indicate a dominant role of T-cells over antibodies in controlling acute Lassa virus infection and providing immunity to reinfection. Knowledge of the epitopes recognized by T-cells may therefore be crucial to the development of a recombinant Lassa virus vaccine. In order to study human T-cell reactivity to the most conserved structural protein of Lassa virus, the glycoprotein 2 (GP2), seven GP2-specific CD4+ T-cell clones (TCCs) were generated from the lymphocytes of a Lassa antibody positive individual. All TCC displayed high specific proliferation, showed DR-restriction, and produced IFN-γ upon stimulation with recombinant GP2. The epitope of four of the clones was localized to a short stretch of 13 amino acids located in the N-terminal part of GP2 (aa 289-301, numbering according to sequence of GPC). This epitope is conserved in all strains of Lassa virus and lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV), shows >90% similarity in all New World arenaviruses of clade B, and overlaps with the proposed fusion domain of GP2. Peptides with conservative aa exchanges, as they naturally occur in the epitope 289-301 of the Old World arenavirus Mopeia and some New World arenaviruses, continued to effectively stimulate the Lassa-GP2-specific T-cell clones tested. The finding of a human T-helper cell epitope, which is highly conserved between Old and New World arenaviruses, is of importance for the design of arenavirus vaccines
Pitting type of pretibial edema in a patient with silent thyroiditis successfully treated by angiotensin ii receptor blockade.
Kazama, Itsuro; Mori, Yoko; Baba, Asuka; Nakajima, Toshiyuki
Female, 56 FINAL DIAGNOSIS: Thyroiditis - silent Symptoms: Palpitations • pretibial pitting edema • short of breath • sweating - Clinical Procedure: - Specialty: Endocrinology and Metabolic. Unknown etiology. Hyper- or hypothyroidism sometimes causes pretibial myxedema characterized by non-pitting infiltration of a proteinaceous ground substance. However, in those patients, the "pitting" type of pretibial edema as a result of increased sodium and fluid retention or vascular hyper-permeability rarely occurs, except in cases complicated by heart failures due to severe cardiomyopathy or pulmonary hypertension. A 56-year-old woman developed bilateral pretibial pitting edema, followed by occasional sweating, palpitations, and shortness of breath, which persisted for more than 2 months. The diagnosis of hyperthyroidism due to silent thyroiditis was supported by elevated levels of free thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3), with a marked decrease in thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), and the negative results for TSH receptor antibodies with typical findings of destructive thyrotoxicosis. Despite her "pitting" type of pretibial edema, a chest radio-graph demonstrated the absence of cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure. Oral administration of angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB) was initiated for her systolic hypertension, with a relatively higher elevation of plasma renin activity compared to that of the aldosterone level. Although the symptoms characteristic to hyperthyroidism, such as increased sweating, palpitations and shortness of breath, slowly improved with a spontaneous resolution of the disease, ARB quickly resolved the pretibial pitting edema shortly after the administration.. In this case, increased activity of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system stimulated by thyroid hormone was likely responsible for the patient's pitting type of edema. The pharmacological blockade of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system was thought to be effective for
An efficient implementation of the head-corner parser
vanNoord, G
This paper describes an efficient and robust implementation of a bidirectional, head-driven parser for constraint-based grammars. This parser is developed for the OVIS system: a Dutch spoken dialogue system in which information about public transport can be obtained by telephone. After a review of
A responsible agenda for applied linguistics: Confessions of a philosopher
Albert Weideman
Full Text Available When we undertake academic, disciplinary work, we rely on philosophical starting points. Several straightforward illustrations of this can be found in the history of applied linguistics. It is evident from the history of our field that various historically influential approaches to our discipline base themselves upon different academic confessions. This paper examines the effects of basing our applied linguistic work on the idea that applied linguistics is a discipline concerned with design. Such a characterisation does justice to both modernist and postmodernist emphases in applied linguistics. Conceptualisations of applied linguistics that came with the proposals for communicative language teaching (CLT some thirty to forty years ago propelled the discipline squarely into postmodern times. To account for this, we need to develop a theory of applied linguistics which shows what constitutive and regulative conditions exist for doing applied linguistic designs. A responsible agenda for applied linguistics today has as its first responsibility to free the users of its designs from toil and drudgery, as well as from becoming victims of fashion, ideology or theory. Secondly, it should design solutions to language problems in such a way that the technical imagination of the designer is not restricted but supported by theory and empirical investigation, and that the productive pedagogical fantasy of the implementers of such plans is set free. Thirdly, it must seek to become accountable by designing theoretically and socially defensible solutions to language problems, solutions that relieve some of the suffering, pain, poverty and injustice in our world.
Rapid mineralisation of the herbicide isoproturon in soil from a previously treated Danish agricultural field.
Sørensen, Sebastian R; Aamand, Jens
Mineralisation of the phenylurea herbicide isoproturon (3-(4-isopropylphenyl)-1,1-dimethylurea) and two of its known metabolites, 3-(4-isopropylphenyl)-1-methylurea (monodesmethyl-isoproturon) and 4-isopropylaniline, was studied in Danish agricultural soils with or without previous exposure to isoproturon. A potential for rapid mineralisation of isoproturon and the two metabolites was present in soils sampled from three plots within an agricultural field previously treated regularly with the herbicide, with 34-45%, 51-58% and 33-36% of the added [phenyl-U-14C]isoproturon, [phenyl-U-14C]monodesmethyl-isoproturon and [phenyl-U-14C]4-isopropylaniline metabolised to [14C]carbon dioxide within 30 days at 20 degrees C. In contrast, such extensive mineralisation of these three compounds was not observed within this period in soils sampled from two other agricultural fields without previous treatment with isoproturon. The mineralisation patterns indicated growth-linked metabolism of the three compounds in the previously exposed soils, and doubling times for [14C]carbon dioxide production ranged from 1.6 to 3.2, 1.0 to 2.1 and 1.3 to 1.7 days for isoproturon, monodesmethyl-isoproturon and 4-isopropylaniline, respectively. The ability to mineralise [phenyl-U-14C]isoproturon to [14C]carbon dioxide was successfully sub-cultured to a fresh mineral medium which provided isoproturon as sole source of carbon and nitrogen. One of the soils sampled from an agricultural field not previously treated with isoproturon showed accelerated mineralisation of [phenyl-U-14C]4-isopropylaniline toward the end of the experiment, with a doubling time for [14C]carbon dioxide production of 7.4days. This study indicates that the occurrence of rapid mineralisation of the phenyl ring of isoproturon to carbon dioxide is related to previous exposure to the herbicide, which suggests that microbial adaptation upon repeated isoproturon use may occur within agricultural fields.
Book Review: Backhaus, Peter (2007: Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters; 158 Pages ISBN 9781853599460
Omar Alomoush
future. As pointed out throughout, Backhaus presents a congruent methodological approach, which has added new dimensions to the existing field of linguistic landscape. More specifically, Backhaus identifies three guiding research questions: Linguistic Landscape by whom? Linguistic landscape for whom? Linguistic landscape quo vadis?. At the same time, his definition of the unit of analysis as described above contributed greatly to linguistic landscape research. Although Backhaus relies on former studies, Backhaus has created analytical categories neglected by previous studies, especially linguistic idiosyncrasies, and uses his own terminology, particularly 'part writing' with its main types adopted from the field of musicology: homophonic, mixed, polyphonic, monophonic signs. The same notions with the exception of monophonic signs have been implemented by Reh (2004, but the terminological designations are different. I wonder why Backhaus uses the term 'polyphonic signs', which might be replaced by code mixing or switching in that it may be mainly subdivided into intra-sentential code-switches and inter-sentential code-switches. This work also counts on the observations made by Scollon and Scollon (2003, especially those on code prominence and layering. For example, code preference as an analytical category in Backhaus' quantitative study relies on placement and size in case that there is a conflict, font size outweighs order. As far as my current project is concerned, the relevance of this work comes from the methodological considerations provided, which will help to expand upon Backhaus' paradigm to apply in the linguistic landscape of urban Jordan. In other words, we will adapt and build upon this methodological framework to devise a coding scheme suitable for the linguistic landscape of Jordanian cities.
Agnieszka Grudzinska
Full Text Available Amount of information transferred by computers grows very rapidly thus outgrowing the average man's capability of reception. It implies computer programs increase in the demand for which would be able to perform an introductory classitication or even selection of information directed to a particular receiver. Due to the complexity of the problem, we restricted it to understanding short newspaper notes. Among many conceptions formulated so far, the conceptual dependency worked out by Roger Schank has been chosen. It is a formal language of description of the semantics of pronouncement integrated with a text understanding algorithm. Substantial part of each text transformation system is a semantic parser of the Polish language. It is a module, which as the first and the only one has an access to the text in the Polish language. lt plays the role of an element, which finds relations between words of the Polish language and the formal registration. It translates sentences written in the language used by people into the language theory. The presented structure of knowledge units and the shape of understanding process algorithms are universal by virtue of the theory. On the other hand the defined knowledge units and the rules used in the algorithms ure only examples because they are constructed in order to understand short newspaper notes.
The subjective use of postural verbs in Afrikaans (II): a corpus ...
Kate H
Whereas the first article focused on the development of the postular .... 25. 2. Corpus discussion. Unfortunately, there are few Afrikaans corpora available .... In the third instance, it is assumed that the original meaning of the word influences the .... the extent to which they have become grammaticalised in terms of each other.
ENVIRONMENTS and EOL: identification of Environment Ontology terms in text and the annotation of the Encyclopedia of Life.
Pafilis, Evangelos; Frankild, Sune P; Schnetzer, Julia; Fanini, Lucia; Faulwetter, Sarah; Pavloudi, Christina; Vasileiadou, Katerina; Leary, Patrick; Hammock, Jennifer; Schulz, Katja; Parr, Cynthia Sims; Arvanitidis, Christos; Jensen, Lars Juhl
The association of organisms to their environments is a key issue in exploring biodiversity patterns. This knowledge has traditionally been scattered, but textual descriptions of taxa and their habitats are now being consolidated in centralized resources. However, structured annotations are needed to facilitate large-scale analyses. Therefore, we developed ENVIRONMENTS, a fast dictionary-based tagger capable of identifying Environment Ontology (ENVO) terms in text. We evaluate the accuracy of the tagger on a new manually curated corpus of 600 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) species pages. We use the tagger to associate taxa with environments by tagging EOL text content monthly, and integrate the results into the EOL to disseminate them to a broad audience of users. The software and the corpus are available under the open-source BSD and the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 licenses, respectively, at http://environments.hcmr.gr. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press.
A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia
Patil, Umesh; Hanne, Sandra; Burchert, Frank; De Bleser, Ria; Vasishth, Shravan
Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan,…
Anglophonic Influence in the Use of Sound Symbolism in Italian Disney Comics: A Corpus-based Analysis
Pischedda Pier Simone
Full Text Available This article will explore the linguistic implications of employing and creating sound symbolism (ideophones, onomatopoeia and interjections in Italian Disney comics. It will endeavour to investigate the way sound symbolic forms in both imported Disney US comics and original Italian stories have profoundly influenced the development of Italian sound symbolism in the last century. The diachronic analysis is carried out thanks to the creation of a corpus of ideophones and interjections from 210 Disney stories published between 1932 and 2013. The corpus will allow the author to investigate how these forms have changed diachronically throughout the eighty years under investigation with the final aim of highlighting changes and patterns in both original and translated Italian stories. The unique status of ideophones, confirmed by language, sociological and neurological studies, has led to interesting experimentations but also to complicated dynamics. Certain linguistic settings seem to foster a better affinity towards the device- particularly if compared to Romance languages, such as Italian and Spanish, that often have to rely on Anglophone renditions. Anglicisation has indeed overshadowed previous original attempts. Nevertheless, recent creations, particularly from cartoonists, bear witness to a willingness to stretch language again in order to enhance language iconicity.
Law & Psychiatry: Has the ADA Been Reborn as a Tool of Broad Community Change for People With Mental Disabilities?
Petrila, John
Twenty-five years after enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the U.S. Justice Department has begun to aggressively use the law to compel states to reform community care of individuals with mental disabilities. In this month's Law & Psychiatry column, the author highlights settlement agreements between Justice and the states of New York and Rhode Island that will produce sweeping changes in housing and employment for thousands of individuals with mental disabilities. Is the ADA's original promise finally being realized? The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted with the hope that it would result in the end of segregation based on disability. That promise has been only partially met. However, two recent settlement agreements between the U.S. Department of Justice and the states of New York and Rhode Island promise sweeping change in housing and employment for thousands of individuals with mental disabilities. This column describes the agreements, which adopt best practices as the foundation for community change and which suggest that the ADA may be reaching its full promise.
Zagorovskaya, O.V.
Full Text Available One of the most promising areas of modern research is speech analysis for the purpose of identifying the mental state and assessing the mental health of the speaker / writer. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in solving problems of this kind with the use of methods and tools for computer linguistics and data mining. A separate scientific problem far from its solution and, undoubtedly, requiring consolidation of the efforts of psychologists, linguists and experts in the intellectual analysis of data, is the problem of diagnosing a propensity for autoaggressive behavior (and suicide as an extreme form of it based on linguistic analysis of writing. This problem has not only theoretical, but also obvious practical significance. Using the methods of natural language processing, scientists analyze the texts (mostly English of suiciders and build models that classify the text as belonging or not belonging to the suicider, and reveal the characteristics of such texts. At the same time, if earlier mainly the fiction texts of suiciders were analyzed, then in the newest works scientists study Internet texts (blogs, tweets, Facebook posts etc. of persons who committed suicide or express their intention to commit it. The Russian language has long remained on the periphery of such studies. The article presents the results of studies aimed at identifying the linguistic features of Russian-language texts of persons who committed suicide, as well as persons prone to autoaggressive behavior. The studies used methods and techniques of corpus linguistics, computer linguistics, statistical analysis. Prospects for further research are indicated.
Is There Such a Thing As a "Perfect" Parent?
... socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically. A child's maturity level may be different for the various qualities he is developing, including social skills, athletic abilities and learning capabilities. He might be strong in math but weak in writing (or vice versa), or ...
A Frequency-List of Sentence Structures: Distribution of Kernel Sentences
Geens, Dirk
A corpus of 10,000 sentences extracted from British theatrical texts was used to construct a frequency list of kernel sentence structures. Thirty-one charts illustrate the analyzed results. The procedures used and an interpretation of the frequencies are given. Such lists might aid foreign language teachers in course organization. Available from…
Dependency Grammar in Lithuanian Language Processing
Grigonytė, Gintarė
Lithuanian language is quite in an early stage of language processing. And therefore has a high demand on automated tools like taggers, parsers, word sense disambiguators etc. During the last 10 years only a few researchers were attempting to create a parser for Lithuanian language. However none of them are used in practices nowadays. The process of designing and implementing rule based parser for Lithuanian language is presented in this paper. Rules and constraints of the formal grammar foll...
A Neural Network Based Dutch Part of Speech Tagger
Boschman, E.; op den Akker, Hendrikus J.A.; Nijholt, A.; Nijholt, Antinus; Pantic, Maja; Pantic, M.; Poel, M.; Poel, Mannes; Hondorp, G.H.W.
In this paper a Neural Network is designed for Part-of-Speech Tagging of Dutch text. Our approach uses the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN) consisting of almost 9 million transcribed words of spoken Dutch, divided into 15 different categories. The outcome of the design is a Neural Network with an
Characterization of a branched lipopeptide candidate vaccine against influenza A/Puerto Rico 8/34 which is recognized by human B and T-cell immune responses
Diaz-Mitoma Francisco
Full Text Available Abstract The use of synthetic peptides as immunogens represents an exciting alternative to traditional vaccines. However, to date most of these synthetic peptides are not highly immunogenic. The lack of immunogenicity might be addressed by conjugation between T or B cell epitopes with universal or immunodominant T-helper epitopes. The construction of lipidated peptides, branched peptides, or designs combining both of these elements might enhance the immunogenicity, as they might target Toll-Like Receptors and/or mimic the 3-dimensional structure of epitopes within the native protein. Herein, a recognized peptide immunogen based on the hemagglutinin protein of A/Puerto Rico/8/34 was chosen as a backbone and modified to evaluate if the construction of branched peptides, lipidation, the addition of cysteine residues, or mutations could indeed alter epitope reactivity. Screening the different designs with various antibody binding and cellular assays revealed that combining a branched design with the addition of lipid moieties greatly enhanced the immunoreactivity.
Corpus callosum thickness on mid-sagittal MRI as a marker of brain volume: a pilot study in children with HIV-related brain disease and controls
Andronikou, Savvas; Ackermann, Christelle; Laughton, Barbara; Cotton, Mark; Tomazos, Nicollette; Spottiswoode, Bruce; Mauff, Katya; Pettifor, John M.
Corpus callosum thickness measurement on mid-sagittal MRI may be a surrogate marker of brain volume. This is important for evaluation of diseases causing brain volume gain or loss, such as HIV-related brain disease and HIV encephalopathy. To determine if thickness of the corpus callosum on mid-sagittal MRI is a surrogate marker of brain volume in children with HIV-related brain disease and in controls without HIV. A retrospective MRI analysis in children (<5 years old) with HIV-related brain disease and controls used a custom-developed semi-automated tool, which divided the midline corpus callosum and measured its thickness in multiple locations. Brain volume was determined using volumetric analysis. Overall corpus callosum thickness and thickness of segments of the corpus callosum were correlated with overall and segmented (grey and white matter) brain volume. Forty-four children (33 HIV-infected patients and 11 controls) were included. Significant correlations included overall corpus callosum (mean) and total brain volume (P = 0.05); prefrontal corpus callosum maximum with white matter volume (P = 0.02); premotor corpus callosum mean with total brain volume (P = 0.04) and white matter volume (P = 0.02), premotor corpus callosum maximum with white matter volume (P = 0.02) and sensory corpus callosum mean with total brain volume (P = 0.02). Corpus callosum thickness correlates with brain volume both in HIV-infected patients and controls. (orig.)
Corpus callosum thickness on mid-sagittal MRI as a marker of brain volume: a pilot study in children with HIV-related brain disease and controls
Andronikou, Savvas [University of the Witwatersrand, Department of Radiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Cape Town (South Africa); Ackermann, Christelle [University of Stellenbosch, Department of Radiology, Stellenbosch (South Africa); Laughton, Barbara; Cotton, Mark [Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Children' s Hospital, Children' s Infectious Diseases Research Unit, Stellenbosch (South Africa); Tomazos, Nicollette [University of Cape Town, Faculty of Commerce, Department of Management Studies, Cape Town (South Africa); Spottiswoode, Bruce [University of Cape Town, MRC/UCT Medical Imaging Research Unit, Department of Human Biology, Cape Town (South Africa); Mauff, Katya [University of Cape Town, Department of Statistical Sciences, Cape Town (South Africa); Pettifor, John M. [University of the Witwatersrand, MRC/Wits Developmental Pathways for Health Research Unit, Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Health Sciences, Witwatersrand (South Africa)
Corpus callosum thickness measurement on mid-sagittal MRI may be a surrogate marker of brain volume. This is important for evaluation of diseases causing brain volume gain or loss, such as HIV-related brain disease and HIV encephalopathy. To determine if thickness of the corpus callosum on mid-sagittal MRI is a surrogate marker of brain volume in children with HIV-related brain disease and in controls without HIV. A retrospective MRI analysis in children (<5 years old) with HIV-related brain disease and controls used a custom-developed semi-automated tool, which divided the midline corpus callosum and measured its thickness in multiple locations. Brain volume was determined using volumetric analysis. Overall corpus callosum thickness and thickness of segments of the corpus callosum were correlated with overall and segmented (grey and white matter) brain volume. Forty-four children (33 HIV-infected patients and 11 controls) were included. Significant correlations included overall corpus callosum (mean) and total brain volume (P = 0.05); prefrontal corpus callosum maximum with white matter volume (P = 0.02); premotor corpus callosum mean with total brain volume (P = 0.04) and white matter volume (P = 0.02), premotor corpus callosum maximum with white matter volume (P = 0.02) and sensory corpus callosum mean with total brain volume (P = 0.02). Corpus callosum thickness correlates with brain volume both in HIV-infected patients and controls. (orig.)
Stephan Terblanche
Full Text Available The Child Justice Act 75 of 2008 establishes a criminal justice system for child accused, separate from the criminal justice system which continues to apply for adult accused in South Africa. The Act aims to keep children out of detention and away from the formal criminal justice system, mainly through diversion. When these interventions would be inadequate or unsuccessful, the Act provides for child offenders to the tried and sentenced in child justice courts. Until now there has been little discussion of the details of the provisions dealing with sentencing.Sentencing in a child justice court is regulated by chapter 10 of the Act and section 68 is the first section in this chapter. This section effectively amounts to the "jurisdictional" provision of the new child sentencing system: it not only mandates child justice courts to impose their sentences in terms of the Act, but also provides the first set of boundaries (or the first part of the framework within which sentencing should take place. Despite its brevity, section 68 is not without interpretative challenges. Of course, it has to be interpreted within the context of the entire Act. Explaining this context is the first function of this article. The various aspects of section 68 are further critically explored and discussed.
From a dictionary to an atlas: segmental mapping of the linguistic picture of the world
Sergey N. Gagarin
Full Text Available 'At the heart of any language lies a vision. It embraces the world around us in myriads of complex ways. It is the lifeblood of every people's identity. It is so essential and indispensable that few assets of humankind can rival it for value or timelessness. It is known as the linguistic picture of the world, and it is notorious for being among the knottiest study subjects of language science. No coherent methodology has been proposed to date as to how it should be consistently structured to result in a systemic and navigable map of its core words and concepts. This constitutes a conspicuous gap in contemporary linguistics, which the present article addresses from the perspective of cognitive lexicology and lexicography while engaging the linguistic picture of the world on a segment-by-segment basis. In keeping with the aforesaid approach, one segment at a time is selected, and the discourse that reflects it is analysed with a view to identifying transcendental notions contained therein. The latter are construed as a type of cognitive concepts which epitomise the core ideas inherent in a particular type of spoken or written discourse. Being verbalised by means of relevant verbal fields, these transcendental notions permeate the cognitive and textual fabric of the selected segment of a linguistic picture of the world. By way of demonstrating the feasibility of this approach, a new type of dictionary has been compiled by the author, which captures and reveals in a semantically structured way the verbal side of the transcendental notion "countering" in the socio-political discourse of English-language media. Along with other transcendental notions, such as "facilitation", "communication", "attitude", etc., it is viewed as part of a range of the cognitive pillars which are essential to a limited segment of a linguistic picture of the world, but are by no means reserved to it, stretching far beyond and reaching throughout the vision of the world
The Perilous Life of a Linguistic Genre Convention
Borchmann, Simon
, the descriptions are more informative than the structures hitherto described by text linguistics. Secondly, as historical norms, they are a testimony to the development and change of language use. Thirdly, the descriptions contribute to language users' awareness of the origin of standards, their understanding......The primary, theoretical aim of the article is to present a linguistic text analysis that differs from standard text linguistic approaches by being informative with regard to the linguistic choices and textual organisation that characterise a text as a social act. The analysis is exemplified...... by using texts of a relatively new Danish journalistic genre nyhedsanalyse (news analysis). The secondary, empirical aim of the article is to present a corpus-based, linguistic analysis of central elements of the genre nyhedsanalyse within the Danish system of newspaper genres. Text linguistics is based...
The Effects of Linguistic Context on Word Recognition in Noise by Elderly Listeners Using Spanish Sentence Lists (SSL)
Cervera, Teresa; Rosell, Vicente
This study evaluated the effects of the linguistic context on the recognition of words in noise in older listeners using the Spanish Sentence Lists. These sentences were developed based on the approach of the SPIN test for the English language, which contains high and low predictability (HP and LP) sentences. In addition, the relative contribution…
Meaningful questions: The acquisition of auxiliary inversion in a connectionist model of sentence production.
Fitz, Hartmut; Chang, Franklin
Nativist theories have argued that language involves syntactic principles which are unlearnable from the input children receive. A paradigm case of these innate principles is the structure dependence of auxiliary inversion in complex polar questions (Chomsky, 1968, 1975, 1980). Computational approaches have focused on the properties of the input in explaining how children acquire these questions. In contrast, we argue that messages are structured in a way that supports structure dependence in syntax. We demonstrate this approach within a connectionist model of sentence production (Chang, 2009) which learned to generate a range of complex polar questions from a structured message without positive exemplars in the input. The model also generated different types of error in development that were similar in magnitude to those in children (e.g., auxiliary doubling, Ambridge, Rowland, & Pine, 2008; Crain & Nakayama, 1987). Through model comparisons we trace how meaning constraints and linguistic experience interact during the acquisition of auxiliary inversion. Our results suggest that auxiliary inversion rules in English can be acquired without innate syntactic principles, as long as it is assumed that speakers who ask complex questions express messages that are structured into multiple propositions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Post-Fukushima additional safety assessments: behaviour of French nuclear installations in case of extreme situations and relevance of propositions of improvement. Summary of the IRSN report Nr 679 which has been used as a reference for the permanent Group of experts for reactors and plants held on the 8, 9 and 10 November
This document summarizes the content of a report made by the IRSN and analysing the additional safety assessments performed and transmitted by operators in September 2011. It evokes the international context after the Fukushima-accident, addresses the analysis approach followed by the IRSN, discusses and comments the installation conditions, the robustness of installations with respect to high level risks and to those retained for their sizing, the behaviour of installations in the case of a total loss of cooling sources or of a long duration loss of energy supplies affecting several installations within a same site (case of EDF reactors, of the high flux reactor of the Laue Langevin Institute, CEA installations, Areva laboratories and plants), the capacity of operators to handle a crisis situation in such conditions, appeal to subcontracting
Integrated Spreadsheets as a Paradigm of Type II Technology Applications in Mathematics Teacher Education
Abramovich, Sergei
The paper presents the use of spreadsheets integrated with digital tools capable of symbolic computations and graphic constructions in a master's level capstone course for secondary mathematics teachers. Such use of spreadsheets is congruent with the Type II technology applications framework aimed at the development of conceptual knowledge in the…
Dental and skeletal changes in mild to moderate Class II malocclusions treated by either a Twin-block or Xbow appliance followed by full fixed orthodontic treatment.
Ehsani, Sayeh; Nebbe, Brian; Normando, David; Lagravere, Manuel O; Flores-Mir, Carlos
To compare the short-term skeletal and dental effects of two-phase orthodontic treatment including either a Twin-block or an XBow appliance. This was a retrospective clinical trial of 50 consecutive Class II cases treated in a private practice with either a Twin-block (25) or XBow (25) appliance followed by full fixed orthodontic treatment. To factor out growth, an untreated Class II control group (25) was considered. A MANOVA of treatment/observation changes followed by univariate pairwise comparisons showed that the maxilla moved forward less in the treatment groups than in the control group. As for mandibular changes, the corpus length increase was larger in the Twin-block group by 3.9 mm. Dentally, mesial movement of mandibular molars was greater in both treatment groups. Although no distalization of maxillary molars was found in either treatment group, restriction of mesial movement of these teeth was seen in both treatment groups. Both treatment groups demonstrated increased mandibular incisor proclination with larger increases for the XBow group by 3.3°. The Wits value was decreased by 1.6 mm more in the Twin-block group. No sex-related differences were observed. Class II correction using an XBow or Twin-block followed by fixed appliances occurs through a relatively similar combination of dental and skeletal effects. An increase in mandibular incisor inclination for the XBow group and an increased corpus length for the Twin-block group were notable exceptions. No overall treatment length differences were seen.
Method and an apparatus to control the lateral motion of a long metal bar being formed by a mechanical process such as rolling or drawing
Chang, Tzyy-Shuh; Huang, Hsun-Hau; Lin, Chang-Hung
An adjustable guide, includes two or more mechanisms each having a rotatable retaining element containing a retaining groove with a variable radius in its perimeter surface. The grooves form a guidance path to control the lateral, i.e. non-axial, motion of a long bar moving along a longitudinal axis during a production process.The diameter of the guidance path varies according to the variable radii of the grooves. The guidance path increases in size at a predetermined rate, from a point of origin to an end point on the retaining groove. Rotating the retaining elements causes the diameter of the retaining grooves to change so that the size of the guidance path can be changed to match the diameter of the bar being rolled, size of the guidance path can be changed to fit the diameter of a new bar rolled without having to exchange the guide for a different sized guide, reduce fiction between the bar and the guide, a media, such as compressed air, can be injected between the retaining elements via orifices.Each retaining element is attached to a mounting apparatus. The mounting apparatus can be fixed or flexible. The flexible mounting apparatus includes one or more springs and one or more shock absorbers. A force neutral position of the flexible mounting apparatus is designed to be located on the predetermined ideal bar path line. The flexible mounting apparatus dissipates kinetic energy from the bar thereby reducing the bar's lateral motion relative to the ideal bar path line.The damping ratio of the mounting apparatus can be adjustable to alter the product's vibration mode to enable better control of the bar's lateral motion.
The acute mania of King George III: A computational linguistic analysis.
Vassiliki Rentoumi
Full Text Available We used a computational linguistic approach, exploiting machine learning techniques, to examine the letters written by King George III during mentally healthy and apparently mentally ill periods of his life. The aims of the study were: first, to establish the existence of alterations in the King's written language at the onset of his first manic episode; and secondly to identify salient sources of variation contributing to the changes. Effects on language were sought in two control conditions (politically stressful vs. politically tranquil periods and seasonal variation. We found clear differences in the letter corpus, across a range of different features, in association with the onset of mental derangement, which were driven by a combination of linguistic and information theory features that appeared to be specific to the contrast between acute mania and mental stability. The paucity of existing data relevant to changes in written language in the presence of acute mania suggests that lexical, syntactic and stylometric descriptions of written discourse produced by a cohort of patients with a diagnosis of acute mania will be necessary to support the diagnosis independently and to look for other periods of mental illness of the course of the King's life, and in other historically significant figures with similarly large archives of handwritten documents.
A primer in macromolecular linguistics.
Searls, David B
Polymeric macromolecules, when viewed abstractly as strings of symbols, can be treated in terms of formal language theory, providing a mathematical foundation for characterizing such strings both as collections and in terms of their individual structures. In addition this approach offers a framework for analysis of macromolecules by tools and conventions widely used in computational linguistics. This article introduces the ways that linguistics can be and has been applied to molecular biology, covering the relevant formal language theory at a relatively nontechnical level. Analogies between macromolecules and human natural language are used to provide intuitive insights into the relevance of grammars, parsing, and analysis of language complexity to biology. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A General Overview of Motivation in Linguistics
In recent years, the term of motivation in linguistics study has aroused the interests of scholars. Different studies of mo -tivation have been produced by different scholars. In this paper, the writer organizes the recent studies on motivation in linguistics. the paper is divided into three parts, the introduction of the term motivation, different types of motivation, and theories of moti -vation.
FTA Corpus: a parallel corpus of English and Spanish Free Trade Agreements for the study of specialized collocations
Pedro Patiño García
Full Text Available This paper describes the Corpus of Free Trade Agreements (henceforth FTA, a specialized parallel corpus in English and Spanish from Europe and America and a smaller subcorpus in English-Norwegian and Spanish-Norwegian that was prepared and then aligned with Translation Corpus Aligner 2 (Hofland & Johansson, 1998. The data was taken from Free Trade Agreements. These agreements are specialized texts officially signed and ratified by several countries and blocks of countries in the last twenty years. Thus, FTAs are a rich repository for terminology and phraseology that is used in different fields of business activity throughout the world. The corpus contains around 1.37 million words in the English section and 1.48 million words in its Spanish counterpart, plus 60,000 words each in the Spanish-Norwegian and English-Norwegian subcorpus. The corpus is being used primarily to study the terms and specialized collocations that include these terms in this kind of specialized texts.Keywords: specialized collocation, specialized parallel corpus, corpus linguistics, Free Trade Agreement
Recognizing emotional speech in Persian: a validated database of Persian emotional speech (Persian ESD).
Keshtiari, Niloofar; Kuhlmann, Michael; Eslami, Moharram; Klann-Delius, Gisela
Research on emotional speech often requires valid stimuli for assessing perceived emotion through prosody and lexical content. To date, no comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian is officially available. The present article reports the process of designing, compiling, and evaluating a comprehensive emotional speech database for colloquial Persian. The database contains a set of 90 validated novel Persian sentences classified in five basic emotional categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), as well as a neutral category. These sentences were validated in two experiments by a group of 1,126 native Persian speakers. The sentences were articulated by two native Persian speakers (one male, one female) in three conditions: (1) congruent (emotional lexical content articulated in a congruent emotional voice), (2) incongruent (neutral sentences articulated in an emotional voice), and (3) baseline (all emotional and neutral sentences articulated in neutral voice). The speech materials comprise about 470 sentences. The validity of the database was evaluated by a group of 34 native speakers in a perception test. Utterances recognized better than five times chance performance (71.4 %) were regarded as valid portrayals of the target emotions. Acoustic analysis of the valid emotional utterances revealed differences in pitch, intensity, and duration, attributes that may help listeners to correctly classify the intended emotion. The database is designed to be used as a reliable material source (for both text and speech) in future cross-cultural or cross-linguistic studies of emotional speech, and it is available for academic research purposes free of charge. To access the database, please contact the first author.
The usage of amount, quantity and body in a corpus of biology
Purificación Sánchez Hernández
Full Text Available Grammars and dictionaries usually offer relevant and accurate information to students of a second language. However, the meaning of a textual element is often dynamic and that information is not always based on real usage patterns. New occurrences on the object level in new contexts can introduce novel semantic potentials, so that existing interpretations may be superseded by new ones. Concordancing has been shown to be one of the most important tools to facilitate the understanding of the usage patterns of a language. In this paper we examine the differences between amount, quantity and body as terms expressing magnitude, sum and size in a corpus of Biology. According to some popular dictionaries and grammars, the terms amount and quantity have always been considered synonymous terms for expressing magnitude, size and sum. We demonstrate that, according to our records, they cannot be always used as synonymous terms since they have different patterns of usage. On the other hand there are other forms, such as body, that appear in our Corpus, implying magnitude, size and sum, that are not usually described as having such meanings in dictionaries.
Sulfatide-activated type II NKT cells prevent allergic airway inflammation by inhibiting type I NKT cell function in a mouse model of asthma.
Zhang, Guqin; Nie, Hanxiang; Yang, Jiong; Ding, Xuhong; Huang, Yi; Yu, Hongying; Li, Ruyou; Yuan, Zhuqing; Hu, Suping
Asthma is a common chronic inflammatory disease involving many different cell types. Recently, type I natural killer T (NKT) cells have been demonstrated to play a crucial role in the development of asthma. However, the roles of type II NKT cells in asthma have not been investigated before. Interestingly, type I and type II NKT cells have been shown to have opposing roles in antitumor immunity, antiparasite immunity, and autoimmunity. We hypothesized that sulfatide-activated type II NKT cells could prevent allergic airway inflammation by inhibiting type I NKT cell function in asthma. Strikingly, in our mouse model, activation of type II NKT cells by sulfatide administration and adoptive transfer of sulfatide-activated type II NKT cells result in reduced-inflammation cell infiltration in the lung and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, decreased levels of IL-4 and IL-5 in the BALF; and decreased serum levels of ovalbumin-specific IgE and IgG1. Furthermore, it is found that the activation of sulfatide-reactive type II NKT cells leads to the functional inactivation of type I NKT cells, including the proliferation and cytokine secretion. Our data reveal that type II NKT cells activated by glycolipids, such as sulfatide, may serve as a novel approach to treat allergic diseases and other disorders characterized by inappropriate type I NKT cell activation.
Shkelqim Millaku
A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause. A multiple sentence contains one or more clauses as its immediate constituents. Multiple sentences are either compound or complex. In a compound sentence the immediate constituents are two or more coordinate clause. In a complex sentence one or more of its elements, such as direct object or adverbial, are realized by a subordinate.[1] Simple sentence may be divided into four major syntactic classes, whose use correlates with different...
Production of graphic symbol sentences by individuals with aphasia: efficacy of a computer-based augmentative and alternative communication intervention.
Koul, Rajinder; Corwin, Melinda; Hayes, Summer
The study employed a single-subject multiple baseline design to examine the ability of 9 individuals with severe Broca's aphasia or global aphasia to produce graphic symbol sentences of varying syntactical complexity using a software program that turns a computer into a speech output communication device. The sentences ranged in complexity from simple two-word phrases to those with morphological inflections, transformations, and relative clauses. Overall, results indicated that individuals with aphasia are able to access, manipulate, and combine graphic symbols to produce phrases and sentences of varying degrees of syntactical complexity. The findings are discussed in terms of the clinical and public policy implications.
A grammar of newspaper editorial language: The complex sentence ...
This study sets out to examine what linguistic choices are made at the level of the sentence in selected English Language editorials in a particular newspaper in Ghana – the Daily Graphic. Data for the study consists of 338 selected sentences from 22 editorials of the Daily Graphic published in January 2008. We have ...
Lexicon and teaching: an analysis of the use of less frequent prepositions in a Spanish learners corpus
Jéssyca Camargo Cruz
Full Text Available This article aims at presenting a quantitative research and the analysis of the use of prepositions that are less frequent (underused in a corpus of learners of Spanish as a foreign language. We have observed the use of contra, hacia, enfrente de, excepto and tras through Corpus Linguistics by contrasting this lexical set and a supplementary corpus, composed by normative and descriptive Spanish grammar and by an online reference corpus of Spanish (CREA. Therefore, we present analyses made on a corpus constituted by 276 writings (85.729 words, gathered from two groups of freshman Language/Letras students, from 2011 to 2013. The data were collected with the aid of the WordSmith Tools (version 6 software and its tools, WordList and Concord enabled us to extract the frequency list of the prepositions in the corpus of study, as well as to observe and analyse their respective uses based on the lines of concordance.
Causal-implicative relationships in the Serbian hypotaxis (Complex of generative complex sentences
Vojvodić Dojčil P.
Full Text Available The paper analyzes the causal-implicative relationships in the segmented complex sentences with a "closed" (asymmetric, mandatory bi-situational generative (conditional semantic structure on the corpus of the Serbian language. The generative (conditional semantic structure consists of meaningfully interconnected antecedents and consequents that are based on the principle of subordination. These sentences are characterized with a general causal link due to the specific implicative relationship between the segments that can be realized within dependent clauses with diverse categorically-differential semantics (i.e. causal, consecutive, final, conditional and concessive. The author reaches a conclusion that the given implicative relationships (P ⇒ Q, P ⇐ Q/Q ⇒ P, P ⇔Q, P ⇒ Q´ Δ P´ ⇒ Q represent, in fact, semantic invariants of generative complex sentences. It is pointed out that the structure, formation and functioning of these relationships (sentences are always determined by the interconnectedness of syntax and lexicon. They are based on a general causal adverbial meaning of the conjunctions in a subordinate clause, which are also used to determine the adverbial semantics of a sentence as a whole. The article discusses in particular the aspectual-temporal correlations that are realized in complex sentences with a generative structure. It has been noted very often in the literature that there is no differentiation made among all of the types of the hypothetical conditionality - real, eventual, potential and unreal. The paper analyzes taxis of simultaneity and succession (anteriority/posteriority of the main and subordinate clause predicates in conditional sentences as a special type of the relative-temporal relationships within the same temporal plan. In order to interpret these correlations, the Serbian data was compared to the data in Russian and Polish. It is noted that the Northern Slavic languages (in this case Russian and
All beefed up : an old friend of the oilpatch, Accumap, has been given a makeover
Cope, G.
Accumap software has been used by engineers, landmen and geologists to access and query public petroleum databases for the last 16 years. This article described a new software program designed by IHS called Enerdeq Desktop, which has the ability to respond to queries far more quickly than Accumap. The software is aimed at oil and gas industry professionals who wish to perform studies and need to quickly gather and analyze pertinent well production, pipeline, and battery information. IHS has been collecting and licensing databases in a wide range of sectors over the last decade, and purchased Accumap as part of its strategy to create a platform on which similar systems around the world could be globally accessed. The software is a refinement of the Accumap software, in which large volumes of information can be used to create detailed analysis. The centre map feature is flanked by pull-down menus that allow users to access and display a wide range of data. Maps can be customized to meet land sales, tie-ins, and joint ventures. The cursor can also instantly display producing formations, production history, and a host of other information. Proprietary data can be incorporated into the software, and the system is designed to be installed on a stand-alone unit. IHS plans to launch an updated version of the software in 2007, which will have the ability to integrate land and sale data. Another version will be released in 2008 which is aimed at geologists and geophysicists, and will include release, sub-surface analysis data, and improved data currency. It was concluded that Enerdeq is now being successfully used by a wide range of oil and gas industry experts. 1 fig
How is trunk muscle activity during forward bending in standing in chronic non-specific low back pain patients presenting with psychosocial characteristics such as fear avoidance beliefs, pain catastrophizing or kinesiophobia? A systematic review of the literature
Sørensen, Brian Østergaard
Low back pain (LBP) is the most common single reason for addressing the health care system due to musculoskeletal pain. More than 80% will experience LBP at some point in life; 6 - 10% of those experiencing LBP will develop persistent and chronic pain with great variance in level of disability an...... the importance of not treating all patients with LBP in the same way but trying to provide stratified care has been highlighted resulting in better outcomes....
Elaboration over a discourse facilitates retrieval in sentence processing
Melissa eTroyer
Full Text Available Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher' leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions, processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators, one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'. The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican / Democrat} had voted for…' contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican' or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'. We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for', where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich & West, 1989, providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b richer/more highly-structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe
Corpus linguistics and statistics with R introduction to quantitative methods in linguistics
Desagulier, Guillaume
This textbook examines empirical linguistics from a theoretical linguist's perspective. It provides both a theoretical discussion of what quantitative corpus linguistics entails and detailed, hands-on, step-by-step instructions to implement the techniques in the field. The statistical methodology and R-based coding from this book teach readers the basic and then more advanced skills to work with large data sets in their linguistics research and studies. Massive data sets are now more than ever the basis for work that ranges from usage-based linguistics to the far reaches of applied linguistics. This book presents much of the methodology in a corpus-based approach. However, the corpus-based methods in this book are also essential components of recent developments in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Material from the book will also be appealing to researchers in digital humanities and the many non-linguistic fields that use textual data analysis and t...
1.0 INTRODUCTION In recent years, there ·. has been a shortfall in the
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of florin, llorin, Nigeriae- ... We prese.nt the development and deployment process of a computer-aided learning tool ... implementation of the=software which ·is also aimed at teaching software- -.
Multiple Regions of a Cortical Network Commonly Encode the Meaning of Words in Multiple Grammatical Positions of Read Sentences.
Anderson, Andrew James; Lalor, Edmund C; Lin, Feng; Binder, Jeffrey R; Fernandino, Leonardo; Humphries, Colin J; Conant, Lisa L; Raizada, Rajeev D S; Grimm, Scott; Wang, Xixi
Deciphering how sentence meaning is represented in the brain remains a major challenge to science. Semantically related neural activity has recently been shown to arise concurrently in distributed brain regions as successive words in a sentence are read. However, what semantic content is represented by different regions, what is common across them, and how this relates to words in different grammatical positions of sentences is weakly understood. To address these questions, we apply a semantic model of word meaning to interpret brain activation patterns elicited in sentence reading. The model is based on human ratings of 65 sensory/motor/emotional and cognitive features of experience with words (and their referents). Through a process of mapping functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging activation back into model space we test: which brain regions semantically encode content words in different grammatical positions (e.g., subject/verb/object); and what semantic features are encoded by different regions. In left temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior/superior frontal regions we detect the semantic encoding of words in all grammatical positions tested and reveal multiple common components of semantic representation. This suggests that sentence comprehension involves a common core representation of multiple words' meaning being encoded in a network of regions distributed across the brain.
"Hindi Bayani/Not a Hero": The Linguistic Landscape of Protest in Manila
Jennifer Monje
Full Text Available This article examines the linguistic landscape of Manila during a protest march in November 2016 in response to the burial of deposed president Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes' Cemetery. This article is situated among linguistic landscape of protest research (Kasanga, 2014; Seals, 2011; Shiri, 2015 where data is composed of mobile posters, placards, banners, and other 'unfixed' signs, including texts on bodies, t-shirts, umbrellas, and rocks. Following Sebba (2010, this article argues that both 'fixed' linguistic landscape and 'mobile' public texts are indices of the linguistic composition of cities, linguistic diversity, and ethnolinguistic vitality (Landry & Bourhis, 1997. Through a qualitative analysis of selected pictures produced during the protest march and uploaded onto social media, the multilingual nature of Manila is rendered salient and visible, albeit temporarily, and strategies of dissent are reflective of the language of the millennials who populated the protests.
Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge.
Lau, Jey Han; Clark, Alexander; Lappin, Shalom
The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
"Your character has been robbed. Do you want to sue the other player?" Polish criminal law and the notion of "theft" in a computer game.
Olczyk, Adam
Technological development implies a lot of new ways to commit crimes in cyberspace. Stealing virtual objects (such as magical swords or shoes) is one of them. It is unique because virtual theft combines one of the oldest types of criminal activity with the achievements of modern technology. This article deals with those situations when the actions taken by players stop being protected by the 'magic circle' and become criminal. It will also explore how the Polish Penal Law deals with these mat...
Efficacy of pulsed dye laser treatment for common warts is not influenced by the causative HPV type: a prospective study.
Fichman, Yoseph; Levi, Assi; Hodak, Emmilia; Halachmi, Shlomit; Mazor, Sigal; Wolf, Dana; Caplan, Orit; Lapidoth, Moshe
Verruca vulgaris (VV) is a prevalent skin condition caused by various subtypes of human papilloma virus (HPV). The most common causes of non-genital lesions are HPV types 2 and 4, and to a lesser extent types 1, 3, 26, 29, and 57. Although numerous therapeutic modalities exist, none is universally effective or without adverse events (AE). Pulsed dye laser (PDL) is a favorable option due to its observed efficacy and relatively low AE rate. However, it is not known which verrucae are most likely to respond to PDL, or whether the causative viral subtype influences this response. The objective of this prospective blinded study was to assess whether the HPV subtype was predictive of response to PDL. For that matter, 26 verrucae from 26 immunocompetent patients were biopsied prior to treatment by PDL. HPV coding sequences were isolated and genotyped using PCR analysis. Patients were treated by PDL (595 nm wavelength, 5 mm spot size, 1.5 ms pulse duration, 12 J/cm 2 fluence) once a month for up to 6 months, and clinical response was assessed. Binary logistic regression analysis and linear logistic regression analysis were used in order to evaluate statistical significance. Different types of HPV were identified in 22 of 26 tissue samples. Response to treatment did not correlate with HPV type, age, or gender. As no association between HPV type and response to PDL therapy could be established, it is therefore equally effective for all HPV types and remains a favorable treatment option for all VV.
Deep-learning Top Taggers or The End of QCD?
CERN. Geneva
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08784 Machine learning based on convolutional neural networks can be used to study jet images from the LHC. Top tagging in fat jets offers a well-defined framework to establish our DeepTop approach and compare its performance to QCD-based top taggers. We first optimize a network architecture to identify top quarks in Monte Carlo simulations of the Standard Model production channel. Using standard fat jets we then compare its performance to a multivariate QCD-based top tagger. We find that both approaches lead to comparable performance, establishing convolutional networks as a promising new approach for multivariate hypothesis-based top tagging.
Local cluster of germ cell cancer in a cohort of male automotive workers in Germany not explained by previous or concurrent activities and exposures in farming and forestry.
Schmeisser, N; Behrens, T; Mester, B; Gottlieb, A; Langner, I; Ahrens, W
To examine whether exposures or activities in farming, forestry and related occupations explain the excess incidence of germ cell cancer (GCC) observed among male employees in one of the six car-manufacturing plants that is located in a geographic area where farming is frequent. A cohort based case-control study was conducted among workers in six car-manufacturing plants located in areas with different industrial structure. The study involved 188 cases of germ cell cancer identified through active retrieval in 38 hospitals and 1000 controls, drawn from administrative accounting files, individually matched by year of birth (± 2 years). Information regarding tasks and exposures and potential confounding variables were obtained by face-to-face or telephone interviews. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated using a conditional logistic regression model adjusted for cryptorchidism and other potential confounders. In this case-control study 5.3% of cases and 6.3% of controls ever worked in agriculture or livestock farming. No increased risks were observed for working in agriculture (OR=0.8 95% CI: 0.4-1.6), livestock farming (OR=0.8 95% CI: 0.4-1.6) or for exposure to pesticides (OR=0.7 95% CI: 0.3-1.7), for exposure to fertilizers (OR=0.8 95% CI: 0.4-1.8) and disinfectants (OR=1.0 95% CI: 0.3-2.8). There were no statistically significant increases in risk associated with ever exposure to salt based wood protection agents (OR=2.3 95% CI: 0.6-9.1), working with plywood (OR=1.4 95% CI: 0.6-3.2), coated wood (OR=1.4 95% CI: 0.5-3.9) or working in forestry (OR=1.7 95% CI: 0.5-6.4). Lagging of exposures did not alter the results. The observed excess incidence in the cohort of automotive workers can be hardly explained by previous or concurrent work in farming or forestry. Because of the small numbers of subjects ever employed in farming the statistical power in assessing associations between agricultural work and agricultural exposures was limited
25 CFR 1000.54 - How will a Tribe/Consortium know whether or not it has been selected to receive an advance...
...) Planning and Negotiation Grants Advance Planning Grant Funding § 1000.54 How will a Tribe/Consortium know... Director will notify the Tribe/Consortium by letter whether it has been selected to receive an advance... 25 Indians 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false How will a Tribe/Consortium know whether or not it has...
38 CFR 38.618 - Findings concerning commission of a capital crime where a person has not been convicted due to...
... commission of a capital crime where a person has not been convicted due to death or flight to avoid... of a capital crime where a person has not been convicted due to death or flight to avoid prosecution... committed a Federal or State capital crime of which he or she was not convicted due to death or flight to...
A study of the epitopes on steroid 21-hydroxylase recognized by autoantibodies in patients with or without Addison's disease
Volpato, M; Prentice, L; Chen, S; Betterle, C; Rees Smith, B; Furmaniak, J
Steroid 21-hydroxylase (21-OH) autoantibodies are found in patients with autoimmune Addison's disease (AAD), either isolated or associated with autoimmune polyglandular syndrome (APS) type I and II and in adrenal-cortex autoantibody (ACA)-positive patients without AAD. In order to assess any differences in the 21-OH autoantibodies in these different patient groups, we have studied their reactivity with different epitopes on 21-OH using full length and modified 35S-labelled 21-OH proteins produced in an in vitro transcription/translation system. There were no major differences in the pattern of autoantibody reactivity with the different modified 21-OH proteins in patients with isolated AAD or with APS types I and II, and in 21-OH autoantibody-positive patients with clinical AAD, subclinical AAD and those maintaining a normal adrenal function. Our studies also indicate that the main epitopes for 21-OH autoantibodies in patients with different forms of autoimmune adrenal disease are located in the C-terminal end and in a central region of 21-OH. PMID:9486414
Academic writing in a corpus of 4th grade science notebooks: An analysis of student language use and adult expectations of the genres of school science
Esquinca, Alberto
This is a study of language use in the context of an inquiry-based science curriculum in which conceptual understanding ratings are used split texts into groups of "successful" and "unsuccessful" texts. "Successful" texts could include known features of science language. 420 texts generated by students in 14 classrooms from three school districts, culled from a prior study on the effectiveness of science notebooks to assess understanding, in addition to the aforementioned ratings are the data sources. In science notebooks, students write in the process of learning (here, a unit on electricity). The analytical framework is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Eggins, 2004), specifically the concepts of genre, register and nominalization. Genre classification involves an analysis of the purpose and register features in the text (Schleppegrell, 2004). The use of features of the scientific academic register, namely the use relational processes and nominalization (Halliday and Martin, 1993), requires transitivity analysis and noun analysis. Transitivity analysis, consisting of the identification of the process type, is conducted on 4737 ranking clauses. A manual count of each noun used in the corpus allows for a typology of nouns. Four school science genres, procedures, procedural recounts reports and explanations, are found. Most texts (85.4%) are factual, and 14.1% are classified as explanations, the analytical genre. Logistic regression analysis indicates that there is no significant probability that the texts classified as explanation are placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, material process clauses predominate in the corpus, followed by relational process clauses. Results of a logistic regression analysis indicate that there is a significant probability (Chi square = 15.23, p placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, 59.5% of 6511 nouns are references to physical materials, followed by references to
'Not an ogre':adult music learners and their teachers, a corpus-based discourse analysis
Shirley, Rachel
Adult learners are an under-researched group in music education. Although music education research often uses texts (interviews, autobiographical accounts, survey responses), linguistic analysis has not yet been used in this area. Meanwhile, the internet has become a source of support and expression for adult music learners, through blogs and forums. This presentation describes part of the research undertaken for my MA in English Language, which uses a corpus of online texts to investigate di...
Effects produced by different types of laser in cornea of Guinea pigs: Identification of a laser capable of producing superficial lesions without leaving scars.
Suárez, A C; Suárez, M F; Crim, N; Monti, R; Urrets-Zavalía, J A; Serra, H M
Climatic droplets keratopathy (CDK) is closely associated with superficial corneal erosions and lack of protective mechanisms against the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) during a prolonged period of time. One of the difficulties in studying the pathogenic mechanisms involved in this human disease is the lack of an experimental animal model. In this paper, a study is conducted on the effects of 4 types of lasers at various powers and time conditions on the normal guinea pig corneas in order to select only one laser condition that reversibly injures the epithelium and superficial stroma, without leaving scarring. Damage was induced in the cornea of Guinea pigs using different powers and exposure times of 4 types of laser: argon, CO2, diode and Nd-Yag, and any injuries were evaluated by biomicroscopy (BM) and optical microscopy. Corneas from other normal animals were exposed to argon laser (350 mW, 0.3s, 50 μm of diameter), and the induced alterations were studied at different times using BM, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Only argon laser at 350 mW, 0.3s, 50 μm of diameter produced epithelium and superficial stroma lesions. Some leukomas were observed by BM, and they disappeared by day 15. Corneal thickness measured by OCT decreased in the eyes treated with argon laser during the first week. Using TEM, different ultra structural alterations in corneal epithelium and stroma were observed during the early days, which disappeared by day 15. It was possible to develop reproducible corneal epithelium and anterior stroma injuries using Argon laser at 350 mW, 0.3s, 50 μm of diameter. In vivo and in vitro studies showed that injured corneas with these laser conditions did not leave irreversible microscopic or ultra structural alterations. This protocol of corneal erosion combined with exposure to UVR and partial deficiency of ascorbate in the diets of the animals for an extended period of time has been used in
The French Phonological Corpus with Equivalents in English, German and Turkish, as Part of a New Multilingual Dictionary Project
Yurtbasi, Metin
The aim of this article is to present to the reader a specific sampling from the French phonological terminology collected from relevant literature with their equivalents in English, German and Turkish. There has been so far many linguistic studies and publications in the French sound system both by French and foreign scholars in form of books,…
Syntactic analysis in sentence comprehension: effects of dependency types and grammatical constraints.
De Vincenzi, M
This paper presents three experiments on the parsing of Italian wh-questions that manipulate the wh-type (who vs. which-N) and the wh extraction site (main clause, dependent clause with or without complementizer). The aim of these manipulations is to see whether the parser is sensitive to the type of dependencies being processed and whether the processing effects can be explained by a unique processing principle, the minimal chain principle (MCP; De Vincenzi, 1991). The results show that the parser, following the MCP, prefers structures with fewer and less complex chains. In particular: (1) There is a processing advantage for the wh-subject extractions, the structures with less complex chains; (2) there is a processing dissociation between the who and which questions; (3) the parser respects the principle that governs the well-formedness of the empty categories (ECP).
How Do I Begin to Tell a Story That Has Not Been Told? Anarchism, Autoethnography, and the Middle Ground
DeLeon, Abraham P.
As a testament to the growing literature on autoethnography and my own connections to systemic and direct racism, this article is a therapeutic way to explore my past through the ancient way of telling, testifying, and developing knowledge through narrative inquiry. Testimony opens new ways of looking at the world by participating in a subversive…
Planning in Sentence Production: Evidence for the Phrase as a Default Planning Scope
Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P., II; Yang, Chin-Lung
Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…
Psychotherapy Is Chaotic—(Not Only in a Computational World
Günter K. Schiepek
Full Text Available Objective: The aim of this article is to outline the role of chaotic dynamics in psychotherapy. Besides some empirical findings of chaos at different time scales, the focus is on theoretical modeling of change processes explaining and simulating chaotic dynamics. It will be illustrated how some common factors of psychotherapeutic change and psychological hypotheses on motivation, emotion regulation, and information processing of the client's functioning can be integrated into a comprehensive nonlinear model of human change processes.Methods: The model combines 5 variables (intensity of emotions, problem intensity, motivation to change, insight and new perspectives, therapeutic success and 4 parameters into a set of 5 coupled nonlinear difference equations. The results of these simulations are presented as time series, as phase space embedding of these time series (i.e., attractors, and as bifurcation diagrams.Results: The model creates chaotic dynamics, phase transition-like phenomena, bi- or multi-stability, and sensibility of the dynamic patterns on parameter drift. These features are predicted by chaos theory and by Synergetics and correspond to empirical findings. The spectrum of these behaviors illustrates the complexity of psychotherapeutic processes.Conclusion: The model contributes to the development of an integrative conceptualization of psychotherapy. It is consistent with the state of scientific knowledge of common factors, as well as other psychological topics, such as: motivation, emotion regulation, and cognitive processing. The role of chaos theory is underpinned, not only in the world of computer simulations, but also in practice. In practice, chaos demands technologies capable of real-time monitoring and reporting on the nonlinear features of the ongoing process (e.g., its stability or instability. Based on this monitoring, a client-centered, continuous, and cooperative process of feedback and control becomes possible. By
Psychotherapy Is Chaotic—(Not Only) in a Computational World
Schiepek, Günter K.; Viol, Kathrin; Aichhorn, Wolfgang; Hütt, Marc-Thorsten; Sungler, Katharina; Pincus, David; Schöller, Helmut J.
Objective: The aim of this article is to outline the role of chaotic dynamics in psychotherapy. Besides some empirical findings of chaos at different time scales, the focus is on theoretical modeling of change processes explaining and simulating chaotic dynamics. It will be illustrated how some common factors of psychotherapeutic change and psychological hypotheses on motivation, emotion regulation, and information processing of the client's functioning can be integrated into a comprehensive nonlinear model of human change processes. Methods: The model combines 5 variables (intensity of emotions, problem intensity, motivation to change, insight and new perspectives, therapeutic success) and 4 parameters into a set of 5 coupled nonlinear difference equations. The results of these simulations are presented as time series, as phase space embedding of these time series (i.e., attractors), and as bifurcation diagrams. Results: The model creates chaotic dynamics, phase transition-like phenomena, bi- or multi-stability, and sensibility of the dynamic patterns on parameter drift. These features are predicted by chaos theory and by Synergetics and correspond to empirical findings. The spectrum of these behaviors illustrates the complexity of psychotherapeutic processes. Conclusion: The model contributes to the development of an integrative conceptualization of psychotherapy. It is consistent with the state of scientific knowledge of common factors, as well as other psychological topics, such as: motivation, emotion regulation, and cognitive processing. The role of chaos theory is underpinned, not only in the world of computer simulations, but also in practice. In practice, chaos demands technologies capable of real-time monitoring and reporting on the nonlinear features of the ongoing process (e.g., its stability or instability). Based on this monitoring, a client-centered, continuous, and cooperative process of feedback and control becomes possible. By contrast, restricted
Psychotherapy Is Chaotic-(Not Only) in a Computational World.
Schiepek, Günter K; Viol, Kathrin; Aichhorn, Wolfgang; Hütt, Marc-Thorsten; Sungler, Katharina; Pincus, David; Schöller, Helmut J
Objective: The aim of this article is to outline the role of chaotic dynamics in psychotherapy. Besides some empirical findings of chaos at different time scales, the focus is on theoretical modeling of change processes explaining and simulating chaotic dynamics. It will be illustrated how some common factors of psychotherapeutic change and psychological hypotheses on motivation, emotion regulation, and information processing of the client's functioning can be integrated into a comprehensive nonlinear model of human change processes. Methods: The model combines 5 variables (intensity of emotions, problem intensity, motivation to change, insight and new perspectives, therapeutic success) and 4 parameters into a set of 5 coupled nonlinear difference equations. The results of these simulations are presented as time series, as phase space embedding of these time series (i.e., attractors), and as bifurcation diagrams. Results: The model creates chaotic dynamics, phase transition-like phenomena, bi- or multi-stability, and sensibility of the dynamic patterns on parameter drift. These features are predicted by chaos theory and by Synergetics and correspond to empirical findings. The spectrum of these behaviors illustrates the complexity of psychotherapeutic processes. Conclusion: The model contributes to the development of an integrative conceptualization of psychotherapy. It is consistent with the state of scientific knowledge of common factors, as well as other psychological topics, such as: motivation, emotion regulation, and cognitive processing. The role of chaos theory is underpinned, not only in the world of computer simulations, but also in practice. In practice, chaos demands technologies capable of real-time monitoring and reporting on the nonlinear features of the ongoing process (e.g., its stability or instability). Based on this monitoring, a client-centered, continuous, and cooperative process of feedback and control becomes possible. By contrast, restricted
Toward a universal decoder of linguistic meaning from brain activation.
Pereira, Francisco; Lou, Bin; Pritchett, Brianna; Ritter, Samuel; Gershman, Samuel J; Kanwisher, Nancy; Botvinick, Matthew; Fedorenko, Evelina
Prior work decoding linguistic meaning from imaging data has been largely limited to concrete nouns, using similar stimuli for training and testing, from a relatively small number of semantic categories. Here we present a new approach for building a brain decoding system in which words and sentences are represented as vectors in a semantic space constructed from massive text corpora. By efficiently sampling this space to select training stimuli shown to subjects, we maximize the ability to generalize to new meanings from limited imaging data. To validate this approach, we train the system on imaging data of individual concepts, and show it can decode semantic vector representations from imaging data of sentences about a wide variety of both concrete and abstract topics from two separate datasets. These decoded representations are sufficiently detailed to distinguish even semantically similar sentences, and to capture the similarity structure of meaning relationships between sentences.
The electricity grid as a marketplace. Mannheim tests virtual energy market for generators, consumers and grid operators; Das Stromnetz wird zum Marktplatz. Mannheim erprobt virtuellen Energiemarkt fuer Erzeuger, Verbraucher und Netzbetreiber
Friedrich, Uwe
In future, electricity grids will have to transport large quantities of electricity from renewable energy sources fed centrally and decentrally. Plus, we need greater reserves, storage facilities and flexibility in the electricity market due to the fluctuating supply. In the ''Modellstadt Mannheim'' project, a virtual energy marketplace is being developed for energy generators, consumers and grid operators. Customers can see the source and price of their electricity and influence them directly via the timing and extent of their consumption and the delivery from their own generation systems. This approach also includes gas, water and district heating. (orig.)
A Computerized Version of the Scrambled Sentences Test
Roberto Viviani
Full Text Available The scrambled sentences test (SST, an experimental procedure that involves participants writing down their cognitions, has been used to elicit individual differences in depressiveness and vulnerability to depression. We describe here a modification of the SST to adapt it to computerized administration, with a particular view of its use in large samples and functional neuroimaging applications. In a first study with the computerized version, we reproduce the preponderance of positive cognitions in the healthy and the inverse association of these cognitions with individual measures of depressiveness. We also report a tendency of self-referential cognitions to elicit higher positive cognition rates. In a second study, we describe the patterns of neural activations elicited by emotional and neutral sentences in a functional neuroimaging study, showing that it replicates and extends previous findings obtained with the original version of the SST. During the formation of emotional cognitions, ventral areas such as the ventral anterior cingulus and the supramarginal gyrus were relatively activated. This activation pattern speaks for the recruitment of mechanisms coordinating motivational and associative processes in the formation of value-based decisions.
What is said or how it is said makes a difference : role of the right fronto-parietal operculum in emotional prosody as revealed by repetitive TMS
van Rijn, S; Aleman, A; van Diessen, E; Berckmoes, C; Vingerhoets, G; Kahn, RS
Emotional signals in spoken language can be conveyed by semantic as well as prosodic cues. We investigated the role of the fronto-parietal operculum, a somatosensory area where the lips, tongue and jaw are represented, in the right hemisphere to detection of emotion in prosody vs. semantics. A total
Translation as a Paradigm Shift: A Corpus Study of Academic Writing
Agnes Pisanski Peterlin
Full Text Available In recent decades the increasing reliance on computer technology and the emergence of electronic publishing have precipitated changes in both the production and reception of academic writing. At the same time, the dominance of English as the medium of academic communication has been asserted in all fields of study. While many scholars write their own texts in English, it is not exceptional for others to have their papers translated into English. It is interesting, however, that translation of academic discourse has received relatively little research attention so far. In the study presented here, the question how translated academic texts differ from comparable original English academic texts is addressed. To explore this question, a 700,000-word corpus comprising 104 research articles (Slovene-English translations and comparable English originals is analyzed in terms of references to the entire text itself. The results show considerable differences between the translated texts and the comparable English-language originals.
Predictors of post-sentence mental health service use in a population cohort of first-time adult offenders in Western Australia.
Sodhi-Berry, Nita; Knuiman, Matthew; Preen, David B; Alan, Janine; Morgan, Vera A
Little is known about whether or how offenders use mental health services after sentence completion. This study aimed to determine the likelihood of such service use by adult (18-44 years) first-time offenders up to 5 years after sentence completion and possible predictor variables. Pre-sentence and post-sentence mental health service use was obtained from whole-population linked administrative data on 23,661 adult offenders. Cox proportional hazard models were used to determine which socio-demographic, offending and pre-sentence health service variables were associated with such post-sentence service use. The estimated 5-year probability of any post-sentence mental health service use was 12% for offenders who had not previously used such services, but still only 42% for those who had. For the latter, best predictors of post-sentence use were past psychiatric diagnosis and history of self-harm; history of self-harm also predicted post-sentence use among new mental health services users and so also did past physical illness. Indigenous offenders had a greater likelihood of service use for any mental disorder or for substance use disorders than non-Indigenous offenders, irrespective of pre-sentence use. Among those with pre-sentence service contact, imprisoned offenders were less likely to use mental health services after sentence than those under community penalties; in its absence, socio-economic disadvantage and geographic accessibility were associated with greater likelihood of post-sentence use. Our findings highlight the discontinuity of mental healthcare for most sentenced offenders, but especially prisoners, and suggest a need for better management strategies for these vulnerable groups with mental disorders. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A simple DOP model for constituency parsing of Italian sentences
Sangati, F.
We present a simplified Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) formalism for learning the constituency structure of Italian sentences. In our approach we try to simplify the original DOP methodology by constraining the number and type of fragments we extract from the training corpus. We provide some examples
Owen, L N
The author discusses second generation robots. The second generation is attempting to overcome unawareness by equipping machines with senses and applying artificial intelligence techniques in order that the senses may be used in a human-like manner. The most critical element in robotics is the interface with the environment, both in sensing (input) and manipulating (output). Until recently the curent technology offered much on the output side but was lacking considerably on the input interface. Obviously the direction for research and development is in the application of sensors, the question therefore is how.
The master regulator of IncA/C plasmids is recognized by the Salmonella Genomic island SGI1 as a signal for excision and conjugal transfer.
Kiss, János; Papp, Péter Pál; Szabó, Mónika; Farkas, Tibor; Murányi, Gábor; Szakállas, Erik; Olasz, Ferenc
The genomic island SGI1 and its variants, the important vehicles of multi-resistance in Salmonella strains, are integrative elements mobilized exclusively by the conjugative IncA/C plasmids. Integration and excision of the island are carried out by the SGI1-encoded site-specific recombinase Int and the recombination directionality factor Xis. Chromosomal integration ensures the stable maintenance and vertical transmission of SGI1, while excision is the initial step of horizontal transfer, followed by conjugation and integration into the recipient. We report here that SGI1 not only exploits the conjugal apparatus of the IncA/C plasmids but also utilizes the regulatory mechanisms of the conjugation system for the exact timing and activation of excision to ensure efficient horizontal transfer. This study demonstrates that the FlhDC-family activator AcaCD, which regulates the conjugation machinery of the IncA/C plasmids, serves as a signal of helper entry through binding to SGI1 xis promoter and activating SGI1 excision. Promoters of int and xis genes have been identified and the binding site of the activator has been located by footprinting and deletion analyses. We prove that expression of xis is activator-dependent while int is constitutively expressed, and this regulatory mechanism is presumably responsible for the efficient transfer and stable maintenance of SGI1. © The Author(s) 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.
From Utterance to Example Sentence
Kristoffersen, Jette Hedegaard
This poster will address some of the problems on excerption of example sentences for the online dictionary of Danish Sign Language (DTS) from a raw corpus of dialogues and monologues. In the Danish Sign Language Dictionary every meaning is illustrated by one or more sentences showing the sign...... lexicographers. The sentences were excerpted by hand from a raw corpus of dialogues and monologues – given to us by our group of consultants. The poster describes the process from utterance in a corpus in a larger context to an example sentence in a dictionary, where the purpose of having examples sentences...... for use in the dictionary consists of 11 stages in the DTS dictionary project. Special focus will be on the stage in the process where the sentence is judged suitable for dictionary use. A set of guidelines for what makes up a good example sentence has been developed for the DTS dictionary project...
A lifestyle program of exercise and weight loss is effective in preventing and treating type 2 diabetes mellitus: Why are programs not more available?
Ades, Philip A
There is substantial evidence that type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) can be prevented in high-risk individuals by a lifestyle program of regular exercise and weight reduction. Additionally, there is emerging evidence that new onset T2DM (lifestyle programs to support such behavior change are not widely available. Moreover, health care insurance companies generally do not provide coverage for behavioral weight loss programs to prevent or treat T2DM. Consequently, physicians caring for individuals with T2DM may find it much easier to start a chronic glucose lowering medication rather than attempting to motivate and support patients through long-term behavior change. The cardiac rehabilitation model of disease management, with a network of over 2000 programs in the U.S., is well suited to deliver medically-supervised lifestyle programs. National organizations such as the American Diabetes Association and the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation should support greater availability and use of lifestyle programs for T2DM treatment and prevention. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Usefulness of continuous glucose monitoring for the diagnosis of hypoglycemia after a gastric bypass in a patient previously treated for type 2 diabetes.
Hanaire, Hélène; Dubet, Audrey; Chauveau, Marie-Emilie; Anduze, Yves; Fernandes, Martine; Melki, Vincent; Ritz, Patrick
Hypoglycemia is rare after a gastric bypass and can be taken for a dumping syndrome. There is no report in the literature of the contribution of continuous glucose monitoring to the diagnosis of hypoglycemia in these circumstances. The present case report shows that continuous glucose monitoring can be a useful tool for the diagnosis and the management of such episodes. Continuous glucose monitoring revealed hypoglycemic episodes in free living circumstances that were not present during 72-h fasting. These episodes followed wide hyperglycemic swings. No such episode resumed over 8 months after specific dietary advices and treatment by 50 mg TID of acarbose. Because hypoglycemia can be difficult to diagnose from dumping syndrome, continuous glucose monitoring is a very useful tool revealing the episodes in free living circumstances and can be used to monitor the treatment success.
Computer simulation as an important approach to explore language universal. Comment on "Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages" by Haitao Liu et al.
Lu, Qian
Exploring language universal is one of the major goals of linguistic researches, which are largely devoted to answering the ;Platonic questions; in linguistics, that is, what is the language knowledge, how to get and use this knowledge. However, if solely guided by linguistic intuition, it is very difficult for syntactic studies to answer these questions, or to achieve abstractions in the scientific sense. This suggests that linguistic analyses based on the probability theory may provide effective ways to investigate into language universals in terms of biological motivations or cognitive psychological mechanisms. With the view that ;Language is a human-driven system;, Liu, Xu & Liang's review [1] pointed out that dependency distance minimization (DDM), which has been corroborated by big data analysis of corpus, may be a language universal shaped in language evolution, a universal that has profound effect on syntactic patterns.
Process for the elimination of organic compounds in solution or in suspension from an aqueous solution such as a radioactive effluent
Cordero, G.; Gauthier, F.; Perotin, J.P.; Saulze, J.L.
Organic compounds such as complexing agents (for instance citric acid, EDTA and tartric acid) are oxidized with Co 3+ ions. For this purpose a cobalt (II) salt is added to the aqueous solution and Co 3+ ions required for oxidation are continuously generated by electrolysis. The cobalt salt is preferentially cobalt nitrate [fr
A case of total agenesis of the corpus callosum
Sakamoto, Masanobu; Takeda, Katsuhiko; Bandou, Mitsuaki; Murayama, Shigeo; Sakuta, Manabu
We have reported a case of agenesis of the corpus callosum, in which NMR-CT revealed a complete defect of it, and have examined the localization of the speech center of this patient. The patient is a right-handed 26-year-old man who has complained of headache on the parietal region. His neurological examination revealed only a mild mental difficulty (IQ 77). X-ray CT showed the lateral ventricles to be separated widely and the posterior horns dilated, which were compatible with the agenesis of the corpus callosum. Further, NMR-CT has revealed a total agenesis of the corpus callosum. NMR-CT seems to be highly useful for the detection of the degree of the callosal defect. We have carried out the intracarotid amobarbital injection (Wada's test) for the determination of the lateralization of cerebral speech dominance. It had been reported by some authors that when it comes to the cerebral speech dominance, acallosal patients had no difference between each hemisphere. However, our results have demonstrated a left sided dominance. (author)
In vivo bone strain in the mandibular corpus of Sapajus during a range of oral food processing behaviors.
Ross, Callum F; Iriarte-Diaz, Jose; Reed, David A; Stewart, Thomas A; Taylor, Andrea B
It has been hypothesized that mandibular corpus morphology of primates is related to the material properties of the foods that they chew. However, chewing foods with different material properties is accompanied by low levels of variation in mandibular strain patterns in macaques. We hypothesized that if variation in primate mandible form reflects adaptations to feeding on foods with different material and geometric properties, then this variation will be driven primarily by differences in oral food processing behavior rather than differences in chewing per se. To test this hypothesis, we recorded in vivo bone strain data from the lateral and medial surfaces of the mandibular corpus during complete feeding sequences in three adult male Sapajus as they fed on foods with a range of sizes and material properties. We assessed whether variation in mandibular corpus strain regimes is associated with variation in feeding behaviors and/or chewing on different foods, and we quantified the relative variation in mandibular corpus strain regimes associated with chewing on foods of different material properties versus a range of oral food processing behaviors (incisor, premolar, and molar biting; pulling on incisors; mastication). Feeding behavior had a significant effect on mandibular corpus strain regimes, as did chewing side and the cycle number in a feeding sequence. However, food type had weaker effects and usually only through interaction effects with chewing side and/or cycle type. Strain regimes varied most across different chew sides, then across different behaviors, and lastly between mastication cycles on different foods. Strain magnitudes associated with premolar, molar, and incisor biting were larger than those recorded during mastication. These data suggest that intra- and inter-specific variation in mandible morphology is a trade-off between performance requirements of different oral food processing behaviors and of variation in chewing side, with direct effects
A Linguistic Study of Courtship as a Rule-Bound Social Institution in Pride and Prejudice
Akram Pouralifard
Full Text Available The focus of this research is in the area of the relationship between linguistics and the Victorian literature. Such a study is important in order to demonstrate how the masterpieces of Victorian literature possess the potential to be studied according to the principles of linguistics and how the motives behind many characters' activities can be determined by recourse to linguistics. The findings from this research provide evidence that all human activities follow the same rules which all the human languages are based on and according to which they all function due to their common root in the human mind. The main conclusion drawn from this study is that linguistic principles can constitute a great methodology for determining the real motives behind many activities done by the humans. This paper recommends that linguistic principles can be an excellent methodology by means of which the researchers can study the literary works of other eras in the English literature.
"gnparser": a powerful parser for scientific names based on Parsing Expression Grammar.
Mozzherin, Dmitry Y; Myltsev, Alexander A; Patterson, David J
Scientific names in biology act as universal links. They allow us to cross-reference information about organisms globally. However variations in spelling of scientific names greatly diminish their ability to interconnect data. Such variations may include abbreviations, annotations, misspellings, etc. Authorship is a part of a scientific name and may also differ significantly. To match all possible variations of a name we need to divide them into their elements and classify each element according to its role. We refer to this as 'parsing' the name. Parsing categorizes name's elements into those that are stable and those that are prone to change. Names are matched first by combining them according to their stable elements. Matches are then refined by examining their varying elements. This two stage process dramatically improves the number and quality of matches. It is especially useful for the automatic data exchange within the context of "Big Data" in biology. We introduce Global Names Parser (gnparser). It is a Java tool written in Scala language (a language for Java Virtual Machine) to parse scientific names. It is based on a Parsing Expression Grammar. The parser can be applied to scientific names of any complexity. It assigns a semantic meaning (such as genus name, species epithet, rank, year of publication, authorship, annotations, etc.) to all elements of a name. It is able to work with nested structures as in the names of hybrids. gnparser performs with ≈99% accuracy and processes 30 million name-strings/hour per CPU thread. The gnparser library is compatible with Scala, Java, R, Jython, and JRuby. The parser can be used as a command line application, as a socket server, a web-app or as a RESTful HTTP-service. It is released under an Open source MIT license. Global Names Parser (gnparser) is a fast, high precision tool for biodiversity informaticians and biologists working with large numbers of scientific names. It can replace expensive and error
Bootstrapping a Multilingual Part-of-speech Tagger in One Person-day
Cucerzan, Silviu; Yarowsky, David
...) access to an existing monolingual text corpus in the language. The algorithm begins by inducing initial lexical POS distributions from English translations in a bilingual dictionary without POS tags...
Method and apparatus to control the lateral motion of a long metal bar being formed by a mechanical process such as rolling or drawing
Chang, Tzyy-Shuh [Ann Arbor, MI; Huang, Hsun-Hau [Ann Arbor, MI; Lin, Chang-Hung [Ypsilanti, MI
An apparatus to control lateral motion of a bar moving along a guidance path includes a pair of rotatable hubs each having at least first and second rollers at locations around the perimeter of the hub. The first roller has a first retaining groove of a first radius and the second roller has a second groove of a second radius smaller than the first radius. Each hub further includes at least one guiding element located between the rollers with a guide channel extending in the outer surface. A mounting system allows the hubs to be rotated between first and second positions. In the first position the first rollers oppose each other forming a guideway having a first, enlarged diameter for capturing a free end of an approaching bar. In the second position the second rollers form a second, smaller diameter to match the actual size of the bar.
Sentence connexion and global text structures: a case study of a political text, English leader article
Stein, Dieter; Mattei, Adriana
The paper first gives a brief overview of the history and theoretical status of discourse analysis, or "text linguistics." The main body of the paper consists of a detailed analysis of sentence connexion, i.e. the logical relationship between sentences and larger chunks of text, performed on a newspaper leader article. The results of this local analysis are then related to the global organisation of text structure with components such as macro- and super-structure by way of int...
The Persian developmental sentence scoring as a clinical measure of morphosyntax in children.
Jalilevand, Nahid; Kamali, Mohammad; Modarresi, Yahya; Kazemi, Yalda
Background: Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) was developed as a numerical measurement and a clinical method based on the morphosyntactic acquisition in the English language. The aim of this study was to develop a new numerical tool similar to DSS to assess the morphosyntactic abilities in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In this cross-sectional and comparative study, the language samples of 115 typically developing Persian-speaking children aged 30 - 65 months were audio recorded during the free play and picture description sessions. The Persian Developmental Sentence Score (PDSS) and the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) were calculated. Pearson correlation and one - way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for data analysis. Results: The correlation between PDSS and MLU in morphemes (convergent validity) was significant with a correlation coefficient of 0.97 (pPersian-speaking children.
The low energy photon tagger NEPTUN: Toward a detailed study of the Pygmy dipole resonance with real photons
Semmler, Diego; Aumann, T.; Bauer, C.; Baumann, M.; Beckstein, M.; Beller, J.; Blecher, A.; Cvejin, N.; Duchene, M.; Hug, F.; Kahlbow, J.; Knoerzer, M.; Kreis, K.; Kremer, C.; Ries, P.; Romig, C.; Scheit, H.; Schnorrenberger, L.; Symochko, D.; Walz, C. [Institut fuer Kernphysik, Darmstadt (Germany); Lefol, R. [University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon (Canada); Loeher, B. [ExtreMe Matter Institute EMMI and Research Division, Frankfurt (Germany); Institute for Advanced Studies FIAS, Frankfurt (Germany)
The low energy photon tagger NEPTUN at the S-DALINAC delivers a quasi-monoenergetic photon beam between about 4 MeV and 20 MeV with a resolution of approximately 25 keV. Tagged photons provide the possibility to measure the dipole strength of nuclei in the energy range below and above the neutron threshold. The highly efficient LaBr{sub 3} based spectrometer GALATEA will be used to detect not only the direct decays to the ground state, but also cascading decays can be measured with suitable efficiency. We will measure (γ,n)- and (γ,nγ)-reactions with neutron detectors based on plastic scintillators. This talk provides an overview about setup and goals of the NEPTUN experiment as well as the current state of the commissioning phase. Planned optimizations of the setup, based on the results of a test beam time in June 2013, are also presented.
Evidence that Mediator is essential for Pol II transcription, but is not a required component of the preinitiation complex in vivo.
Petrenko, Natalia; Jin, Yi; Wong, Koon Ho; Struhl, Kevin
The Mediator complex has been described as a general transcription factor, but it is unclear if it is essential for Pol II transcription and/or is a required component of the preinitiation complex (PIC) in vivo. Here, we show that depletion of individual subunits, even those essential for cell growth, causes a general but only modest decrease in transcription. In contrast, simultaneous depletion of all Mediator modules causes a drastic decrease in transcription. Depletion of head or middle subunits, but not tail subunits, causes a downstream shift in the Pol II occupancy profile, suggesting that Mediator at the core promoter inhibits promoter escape. Interestingly, a functional PIC and Pol II transcription can occur when Mediator is not detected at core promoters. These results provide strong evidence that Mediator is essential for Pol II transcription and stimulates PIC formation, but it is not a required component of the PIC in vivo.
[Musical perception and cognitive functions. Is there such a thing as the Mozart effect?].
Talero-Gutiérrez, C; Zarruk-Serrano, J G; Espinosa-Bode, A
Throughout the second half of the 20th century important advances were made in the study of neurobiology related to the processing of music, the differences and similarities between the neural pathways involved in language and in music, the role played by each hemisphere in recognising these stimuli, and the effects that exposure to certain specific pieces of music could have on the cognitive functions. The objective of this study is to review the literature concerning music and the central nervous system, bearing in mind the above-mentioned aspects. Likewise, we also wanted to analyse the reports referring to the Mozart effect and Tomatis, in addition to those dealing with formal musical education and its effects. The increased capacity to respond in visuospatial-type tasks after exposure to music by Mozart has triggered a commercial boom which makes use of isolated data, while the real extent of the effect remains unknown. After reviewing the scientific literature on this subject, it was found that the effects of exposure to music by Mozart (the 'Mozart effect') when they actually occurred, were limited to a specific skill that did not last for more than a few minutes. Formal musical education, on the other hand, shows more permanent positive effects but which can be attributed to the individual attention the pupil receives and to the stimulation in basic skills for general learning.
Agenesis of the corpus callosum and autism: a comprehensive comparison.
Paul, Lynn K; Corsello, Christina; Kennedy, Daniel P; Adolphs, Ralph
The corpus callosum, with its ∼200 million axons, remains enigmatic in its contribution to cognition and behaviour. Agenesis of the corpus callosum is a congenital condition in which the corpus callosum fails to develop; such individuals exhibit localized deficits in non-literal language comprehension, humour, theory of mind and social reasoning. These findings together with parent reports suggest that behavioural and cognitive impairments in subjects with callosal agenesis may overlap with the profile of autism spectrum disorders, particularly with respect to impairments in social interaction and communication. To provide a comprehensive test of this hypothesis, we directly compared a group of 26 adults with callosal agenesis to a group of 28 adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder but no neurological abnormality. All participants had full-scale intelligence quotient scores >78 and groups were matched on age, handedness, and gender ratio. Using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule together with current clinical presentation to assess autistic symptomatology, we found that 8/26 (about a third) of agenesis subjects presented with autism. However, more formal diagnosis additionally involving recollective parent-report measures regarding childhood behaviour showed that only 3/22 met complete formal criteria for an autism spectrum disorder (parent reports were unavailable for four subjects). We found no relationship between intelligence quotient and autism symptomatology in callosal agenesis, nor evidence that the presence of any residual corpus callosum differentiated those who exhibited current autism spectrum symptoms from those who did not. Relative to the autism spectrum comparison group, parent ratings of childhood behaviour indicated children with agenesis were less likely to meet diagnostic criteria for autism, even for those who met autism spectrum criteria as adults, and even though there was no group difference in parent report of current
Chronic constipation recognized as a sign of a SOX10 mutation in a patient with Waardenburg syndrome.
Arimoto, Yukiko; Namba, Kazunori; Nakano, Atsuko; Matsunaga, Tatsuo
Waardenburg syndrome is characterized by hearing loss, pigmentation abnormalities, dysmorphologic features, and neurological phenotypes. Waardenburg syndrome consists of four distinct subtypes, and SOX10 mutations have been identified in type II and type IV. Type IV differs from type II owing to the presence of Hirschsprung disease. We identified a de novo nonsense mutation in SOX10 (p.G39X) in a female pediatric patient with Waardenburg syndrome with heterochromia iridis, profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, inner ear malformations, and overall hypopigmentation of the hair without dystopia canthorum. This patient has experienced chronic constipation since she was a neonate, but anorectal manometry showed a normal anorectal reflex. Chronic constipation in this patient was likely to be a consequence of a mild intestinal disorder owing to the SOX10 mutation, and this patient was considered to have a clinical phenotype intermediate between type II and type IV of the syndrome. Chronic constipation may be recognized as indicative of a SOX10 mutation in patients with Waardenburg syndrome. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
VGH Mannheim: legitimacy of the decommissioning license for a nuclear power plant; VGH Mannheim: Rechtmaessigkeit der Stilllegungsgenehmigung fuer ein Kernkraftwerk
The contribution describes the details of the court (VGH) decision on the legitimacy of the decommissioning license for the NPP Obrigheim. Inhabitants of the neighborhood (3 to 4.5 km distance from the NPP) are suspect hazards for life, health and property due to the dismantling of the nuclear power plant in case of an accident during the licensed measures or a terroristic attack with radioactive matter release.
Legal Linguistics as a Mutual Arena for Cooperation: Recent Developments in the Field of Applied Linguistics and Law
Engberg, Jan
This article reports on some of the recent projects and individual works in the field of Legal Linguistics as examples of cooperation between Applied Linguistics and law. The article starts by discussing relevant prototypical concepts of Legal Linguistics. Legal Linguistics scrutinizes interactions between human beings in the framework of legal…
Representing sentence information
Perkins, Walton A., III
This paper describes a computer-oriented representation for sentence information. Whereas many Artificial Intelligence (AI) natural language systems start with a syntactic parse of a sentence into the linguist's components: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc., we argue that it is better to parse the input sentence into 'meaning' components: attribute, attribute value, object class, object instance, and relation. AI systems need a representation that will allow rapid storage and retrieval of information and convenient reasoning with that information. The attribute-of-object representation has proven useful for handling information in relational databases (which are well known for their efficiency in storage and retrieval) and for reasoning in knowledge- based systems. On the other hand, the linguist's syntactic representation of the works in sentences has not been shown to be useful for information handling and reasoning. We think it is an unnecessary and misleading intermediate form. Our sentence representation is semantic based in terms of attribute, attribute value, object class, object instance, and relation. Every sentence is segmented into one or more components with the form: 'attribute' of 'object' 'relation' 'attribute value'. Using only one format for all information gives the system simplicity and good performance as a RISC architecture does for hardware. The attribute-of-object representation is not new; it is used extensively in relational databases and knowledge-based systems. However, we will show that it can be used as a meaning representation for natural language sentences with minor extensions. In this paper we describe how a computer system can parse English sentences into this representation and generate English sentences from this representation. Much of this has been tested with computer implementation.
A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Contractions by EFL Learners in Argumentative Essays
M. Pınar Babanoğlu
Full Text Available Contraction forms in English are mostly occur in speech and informal writing and they are generally avoided in formal writing types such as academic prose, business reports and journal articles, therefore, most teachers discourage their use in academic essays (Biber, Johansonn, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999. Contractions in English have two types; negative contractions (isn't, haven't, doesn't and verb contractions (I'm, they've, that's. This corpus based study attempts to investigate contraction usage in learner and native English speaker essays. Major goal is to examine whether learners consider essay writing rules in respect of contractions which are accepted inappropriate for academic prose style. Five corpora, three learner and two native English, were utilized in order to analyze verb and not-contraction forms. Frequency calculations of contraction forms in each corpus compared via log-likelihood measurement for statistical significance. Results revealed that learners use considerably more contraction forms, especially negative ones, than native English students in their argumentative essays.
Is the World Floundering or Has She a Vision?
Ashok Natarajan
Full Text Available To all appearances the world seems to be floundering without leadership, direction or even a clear formulation of goals and processes. Yet, paradoxically, amidst the apparent chaos and confusion, evolutionary patterns of advance somehow seem to emerge, universal values become ever more prevalent and powerful as deep drivers and determinates, a more than conventional wisdom seems to guide situations where conventional wisdom is stymied or blinded by dogma and superstition, and susceptible ignorant masses sooner or later choose a course that leads to the future rather than back to the past. This progressive movement is far from steady and often interspersed with retrograde steps and descends into utter folly and vicious violence, but all the same a direction seems to emerge that defies the expectations of scientific projections and doomsday prophets. Despite our adoration of rationality, irrationality prevails even in the halls of knowledge. Bursts of extraordinary creativity follow episodes of suicidal stupidity. Humanity's predilection to self-destruction exists side by side with a serendipitous capacity for creativity and coming to our senses just in the nick of time to avert calamity. Pessimists decry the negative tendency. Optimists affirm the positive. None seem able to discern the pattern or process by which challenges become opportunities and imminent disaster is transmuted into progress. A key to deciphering this enigma lies in the invisible, yet to be realized potentials of the individual and society. This clumsy, costly, painful process is the mark of a still largely unconscious species struggling to discover its raison d'être and the secret of conscious evolution. Utopian ideals discredited by a world disillusioned by false promises exhibit a remarkable regenerative power to advance toward unseen goals. An unrealized vision founded on universal values guides us toward an inevitable destiny we have yet to conceive. Those seed
D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity
Kirby, Kathryn R.; Gray, Russell D.; Greenhill, Simon J.; Jordan, Fiona M.; Gomes-Ng, Stephanie; Bibiko, Hans-Jörg; Blasi, Damián E.; Botero, Carlos A.; Bowern, Claire; Ember, Carol R.; Leehr, Dan; Low, Bobbi S.; McCarter, Joe; Divale, William; Gavin, Michael C.
From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at https://d-place.org) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers
D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity.
Kirby, Kathryn R; Gray, Russell D; Greenhill, Simon J; Jordan, Fiona M; Gomes-Ng, Stephanie; Bibiko, Hans-Jörg; Blasi, Damián E; Botero, Carlos A; Bowern, Claire; Ember, Carol R; Leehr, Dan; Low, Bobbi S; McCarter, Joe; Divale, William; Gavin, Michael C
From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at https://d-place.org) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers
Relative Weighting of Semantic and Syntactic Cues in Native and Non-Native Listeners' Recognition of English Sentences.
Shi, Lu-Feng; Koenig, Laura L
Non-native listeners do not recognize English sentences as effectively as native listeners, especially in noise. It is not entirely clear to what extent such group differences arise from differences in relative weight of semantic versus syntactic cues. This study quantified the use and weighting of these contextual cues via Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors. The j represents the probability of recognizing sentences with or without context, whereas the k represents the degree to which context improves recognition performance. Four groups of 13 normal-hearing young adult listeners participated. One group consisted of native English monolingual (EMN) listeners, whereas the other three consisted of non-native listeners contrasting in their language dominance and first language: English-dominant Russian-English, Russian-dominant Russian-English, and Spanish-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. All listeners were presented three sets of four-word sentences: high-predictability sentences included both semantic and syntactic cues, low-predictability sentences included syntactic cues only, and zero-predictability sentences included neither semantic nor syntactic cues. Sentences were presented at 65 dB SPL binaurally in the presence of speech-spectrum noise at +3 dB SNR. Listeners orally repeated each sentence and recognition was calculated for individual words as well as the sentence as a whole. Comparable j values across groups for high-predictability, low-predictability, and zero-predictability sentences suggested that all listeners, native and non-native, utilized contextual cues to recognize English sentences. Analysis of the k factor indicated that non-native listeners took advantage of syntax as effectively as EMN listeners. However, only English-dominant bilinguals utilized semantics to the same extent as EMN listeners; semantics did not provide a significant benefit for the two non-English-dominant groups. When combined, semantics and syntax benefitted EMN
Test of the hypothesis; a lymphoma stem cells exist which is capable of self-renewal
Kjeldsen, Malene Krag
Test of the hypothesis; a lymphoma stem cell exist which is capable of self-renewal Malene Krag Pedersen, Karen Dybkaer, Hans E. Johnsen The Research Laboratory, Department of Haematology, Aalborg Hospital, Århus University Failure of current therapeutics in the treatment of diffuse large B...... and sustaining cells(1-3). My project is based on studies of stem and early progenitor cells in lymphoid cell lines from patients with advanced DLBCL. The cell lines are world wide recognised and generously provided by Dr. Hans Messner and colleagues. Hypothesis and aims: A lymphoma stem and progenitor cell...
Prediction in a visual language: real-time sentence processing in American Sign Language across development.
Lieberman, Amy M; Borovsky, Arielle; Mayberry, Rachel I
Prediction during sign language comprehension may enable signers to integrate linguistic and non-linguistic information within the visual modality. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated American Sign language (ASL) semantic prediction in deaf adults and children (aged 4-8 years). Participants viewed ASL sentences in a visual world paradigm in which the sentence-initial verb was either neutral or constrained relative to the sentence-final target noun. Adults and children made anticipatory looks to the target picture before the onset of the target noun in the constrained condition only, showing evidence for semantic prediction. Crucially, signers alternated gaze between the stimulus sign and the target picture only when the sentential object could be predicted from the verb. Signers therefore engage in prediction by optimizing visual attention between divided linguistic and referential signals. These patterns suggest that prediction is a modality-independent process, and theoretical implications are discussed.
Laparoscopy in the treatment of cancer of the corpus uteri in patients with metabolic syndrome. A case report
A. I. Berishvili
Full Text Available Today, the common term metabolic syndrome encompasses visceral (abdominal obesity, glucose intolerance, type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM, hypertension, and dyslipidemia. In Europe, the rate of obesity mong the women ranges from 6 to 36 %. In the USA, 65 % of the adult population is overweight and 30 % is obese. High estrogen production in adipose tissue in patients with obesity has been established to increase the risk of cancer of the corpus uteri (CCU by 4 times as compared to that in normal weight female patients. Furthermore, obese patients are at increased risk for DM that is also a risk factor for CCU. A rise in the number of obese patients leads to the population redistribution of gynecological cancer. The increasing number of patients with gynecological cancer is overweight. This patient group has an increased risk from surgery and anesthesia, a higher incidence of postoperative complications, and delayed recovery. Laparotomy increases the duration of hospital stay and the rate of wound complications. The frequency of urologic injuries in obese patients varies between 2 and 4 %. In this patient category, the rate of damage to the large vessels or bowels has also statistically significant differences. The literature highlights a number of complications specific to patients with obesity: trocar damage to anterior abdominal wall vessels, particularly to the inferior epigastric artery, urinary bladder, as well as trocar site hernia. The authors describe their experience in treating CCU patients with metabolic syndrome at the Department of Surgery for Female Reproductive System Tumors, N. N. Blokhin Russian Cancer Research Center. They demonstrate that laparoscopic extirpation of the uterus and its appendages can be performed in patients with third-degree obesity (weighing 174 kg in Stage I CCU. It should be noted that this weight was previously regarded as an absolute contraindication to surgical treatment. Today, the active
29 CFR 1903.18 - Failure to correct a violation for which a citation has been issued.
... 29 Labor 5 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Failure to correct a violation for which a citation has... SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR INSPECTIONS, CITATIONS AND PROPOSED PENALTIES § 1903.18 Failure to correct a violation for which a citation has been issued. (a) If an inspection...
Getting a good night sleep? The importance of recognizing and treating nocturnal hypokinesia in Parkinson's disease.
Bhidayasiri, Roongroj; Trenkwalder, Claudia
When Parkinson's disease (PD) patients are asked about the quality of their sleep, their answers are dominated by difficulties associated with impaired mobility in bed, medically referred to as nocturnal hypokinesia. Nocturnal hypokinesia is symptomatic from the mid-stage of the disease, affecting up to 70% of PD patients, and contributes to poor sleep quality, and increased carer burden. Here we explore four areas of nocturnal hypokinesia that are relevant to clinical practice, namely: manifestations and definition; clinical assessment and objective monitoring; etiologies and contributing factors; and evidence-based therapeutic approaches. In addition, we provide an operational definition of what constitutes nocturnal hypokinesia and outline different methods of assessment, ranging from clinical interviews and rating scales to objective night-time monitoring with inertial sensors. Optimal management of nocturnal hypokinesia in PD begins with recognizing its manifestation by inquiring about cardinal symptoms and contributing factors from, not only patients, but also carers, followed by formal assessment, and the application of individualized evidence-based treatment. Night-time dopaminergic treatment is the primary therapy; however, careful clinical judgment is required to balance the benefits with the potential adverse events related to nocturnal dopaminergic stimulation. Future studies are needed to explore the practicality of home-based objective assessment of nocturnal hypokinesia, new therapeutic options not limited to dopaminergic medications, and non-pharmacologic approaches, including training on compensatory strategies and bedroom adaptations. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Boosted $H\\rightarrow b \\bar{b}$ Tagger in Run II
AUTHOR|(INSPIRE)INSPIRE-00394595; The ATLAS collaboration
Many searches for Higgs bosons decaying to b quark pairs benefit from the increased Run II centre of mass energy by exploiting the large transverse momentum (boosted) Higgs boson regime, where the two b-jets are merged into one large radius jet. ATLAS uses a boosted $H \\rightarrow b\\bar{b}$ tagger algorithm to separate Higgs signal from background processes (QCD, W and Z bosons, top quarks). The tagger takes as input a large R=1.0 jet with calibrated pseudorapidity, energy and mass scale. It employs b-tagging, Higgs candidate mass, and substructure information. The performance of several operating points in Higgs boson signal, QCD and $t\\bar{t}$ all-hadronic backgrounds are presented. Systematic uncertainties are evaluated so that this tagger can be used in analyses.
Fusion reactor in which the hydrogen plasma is heated, confined, and stabilized by oscillating magnetic fields in the center of a spherical or toroidal reaction vessel
The two most difficult problems in the tests for controlled nuclear fusion are heating of the plasma to fusion temperature as well as the safe confinement in a magnetic field. According to the invention, low-resistance, low-inductive, iron-free AC compression coils are provided for dealing with these two problems the coils being arranged on the reactor vessel in such a way that both effective heating and a sufficient enclosure time are possible. It is of essential importance in this connection that the coils are fed with a relatively rectangular alternating current, which is variable with respect to frequency and power. (orig./GG) [de
Angiotensin II increases phosphodiesterase 5A expression in vascular smooth muscle cells: A mechanism by which angiotensin II antagonizes cGMP signaling
Kim, Dongsoo; Aizawa, Toru; Wei, Heng; Pi, Xinchun; Rybalkin, Sergei D.; Berk, Bradford C.; Yan, Chen
Angiotensin II (Ang II) and nitric oxide (NO)/natriuretic peptide (NP) signaling pathways mutually regulate each other. Imbalance of Ang II and NO/NP has been implicated in the pathophysiology of many vascular diseases. cGMP functions as a key mediator in the interaction between Ang II and NO/NP. Cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase 5A (PDE5A) is important in modulating cGMP signaling by hydrolyzing cGMP in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC). Therefore, we examined whether Ang II negatively modulates intracellular cGMP signaling in VSMC by regulating PDE5A. Ang II rapidly and transiently increased PDE5A mRNA levels in rat aortic VSMC. Upregulation of PDE5A mRNA was associated with a time-dependent increase of both PDE5 protein expression and activity. Increased PDE5A mRNA level was transcription-dependent and mediated by the Ang II type 1 receptor. Ang II-mediated activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK1/2) was essential for Ang II-induced PDE5A upregulation. Pretreatment of VSMC with Ang II inhibited C-type NP (CNP) stimulated cGMP signaling, such as cGMP dependent protein kinase (PKG)-mediated phosphorylation of vasodilator-stimulated-phosphoprotein (VASP). Ang II-mediated inhibition of PKG was blocked when PDE5 activity was decreased by selective PDE5 inhibitors, suggesting that upregulation of PDE5A expression is an important mechanism for Ang II to attenuate cGMP signaling. PDE5A may also play a critical role in the growth promoting effects of Ang II because inhibition of PDE5A activity significantly decreased Ang II-stimulated VSMC growth. These observations establish a new mechanism by which Ang II antagonizes cGMP signaling and stimulates VSMC growth. PMID:15623434
Easy-to-read texts for students with intellectual disability: linguistic factors affecting comprehension.
Fajardo, Inmaculada; Ávila, Vicenta; Ferrer, Antonio; Tavares, Gema; Gómez, Marcos; Hernández, Ana
The use of 'easy-to-read' materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines and (ii) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a reading comprehension test. The corpus of texts was composed of a set of forty-eight pieces of news selected from www.noticiasfacil.es, a Spanish digital newspaper that publishes daily journalistic texts following international guidelines for the design of easy-to-read documents (IFLA, Tronbacke B. (1997) Guidelines for Easy-to-read Materials. IFLA, The Hague). Participants correctly answered 80% of the comprehension questions, showing significantly higher scores for literal questions than for inferential questions. The analyses of the texts' linguistic features revealed that the number of coreferences was the variable that best predicted literal comprehension, but contrary to what the previous literature seemed to indicate, the relationship between the two variables was inverse. In the case of inferential comprehension, the number of sentences was a significant negative predictor; that is, the higher the sentence density, the lower the ability of these students to find relationships between them. The effects of the rest of linguistic variables, such as word frequency and word length, on comprehension were null. These results provide preliminary empirical support for the use of easy-to-read texts but bring into question the validity of some popular design guidelines (e.g. augmenting word frequency) to
When Is a Failure to Replicate Not a Type II Error?
Vasconcelos, Marco; Urcuioli, Peter J.; Lionello-DeNolf, Karen M.
Zentall and Singer (2007) challenge our conclusion that the work-ethic effect reported by Clement, Feltus, Kaiser, and Zentall (2000) may have been a Type I error by arguing that (a) the effect has been extensively replicated and (b) the amount of overtraining our pigeons received may not have been sufficient to produce it. We believe that our…
Relations between Formal Linguistic Insecurity and the Perception of Linguistic Insecurity: A Quantitative Study in an Educational Environment at the Valencian Community (Spain)
Baldaqui Escandell, Josep M.
What is the relationship between the awareness of linguistic prestige and the security or insecurity in the use of minoritised languages? Is formal linguistic insecurity (as initially described by Labov) the same as the speakers' perception of linguistic insecurity? Which are the variables related to the various types of linguistic insecurity in…
Addiction is one of the social problems which has a significant role in the spiritual and physical health of the person, family
Fereshte Jaliliyan
Addiction is one of the social problems which has a significant role in the spiritual and physical health of the person, family, and specially the health of the society. One of the main factors for continuance and intensity of involvement in addiction, is that the individuals, the network positive (healthy) relations is low. There fore, in this study, the role of the network positive (healthy) and the network negative (unhealthy) relations in degree (intensity) of the person's involvement in ...
40 years Mannheim power plant chemistry. A retrospect and a prospect with highlights of the last years
Leidich, F.U.; Seipp, H.G.
The power plant chemistry department of ALSTOM in Mannheim was found in 1967 at the former BBC. The presentation will summarise our contribution to the development of new power plant technologies during the past four decades. This also includes the portfolio of power plant chemistry that is also based on the feedback of development, planning and commissioning of all kinds of power plants. The paper is rounded off by an outlook to future power plant engineering. (orig.)
Test beam results for an upgraded forward tagger of the L3 experiment at LEP II
Chemarin, M.; Depasse, P.; Fay, J.; Felcini, M.; Fredj, L.; Ille, B.; Nessi-Tedaldi, F.; Susinno, G.F.
We have tested new scintillator modules with silicon photodiode readout for the upgraded Active Lead Rings (ALR) of the L3 detector at LEP II. Results are presented from data recorded in muon and electron test beams with particular emphasis on the light production and collection as a function of the particle impact position on the scintillator modules. The results from the beam test data will be used for the design of the readout and trigger electronics in conjunction with the required ALR performance as an electron tagger and beam background monitor at LEP II. ((orig.))
Hyperlexia and ambient echolalia in a case of cerebral infarction of the left anterior cingulate cortex and corpus callosum.
Suzuki, Tadashi; Itoh, Shouichi; Hayashi, Mototaka; Kouno, Masako; Takeda, Katsuhiko
We report the case of a 69-year-old woman with cerebral infarction in the left anterior cingulate cortex and corpus callosum. She showed hyperlexia, which was a distinctive reading phenomenon, as well as ambient echolalia. Clinical features also included complex disorders such as visual groping, compulsive manipulation of tools, and callosal disconnection syndrome. She read words written on the cover of a book and repeated words emanating from unrelated conversations around her or from hospital announcements. The combination of these two features due to a focal lesion has never been reported previously. The supplementary motor area may control the execution of established subroutines according to external and internal inputs. Hyperlexia as well as the compulsive manipulation of tools could be interpreted as faulty inhibition of preexisting essentially intact motor subroutines by damage to the anterior cingulate cortex reciprocally interconnected with the supplementary motor area.
Global Education as a Way of Reinforcing the Process by Which a Solidaritous and Just World is Built
Kaniewska, Małgorzata; Klimski, Marcin
Global education is a part of civic education and upbringing that contributes to their scope through the better understanding of various phenomena and global interdependencies that it affords. It thus represents a response to globalisation processes that has as its goal the development of critical thinking skills in schoolchildren from an early age, with a view to stereotypes and prejudices being combated, human life and human dignity being shown values, and emphasis placed on equality, peace, tolerance, solidarity and equity. The paper considers the reasons for including axiological reflection in school education programmes encompassing matters that are global in nature. Also presented are methods by which to achieve postulates of global education at the primary-school teaching level, as well as the results of research into the level of knowledge on key aspects of this education that are present among primary-school teachers.
Taylor vortices in the flow between two coaxial cylinders one of which has a step change in radius
Raju, V R K
A numerical study of the flow between two coaxial cylinders, where one of the cylinders has a step change in radius, is carried out. The inner cylinder rotates and the outer cylinder is stationary. Computation is restricted to axisymmetric motion since instability in flow between coaxial cylinders is found to first occur in the form of axisymmetric Taylor vortices. In the presence of a step, Taylor vortices are found to appear first in the region where the gap between the cylinders is larger and approximately when the local Taylor number in this region reaches the critical Taylor number for onset of instability. Subsequently, Taylor vortices appear in the region where the gap is narrower, and when the local Taylor number in that region exceeds the critical Taylor number. The Taylor vortices have inward flow at a stationary end plate, and outward flow at an end plate which rotates with the same angular velocity as the inner cylinder. Similar results were obtained by Sprague et al (2008 Phys. Fluids 20 014102) for a step on inner cylinder configuration. The step functions as another end plate, if the step size is large. Whereas, it has no effect, if the step size is small. In most situations, these determine whether the number of Taylor vortices in the wide and narrow gap regions is even or odd. When the end plates rotate synchronously, but at a different speed from the inner cylinder, a change from even to odd or odd to even number of vortices in each region occurs at certain rotation rates of the end plates by sudden appearance or disappearance of a vortex at the end of the column. For a certain range of rotation rates of the end plates, the total number of vortices in the entire fluid column is odd, although the end conditions are symmetrical. (paper)
The Interlanguage Interference on the Difficulties of Building Question Sentences by the Second Year Students of MA As Soorkaty Salatiga
Sari Famularsih
Full Text Available This study is aimed to elaborate the interlanguage interference of the difficulties which are faced by 40 second year students of MA As Soorkaty Salatiga in academic year of 2004-2005 in building question sentences and the sources of difficulties. The research is conducted by such kind of test. The total number of test are 20 items, consist of 5 yes-no questions, 5 W-H questions, and 10 tag questions which is done in a written essay form. Based on the analysis, the result shows some conclusions. Firstly, the researcher finds the types of difficulties problems are faced by the students in building question mastery, such as: (1 building yes-no question sentences in translation the word "apakah", that is related with the use of to be. (2 Building interrogative word question sentences in translation the words "apa", "kapan", "milik siapa", etc. That are related with the use of "what", "when", "whose", etc. (3 Completing the tag question sentences with the proper auxiliary based on tense of the sentences. The most difficulties in building question sentences are especially in yes-no question form by using the word "apakah". In the term of interlanguage, the students' errors are mostly included in expressing meaning by the words and grammar of the first language. The source of difficulties which have been analyzed are mostly caused by inter lingual and intra lingual transfer.
Preventive Effect of Boiogito on Metabolic Disorders in the TSOD Mouse, a Model of Spontaneous Obese Type II Diabetes Mellitus
Tsutomu Shimada
Full Text Available "Boiogito" is a Kampo preparation which has been used since ancient times in patients with obesity of the "asthenic constitution" type, so-called "watery obesity", and its effect has been recognized clinically. In this study, we investigated the anti-obesity effect of Boiogito in the TSOD (Tsumura Suzuki Obese Diabetes mouse, a model of spontaneous obese type II diabetes mellitus. Boiogito showed a significant anti-obesity effect in TSOD mice by suppressing body weight gain in a dosage-dependent manner. In addition, Boiogito showed significant ameliorative effects on features of metabolic syndrome such as hyperinsulinemia, fasting hyperglycemia and abnormal lipid metabolism. Regarding lipid accumulation in TSOD mice, Boiogito showed a significant suppressive effect on accumulation of subcutaneous fat, but the effect on the visceral fat accumulation that constitutes the basis of metabolic syndrome was weak, and the suppressive effect on insulin resistance was also weak. Furthermore, Boiogito did not alleviate the abnormal glucose tolerance, the hypertension or the peripheral neuropathy characteristically developed in the TSOD mice. In contrast, in the TSNO (Tsumura Suzuki Non-Obesity mice used as controls, Boiogito suppressed body weight gain and accumulation of subcutaneous and visceral fat. The above results suggested that Boiogito is effective as an anti-obesity drug against obesity of the "asthenic constitution" type in which subcutaneous fat accumulates, but cannot be expected to exert a preventive effect against various symptoms of metabolic syndrome that are based on visceral fat accumulation.
Coxsackievirus B4 as a Causative Agent of Diabetes Mellitus Type 1: Is There a Role of Inefficiently Treated Drinking Water and Sewage in Virus Spreading?
El-Senousy, Waled M; Abdel-Moneim, Adel; Abdel-Latif, Mahmoud; El-Hefnawy, Mohamed H; Khalil, Rehab G
This study proposed to detect the enterovirus (EV) infection in children with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D) and to assess the role of insufficiently treated water and sewage as sources of viral spreading. Three hundred and eighty-two serum specimens of children with T1D, one hundred serum specimens of children who did not suffer from T1D as control, and forty-eight water and sewage samples were screened for EV RNA using nested RT-PCR. The number of genome copies and infectious units of EVs in raw and treated sewage and water samples were investigated using real-time (RT)-PCR and plaque assay, respectively. T1D markers [Fasting blood glucose (FBG), HbA1c, and C-peptide], in addition to anti-Coxsackie A & B viruses (CVs A & B) IgG, were measured in control, T1D-negative EV (T1D-EV - ), and T1D-positive EV (T1D-EV + ) children specimens. The prevalence of EV genome was significantly higher in diabetic children (26.2%, 100 out of 382) than the control children (0%, 0 out of 100). FBG and HbA1c in T1D-EV - and T1D-EV + children specimens were significantly higher than those in the control group, while c-peptide in T1D-EV - and T1D-EV + children specimens was significantly lower than that in the control (n = 100; p water and treated sewage samples was 25 and 33.3%, respectively. The prevalence of EV infectious units in drinking water and treated sewage samples was 8.5 and 25%, respectively. Quantification assays were performed to assess the capabilities of both wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and water treatment plants (WTPs) to remove EV. The reduction of EV genome in Zenin WWTP ranged from 2 to 4 log 10 , while the reduction of EV infectious units ranged from 1 to 4 log 10 . The reduction of EV genome in El-Giza WTP ranged from 1 to 3 log 10 , while the reduction of EV infectious units ranged from 1 to 2 log 10 . This capability of reduction did not prevent the appearance of infectious EV in treated sewage and drinking water. Plaque purification was performed
A Computational Model of the SC Multisensory Neurons: Integrative Capabilities, Maturation, and Plasticity
Cristiano Cuppini
Full Text Available Different cortical and subcortical structures present neurons able to integrate stimuli of different sensory modalities. Among the others, one of the most investigated integrative regions is the Superior Colliculus (SC, a midbrain structure whose aim is to guide attentive behaviour and motor responses toward external events. Despite the large amount of experimental data in the literature, the neural mechanisms underlying the SC response are not completely understood. Moreover, recent data indicate that multisensory integration ability is the result of maturation after birth, depending on sensory experience. Mathematical models and computer simulations can be of value to investigate and clarify these phenomena. In the last few years, several models have been implemented to shed light on these mechanisms and to gain a deeper comprehension of the SC capabilities. Here, a neural network model (Cuppini et al., 2010 is extensively discussed. The model considers visual-auditory interaction, and is able to reproduce and explain the main physiological features of multisensory integration in SC neurons, and their acquisition during postnatal life. To reproduce a neonatal condition, the model assumes that during early life: 1 cortical-SC synapses are present but not active; 2 in this phase, responses are driven by non-cortical inputs with very large receptive fields (RFs and little spatial tuning; 3 a slight spatial preference for the visual inputs is present. Sensory experience is modeled by a "training phase" in which the network is repeatedly exposed to modality-specific and cross-modal stimuli at different locations. As results, Cortical-SC synapses are crafted during this period thanks to the Hebbian rules of potentiation and depression, RFs are reduced in size, and neurons exhibit integrative capabilities to cross-modal stimuli, such as multisensory enhancement, inverse effectiveness, and multisensory depression. The utility of the modelling
A shared neural substrate for mentalizing and the affective component of sentence comprehension.
Pierre-Yves Hervé
Full Text Available Using event-related fMRI in a sample of 42 healthy participants, we compared the cerebral activity maps obtained when classifying spoken sentences based on the mental content of the main character (belief, deception or empathy or on the emotional tonality of the sentence (happiness, anger or sadness. To control for the effects of different syntactic constructions (such as embedded clauses in belief sentences, we subtracted from each map the BOLD activations obtained during plausibility judgments on structurally matching sentences, devoid of emotions or ToM. The obtained theory of mind (ToM and emotional speech comprehension networks overlapped in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, right anterior temporal lobe, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the left inferior frontal sulcus. These regions form a ToM network, which contributes to the emotional component of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared with the ToM task, in which the sentences were enounced on a neutral tone, the emotional sentence classification task, in which the sentences were play-acted, was associated with a greater activity in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in line with the presence of emotional prosody. Besides, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was more active during emotional than ToM sentence processing. This region may link mental state representations with verbal and prosodic emotional cues. Compared with emotional sentence classification, ToM was associated with greater activity in the caudate nucleus, paracingulate cortex, and superior frontal and parietal regions, in line with behavioral data showing that ToM sentence comprehension was a more demanding task.
Data modelling in corpus linguistics: how low may we go?
van Velzen, Marjolein H; Nanetti, Luca; de Deyn, Peter P
Corpus linguistics allows researchers to process millions of words. However, the more words we analyse, i.e., the more data we acquire, the more urgent the call for correct data interpretation becomes. In recent years, a number of studies saw the light attempting to profile some prolific authors' linguistic decline, linking this decline to pathological conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, in line with the nature of the (literary) work that was analysed, numbers alone do not suffice to 'tell the story'. The one and only objective of using statistical methods for the analysis of research data is to tell a story--what happened, when, and how. In the present study we describe a computerised but individualised approach to linguistic analysis--we propose a unifying approach, with firm grounds in Information Theory, that, independently from the specific parameter being investigated, guarantees to produce a robust model of the temporal dynamics of an author's linguistic richness over his or her lifetime. We applied this methodology to six renowned authors with an active writing life of four decades or more: Iris Murdoch, Gerard Reve, Hugo Claus, Agatha Christie, P.D. James, and Harry Mulisch. The first three were diagnosed with probable Alzheimer Disease, confirmed post-mortem for Iris Murdoch; this same condition was hypothesized for Agatha Christie. Our analysis reveals different evolutive patterns of lexical richness, in turn plausibly correlated with the authors' different conditions. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A case of the corpus callosum and alien hand syndrome from a discrete paracallosal lesion.
Faber, Raymond; Azad, Alvi; Reinsvold, Richard
Here we present a patient with an isolated paracallosal brain lesion who exhibited behavioral changes associated with the corpus callosum syndrome (CCS) including features of the alien hand syndrome (AHS). The CCS is also known as the split-brain syndrome, the syndrome of hemisphere disconnection, the syndrome of brain bisection and the syndrome of the cerebral commissures. Because most reported cases of CCS were caused by tumors which extended beyond the corpus callosum (CC) and did not always induce a complete disconnection, there was much controversy about the role of the CC and the existence of a specific CCS. Aside from surgically based cases, the full complement of the CCS is infrequently clinically encountered. The patient described has a classic CCS from natural causes. This case report is unique in exhibiting a complete CCS with AHS secondary to an ischemic event affecting the left pericallosal region. To our knowledge this is the first case report of such a combination.
The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach
Temperley, David
Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the "multi-head" view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct…
First Measurement of the E Double-polarization Observable for the γη to Κ+Σ- with CLAS & a New Forward Tagger Hodoscope for CLAS12
Fleming, Jamie [Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom)
Establishing the excitation spectrum of the nucleon would be a key advance to further our understanding of nucleon structure and Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Recent theoretical advances allow predictions of the excitation spectrum of the nucleon and other nucleon properties directly from QCD in the nonperturbative regime, via numerical methods (such as Lattice QCD), complementing existing constituent quark models. There is an ongoing world programme in meson photoproduction from the nucleon, which has already led to a number of nucleon resonances being discovered and established. This advance has largely been made possible by the first accurate measurement of polarisation observables. Available data has been obtained for proton targets, whereas for a complete picture of meson photoproduction, data from the neutron must also be obtained. This is important, as nucleon resonances can have very different photo-couplings to the proton and neutron. This thesis presents the rst measurement of the E double-polarisation observable for the exclusive γη -> Κ+Σ- reaction using a polarised hydrogendeuterium target from the g14 run period at CLAS. Circularly polarised photons of energies between 1:1 and 2:3 GeV were used, with results shown in 200 MeV bins in E and bins of 0:4 in cosθC.M./Κ+ . Further to this, CLAS has undergone a detector upgrade in order to facilitate electrons of up to 12 GeV from Jefferson Lab's upgraded accelerator. Essential to this, is a new system for tagging quasi-real photons by detecting electrons scattered at very small angles. My work includes signicant contributions to the design, realisation and construction of a hodoscope for this forward photon tagging apparatus. Presented in this thesis is a comprehensive overview of my work in developing and constructing the scintillating hodoscope for the CLAS12 Forward Tagger.
Platelet cytosolic 44-kDa protein is a substrate of cholera toxin-induced ADP-ribosylation and is not recognized by antisera against the α subunit of the stimulatory guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory protein
Molina Y Vedia, L.M.; Reep, B.R.; Lapetina, E.G.
ADP-ribosylation induced by cholera toxin and pertussis toxin was studied in particulate and cytosolic fractions of human platelets. Platelets were disrupted by a cycle of freezing and thawing in the presence of a hyposmotic buffer containing protease inhibitors. In both fractions, the A subunit of cholera toxin ADP-ribosylates two proteins with molecular masses of 42 and 44 kDa, whereas pertussis toxin ADP-ribosylates a 41-kDa polypeptide. Two antisera against the α subunit of the stimulatory guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory protein recognize only the 42-kDa polypeptide. Cholera toxin-induced ADP-ribosylation of the 42- and 44-kDa proteins is reduced by pretreatment of platelets with iloprost, a prostacyclin analog. The 44-kDa protein, which is substrate of cholera toxin, could be extracted completely from the membrane and recovered in the cytosolic fraction when the cells were disrupted by Dounce homogenization and the pellet was extensively washed. A 44-kDa protein can also be labeled with 8-azidoguanosine 5'-[α- 32 P]triphosphate in the cytosol and membranes. These finding indicate that cholera and pertussis toxins produced covalent modifications of proteins present in particulate and cytosolic platelet fractions. Moreover, the 44-kDa protein might be an α subunit of a guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory protein that is not recognized by available antisera
Exploring the Types of SMEs Which Could use Blogs as a Marketing Tool: a Proposed Future Research Agenda
Adeline Phaik Harn Chua; Kenneth R. Deans; Craig M. Parker
Blogs appear to be gaining momentum as a marketing tool which can be used by organisations for such strategies and processes as branding, managing reputation, developing customer trust and loyalty, niche marketing, gathering marketing intelligence and promoting their online presence. There has been limited academic research in this area, and most significantly concerning the types of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for which blogs might have potential as a marketing tool. In an attempt to...
Increased Serum Pepsinogen II Level as a Marker of Pangastritis and Corpus-Predominant Gastritis in Gastric Cancer Prevention.
Massarrat, Sadegh; Haj-Sheykholeslami, Arghavan
Serum pepsinogen I and II are considered as indicators of changes in gastric morphology. Important publications from the last decades are reviewed with regard to the serum level of these biomarkers for the diagnosis of normal gastric mucosa, diffuse gastritis and its change to atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia as well as gastric cancer. Due to the low sensitivity of serum biomarkers for diagnosis of gastric cancer, especially at its early stage and the poor prognosis of the tumor at the time of diagnosis, its prevention by eradication of H. pylori remains the mandatory strategy. On the other hand, the severity of regression and non-reversibility of precancerous lesions and intestinal metaplasia in gastric mucosa through eradication of H. pylori make it necessary to diagnose diffuse gastritis at its early stage. Increased serum pepsinogen II compared to normal serum pepsinogen I seems to indicate the presence of diffuse gastritis without precancerous lesions suitable for eradication of H. pylori infection, when it is serologically positive. A diagram illustrates the strategy of this therapeutic measure depending on the age of people and the level of serum biomarkers in areas with high gastric cancer prevalence.
Is There a Geography of Thought for East-West Differences? Why or Why Not?
Chan, Ho Mun; Yan, Hektor K. T.
Richard Nisbett's "The Geography of Thought" is one of several recent works that have highlighted purported differences in thinking patterns between East Asians and Westerners on the basis of empirical research. This has implications for teaching and for other issues such as cultural integration. Based on a framework consisting of three distinct…
Techniques for Automated Testing of Lola Industrial Robot Language Parser
M. M. Lutovac
Full Text Available The accuracy of parsing execution directly affects the accuracy of semantic analysis, optimization and object code generation. Therefore, parser testing represents the basis of compiler testing. It should include tests for correct and expected, but also for unexpected and invalid cases. Techniques for testing the parser, as well as algorithms and tools for test sentences generation, are discussed in this paper. The methodology for initial testing of a newly developed compiler is proposed. Generation of negative test sentences by modifying the original language grammar is described. Positive and negative test cases generated by Grow, Purdom's algorithm with and without length control, CDRC-P algorithm and CDRC-P algorithm with length control are applied to the testing of L-IRL robot programming language. For this purpose two different tools for generation of test sentences are used. Based on the presented analysis of possible solutions, the appropriate method can be chosen for testing the parser for smaller grammars with many recursive rules.
Sentence Imitation as a Marker of SLI in Czech: Disproportionate Impairment of Verbs and Clitics
Smolík, Filip; Vávru, Petra
Purpose: The authors examined sentence imitation as a potential clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in Czech and its use to identify grammatical markers of SLI. Method: Children with SLI and the age-and language-matched control groups (total N = 57) were presented with a sentence imitation task, a receptive vocabulary task, and…
Immunotoxicity of nanoparticles: a computational study suggests that CNTs and C60 fullerenes might be recognized as pathogens by Toll-like receptors
Turabekova, M.; Rasulev, B.; Theodore, M.; Jackman, J.; Leszczynska, D.; Leszczynski, J.
Over the last decade, a great deal of attention has been devoted to study the inflammatory response upon exposure to multi/single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and different fullerene derivatives. In particular, carbon nanoparticles are reported to provoke substantial inflammation in alveolar and bronchial epithelial cells, epidermal keratinocytes, cultured monocyte-macrophage cells, etc. We suggest a hypothetical model providing the potential mechanistic explanation for immune and inflammatory responses observed upon exposure to carbon nanoparticles. Specifically, we performed a theoretical study to analyze CNT and C60 fullerene interactions with the available X-ray structures of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) homo- and hetero-dimer extracellular domains. This assumption was based on the fact that similar to the known TLR ligands both CNTs and fullerenes induce, in cells, the secretion of certain inflammatory protein mediators, such as interleukins and chemokines. These proteins are observed within inflammation downstream processes resulted from the ligand molecule dependent inhibition or activation of TLR-induced signal transduction. Our computational studies have shown that the internal hydrophobic pockets of some TLRs might be capable of binding small-sized carbon nanostructures (5,5 armchair SWCNTs containing 11 carbon atom layers and C60 fullerene). High binding scores and minor structural alterations induced in TLR ectodomains upon binding C60 and CNTs further supported our hypothesis. Additionally, the proposed hypothesis is strengthened by the indirect experimental findings indicating that CNTs and fullerenes induce an excessive expression of specific cytokines and chemokines (i.e. IL-8 and MCP1).Over the last decade, a great deal of attention has been devoted to study the inflammatory response upon exposure to multi/single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and different fullerene derivatives. In particular, carbon nanoparticles are reported to provoke
Triplets with growth failure, microcephaly, mental retardation, nail hypoplasia and corpus callosum agenesis: is it a variant of Coffin-Siris or a new syndrome?
Kirel, B; Kural, N; Yakut, A; Adapinar, B
We report eight-year-old triplet girls whose clinical features included microcephaly, severe mental retardation, hypoplasia of distal phalanges of both fifth and second fingers and nail hypoplasia on second fingers, dysmorphic facial features, and partial corpus callosum agenesis. During infancy, a Pavlik harness was used for congenital hip dislocation, and they had difficulty in feeding. One had been operated for patent ductus arteriosus. To our knowledge, this rare combination has not been previously reported in triplets whose clinical features closely resemble those of Coffin-Siris syndrome. The other diagnostic possibilities are also reviewed.
The Deaf Child as a Linguistic Minority.
Charrow, Veda R.; Wilbur, Ronnie B.
The author offers support for viewing the deaf child as a member of a linguistic minority and considers how this situation affects education of the deaf. Deaf persons are discussed in terms of their intellectual abilities, educational achievement, English competence, and the sociolinguistic factors which point to the existence of a deaf community.…
Reversible splenial lesion on the corpus callosum in nonfulminant hepatitis A presenting as encephalopathy
Soon Young Ko
Full Text Available Reversible focal lesions on the splenium of the corpus callosum (SCC have been reported in patients with mild encephalitis/encephalopathy caused by various infectious agents, such as influenza, mumps, adenovirus, Varicella zoster, Escherichia coli, Legionella pneumophila, and Staphylococcus aureus. We report a case of a reversible SCC lesion causing reversible encephalopathy in nonfulminant hepatitis A. A 30-year-old healthy male with dysarthria and fever was admitted to our hospital. After admission his mental status became confused, and so we performed electroencephalography (EEG and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI of the brain, which revealed an intensified signal on diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI at the SCC. His mental status improved 5 days after admission, and the SCC lesion had completely disappeared 15 days after admission.
Full Text Available The level of moral development in a sampled of convicts from West Venezuela is presented. The studywas carried out by means of Defining Issues Test (DIT evaluation. The sample includes 50 persons between19 and 55 years old (M = 34,33 y DT = 8,76, out of them 39 were males (average age 33,74,DT=8,24 an 11 were females (average age 35,91, DT=10,67. All of them were beneficiaries of alternativesformulas of their respective sentences such as social work, parole or conditional suspension ofsentences and following the corresponding process or rehabilitation out of prisons. This sample registereda moral principles index of 19,67 and a non-relevant answers index of 12,07 as well as fourthmoral developmental stage of 41,3 which are unusually high. The results suggest that there is not astatistically significant difference in the pattern of moral development depending on sex, age, or institutionfor sentenced fulfillment. However, the unusual high pattern of answers and the inverse correspondence between the duration of sentences and the resulting level of moral principles suggest that thesample behaves in a way, which is different from what is expected in no-out-law samples. Findings andimplications are discused.
Recognizing a fundamental liberty interest protecting the right to die: an analysis of statutes which criminalize or legalize physician-assisted suicide.
Tarnow, W J
Physician-assisted suicide is one of the most controversial issues in society today. We live in an age where medical technology has developed so fast and so far that those who would have swiftly succumbed to deadly diseases in the not too distant past are now living, or, rather, being kept alive long past the point of meaningful existence. Although everyone sympathizes with the painful plight of the terminally ill, the specter of physician-assisted suicide gives many pause, and rightfully so: one need only think of the carbon monoxide contraption in the back of Dr. Death's infamous van to realize that society must address the issue of the right to die. Is there any solution to this great debate? In this note, Mr. William Tarnow passionately answers in the affirmative. Mr. Tarnow analyzes the constitutionality of state statutes which either criminalize or legalize physician-assisted suicide under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution of the United States. The note also considers the case law, largely from the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, invalidating and upholding such statutes under the Constitution. Arguing that there is indeed a constitutional liberty interest in physician-assisted suicide, Mr. Tarnow concludes by suggesting that state legislatures can and must create legislation that legalizes physician-assisted suicide and passes constitutional muster.
Levelling-out and register variation in the translations of experienced and inexperienced translators: a corpus-based study
Karien Redelinghuys
Full Text Available Explicitation, simplification, normalisation and levelling-out, the four features of translation proposed by Baker (1996, have attracted considerable attention in translation studies. Although the first three have been studied extensively, levelling-out has been the subject of less empirical investigation. Furthermore, there are no studies to date that have investigated the extent to which levelling-out occurs in translations by experienced translators and inexperienced translators. In this study, levelling-out is operationalised in terms of register. It is hypothesised that less register variation will be apparent in translations by inexperienced translators and, in keeping with the features of translation hypothesis, it is predicted that select linguistic features will demonstrate less register variation in translations than in non-translations. A custom-built corpus was compiled to test these hypotheses. While some light is shed on how translation expertise contributes to register sensitivity and the distribution of certain features across different registers, little evidence could be found for levelling-out as register variation is evident in the translation corpora.
Fast self paced listening times in syntactic comprehension is aphasia -- implications for deficits
Jennifer Michaud
(the DV against corrected self paced listening times in the corresponding words in the baseline sentences (the IV in correct responses. We call the residuals of these regressions "relative corrected listening times." Relative corrected listening times are based on listening times at points at which task-related operations are similar, and therefore factor out these effects. They also factor out differences in general speed of processing and motor functioning, which determine the intercepts of the regressions. The relative corrected listening times for each participant therefore reflect the time taken by each pwa or control participant to perform the parsing and interpretation operations needed in the experimental sentences, compared to the time taken by the other controls or pwa. We performed these regressions separately in each of the four groups of sentences. We analyzed pwa and controls separately. We analyzed groups and not individuals, because performing these regressions on an individual basis would lead to a mean residual for an experimental sentence type compared to a baseline sentence type that approximates zero in each individual (this is a property of linear regression. We analyzed controls and pwa separately to produce separate estimates of basic speed of processing, decision-making and other processes in controls and pwa. We calculated the normal range of relative corrected listening times for each sentence type group by applying the formula in Crawford and Howell (1998 to the results of the regressions in the controls. We then determined whether the relative corrected listening time for each group of sentences in each pwa was within the normal range of residuals. We focus on a finding that has not previously been reported, which is that, in some pwa, some relative corrected listening times (i.e., residuals of the regression of critical words in experimental sentences against corresponding words in baseline sentences were lower than those seen in
Volcanic Tephra ejected in south eastern Asia is the sole cause of all historic ENSO events. This natural aerosol plume has been intensified by an anthropogenic plume in the same region in recent decades which has intensified some ENSO events and altered the Southern Oscillation Index characteristics
Potts, K. A.
ENSO events are the most significant perturbation of the climate system. Previous attempts to link ENSO with volcanic eruptions typically failed because only large eruptions across the globe which eject tephra into the stratosphere were considered. I analyse all volcanic eruptions in South Eastern (SE) Asia (10ºS to 10ºN and from 90ºE to 160ºE) the most volcanically active area in the world with over 23% of all eruptions in the Global Volcanism Program database occurring here and with 5 volcanoes stated to have erupted nearly continuously for 30 years. SE Asia is also the region where the convective arm of the thermally direct Walker Circulation occurs driven by the intense equatorial solar radiation which creates the high surface temperature. The volcanic tephra plume intercepts some of the solar radiation by absorption/reflection which cools the surface and heats the atmosphere creating a temperature inversion compared to periods without the plume. This reduces convection and causes the Walker Cell and Trade Winds to weaken. This reduced wind speed causes the central Pacific Ocean to warm which creates convection there which further weakens the Walker Cell. With the reduced wind stress the western Pacific warm pool migrates east. This creates an ENSO event which continues until the tephra plume reduces, typically when the SE Asian monsoon commences, and convection is re-established over SE Asia and the Pacific warm pool migrates back to the west. Correlations of SE Asian tephra and the ENSO indices are typically over 0.80 at p indices. If two events A and B correlate 5 options are available: 1. A causes B; 2. B causes A; 3. C, another event, causes A &B simultaneously; 4. It's a coincidence; and 5. The relationship is complex with feedback. The volcanic correlations only allow options 1 or 4 as ENSO cannot cause volcanoes to erupt and are backed up by several independent satellite datasets. I conclude volcanic and anthropogenic aerosols over SE Asia are the
In a recent article, photodynamic therapy (PDT) has been suggested ...
Apr 30, 2013 ... compounds, and light absorption in the red or far red part of the visible spectrum. .... room, students learn the principles of PDT, the drugs used, their mode of ... power of video-based demonstrations of PDT derives from the ...
Optimization of the Dutch Matrix Test by Random Selection of Sentences From a Preselected Subset
Rolph Houben
Full Text Available Matrix tests are available for speech recognition testing in many languages. For an accurate measurement, a steep psychometric function of the speech materials is required. For existing tests, it would be beneficial if it were possible to further optimize the available materials by increasing the function's steepness. The objective is to show if the steepness of the psychometric function of an existing matrix test can be increased by selecting a homogeneous subset of recordings with the steepest sentence-based psychometric functions. We took data from a previous multicenter evaluation of the Dutch matrix test (45 normal-hearing listeners. Based on half of the data set, first the sentences (140 out of 311 with a similar speech reception threshold and with the steepest psychometric function (≥9.7%/dB were selected. Subsequently, the steepness of the psychometric function for this selection was calculated from the remaining (unused second half of the data set. The calculation showed that the slope increased from 10.2%/dB to 13.7%/dB. The resulting subset did not allow the construction of enough balanced test lists. Therefore, the measurement procedure was changed to randomly select the sentences during testing. Random selection may interfere with a representative occurrence of phonemes. However, in our material, the median phonemic occurrence remained close to that of the original test. This finding indicates that phonemic occurrence is not a critical factor. The work highlights the possibility that existing speech tests might be improved by selecting sentences with a steep psychometric function.
The Persian developmental sentence scoring as a clinical measure of morphosyntax in children
Jalilevand, Nahid; Kamali, Mohammad; Modarresi, Yahya; Kazemi, Yalda
Background: Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) was developed as a numerical measurement and a clinical method based on the morphosyntactic acquisition in the English language. The aim of this study was to develop a new numerical tool similar to DSS to assess the morphosyntactic abilities in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In this cross-sectional and comparative study, the language samples of 115 typically developing Persian-speaking children aged 30 - 65 months were audio recorded during the free play and picture description sessions. The Persian Developmental Sentence Score (PDSS) and the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) were calculated. Pearson correlation and one – way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for data analysis. Results: The correlation between PDSS and MLU in morphemes (convergent validity) was significant with a correlation coefficient of 0.97 (p< 0.001). The value Cronbach's Alpha (α= 0.79) in the grammatical categories and the split-half coefficient (0.86) indicated acceptable internal consistency reliability. Conclusion: The PDSS could be used as a reliable numerical measurement to estimate the syntactic development in Persian-speaking children. PMID:28210600
A decade of malaria during pregnancy in Brazil: what has been done concerning prevention and management
Paola Marchesini
Full Text Available In Brazil, malaria remains a disease of major epidemiological importance because of the high number of cases in the Amazonian Region. Plasmodium spp infections during pregnancy are a significant public health problem with substantial risks for the pregnant woman, the foetus and the newborn child. In Brazil, the control of malaria during pregnancy is primarily achieved by prompt and effective treatment of the acute episodes. Thus, to assure rapid diagnosis and treatment for pregnant women with malaria, one of the recommended strategy for low transmission areas by World Health Organization and as part of a strategy by the Ministry of Health, the National Malaria Control Program has focused on integrative measures with woman and reproductive health. Here, we discuss the approach for the prevention and management of malaria during pregnancy in Brazil over the last 10 years (2003-2012 using morbidity data from Malaria Health Information System. Improving the efficiency and quality of healthcare and education and the consolidation of prevention programmes will be challenges in the control of malaria during pregnancy in the next decade.
Clinical problems of the patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage which had not been diagnosed until they suffered ischemic neurological deficits and/or rebleeding
Fukui, Issei; Ishikawa, Tatsuya; Moroi, Junta
A small part of the patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) are not properly diagnosed until they suffer ischemic neurological deficits and/or rebleeding during vasospasm. We therefore investigated the clinical profile of such patients. We retrospectively analyzed 581 patients with aneurysmal SAH experienced in our institute between 2001 and 2009. Patient's characteristics, presence and severity of headache before final diagnosis, imaging investigations they received, their World Federation of Neurological Surgeons (WFNS) grades at admission, the location of aneurysm, treatment, and outcome at discharge were investigated. Five patients were not correctly diagnosed until they presented neurological deficits due to vasospasm or experienced simultaneous rebleeding. Their mean age was 69.4, and all were female. Although all patients had a bad headache, they did not undergo any imaging examinations. Immediate coil embolization was performed for 2 patients, 1 died due to rupturing during embolization procedure. The other 3 were treated by open clipping surgery (2 delayed and 1 immediate). Four patients had some disability as a sequel, and their outcomes were significantly worse compared with 53 patients with SAH in WFNS Grade II. The patients with SAH who had not been properly diagnosed in the acute stage had a poor outcome. We should be very careful when we see patients complaining of severe headache. (author)
Aristotle on Sentence Types and Forms of Speech
Gábor Bolonyai
Full Text Available According to the Hermeneutics, Ch. 4, the analysis of non-assertoric sentences such as wishes, commands, etc. belongs to rhetoric or poetics. They are, however, examined neither in the Rhetoric nor in the Poetics, where (Ch. 20 their treatment. is explicitly excluded from the art of poetry and referred to that of delivery or performance. The paper gives an explanation for this discrepancy, based on an interpretation of Aristotle's rejection of Protagoras' criticism of Homer. The sophist found fault with the first line of the Iliad where Homer invokes the Muse by the imperative Menin aeide, thea thus uttering a command while believing that he is expressing a prayer. Aristotle's grounds for rejecting this criticism remain implicit, but it appears very likely that he thought that, if uttered or performed in the right manner, the sentence could he taken as a prayer. From this observation, which is certainly valid in this particular case, he drew the conclusion that performative or vocal features in themselves, i.e. rhythm, intonation and volume of sound, are always sufficient to identify particular "figures of speech", as he calls non-assertoric sentence types in the Poetics. This conclusion is, however, not entirely justified. Performative features are not always enough to differentiate between two `figures of speech'; the possible range of verbal moods and sentence types is likewise determined by morphological marks (e.g. mood signs, syntactical features (word-order, and lexical items (certain adverbs or particles. Aristotle's decision to dismiss figures of speech altogether from the field of lexis may also have contributed to the later development of keeping linguistics and theory of style apart as two separate branches of inquiry.
Linguistic Competence Profiles in English as a Foreign Language in Mexican University Students.
Vivaldo-Lima, Javier; Gonzalez-Robles, Rosa O.; Castillo-Morales, Alberto
Linguistic competence in English (LCE) as a foreign language has been acknowledged as an important determinant of academic success in higher education. The purpose of this study is to determine the LCE profiles of Mexican freshman students as well as the main factors associated with differences in linguistic competence between proficient and poor…
A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Meaning and Function of Although
María Carbonell-Olivares
Full Text Available The extent to which semantic and pragmatic descriptions of linguistic phenomena should be based on naturally occurring language is subject to debate. In the case of discourse markers and connective expressions, most research remains at a theoretical level, despite the increasing interest in the use of corpora for linguistic analysis in the last decades. We undertake a corpus-based analysis of the meaning and function of although, drawing on previous descriptions of this unit formulated from different theoretical perspectives (discourse analysis, pragmatics, semantics. We aim to contribute empirical evidence for certain claims made in the literature, and to complement such descriptions with our findings. The study focuses on the type of contrast expressed by although, the elements of the contrast relation and the structure of the information. First, the theoretical background for the particular issues we study is presented. Then, the objectives and methodology are explained, and results discussed.La medida en que las descripciones semánticas y pragmáticas de fenómenos lingüísticos deberían basarse en el lenguaje natural está abierta a debate. En el caso de los marcadores discursivos y expresiones conectivas, la mayor parte de la investigación se realiza en el plano teórico, a pesar del creciente interés por la utilización de córpora para el análisis lingüístico. Presentamos un análisis del significado y la función de although basado en un corpus, partiendo de las descripciones de esta unidad formuladas desde distintas perspectivas teóricas (análisis del discurso, pragmática, semántica. Pretendemos contrastar empíricamente algunas afirmaciones realizadas en la bibliografía, y complementar tales descripciones con nuestros resultados. Analizamos el tipo de contraste expresado por although, los elementos de la relación de contraste y la estructura de la información. En primer lugar, se presenta el marco teórico de las
EEG correlates of song prosody: A new look at the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm
Reyna L Gordon
Full Text Available Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called textsetting. Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners' attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic (EEG recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually. Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech.
EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm
Gordon, Reyna L.; Magne, Cyrille L.; Large, Edward W.
Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called "textsetting." Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners' attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech. PMID:22144972
EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm.
Gordon, Reyna L; Magne, Cyrille L; Large, Edward W
Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called "textsetting." Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners' attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech.
Preoperative embolization of a giant neurofibroma of the chest in a patient with neurofibromatosis type II: A case report
Bae, Suk Hyun [Dept. of Radiology, Inje University College of Medicine, Ilsan Paik Hospital, Goyang (Korea, Republic of); Shin, Jong Soo [Dept. of Radiology, Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong, School of Medicine, Kyung Hee University, Seoul (Korea, Republic of)
Giant plexiform neurofibromas, which are rare in patients with neurofibromatosis type II (NFII), are difficult to manage surgically, as they are extensively infiltrative and highly vascularized. Preoperative embolization is performed to reduce intraoperative blood loss and operative time, increase resectability of lesions, and improve visualization of the operative field during surgery of hypervascular tumors such as renal cell carcinoma and intracranial meningioma. Preoperative intravascular embolization of a giant chest wall neurofibroma has not been reported in the English literature. We report successful treatment of a giant chest wall neurofibroma in a 45-year-old male with NFII by preoperative intravascular embolization followed by surgical resection.
Is There Such a Thing as Adrenal Fatigue?
... it? Is there such a thing as adrenal fatigue? Answers from Todd B. Nippoldt, M.D. Adrenal fatigue is a term applied to a collection of nonspecific symptoms, such as body aches, fatigue, nervousness, sleep disturbances and digestive problems. The term ...
A different role of angiotensin II type 1a receptor in the development and hypertrophy of plantaris muscle in mice.
Zempo, Hirofumi; Suzuki, Jun-Ichi; Ogawa, Masahito; Watanabe, Ryo; Isobe, Mitsuaki
The role of angiotensin II type 1 (AT1) receptors in muscle development and hypertrophy remains unclear. This study was designed to reveal the effects that a loss of AT1 receptors has on skeletal muscle development and hypertrophy in mice. Eight-week-old male AT1a receptor knockout (AT1a(-/-)) mice were used for this experiment. The plantaris muscle to body weight ratio, muscle fiber cross-sectional area, and number of muscle fibers of AT1a(-/-) mice was significantly greater than wild type (WT) mice in the non-intervention condition. Next, the functional overload (OL) model was used to induce plantaris muscle hypertrophy by surgically removing the two triceps muscles consisting of the calf, soleus, and gastrocnemius muscles in mice. After 14 days of OL intervention, the plantaris muscle weight, the amount of fiber, and the fiber area increased. However, the magnitude of the increment of plantaris weight was not different between the two strains. Agtr1a mRNA expression did not change after OL in WT muscle. Actually, the Agt mRNA expression level of WT-OL was lower than WT-Control (C) muscle. An atrophy-related gene, atrogin-1 mRNA expression levels of AT1a(-/-)-C, WT-OL, and AT1a(-/-)-OL muscle were lower than that of WT-C muscle. Our findings suggest that AT1 receptor contributes to plantaris muscle development via atrogin-1 in mice.
A Deficit in Movement-Derived Sentences in German-Speaking Hearing-Impaired Children
Esther Ruigendijk
Full Text Available Children with hearing impairment (HI show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement, which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. Therefore, our study tested subject and object relatives, subject and object Wh-questions, passive sentences, and topicalized sentences, as well as sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. We tested 19 HI children aged 9;5–13;6 and compared their performance with hearing children using comprehension tasks of sentence-picture matching and sentence repetition tasks. For the comprehension tasks, we included HI children who passed an auditory discrimination task; for the sentence repetition tasks, we selected children who passed a screening task of simple sentence repetition without lip-reading; this made sure that they could perceive the words in the tests, so that we could test their grammatical abilities. The results clearly showed that most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. Repetition of passives was only problematic for some children. Object relatives were still difficult at this age for both HI and hearing children. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures
The evolution of the Faculty of Language from a Chomskyan perspective: bridging linguistics and biology.
Longa, Victor Manuel
While language was traditionally considered a purely cultural trait, the advent of Noam Chomsky's Generative Grammar in the second half of the twentieth century dramatically challenged that view. According to that theory, language is an innate feature, part of the human biological endowment. If language is indeed innate, it had to biologically evolve. This review has two main objectives: firstly, it characterizes from a Chomskyan perspective the evolutionary processes by which language could have come into being. Secondly, it proposes a new method for interpreting the archaeological record that radically differs from the usual types of evidence Paleoanthropology has concentrated on when dealing with language evolution: while archaeological remains have usually been regarded from the view of the behavior they could be associated with, the paper will consider archaeological remains from the view of the computational processes and capabilities at work for their production. This computational approach, illustrated with a computational analysis of prehistoric geometric engravings, will be used to challenge the usual generative thinking on language evolution, based on the high specificity of language. The paper argues that the biological machinery of language is neither specifically linguistic nor specifically human, although language itself can still be considered a species-specific innate trait. From such a view, language would be one of the consequences of a slight modification operated on an ancestral architecture shared with vertebrates.
From exemplar to grammar: a probabilistic analogy-based model of language learning.
Bod, Rens
While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase-structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the "best" tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing "structural analogy" between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus-based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar-based and rule-based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children's language development from item-based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Urethral advancement in hypospadias with a distal division of the corpus spongiosum: outcome in 158 cases.
Thiry, S; Gorduza, D; Mouriquand, P
Outcome of urethral mobilization and advancement (Koff procedure) in hypospadias with a distal division of the corpus spongiosum and redo cases with distal urethral failure. From January 1999 to November 2012, 158 children with a distal hypospadias (115 primary cases and 43 redo cases) underwent surgical repair using the Koff technique with a median age at surgery of 21 months (range, 12-217 months). Mean follow-up was 19 months (median, 14 months). Thirty patients (19%) presented with a complication (13.9% in primary cases and 32.5% in redo surgery) mostly at the beginning of our experience. Meatal stenosis was the most common one (3.5% in primary case, 6% overall). Ventral curvature (>10°), which is considered as a possible long-term iatrogenic complication of the Koff procedure, was not found in patients with fully grown penis except in one redo patient who had, retrospectively, an inadequate indication for this type of repair. Of 158 patients, 33 reached the age of puberty (>14 years old) with a mean follow-up of 34 months, only one presented with a significant ventral curvature. Urethral mobilization and advancement is a reasonable alternative for anterior hypospadias and distal fistula repair in selected cases. It has two major advantages compared to other techniques: it avoids any urethroplasty with non-urethral tissue and eliminates dysplastic tissues located beyond the division of the corpus spongiosum, which may not grow at the same pace as the rest of the penis. Significant iatrogenic curvature in fully grown penis is not supported by this series. Copyright © 2013 Journal of Pediatric Urology Company. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Lexical Properties of Slovene Sign Language: A Corpus-Based Study
Vintar, Špela
Slovene Sign Language (SZJ) has as yet received little attention from linguists. This article presents some basic facts about SZJ, its history, current status, and a description of the Slovene Sign Language Corpus and Pilot Grammar (SIGNOR) project, which compiled and annotated a representative corpus of SZJ. Finally, selected quantitative data…
Acute aortic dissection type A discloses Corpus alienum
Kolat Philipp
Full Text Available Abstract We report an unusual case of an aortic type A dissection with a corpus alienum which compresses the right ventricle. The patient successfully underwent an aortic root replacement in deep hypothermia with re-implantation of the coronary arteries using a modified Bentall procedure and the resection of the corpus alienum. Intraoperative finding reveals 3 greatly adhered gauze compresses, which were most likely forgotten in the operation 34 years ago.
ImageParser: a tool for finite element generation from three-dimensional medical images
Yamada T
Full Text Available Abstract Background The finite element method (FEM is a powerful mathematical tool to simulate and visualize the mechanical deformation of tissues and organs during medical examinations or interventions. It is yet a challenge to build up an FEM mesh directly from a volumetric image partially because the regions (or structures of interest (ROIs may be irregular and fuzzy. Methods A software package, ImageParser, is developed to generate an FEM mesh from 3-D tomographic medical images. This software uses a semi-automatic method to detect ROIs from the context of image including neighboring tissues and organs, completes segmentation of different tissues, and meshes the organ into elements. Results The ImageParser is shown to build up an FEM model for simulating the mechanical responses of the breast based on 3-D CT images. The breast is compressed by two plate paddles under an overall displacement as large as 20% of the initial distance between the paddles. The strain and tangential Young's modulus distributions are specified for the biomechanical analysis of breast tissues. Conclusion The ImageParser can successfully exact the geometry of ROIs from a complex medical image and generate the FEM mesh with customer-defined segmentation information.
Quickscan of substances for which the set reduction of emissions has not been realised; Quickscan van stoffen met niet gerealiseerde emissiereducties uit het Doelgroepbeleid Milieu en Industrie
Bakker, J.
In a Quickscan study the RIVM has examined how much the Dutch industry contributes to the release of 14 substances to air or water. Furthermore the RIVM has investigated to what extent the measured concentrations of these substances in the environment exceed the environmental quality standards in the Netherlands. The Quickscan was requested because the government and industry sectors had agreed by contract to reduce the release of priority substances to air and water in 2010. The industry sectors have not yet been able to achieve the agreed reduction levels for the 14 substances. Four out of the fourteen substances do not meet the maximum permissible concentration level or the limit value for air quality on the regional or national level. It concerns fine particulate matter (PM10), nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic compounds and copper. The Dutch industry contributes approximately about 20 percent to the national emission to air of fine particulate matter as well as polycyclic aromatic compounds. For both nitrogen oxides (air) and copper (water) the share in the national emission is less than ten percent. For four substances, namely sulphur dioxide, arsenic, benzene and carbon monoxide, the target value is exceeded. The other six substances do not cause difficulties in terms of air or water because they hardly exceed the environmental quality standards, if at all [Dutch] Het RIVM heeft in een Quickscan onderzocht wat de Nederlandse industrie bijdraagt aan de emissie van 14 stoffen naar lucht of water. Daarnaast is onderzocht in welke mate de gemeten concentraties van deze stoffen in het milieu de geldende milieukwaliteitsnormen overschrijden. De Quickscan is uitgevoerd omdat tussen de overheid en bedrijfstakken in het Doelgroepbeleid Milieu en Industrie (DMI) afspraken zijn gemaakt om de uitstoot van stoffen naar zowel lucht als water in 2010 te verminderen. De bedrijfstakken zijn er voor de 14 onderzochte stoffen nog niet in zijn geslaagd de gestelde reductie
Estimating valence from the sound of a word : Computational, experimental, and cross-linguistic evidence
Louwerse, Max; Qu, Zhan
It is assumed linguistic symbols must be grounded in perceptual information to attain meaning, because the sound of a word in a language has an arbitrary relation with its referent. This paper demonstrates that a strong arbitrariness claim should be reconsidered. In a computational study, we showed
Formality as a Feature of Postcolonial English in Kenya: a Contrastive Analysis Based on the International Corpus of English
Natalia Budohoska
Full Text Available In monolingual countries where English is the native language of the majority of population, it is used across all domains and registers, and by all members of society. In post-colonial, multilingual countries it comes to be used as a lingua franca in more restricted contexts. Because there is a significant difference between the role and use of English in a native and monolingual environment and a non-native, multilingual environment (Trudgill 1999 the following paper concentrates on differences in the formality level of English in postcolonial Kenya and Great Britain on the basis of parameters set up for this study. The data for this paper come from the International Corpus of English for East Africa and for Great Britain. The conclusions concerning the formality of English were drawn basing on a quantitative study employing the chi square test for evaluating significance of the features discussed and revealed a higher level of formality of English in the ICE-K. This study is an introduction to further qualitative research of characteristic morpho-syntactic features of English in Kenya.
A corpus of images and text in online news
L. Hollink (Laura); A. Bedjeti (Adriatik); M. van Harmelen; D. Elliott (Desmond)
htmlabstractIn recent years, several datasets have been released that include images and text, giving impulse to new methods that combine natural language processing and computer vision. However, there is a need for datasets of images in their natural textual context. The ION corpus contains 300K
Is there such a thing as free government data?
Federico Morando
Full Text Available The recently-amended European Public Sector Information (PSI Directive rests on the assumption that government data is a valuable input for the knowledge economy. As a default principle, the directive sets marginal costs as an upper bound for charging PSI. This article discusses the terms under which the 2013 consultation on the implementation of the PSI Directive addresses the calculation criteria for marginal costs, which are complex to define, especially for internet-based services. What is found is that the allowed answers of the consultation indirectly lead the responder to reason in terms of the average incremental cost of allowing reuse, instead of the marginal cost of reproduction, provision and dissemination. Moreover, marginal-cost pricing (or zero pricing is expected to lead to economically efficient results, while aiming at recouping the average incremental cost of allowing re-use may lead to excessive fees.
A person is not a number: discourse involvement in subject-verb agreement computation.
Mancini, Simona; Molinaro, Nicola; Rizzi, Luigi; Carreiras, Manuel
Agreement is a very important mechanism for language processing. Mainstream psycholinguistic research on subject-verb agreement processing has emphasized the purely formal and encapsulated nature of this phenomenon, positing an equivalent access to person and number features. However, person and number are intrinsically different, because person conveys extra-syntactic information concerning the participants in the speech act. To test the person-number dissociation hypothesis we investigated the neural correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, using person and number violations. While number agreement violations produced a left-anterior negativity followed by a P600 with a posterior distribution, the negativity elicited by person anomalies had a centro-posterior maximum and was followed by a P600 effect that was frontally distributed in the early phase and posteriorly distributed in the late phase. These data reveal that the parser is differentially sensitive to the two features and that it deals with the two anomalies by adopting different strategies, due to the different levels of analysis affected by the person and number violations. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
A decade of natalizumab and PML: Has there been a tacit transfer of risk acceptance?
Clifford, David B; Yousry, Tarek A; Major, Eugene O
The interplay between each of the stakeholder's responsibilities and desires clearly has resulted in continued widespread use of natalizumab with substantial risks and an ongoing quest for better risk mitigation. In the United States, regulatory actions codified the process of risk acceptance-and risk transfer-by escalating monitoring and information transfer to physicians and patients. Management of medication-related risks is a core function of regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), European Medicines Agency (EMA), and the medical community. The interaction among stakeholders in medicine, pharma, regulatory bodies, physicians, and patients, sometimes has changed without overt review and discussion. Such is the case for natalizumab, an important and widely used disease-modifying therapy for multiple sclerosis. A rather silent but very considerable shift, effectively transferring increased risk for progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) to the physicians and patients, has occurred in the past decade. We believe this changed risk should be clearly recognized and considered by all the stakeholders.
A rational inference approach to group and individual-level sentence comprehension performance in aphasia.
Warren, Tessa; Dickey, Michael Walsh; Liburd, Teljer L
The rational inference, or noisy channel, account of language comprehension predicts that comprehenders are sensitive to the probabilities of different interpretations for a given sentence and adapt as these probabilities change (Gibson, Bergen & Piantadosi, 2013). This account provides an important new perspective on aphasic sentence comprehension: aphasia may increase the likelihood of sentence distortion, leading people with aphasia (PWA) to rely more on the prior probability of an interpretation and less on the form or structure of the sentence (Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen & Kiran, 2015). We report the results of a sentence-picture matching experiment that tested the predictions of the rational inference account and other current models of aphasic sentence comprehension across a variety of sentence structures. Consistent with the rational inference account, PWA showed similar sensitivity to the probability of particular kinds of form distortions as age-matched controls, yet overall their interpretations relied more on prior probability and less on sentence form. As predicted by rational inference, but not by other models of sentence comprehension in aphasia, PWA's interpretations were more faithful to the form for active and passive sentences than for direct object and prepositional object sentences. However contra rational inference, there was no evidence that individual PWA's severity of syntactic or semantic impairment predicted their sensitivity to form versus the prior probability of a sentence, as cued by semantics. These findings confirm and extend previous findings that suggest the rational inference account holds promise for explaining aphasic and neurotypical comprehension, but they also raise new challenges for the account. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Priyono Priyono
Full Text Available English verbs have built-in properties that determine how they behave syntactically and generate appropriate meaning associated. With these inherent properties some verbs can fill in only in certain syntactic structures and some in others. The observation of the verb COOK using English corpus has revealed its lexical properties covering the area of syntax, semantics, and collocation suggesting uniqueness of its behaviours that are distinguishable from other verbs. Having found the lexical properties of COOK, this article concludes that the acquisition of lexicon should include lexical properties that reflect their level of competence. It also argues that the acquisition of lexical properties should be implicit, not through meta-linguistic knowledge. This would render early grammar teaching unnecessary. The acquisition of lexical properties should take place through subconscious process, not explicit grammar instruction. Many of these are grammatical aspects such as word order, sentence construction, grammatical and lexical collocations.
Evolving towards a critical point: A possible electromagnetic way in which the critical regime is reached as the rupture approaches
P. G. Kapiris
Full Text Available In analogy to the study of critical phase transitions in statistical physics, it has been argued recently that the fracture of heterogeneous materials could be viewed as a critical phenomenon, either at laboratory or at geophysical scales. If the picture of the development of the fracture is correct one may guess that the precursors may reveal the critical approach of the main-shock. When a heterogeneous material is stretched, its evolution towards breaking is characterized by the appearance of microcracks before the final break-up. Microcracks produce both acoustic and electromagnetic(EM emission in the frequency range from VLF to VHF. The microcracks and the associated acoustic and EM activities constitute the so-called precursors of general fracture. These precursors are detectable not only at laboratory but also at geophysical scales. VLF and VHF acoustic and EM emissions have been reported resulting from volcanic and seismic activities in various geologically distinct regions of the world. In the present work we attempt to establish the hypothesis that the evolution of the Earth's crust towards the critical point takes place not only in a mechanical but also in an electromagnetic sense. In other words, we focus on the possible electromagnetic criticality, which is reached while the catastrophic rupture in the Earth's crust approaches. Our main tool is the monitoring of micro-fractures that occur before the final breakup, by recording their radio-electromagnetic emissions. We show that the spectral power law analysis of the electromagnetic precursors reveals distinguishing signatures of underlying critical dynamics, such as: (i the emergence of memory effects; (ii the decrease with time of the anti-persistence behaviour; (iii the presence of persistence properties in the tail of the sequence of the precursors; and (iv the acceleration of the precursory electro-magnetic energy release. Moreover, the statistical analysis of the amplitudes of
DutchParl: A corpus of parliamentary documents in Dutch
Marx, M.; Schuth, A.
A corpus called DutchParl is created which aims to contain all digitally available parliamentary documents written in the Dutch language. The first version of DutchParl contains documents from the parliaments of The Netherlands, Flanders and Belgium. The corpus is divided along three dimensions: per
Mammographic breast cancer screening for women previously treated with high breast doses for diseases such as Hodgkin's
Faulkner, K.; Law, J.
In screening of a general population for breast cancer, benefit/risk ratios are of the order of 100/1. For the very small subgroup of women treated by radiotherapy for Hodgkin's disease below age 35, calculations of this type require different considerations, an overview of which is given in this text. It is concluded that although such previous exposures will increase their radiation risk, their increased risk of carrying an undetected breast cancer means that the potential benefit for them of screening is increased even more. In the United Kingdom, the Dept. of Health has recommended annual screening for these women. (authors)
Has there been an increase in the frequency with which people who drink in a risky fashion receive advice to cut down on their drinking from 1998 to 2015?
Cunningham, John A; Chaiton, Michael
To assess whether there has been an increase over time in the proportion of people who drink in a risky fashion, who receive expressions of concern about their drinking or advice to cut down. Secondary analysis of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Monitor population survey, conducted annually in Ontario (participants: 18 or older) and with relevant data available from 1998 to 2015 (N = 48,124). The proportions of participants who drank above weekly low-risk drinking levels (approximated as 15 or more drinks for males and 11 or more for females) who reported receiving expressions of concern about their drinking or advice to cut down were compared between the time periods 1998-2004, 2005-2010, and 2011-2015. Further, proportions were broken down by age group and participant sex. Overall, there were low rates of participants who reported receiving advice about their drinking (16.8% of those drinking above weekly drinking levels) and no evidence of an increase across tim