COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION BARRIERS TO HEALTH ASSISTANCE FOR DEAF PATIENTS

IN BRAZIL, recent regulations require changes in private and public health systems to make special services available to deaf patients. in the present article, the researchers analyze the perceptions of 25 sign language using patients regarding this assistance. The researchers found communication difficulties between these patients and health services staff, as well as a culture clash and a harmful inability among the service providers to distinguish among the roles of companions, caretakers, and professional translator/interpreters. Thus, it became common for the patients to experience prejudice in the course of treatment and information exchange, damage to their autonomy, limits on their access to services, and reduced efficacy of therapy. The researchers conclude that many issues must be dealt with if such barriers to health access are to be overcome, in particular the worrying degree of exclusion of deaf patients from health care systems.

Improvements on the Porter`s Stemming Algorithm for Portuguese

The amount of textual information digitally stored is growing every day. However, our capability of processing and analyzing that information is not growing at the same pace. To overcome this limitation, it is important to develop semiautomatic processes to extract relevant knowledge from textual information, such as the text mining process. One of the main and most expensive stages of the text mining process is the text pre-processing stage, where the unstructured text should be transformed to structured format such as an attribute-value table. The stemming process, i.e. linguistics normalization, is usually used to find the attributes of this table. However, the stemming process is strongly dependent on the language in which the original textual information is given. Furthermore, for most languages, the stemming algorithms proposed in the literature are computationally expensive. In this work, several improvements of the well know Porter stemming algorithm for the Portuguese language, which explore the characteristics of this language, are proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm executes in far less time without affecting the quality of the generated stems.