Do socioeconomic inequalities in mortality vary between different Spanish cities? a pooled cross-sectional analysis

Background: The relationship between deprivation and mortality in urban settings is well established. This relationship has been found for several causes of death in Spanish cities in independent analyses (the MEDEA project). However, no joint analysis which pools the strength of this relationship across several cities has ever been undertaken. Such an analysis would determine, if appropriate, a joint relationship by linking the associations found. Methods: A pooled cross-sectional analysis of the data from the MEDEA project has been carried out for each of the causes of death studied. Specifically, a meta-analysis has been carried out to pool the relative risks in eleven Spanish cities. Different deprivation-mortality relationships across the cities are considered in the analysis (fixed and random effects models). The size of the cities is also considered as a possible factor explaining differences between cities. Results: Twenty studies have been carried out for different combinations of sex and causes of death. For nine of them (men: prostate cancer, diabetes, mental illnesses, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebrovascular disease; women: diabetes, mental illnesses, respiratory diseases, cirrhosis) no differences were found between cities in the effect of deprivation on mortality; in four cases (men: respiratory diseases, all causes of mortality; women: breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease) differences not associated with the size of the city have been determined; in two cases (men: cirrhosis; women: lung cancer) differences strictly linked to the size of the city have been determined, and in five cases (men: lung cancer, ischaemic heart disease; women: ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases, all causes of mortality) both kinds of differences have been found. Except for lung cancer in women, every significant relationship between deprivation and mortality goes in the same direction: deprivation increases mortality. Variability in the relative risks across cities was found for general mortality for both sexes. Conclusions: This study provides a general overview of the relationship between deprivation and mortality for a sample of large Spanish cities combined. This joint study allows the exploration of and, if appropriate, the quantification of the variability in that relationship for the set of cities considered.

EmotiBlog: a finer-grained and more precise learning of subjectivity expression models

The exponential growth of the subjective information in the framework of the Web 2.0 has led to the need to create Natural Language Processing tools able to analyse and process such data for multiple practical applications. They require training on specifically annotated corpora, whose level of detail must be fine enough to capture the phenomena involved. This paper presents EmotiBlog – a fine-grained annotation scheme for subjectivity. We show the manner in which it is built and demonstrate the benefits it brings to the systems using it for training, through the experiments we carried out on opinion mining and emotion detection. We employ corpora of different textual genres –a set of annotated reported speech extracted from news articles, the set of news titles annotated with polarity and emotion from the SemEval 2007 (Task 14) and ISEAR, a corpus of real-life self-expressed emotion. We also show how the model built from the EmotiBlog annotations can be enhanced with external resources. The results demonstrate that EmotiBlog, through its structure and annotation paradigm, offers high quality training data for systems dealing both with opinion mining, as well as emotion detection.