EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, bi-phones, and bi-syllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users to either upload a set of words to receive their properties, or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal

Singling out individual inventors from patent data

An increasing number of studies in recent years have sought to identify individual inventors from patent data. A variety of heuristics have been proposed for using the names and other information disclosed in patent documents to establish who is who in patents. This paper contributes to this literature by describing a methodology for identifying inventors using patents applied to the European Patent Office, EPO hereafter. As in much of this literature, we basically follow a threestep procedure : 1- the parsing stage, aimed at reducing the noise in the inventor’s name and other fields of the patent; 2- the matching stage, where name matching algorithms are used to group similar names; and 3- the filtering stage, where additional information and various scoring schemes are used to filter out these similarlynamed inventors. The paper presents the results obtained by using the algorithms with the set of European inventors applying to the EPO over a long period of time.

Comparing multiple criteria for species identification in two recently diverged seabirds

Correct species identification is a crucial issue in systematics with key implications for prioritising conservation effort. However, it can be particularly challenging in recently diverged species due to their strong similarity and relatedness. In such cases, species identification requires multiple and integrative approaches. In this study we used multiple criteria, namely plumage colouration, biometric measurements, geometric morphometrics, stable isotopes analysis (SIA) and genetics (mtDNA), to identify the species of 107 bycatch birds from two closely related seabird species, the Balearic (Puffinus mauretanicus) and Yelkouan (P. yelkouan) shearwaters. Biometric measurements, stable isotopes and genetic data produced two stable clusters of bycatch birds matching the two study species, as indicated by reference birds of known origin. Geometric morphometrics was excluded as a species identification criterion since the two clusters were not stable. The combination of plumage colouration, linear biometrics, stable isotope and genetic criteria was crucial to infer the species of 103 of the bycatch specimens. In the present study, particularly SIA emerged as a powerful criterion for species identification, but temporal stability of the isotopic values is critical for this purpose. Indeed, we found some variability in stable isotope values over the years within each species, but species differences explained most of the variance in the isotopic data. Yet this result pinpoints the importance of examining sources of variability in the isotopic data in a case-by-case basis prior to the cross-application of the SIA approach to other species. Our findings illustrate how the integration of several methodological approaches can help to correctly identify individuals from recently diverged species, as each criterion measures different biological phenomena and species divergence is not expressed simultaneously in all biological traits.

La efectividad de las políticas activas de mercado de trabajo para luchar contra el paro. La experiencia de Cataluña

El objetivo de este trabajo es evaluar la efectividad de las políticas activas llevadas a cabo por el Servicio de Ocupación de Cataluña (SOC) durante el año 2005. Los resultados obtenidos a partir de la aplicación de técnicas de matching muestran que la probabilidad de encontrar trabajo para un individuo que participó en alguna de las acciones del SOC analizadas es 5 puntos porcentuales superior en relación a los que no participaron. El análisis individualizado de los diferentes programas ha mostrado la eficacia de la mayor parte de las acciones realizadas. Por último, los resultados obtenidos también han puesto de manifiesto la mejora adicional que supone la combinación de algunas de las acciones.

Polyphenol intake and mortality risk: a re-analysis of the PREDIMED trial

Background: Polyphenols may lower the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other chronic diseases due to their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, as well as their beneficial effects on blood pressure, lipids and insulin resistance. However, no previous epidemiological studies have evaluated the relationship between the intake of total polyphenols intake and polyphenol subclasses with overall mortality. Our aim was to evaluate whether polyphenol intake is associated with all-cause mortality in subjects at high cardiovascular risk. Methods: We used data from the PREDIMED study, a 7,447-participant, parallel-group, randomized, multicenter, controlled five-year feeding trial aimed at assessing the effects of the Mediterranean Diet in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Polyphenol intake was calculated by matching food consumption data from repeated food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) with the Phenol-Explorer database on the polyphenol content of each reported food. Hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) between polyphenol intake and mortality were estimated using time-dependent Cox proportional hazard models. Results: Over an average of 4.8 years of follow-up, we observed 327 deaths. After multivariate adjustment, we found a 37% relative reduction in all-cause mortality comparing the highest versus the lowest quintiles of total polyphenol intake (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.63; 95% CI 0.41 to 0.97; P for trend = 0.12). Among the polyphenol subclasses, stilbenes and lignans were significantly associated with reduced all-cause mortality (HR =0.48; 95% CI 0.25 to 0.91; P for trend = 0.04 and HR = 0.60; 95% CI 0.37 to 0.97; P for trend = 0.03, respectively), with no significant associations apparent in the rest (flavonoids or phenolic acids). Conclusions: Among high-risk subjects, those who reported a high polyphenol intake, especially of stilbenes and lignans, showed a reduced risk of overall mortality compared to those with lower intakes. These results may be useful to determine optimal polyphenol intake or specific food sources of polyphenols that may reduce the risk of all-cause mortality.

Indirect likelihood inference (revised)

Standard indirect Inference (II) estimators take a given finite-dimensional statistic, Z_{n} , and then estimate the parameters by matching the sample statistic with the model-implied population moment. We here propose a novel estimation method that utilizes all available information contained in the distribution of Z_{n} , not just its first moment. This is done by computing the likelihood of Z_{n}, and then estimating the parameters by either maximizing the likelihood or computing the posterior mean for a given prior of the parameters. These are referred to as the maximum indirect likelihood (MIL) and Bayesian Indirect Likelihood (BIL) estimators, respectively. We show that the IL estimators are first-order equivalent to the corresponding moment-based II estimator that employs the optimal weighting matrix. However, due to higher-order features of Z_{n} , the IL estimators are higher order efficient relative to the standard II estimator. The likelihood of Z_{n} will in general be unknown and so simulated versions of IL estimators are developed. Monte Carlo results for a structural auction model and a DSGE model show that the proposed estimators indeed have attractive finite sample properties.