A formalization of logical imaging for information retrieval using quantum theory

In this paper we introduce a formalization of Logical Imaging applied to IR in terms of Quantum Theory through the use of an analogy between states of a quantum system and terms in text documents. Our formalization relies upon the Schrodinger Picture, creating an analogy between the dynamics of a physical system and the kinematics of probabilities generated by Logical Imaging. By using Quantum Theory, it is possible to model more precisely contextual information in a seamless and principled fashion within the Logical Imaging process. While further work is needed to empirically validate this, the foundations for doing so are provided.

Using extended random set to find specific patterns

With the overwhelming increase in the amount of data on the web and data bases, many text mining techniques have been proposed for mining useful patterns in text documents. Extracting closed sequential patterns using the Pattern Taxonomy Model (PTM) is one of the pruning methods to remove noisy, inconsistent, and redundant patterns. However, PTM model treats each extracted pattern as whole without considering included terms, which could affect the quality of extracted patterns. This paper propose an innovative and effective method that extends the random set to accurately weigh patterns based on their distribution in the documents and their terms distribution in patterns. Then, the proposed approach will find the specific closed sequential patterns (SCSP) based on the new calculated weight. The experimental results on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1) data collection and TREC topics show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in different popular measures.

Machine learning approaches to analysing textual injury surveillance data: A systematic review

Objective To synthesise recent research on the use of machine learning approaches to mining textual injury surveillance data. Design Systematic review. Data sources The electronic databases which were searched included PubMed, Cinahl, Medline, Google Scholar, and Proquest. The bibliography of all relevant articles was examined and associated articles were identified using a snowballing technique. Selection criteria For inclusion, articles were required to meet the following criteria: (a) used a health-related database, (b) focused on injury-related cases, AND used machine learning approaches to analyse textual data. Methods The papers identified through the search were screened resulting in 16 papers selected for review. Articles were reviewed to describe the databases and methodology used, the strength and limitations of different techniques, and quality assurance approaches used. Due to heterogeneity between studies meta-analysis was not performed. Results Occupational injuries were the focus of half of the machine learning studies and the most common methods described were Bayesian probability or Bayesian network based methods to either predict injury categories or extract common injury scenarios. Models were evaluated through either comparison with gold standard data or content expert evaluation or statistical measures of quality. Machine learning was found to provide high precision and accuracy when predicting a small number of categories, was valuable for visualisation of injury patterns and prediction of future outcomes. However, difficulties related to generalizability, source data quality, complexity of models and integration of content and technical knowledge were discussed. Conclusions The use of narrative text for injury surveillance has grown in popularity, complexity and quality over recent years. With advances in data mining techniques, increased capacity for analysis of large databases, and involvement of computer scientists in the injury prevention field, along with more comprehensive use and description of quality assurance methods in text mining approaches, it is likely that we will see a continued growth and advancement in knowledge of text mining in the injury field.

Scaffolding understanding of tables and graphs

The literacy demands of tables and graphs are different from those of prose texts such as narrative. This paper draws from part of a qualitative case study which sought to investigate strategies that scaffold and enhance the teaching and learning of varied representations in text. As indicated in the paper, the method focused on the teaching and learning of tables and graphs with use of Freebody and Luke's (1990) four resources model from literacy education.

Word Sense Discovery and Disambiguation

The work is based on the assumption that words with similar syntactic usage have similar meaning, which was proposed by Zellig S. Harris (1954,1968). We study his assumption from two aspects: Firstly, different meanings (word senses) of a word should manifest themselves in different usages (contexts), and secondly, similar usages (contexts) should lead to similar meanings (word senses). If we start with the different meanings of a word, we should be able to find distinct contexts for the meanings in text corpora. We separate the meanings by grouping and labeling contexts in an unsupervised or weakly supervised manner (Publication 1, 2 and 3). We are confronted with the question of how best to represent contexts in order to induce effective classifiers of contexts, because differences in context are the only means we have to separate word senses. If we start with words in similar contexts, we should be able to discover similarities in meaning. We can do this monolingually or multilingually. In the monolingual material, we find synonyms and other related words in an unsupervised way (Publication 4). In the multilingual material, we ?nd translations by supervised learning of transliterations (Publication 5). In both the monolingual and multilingual case, we first discover words with similar contexts, i.e., synonym or translation lists. In the monolingual case we also aim at finding structure in the lists by discovering groups of similar words, e.g., synonym sets. In this introduction to the publications of the thesis, we consider the larger background issues of how meaning arises, how it is quantized into word senses, and how it is modeled. We also consider how to define, collect and represent contexts. We discuss how to evaluate the trained context classi?ers and discovered word sense classifications, and ?nally we present the word sense discovery and disambiguation methods of the publications. This work supports Harris' hypothesis by implementing three new methods modeled on his hypothesis. The methods have practical consequences for creating thesauruses and translation dictionaries, e.g., for information retrieval and machine translation purposes. Keywords: Word senses, Context, Evaluation, Word sense disambiguation, Word sense discovery.

Intermediate Past BE : A Paradigm Reshaped With Data Drawn From HARES

In this paper, I look into a grammatical phenomenon found among speakers of the Cambridgeshire dialect of English. According to my hypothesis, the phenomenon is a new entry into the past BE verb paradigm in the English language. In my paper, I claim that the structure I have found complements the existing two verb forms, was and were, with a third verb form that I have labelled ‘intermediate past BE’. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I introduce the theoretical ground for the study of variation, which is founded on empiricist principles. In variationist linguistics, the main claim is that heterogeneous language use is structured and ordered. In the last 50 years of history in modern linguistics, this claim is controversial. In the 1960s, the generativist movement spearheaded by Noam Chomsky diverted attention away from grammatical theories that are based on empirical observations. The generativists steered away from language diversity, variation and change in favour of generalisations, abstractions and universalist claims. The theoretical part of my paper goes through the main points of the variationist agenda and concludes that abandoning the concept of language variation in linguistics is harmful for both theory and methodology. In the method part of the paper, I present the Helsinki Archive of Regional English Speech (HARES) corpus. It is an audio archive that contains interviews conducted in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews were done in accordance to methods used generally in traditional dialectology. The informants are mostly elderly male people who have lived in the same region throughout their lives and who have left school at an early age. The interviews are actually conversations: the interviewer allowed the informant to pick the topic of conversation to induce a maximally relaxed and comfortable atmosphere and thus allow the most natural dialect variant to emerge in the informant’s speech. In the paper, the corpus chapter introduces some of the transcription and annotation problems associated with spoken language corpora (especially those containing dialectal speech). Questions surrounding the concept of variation are present in this part of the paper too, as especially transcription work is troubled by the fundamental problem of having to describe the fluctuations of everyday speech in text. In the empirical section of the paper, I use HARES to analyse the speech of four informants, with special focus on the emergence of the intermediate past BE variant. My observations and the subsequent analysis permit me to claim that my hypothesis seems to hold. The intermediate variant occupies almost all contexts where one would expect was or were in the informants’ speech. This means that the new variant is integrated into the speakers’ grammars and exemplifies the kind of variation that is at the heart of this paper.

Tekstit viraston työssä : Tutkimus etuuspäätösten kielestä ja konteksteista

Texts in the work of a city department: A study of the language and context of benefit decisions This dissertation examines documents granting or denying the access to municipal services. The data consist of decisions on transport services made by the Social Services Department of the City of Helsinki. The circumstances surrounding official texts and their language and production are studied through textual analysis and interviews. The dissertation describes the textual features of the above decisions, and seeks to explain such features. Also explored are the topics and methods of genre studies, especially the relationship between text and context. Although the approach is linguistic, the dissertation also touches on research in social work and administrative decision making, and contributes to more general discussion on the language and duties of public administration. My key premise is that a text is more than a mere psycholinguistic phenomenon. Rather, a text is also a physical object and the result of certain production processes. This dissertation thus not only describes genre-specific features, but also sheds light on the work that generates the texts examined. Textual analysis and analyses of discursive practices are linked through an analysis of intertextuality: written decisions are compared with other application documents, such as expert statements and the applications themselves. The study shows that decisions are texts governed by strict rules and written with modest resources. Textwork is organised as hierarchical mass production. The officials who write decisions rely on standard phrases extracted from a computer system. This allows them to produce texts of uniform quality which have been approved by the department s legal experts. Using a computer system in text production does not, however, serve all the needs of the writers. This leads to many problems in the texts themselves. Intertextual analysis indicates that medical argumentation weighs most heavily in an application process, although a social appraisal should be carried out when deciding on applications for transport services. The texts reflect a hierarchy in which a physician ranks above the applicant, and the department s own expert physician ranks above the applicant s physician. My analysis also highlights good, but less obvious practices. The social workers and secretaries who write decisions must balance conflicting demands. They use delicate linguistic means to adjust the standard phrases to suit individual cases, and employ subtle strategies of politeness. The dissertation suggests that the customer contact staff who write official texts should be allowed to make better use of their professional competence. A more general concern is that legislation and new management strategies require more and more documentation. Yet, textwork is only rarely taken into account in the allocation of resources. Keywords: (Critical) text analysis, genre analysis, administration, social work, administrative language, texts, genres, context, intertextuality, discursive practices

Lukemisen vaikeuden kuntoutus ensiluokkalaisilla : Kolme pedagogista interventiota

Remediation of Reading Difficulties in Grade 1. Three Pedagogical Interventions Keywords: initial teaching, learning to read, reading difficulties, intervention, dyslexia, remediation of dyslexia, home reading, computerized training In this study three different reading interventions were tested for first-graders at risk of reading difficulties at school commencement. The intervention groups were compared together and with a control group receiving special education provided by the school. First intervention was a new approach called syllable rhythmics in which syllabic rhythm, phonological knowledge and letter-phoneme correspondence are emphasized. Syllable rhythmics is based on multi-sensory training elements aimed at finding the most functional modality for every child. The second intervention was computerized training of letter-sound correspondence with the Ekapeli learning game. The third intervention was home-based shared book reading, where every family was given a story book, and dialogic reading style reading and writing exercises were prepared for each chapter of the book. The participants were 80 first-graders in 19 classes in nine schools. The children were matched in four groups according to pre-test results: three intervention and one control. The interventions took ten weeks starting from September in grade 1. The first post-test including several measures of reading abilities was administered in December. The first delayed post-test was administered in March, the second in September in grade 2, and the third, “ALLU” test (reading test for primary school) was administered in March in grade 2. The intervention and control groups differed only slightly from each other in grade 1. However, girls progressed significantly more than boys in both word reading and reading comprehension in December and this difference remained in March. The children who had been cited as inattentive by their teachers also lagged behind the others in the post-tests in December and March. When participants were divided into two groups according to their initial letter knowledge at school entry, the weaker group (maximum 17 correctly named letters in pre-test) progressed more slowly in both word reading and reading comprehension in grade 1. Intervention group and gender had no interaction effect in grade 1. Instead, intervention group and attentiveness had an interaction effect on most test measures the inattentive students in the syllable rhythmic group doing worst and attentive students in the control group doing best in grade 1. The smallest difference between results of attentive and inattentive students was in the Ekapeli group. In grade 2 still only minor differences were found between the intervention groups and control group. The only significant difference was in non-word reading, with the syllable rhythmics group outperforming the other groups in the fall. The difference between girls’ and boys’ performances in both technical reading and text comprehension disappeared in grade 2. The difference between the inattentive and attentive students cold no longer be found in technical reading, and the difference became smaller in text comprehension as well. The difference between two groups divided according to their initial letter knowledge disappeared in technical reading but remained significant in text comprehension measures in the ALLU test in the spring of grade 2. In all, the children in the study did better in the ALLU test than expected according to ALLU test norms. Being the weakest readers in their classes in the pre-test, 52.3 % reached the normal reading ability level. In the norm group 72.3 % of all students attained normal reading ability. The results of this study indicate that different types of remediation programs can be effective, and that special education has been apparently useful. The results suggest careful consideration of first-graders’ initial reading abilities (especially letter knowledge) and possible failure of attention; remediation should be individually targeted while flexibly using different methods.

MLDB: macromolecule ligand database

MLDB (macromolecule ligand database) is a knowledge base containing ligands co-crystallized with the three-dimensional structures available in the Protein Data Bank. The proposed knowledge base serves as an open resource for the analysis and visualization of all ligands and their interactions with macromolecular structures. MLDB can be used to search ligands, and their interactions can be visualized both in text and graphical formats. MLDB will be updated at regular intervals (weekly) with automated Perl scripts. The knowledge base is intended to serve the scientific community working in the areas of molecular and structural biology. It is available free to users around the clock and can be accessed at http://dicsoft2.physics.iisc.ernet.in/mldb/.

Developing and testing readability measurements for second language learners

This research constructed a readability measurement for French speakers who view English as a second language. It identified the true cognates, which are the similar words from these two languages, as an indicator of the difficulty of an English text for French people. A multilingual lexical resource is used to detect true cognates in text, and Statistical Language Modelling to predict the predict the readability level. The proposed enhanced statistical language model is making a step in the right direction by improving the accuracy of readability predictions for French speakers by up to 10% compared to state of the art approaches. The outcome of this study could accelerate the learning process for French speakers who are studying English. More importantly, this study also benefits the readability estimation research community, presenting an approach and evaluation at sentence level as well as innovating with the use of cognates as a new text feature.

Crystal co-ordination of the barium ion

A systematic study has been made of the crystal co-ordination of the barium ion in various compounds whose structures have been solved. Apart from the more common co-ordination polyhedra which are enumerated in text-books, a number of new polyhedra have been identified, particularly in cases where the co-ordination numbers are unusual, such as ten or eleven. According to the radius-ratio rule of Pauling, a co-ordination number of nine or ten is normally expected for the barium ion. The present investigations, however, reveal that it shows a variety of co-ordinations with ligancies from six up to twelve. Some of the factors that might possibly enter in explaining this wide range of co-ordination numbers are discussed. It appears as though the part played by the Ba2+ ion in deciding the structure is secondary, limiting itself only to occupying vacant spaces provided by other atoms in the crystal.

SFL och översättningsforskning

Abstract (SFL and translation studies): In this paper, the study of translation is seen as a study of texts and discourses. It is argued that systemic-functional linguistics gives both a theoretical framework to discuss variation in text and variation in situational and cultural context, as well as an analytical toolkit to use to compare texts with each other. The same systemic-functional framework can hence be used to analyse both directly written texts and translations.

Mihin ryhmään itse haluat kuulua? : Kahdessa yläkoulun terveystiedon oppikirjassa rakentuvien terveysdiskurssien ja subjektipositioiden diskurssianalyyttistä tarkastelua

In the study, two upper elementary school health education textbooks were investigated. The purpose of the study was to examine the health discourses and subject- and reader positions constructed in text. Theoretically, the study is based on poststructuralist thought and critical sociology of health promotion. Methodologically, it draws mainly on critical lingvistics and new rhetorics. Textbooks were understood as informative, argumentative and persuasive texts in which different lexical and grammatical methods to secure the readers´ responsiveness were utilized. Also, the relations of the text to wider genres, social situations, structures, institutions and practices were investigated. The interpersonal and ideational dimensions of the texts were analysed with the aim of finding out the kinds of identities for and relations between the speaker and the ideal reader were constructed and the kinds of representations of health and the world around were produced in the textbooks. Multiple discourses of health, and genres and styles characteristic for many kinds of contexts and situations were found. The identities of and the relationships between the speaker and the ideal reader of the text were also multiple and changing. The text echoes both biomedical health discourse emphasizing prevention of illness and holistic discourse emphasizing personal welfare, fulfillment and happiness. Furthermore, traces for example from development psychological, ecological and civilization critical discourses were perceived. Formal scientific genre was found to be mixed with informal chatting imitating close and equal relationship between participants characteristic for advertisements and other persuasive texts, and obliging and ordering expression typical for school context and other situations where the relationship between participants is unequal and distant. The ideal reader of the text can be characterized as adolescent living in the world saturated by advertising and media. He or she is interested in the life of the celebrities, and is interested rather in her or his appearance, image and short-term enjoyment than health and long-term welfare. In the textbooks, healthy way of life is attempted to create a product which appeals to the values and interests of the imaginary public, the ideal reader of the text. Marketing healthy choices tend to reproduce stereotyped ideas of happiness, good life, youth and sex. Furthermore, individualizing approach mixed with wide definition of health legitimizes easily an erraneous impression of health, beauty and success being personal achievements dependent only on attitudes and competences.

Speaker verification based on the fusion of speech acoustics and inverted articulatory signals

We propose apractical, feature-level and score-level fusion approach by combining acoustic and estimated articulatory information for both text independent and text dependent speaker verification. From a practical point of view, we study how to improve speaker verification performance by combining dynamic articulatory information with the conventional acoustic features. On text independent speaker verification, we find that concatenating articulatory features obtained from measured speech production data with conventional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) improves the performance dramatically. However, since directly measuring articulatory data is not feasible in many real world applications, we also experiment with estimated articulatory features obtained through acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. We explore both feature level and score level fusion methods and find that the overall system performance is significantly enhanced even with estimated articulatory features. Such a performance boost could be due to the inter-speaker variation information embedded in the estimated articulatory features. Since the dynamics of articulation contain important information, we included inverted articulatory trajectories in text dependent speaker verification. We demonstrate that the articulatory constraints introduced by inverted articulatory features help to reject wrong password trials and improve the performance after score level fusion. We evaluate the proposed methods on the X-ray Microbeam database and the RSR 2015 database, respectively, for the aforementioned two tasks. Experimental results show that we achieve more than 15% relative equal error rate reduction for both speaker verification tasks. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Implementación del Modelo de Red Causal en un texto narrativo en español

Resumen: El Modelo de Red Causal propone que la estructura causal de una historia y su representación en la memoria episódica se asemejan a una red, en la que los acontecimientos resultan de una combinación de antecedentes causales, que a su vez tienen múltiples consecuencias. El estudio de la comprensión de textos según este modelo ha tendido a llevarse a cabo utilizando textos experimentales en inglés. En razón de ello, el objetivo de este trabajo consistió en presentar la aplicación del Modelo de Red Causal a un texto narrativo natural en español, a fin de abogar por su utilidad para examinar los procesos cognitivos involucrados en la comprensión textual.