BIOMEDICAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING AND EXTRACTION (BLUE-TEXT): A MINIMAL SYNTACTIC, SEMANTIC METHOD

Clinical text understanding (CTU) is of interest to health informatics because critical clinical information frequently represented as unconstrained text in electronic health records are extensively used by human experts to guide clinical practice, decision making, and to document delivery of care, but are largely unusable by information systems for queries and computations. Recent initiatives advocating for translational research call for generation of technologies that can integrate structured clinical data with unstructured data, provide a unified interface to all data, and contextualize clinical information for reuse in multidisciplinary and collaborative environment envisioned by CTSA program. This implies that technologies for the processing and interpretation of clinical text should be evaluated not only in terms of their validity and reliability in their intended environment, but also in light of their interoperability, and ability to support information integration and contextualization in a distributed and dynamic environment. This vision adds a new layer of information representation requirements that needs to be accounted for when conceptualizing implementation or acquisition of clinical text processing tools and technologies for multidisciplinary research. On the other hand, electronic health records frequently contain unconstrained clinical text with high variability in use of terms and documentation practices, and without commitmentto grammatical or syntactic structure of the language (e.g. Triage notes, physician and nurse notes, chief complaints, etc). This hinders performance of natural language processing technologies which typically rely heavily on the syntax of language and grammatical structure of the text. This document introduces our method to transform unconstrained clinical text found in electronic health information systems to a formal (computationally understandable) representation that is suitable for querying, integration, contextualization and reuse, and is resilient to the grammatical and syntactic irregularities of the clinical text. We present our design rationale, method, and results of evaluation in processing chief complaints and triage notes from 8 different emergency departments in Houston Texas. At the end, we will discuss significance of our contribution in enabling use of clinical text in a practical bio-surveillance setting.

Elements of the reception of aristotelian thought in 19th century german-language philosophy and economics

La cuestión de la interpretación de Aristóteles por parte de la Academia alemana del siglo XIX es de interés tanto para filósofos como para economistas. Esto se debe a que el pensamiento clásico constituyó una cuestión de discusión e inspiración para el Idealismo, el Hegelianismo, el Historicismo y los economistas históricos alemanes (comenzando por Roscher) y su oponente austríaco, Carl Menger, fundador de la Escuela Austríaca de Economía. De este modo la filosofía antigua permaneció vigente. Al evaluar esta recepción, en este trabajo se muestra que el debate sobre entidades colectivas versus individualidad encuentra allí una base, y el individualismo metodológico, una justificación. Esto resulta útil aún hoy en el siglo veintiuno, en que presenciamos una crisis de la corriente principal de la economía.

Reversible language extensions and their application in debugging

A range of methodologies and techniques are available to guide the design and implementation of language extensions and domainspecific languages. A simple yet powerful technique is based on source-tosource transformations interleaved across the compilation passes of a base language. Despite being a successful approach, it has the main drawback that the input source code is lost in the process. When considering the whole workflow of program development (warning and error reporting, debugging, or even program analysis), program translations are no more powerful than a glorified macro language. In this paper, we propose an augmented approach to language extensions for Prolog, where symbolic annotations are included in the target program. These annotations allow selectively reversing the translated code. We illustrate the approach by showing that coupling it with minimal extensions to a generic Prolog debugger allows us to provide users with a familiar, source-level view during the debugging of programs which use a variety of language extensions, such as functional notation, DCGs, or CLP{Q,R}.

Research on parallel logic language implementation and architecture at ICOT

Abstract is not available

Language resources and linked data: a practical perspective

Recently, experts and practitioners in language resources have started recognizing the benefits of the linked data (LD) paradigm for the representation and exploitation of linguistic data on the Web. The adoption of the LD principles is leading to an emerging ecosystem of multilingual open resources that conform to the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud, in which datasets of linguistic data are interconnected and represented following common vocabularies, which facilitates linguistic information discovery, integration and access. In order to contribute to this initiative, this paper summarizes several key aspects of the representation of linguistic information as linked data from a practical perspective. The main goal of this document is to provide the basic ideas and tools for migrating language resources (lexicons, corpora, etc.) as LD on the Web and to develop some useful NLP tasks with them (e.g., word sense disambiguation). Such material was the basis of a tutorial imparted at the EKAW’14 conference, which is also reported in the paper.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus Reverse Transcriptase and Protease Sequence Database: an expanded data model integrating natural language text and sequence analysis programs

The HIV Reverse Transcriptase and Protease Sequence Database is an on-line relational database that catalogs evolutionary and drug-related sequence variation in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reverse transcriptase (RT) and protease enzymes, the molecular targets of anti-HIV therapy (http://hivdb.stanford.edu). The database contains a compilation of nearly all published HIV RT and protease sequences, including submissions from International Collaboration databases and sequences published in journal articles. Sequences are linked to data about the source of the sequence sample and the antiretroviral drug treatment history of the individual from whom the isolate was obtained. During the past year 3500 sequences have been added and the data model has been expanded to include drug susceptibility data on sequenced isolates. Database content has also been integrated with didactic text and the output of two sequence analysis programs.

On the status of conversion in present-day American English: controversial issues and corpus-based study

This paper examines both theoretical and practical issues related to conversion. A quite detailed characterization of the 5329 instances identified in a 300.000-word corpus of American English written in the late 90s is provided. The examples are grouped according to the type of conversion involved. Frequency and the internal structure of words are also considered and compared with the results obtained by earlier scholars. In spite of the limitations that a corpus study imposes, the conclusions obtained seem to suggest that any item, independent of its morphological structure, may undergo conversion and this may happen in any register. Moreover, conversion seems to be an important source of new items in American English nowadays.

Postcolonial Language: Rejection and Subversion

A literatura pós-colonial é muitas vezes pensada como uma forma de tradução cultural, como um lugar privilegiado a partir do qual se pode reescrever a história e retroactivamente reflectir sobre a experiência colonial. Tomando como ponto de partida esta noção de tradução cultural, o presente ensaio procura analisar as obras Une Tempête (1969), de Aimé Césaire, e Foe (1986), de J. M. Coetzee, no que diz respeito à re-escrita das personagens Caliban e Friday, respectivamente. Ambas as figuras serão comparadas e contrastadas relativamente ao uso particular que fazem da língua enquanto instrumento de poder, subversão e rejeição do domínio europeu. Palavras-chave: Literatura Pós-colonial, Mecanismo de “Writing Back”, Tradução Cultural, Língua, Alteridade Postcolonial literature is often depicted as a form of cultural translation, a privileged space from which to rewrite history and retroactively reflect upon the colonial experience. Based on this notion of cultural translation, the article seeks to examine, respectively, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) as regards the “written-back” characters Caliban and Friday. Both characters will be compared and contrasted concerning their peculiar use of language as an instrument of power, subversion, and rejection of the European ruling. Keywords: Postcolonial Literature, Writing Back, Cultural Translation, Language, Other(ness)

The Impact of Language Opacity and Proficiency on Reading Strategies in Bilinguals: An Eye Movement Study

Reading strategies vary across languages according to orthographic depth - the complexity of the grapheme in relation to phoneme conversion rules - notably at the level of eye movement patterns. We recently demonstrated that a group of early bilinguals, who learned both languages equally under the age of seven, presented a first fixation location (FFL) closer to the beginning of words when reading in German as compared with French. Since German is known to be orthographically more transparent than French, this suggested that different strategies were being engaged depending on the orthographic depth of the used language. Opaque languages induce a global reading strategy, and transparent languages force a local/serial strategy. Thus, pseudo-words were processed using a local strategy in both languages, suggesting that the link between word forms and their lexical representation may also play a role in selecting a specific strategy. In order to test whether corresponding effects appear in late bilinguals with low proficiency in their second language (L2), we present a new study in which we recorded eye movements while two groups of late German-French and French-German bilinguals read aloud isolated French and German words and pseudo-words. Since, a transparent reading strategy is local and serial, with a high number of fixations per stimuli, and the level of the bilingual participants' L2 is low, the impact of language opacity should be observed in L1. We therefore predicted a global reading strategy if the bilinguals' L1 was French (FFL close to the middle of the stimuli with fewer fixations per stimuli) and a local and serial reading strategy if it was German. Thus, the L2 of each group, as well as pseudo-words, should also require a local and serial reading strategy. Our results confirmed these hypotheses, suggesting that global word processing is only achieved by bilinguals with an opaque L1 when reading in an opaque language; the low level in the L2 gives way to a local and serial reading strategy. These findings stress the fact that reading behavior is influenced not only by the linguistic mode but also by top-down factors, such as readers' proficiency.

Language characteristics and academic achievement : a look at Asian and Hispanic eighth graders in NELS:88 /

"NCES 92-479."

A classified catalogue of theological and religious books, comprising a large collection of standard works, American and foreign; old and rare works, and recent publications, to September 1, 1871. Also an addenda of miscellaneous literature, works of reference, &c. For sale by Smith, English & Co., booksellers and importers ...

Interleaved.