A general proposal to multilingual information access based on syntactic-semantic patterns

In the last few years, there has been a wide development in the research on textual information systems. The goal is to improve these systems in order to allow an easy localization, treatment and access to the information stored in digital format (Digital Databases, Documental Databases, and so on). There are lots of applications focused on information access (for example, Web-search systems like Google or Altavista). However, these applications have problems when they must access to cross-language information, or when they need to show information in a language different from the one of the query. This paper explores the use of syntactic-sematic patterns as a method to access to multilingual information, and revise, in the case of Information Retrieval, where it is possible and useful to employ patterns when it comes to the multilingual and interactive aspects. On the one hand, the multilingual aspects that are going to be studied are the ones related to the access to documents in different languages from the one of the query, as well as the automatic translation of the document, i.e. a machine translation system based on patterns. On the other hand, this paper is going to go deep into the interactive aspects related to the reformulation of a query based on the syntactic-semantic pattern of the request.

Automatic extraction of syntactic semantic patterns for multilingual resources

In this paper we present an automatic system for the extraction of syntactic semantic patterns applied to the development of multilingual processing tools. In order to achieve optimum methods for the automatic treatment of more than one language, we propose the use of syntactic semantic patterns. These patterns are formed by a verbal head and the main arguments, and they are aligned among languages. In this paper we present an automatic system for the extraction and alignment of syntactic semantic patterns from two manually annotated corpora, and evaluate the main linguistic problems that we must deal with in the alignment process.

Intonational patterns and comprehension in Broca's aphasia

The goal of the study is to determine whether the deficit is syntactic in nature and that aphasic individuals preserve their phonological abilities intact. This has important implications, since it contributes to achieve a more complete characterization of agrammatic comprehension and to report new data from the Romance languages. Here, an experimental task is designed and carried out with six catalan Broca's aphasics, in order to find out whether they preserve their phonological skills. The results establish that Catalan aphasics' comprehension does not result from a phonological impairment

Syntactic Based Machine Translation from English to Malayalam

Due to the emergence of multiple language support on the Internet, machine translation (MT) technologies are indispensable to the communication between speakers using different languages. Recent research works have started to explore tree-based machine translation systems with syntactical and morphological information. This work aims the development of Syntactic Based Machine Translation from English to Malayalam by adding different case information during translation. The system identifies general rules for various sentence patterns in English. These rules are generated using the Parts Of Speech (POS) tag information of the texts. Word Reordering based on the Syntax Tree is used to improve the translation quality of the system. The system used Bilingual English –Malayalam dictionary for translation.

Knowledge Patterns for the Web: extraction, tranformation and reuse

This thesis aims at investigating methods and software architectures for discovering what are the typical and frequently occurring structures used for organizing knowledge in the Web. We identify these structures as Knowledge Patterns (KPs). KP discovery needs to address two main research problems: the heterogeneity of sources, formats and semantics in the Web (i.e., the knowledge soup problem) and the difficulty to draw relevant boundary around data that allows to capture the meaningful knowledge with respect to a certain context (i.e., the knowledge boundary problem). Hence, we introduce two methods that provide different solutions to these two problems by tackling KP discovery from two different perspectives: (i) the transformation of KP-like artifacts to KPs formalized as OWL2 ontologies; (ii) the bottom-up extraction of KPs by analyzing how data are organized in Linked Data. The two methods address the knowledge soup and boundary problems in different ways. The first method provides a solution to the two aforementioned problems that is based on a purely syntactic transformation step of the original source to RDF followed by a refactoring step whose aim is to add semantics to RDF by select meaningful RDF triples. The second method allows to draw boundaries around RDF in Linked Data by analyzing type paths. A type path is a possible route through an RDF that takes into account the types associated to the nodes of a path. Then we present K~ore, a software architecture conceived to be the basis for developing KP discovery systems and designed according to two software architectural styles, i.e, the Component-based and REST. Finally we provide an example of reuse of KP based on Aemoo, an exploratory search tool which exploits KPs for performing entity summarization.

ENHANCING COMMUNICATION THROUGH SUCCESSFUL REPAIR: EXAMINING FLUENCY AND MECHANISMS FOR SYNTACTIC PROGRESS IN APHASIC AND NON-APHASIC SPEECH

The fields of Rhetoric and Communication usually assume a competent speaker who is able to speak well with conscious intent; however, what happens when intent and comprehension are intact but communicative facilities are impaired (e.g., by stroke or traumatic brain injury)? What might a focus on communicative success be able to tell us in those instances? This project considers this question in examining communication disorders through identifying and analyzing patterns of (dis) fluent speech between 10 aphasic and 10 non-aphasic adults. The analysis in this report is centered on a collection of data provided by the Aphasia Bank database. The database’s collection protocol guides aphasic and non-aphasic participants through a series of language assessments, and for my re-analysis of the database’s transcripts I consider communicative success is and how it is demonstrated during a re-telling of the Cinderella narrative. I conducted a thorough examination of a set of participant transcripts to understand the contexts in which speech errors occur, and how (dis) fluencies may follow from aphasic and non-aphasic participant’s speech patterns. An inductive mixed-methods approach, informed by grounded theory, qualitative, and linguistic analyses of the transcripts functioned as a means to balance the classification of data, providing a foundation for all sampling decisions. A close examination of the transcripts and the codes of the Aphasia Bank database suggest that while the coding is abundant and detailed, that further levels of coding and analysis may be needed to reveal underlying similarities and differences in aphasic vs. non-aphasic linguistic behavior. Through four successive levels of increasingly detailed analysis, I found that patterns of repair by aphasics and non-aphasics differed primarily in degree rather than kind. This finding may have therapeutic impact, in reassuring aphasics that they are on the right track to achieving communicative fluency.

Semantic patterns for sentiment analysis of Twitter

Most existing approaches to Twitter sentiment analysis assume that sentiment is explicitly expressed through affective words. Nevertheless, sentiment is often implicitly expressed via latent semantic relations, patterns and dependencies among words in tweets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that automatically captures patterns of words of similar contextual semantics and sentiment in tweets. Unlike previous work on sentiment pattern extraction, our proposed approach does not rely on external and fixed sets of syntactical templates/patterns, nor requires deep analyses of the syntactic structure of sentences in tweets. We evaluate our approach with tweet- and entity-level sentiment analysis tasks by using the extracted semantic patterns as classification features in both tasks. We use 9 Twitter datasets in our evaluation and compare the performance of our patterns against 6 state-of-the-art baselines. Results show that our patterns consistently outperform all other baselines on all datasets by 2.19% at the tweet-level and 7.5% at the entity-level in average F-measure.

Characterization Of Cumulative Joint Damage Patterns In Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Clinical, Serological, And Gene Polymorphism Perspective.

To characterize cumulative joint damage (CJD) patterns in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine their associations with demographic/clinical features and HLA-DRB1 gene polymorphism. Hand and foot radiographs were obtained from 404 patients with RA. CJD patterns were determined by 3 derivations from Sharp/van der Heijde scores, obtained by the mathematical division of scores for hands/feet (Sharp-h/f score), fingers/wrists (Sharp-f/w score), and erosion/space narrowing (Sharp-e/sn score), respectively. DNA and serum were obtained for determination of HLA-DRB1 polymorphism, rheumatoid factor (RF), and anticitrullinated protein antibodies (ACPA). Patients with wrist-dominant CJD pattern were more likely to have severe RA than those with finger-dominant pattern (68.4% vs 46.0%; p = 0.036) as were those with foot-dominant vs hand-dominant CJD pattern (76.5% vs 56.4%; p = 0.044). HLA-DRB1 shared epitope (SE) alleles were associated with erosion-dominant CJD pattern (p = 0.021). Patients with erosion-dominant CJD pattern had higher levels of RF and ACPA than those with space-narrowing-dominant CJD pattern (median RF 71.35 U/ml vs 22.05 U/ml, respectively; p = 0.003; median ACPA 187.9 U/ml vs 143.2 U/ml, respectively; p < 0.001). The majority of triple-positive patients (SE+, RF+, ACPA+) had erosion-dominant CJD pattern (62.3%) while the majority of triple-negative patients (SE-, FR-, ACPA-) had space narrowing-dominant CJD pattern (75%; p = 0.017). ACPA was associated with HLA-DRB1 SE alleles (p < 0.05). Patients with foot-dominant CJD pattern were taller than those with hand-dominant CJD pattern (p = 0.002); those with erosion-dominant CJD pattern had higher weight and body mass index than those with space narrowing-dominant CJD pattern (p = 0.014, p = 0.001). CJD patterns were associated with disease severity, HLA-DRB1 SE status, presence and titer of ACPA and RF, and morphometric features.

Environmental Controls In The Water Use Patterns Of A Tropical Cloud Forest Tree Species, Drimys Brasiliensis (winteraceae).

Trees from tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF) display very dynamic patterns of water use. They are capable of downwards water transport towards the soil during leaf-wetting events, likely a consequence of foliar water uptake (FWU), as well as high rates of night-time transpiration (Enight) during drier nights. These two processes might represent important sources of water losses and gains to the plant, but little is known about the environmental factors controlling these water fluxes. We evaluated how contrasting atmospheric and soil water conditions control diurnal, nocturnal and seasonal dynamics of sap flow in Drimys brasiliensis (Miers), a common Neotropical cloud forest species. We monitored the seasonal variation of soil water content, micrometeorological conditions and sap flow of D. brasiliensis trees in the field during wet and dry seasons. We also conducted a greenhouse experiment exposing D. brasiliensis saplings under contrasting soil water conditions to deuterium-labelled fog water. We found that during the night D. brasiliensis possesses heightened stomatal sensitivity to soil drought and vapour pressure deficit, which reduces night-time water loss. Leaf-wetting events had a strong suppressive effect on tree transpiration (E). Foliar water uptake increased in magnitude with drier soil and during longer leaf-wetting events. The difference between diurnal and nocturnal stomatal behaviour in D. brasiliensis could be attributed to an optimization of carbon gain when leaves are dry, as well as minimization of nocturnal water loss. The leaf-wetting events on the other hand seem important to D. brasiliensis water balance, especially during soil droughts, both by suppressing tree transpiration (E) and as a small additional water supply through FWU. Our results suggest that decreases in leaf-wetting events in TMCF might increase D. brasiliensis water loss and decrease its water gains, which could compromise its ecophysiological performance and survival during dry periods.

Patterns Of Seizure Control In Patients With Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy With And Without Hippocampus Sclerosis.

Objective Patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) may present unstable pattern of seizures. We aimed to evaluate the occurrence of relapse-remitting seizures in MTLE with (MTLE-HS) and without (MTLE-NL) hippocampal sclerosis. Method We evaluated 172 patients with MTLE-HS (122) or MTLE-NL (50). Relapse-remitting pattern was defined as periods longer than two years of seizure-freedom intercalated with seizure recurrence. Infrequent seizures was considered as up to three seizures per year and frequent seizures as any period of seizures higher than that. Results Thirty-seven (30%) MTLE-HS and 18 (36%) MTLE-NL patients had relapse-remitting pattern (X2, p = 0.470). This was more common in those with infrequent seizures (X2, p < 0.001). Twelve MTLE-HS and one MTLE-NL patients had prolonged seizure remission between the first and second decade of life (X2, p = 0.06). Conclusion Similar proportion of MTLE-HS or MTLE-NL patients present relapse-remitting seizures and this occurs more often in those with infrequent seizures.

Estruturas factivas e padrões de extração

This paper investigates the relationship between structural and semantic properties of factive sentences and the pattern of extraction exhibited. It is argued that a classification as weak or strong island is unfeasible for what has been termed Factive Island. The kinds of structures allowed as factive complements are analyzed as well as their corresponding behavior concerning extraction. The common feature these structures show is their presuppositional character, which is derived from a selection requirement. I assume that factive predicates select a [+ specific] complement. The differences showed concerning extraction constitute a spontaneous effect from the structural way each construction may satisfy this requirement.

Breastfeeding and non-nutritive sucking patterns related to the prevalence of anterior open bite in primary dentition

OBJECTIVE: Nutritional, immunological and psychological benefts of exclusive breastfeeding for the frst 6 months of life are unequivocally recognized. However, mothers should also be aware of the importance of breastfeeding for promoting adequate oral development. This study evaluated the association between breastfeeding and non-nutritive sucking patterns and the prevalence of anterior open bite in primary dentition. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Infant feeding and non-nutritive sucking were investigated in a 3-6 year-old sample of 1,377 children, from São Paulo city, Brazil. Children were grouped according to breastfeeding duration: G1 - non-breastfed, G2 - shorter than 6 months, G3 - interruption between 6 and 12 months, and G4 - longer than 12 months. Three calibrated dentists performed clinical examinations and classifed overbite into 3 categories: normal, anterior open bite and deep bite. Chi-square tests (p<0.05) with odds ratio (OR) calculation were used for intergroup comparisons. The impact of breastfeeding and non-nutritive sucking on the prevalence of anterior open bite was analyzed using binary logistic regression. RESULTS: The prevalence estimates of anterior open bite were: 31.9% (G1), 26.1% (G2), 22.1% (G3), and 6.2% (G4). G1 would have signifcantly more chances of having anterior open bite compared with G4; in the total sample (OR=7.1) and in the subgroup without history of non-nutritive sucking (OR=9.3). Prolonging breastfeeding for 12 months was associated with a 3.7 times lower chance of having anterior open bite. In each year of persistence with non-nutritive sucking habits, the chance of developing this malocclusion increased in 2.38 times. CONCLUSIONS: Breastfeeding and non-nutritive sucking durations demonstrated opposite effects on the prediction of anterior open bite. Non-breastfed children presented signifcantly greater chances of having anterior open bite compared with those who were breastfed for periods longer than 12 months, demonstrating the benefcial infuence of breastfeeding on dental occlusion.

Polyamine patterns in haploid and diploid tobacco tissues and in vitro cultures

The aim of this work was to determine PAs levels in pith tissues and callus cultures from haploid and diploid tobacco plants, explanted from the apical and basal regions of the stem. These explants were cultured in an RM-64 medium supplied with IAA and kinetin, under light or in the dark, during successive subcultures. PAs levels followed a basipetal decrease in diploid and an increase in haploid, pith tissues. A similar pattern of total PAs (free + conjugated) was observed for the callus of diploid and haploid plants maintained in the light, and for the haploid callus in the dark, whereas the diploid callus in the dark showed a constant increase in total PAs levels until the end of culture. The PA increase in the diploid callus in the dark was related to free Put levels increase. The ploidy status of the plants could express different PA gradients together with the plant pith and in vitro callus cultures.

Differentiation of Melipona quadrifasciata L. (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini) subspecies using cytochrome b PCR-RFLP patterns

Melipona quadrifasciata quadrifasciata and M. quadrifasciata anthidioides are subspecies of M. quadrifasciata, a stingless bee species common in coastal Brazil. These subspecies are discriminated by the yellow stripe pattern of the abdominal tergites. We found Vsp I restriction patterns in the cytochrome b region closely associated to each subspecies in 155 M. quadrifasciata colonies of different geographical origin. This mitochondrial DNA molecular marker facilitates diagnosis of M. quadrifasciata subspecies matrilines and can be used to establish their natural distribution and identify hybrid colonies.

Hemodynamic, morphometric and autonomic patterns in hypertensive rats - renin-angiotensin system modulation

BACKGROUND: Spontaneously hypertensive rats develop left ventricular hypertrophy, increased blood pressure and blood pressure variability, which are important determinants of heart damage, like the activation of renin-angiotensin system. AIMS: To investigate the effects of the time-course of hypertension over 1) hemodynamic and autonomic patterns (blood pressure; blood pressure variability; heart rate); 2) left ventricular hypertrophy; and 3) local and systemic Renin-angiotensin system of the spontaneously hypertensive rats. METHODS: Male spontaneously hypertensive rats were randomized into two groups: young (n=13) and adult (n=12). Hemodynamic signals (blood pressure, heart rate), blood pressure variability (BPV) and spectral analysis of the autonomic components of blood pressure were analyzed. LEFT ventricular hypertrophy was measured by the ratio of LV mass to body weight (mg/g), by myocyte diameter (μm) and by relative fibrosis area (RFA, %). ACE and ACE2 activities were measured by fluorometry (UF/min), and plasma renin activity (PRA) was assessed by a radioimmunoassay (ng/mL/h). Cardiac gene expressions of Agt, Ace and Ace2 were quantified by RT-PCR (AU). RESULTS: The time-course of hypertension in spontaneously hypertensive rats increased BPV and reduced the alpha index in adult spontaneously hypertensive rats. Adult rats showed increases in left ventricular hypertrophy and in RFA. Compared to young spontaneously hypertensive rats, adult spontaneously hypertensive rats had lower cardiac ACE and ACE2 activities, and high levels of PRA. No change was observed in gene expression of Renin-angiotensin system components. CONCLUSIONS: The observed autonomic dysfunction and modulation of Renin-angiotensin system activity are contributing factors to end-organ damage in hypertension and could be interacting. Our findings suggest that the management of hypertensive disease must start before blood pressure reaches the highest stable levels and the consequent established end-organ damage is reached.