18,859 research outputs found
Rule-Based Morphological Processing in a Second Language: A Behavioural Investigation
According to dual-system accounts of English past-tense processing, regular forms are decomposed into their
stem and affix (played=play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, whereas irregular forms (kept) are
retrieved directly from the mental lexicon. In second language (L2) processing research, it has been suggested
that L2 learners do not have rule-based decomposing abilities, so they process regular past-tense forms similarly to irregular ones (Silva & Clahsen 2008), without applying the morphological rule. The present study investigates morphological processing of regular and irregular verbs in Greek-English L2 learners and native English speakers. In a masked-priming experiment with regular and irregular prime-target verb pairs (playedplay/kept-keep), native speakers showed priming effects for regular pairs, compared to unrelated pairs,
indicating decomposition; conversely, L2 learners showed inhibitory effects. At the same time, both groups
revealed priming effects for irregular pairs. We discuss these findings in the light of available theories on L2
morphological processing
Informed baseline subtraction of proteomic mass spectrometry data aided by a novel sliding window algorithm
Proteomic matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation (MALDI) linear
time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry (MS) may be used to produce protein
profiles from biological samples with the aim of discovering biomarkers for
disease. However, the raw protein profiles suffer from several sources of bias
or systematic variation which need to be removed via pre-processing before
meaningful downstream analysis of the data can be undertaken. Baseline
subtraction, an early pre-processing step that removes the non-peptide signal
from the spectra, is complicated by the following: (i) each spectrum has, on
average, wider peaks for peptides with higher mass-to-charge ratios (m/z), and
(ii) the time-consuming and error-prone trial-and-error process for optimising
the baseline subtraction input arguments. With reference to the aforementioned
complications, we present an automated pipeline that includes (i) a novel
`continuous' line segment algorithm that efficiently operates over data with a
transformed m/z-axis to remove the relationship between peptide mass and peak
width, and (ii) an input-free algorithm to estimate peak widths on the
transformed m/z scale. The automated baseline subtraction method was deployed
on six publicly available proteomic MS datasets using six different m/z-axis
transformations. Optimality of the automated baseline subtraction pipeline was
assessed quantitatively using the mean absolute scaled error (MASE) when
compared to a gold-standard baseline subtracted signal. Near-optimal baseline
subtraction was achieved using the automated pipeline. The advantages of the
proposed pipeline include informed and data specific input arguments for
baseline subtraction methods, the avoidance of time-intensive and subjective
piecewise baseline subtraction, and the ability to automate baseline
subtraction completely. Moreover, individual steps can be adopted as
stand-alone routines.Comment: 50 pages, 19 figure
Insights into Analogy Completion from the Biomedical Domain
Analogy completion has been a popular task in recent years for evaluating the
semantic properties of word embeddings, but the standard methodology makes a
number of assumptions about analogies that do not always hold, either in recent
benchmark datasets or when expanding into other domains. Through an analysis of
analogies in the biomedical domain, we identify three assumptions: that of a
Single Answer for any given analogy, that the pairs involved describe the Same
Relationship, and that each pair is Informative with respect to the other. We
propose modifying the standard methodology to relax these assumptions by
allowing for multiple correct answers, reporting MAP and MRR in addition to
accuracy, and using multiple example pairs. We further present BMASS, a novel
dataset for evaluating linguistic regularities in biomedical embeddings, and
demonstrate that the relationships described in the dataset pose significant
semantic challenges to current word embedding methods.Comment: Accepted to BioNLP 2017. (10 pages
Robust semi-automated path extraction for visualising stenosis of the coronary arteries
Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is useful for diagnosing and planning treatment of heart disease. However, contrast agent in surrounding structures (such as the aorta and left ventricle) makes 3-D visualisation of the coronary arteries difficult. This paper presents a composite method employing segmentation and volume rendering to overcome this issue. A key contribution is a novel Fast Marching minimal path cost function for vessel centreline extraction. The resultant centreline is used to compute a measure of vessel lumen, which indicates the degree of stenosis (narrowing of a vessel). Two volume visualisation techniques are presented which utilise the segmented arteries and lumen measure. The system is evaluated and demonstrated using synthetic and clinically obtained datasets
Ever decreasing circles: speech production in semantic dementia
We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech
samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis software. Lexical measures showed the predicted pattern for nouns and verbs in hand-scored data, and for nouns in software-extracted data, with fewer low frequency items in the speech of the patients relative to controls. The
distribution of complex morpho-syntactic forms for the SD group showed a reduced range, with fewer constructions that required multiple auxiliaries and inflections. Finally, the distribution of syntactic constructions also differed between groups, with a pattern that reflects the patients’ characteristic anomia and constraints on morpho-syntactic complexity. The data are in line with previous findings of an absence of gross syntactic errors or violations in SD speech. Alterations in the distributions of morphology and syntax, however, support constraint satisfaction models of speech production in which there is no hard boundary between lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding
Simultaneous effects on parvalbumin-positive interneuron and dopaminergic system development in a transgenic rat model for sporadic schizophrenia
To date, unequivocal neuroanatomical features have been demonstrated neither for sporadic nor for familial schizophrenia. Here, we investigated the neuroanatomical changes in a transgenic rat model for a subset of sporadic chronic mental illness (CMI), which modestly overexpresses human full-length, non-mutant Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1), and for which aberrant dopamine homeostasis consistent with some schizophrenia phenotypes has previously been reported. Neuroanatomical analysis revealed a reduced density of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and reduced dopaminergic fibres in the striatum. Parvalbumin-positive interneuron occurrence in the somatosensory cortex was shifted from layers II/III to V/VI, and the number of calbindin-positive interneurons was slightly decreased. Reduced corpus callosum thickness confirmed trend-level observations from in vivo MRI and voxel-wise tensor based morphometry. These neuroanatomical changes help explain functional phenotypes of this animal model, some of which resemble changes observed in human schizophrenia post mortem brain tissues. Our findings also demonstrate how a single molecular factor, DISC1 overexpression or misassembly, can account for a variety of seemingly unrelated morphological phenotypes and thus provides a possible unifying explanation for similar findings observed in sporadic schizophrenia patients. Our anatomical investigation of a defined model for sporadic mental illness enables a clearer definition of neuroanatomical changes associated with subsets of human sporadic schizophrenia
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