18 research outputs found

    JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

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    In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

    Towards a system of concepts for Family Medicine. Multilingual indexing in General Practice/ Family Medicine in the era of Semantic Web

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    UNIVERSITY OF LIÈGE, BELGIUM Executive Summary Faculty of Medicine Département Universitaire de Médecine Générale. Unité de recherche Soins Primaires et Santé Doctor in biomedical sciences Towards a system of concepts for Family Medicine. Multilingual indexing in General Practice/ Family Medicine in the era of SemanticWeb by Dr. Marc JAMOULLE Introduction This thesis is about giving visibility to the often overlooked work of family physicians and consequently, is about grey literature in General Practice and Family Medicine (GP/FM). It often seems that conference organizers do not think of GP/FM as a knowledge-producing discipline that deserves active dissemination. A conference is organized, but not much is done with the knowledge shared at these meetings. In turn, the knowledge cannot be reused or reapplied. This these is also about indexing. To find knowledge back, indexing is mandatory. We must prepare tools that will automatically index the thousands of abstracts that family doctors produce each year in various languages. And finally this work is about semantics1. It is an introduction to health terminologies, ontologies, semantic data, and linked open data. All are expressions of the next step: Semantic Web for health care data. Concepts, units of thought expressed by terms, will be our target and must have the ability to be expressed in multiple languages. In turn, three areas of knowledge are at stake in this study: (i) Family Medicine as a pillar of primary health care, (ii) computational linguistics, and (iii) health information systems. Aim • To identify knowledge produced by General practitioners (GPs) by improving annotation of grey literature in Primary Health Care • To propose an experimental indexing system, acting as draft for a standardized table of content of GP/GM • To improve the searchability of repositories for grey literature in GP/GM. 1For specific terms, see the Glossary page 257 x Methods The first step aimed to design the taxonomy by identifying relevant concepts in a compiled corpus of GP/FM texts. We have studied the concepts identified in nearly two thousand communications of GPs during conferences. The relevant concepts belong to the fields that are focusing on GP/FM activities (e.g. teaching, ethics, management or environmental hazard issues). The second step was the development of an on-line, multilingual, terminological resource for each category of the resulting taxonomy, named Q-Codes. We have designed this terminology in the form of a lightweight ontology, accessible on-line for readers and ready for use by computers of the semantic web. It is also fit for the Linked Open Data universe. Results We propose 182 Q-Codes in an on-line multilingual database (10 languages) (www.hetop.eu/Q) acting each as a filter for Medline. Q-Codes are also available under the form of Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) and are exportable in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC) is linked to Q-Codes in order to form the Core Content Classification in General Practice/Family Medicine (3CGP). So far, 3CGP is in use by humans in pedagogy, in bibliographic studies, in indexing congresses, master theses and other forms of grey literature in GP/FM. Use by computers is experimented in automatic classifiers, annotators and natural language processing. Discussion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to expand the ICPC coding system with an extension for family physician contextual issues, thus covering non-clinical content of practice. It remains to be proven that our proposed terminology will help in dealing with more complex systems, such as MeSH, to support information storage and retrieval activities. However, this exercise is proposed as a first step in the creation of an ontology of GP/FM and as an opening to the complex world of Semantic Web technologies. Conclusion We expect that the creation of this terminological resource for indexing abstracts and for facilitating Medline searches for general practitioners, researchers and students in medicine will reduce loss of knowledge in the domain of GP/FM. In addition, through better indexing of the grey literature (congress abstracts, master’s and doctoral theses), we hope to enhance the accessibility of research results and give visibility to the invisible work of family physicians

    Protection of Personal Data in sub-Saharan Africa

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    Africa is by far the least developed continent in terms of protection of personal data. At present there are 11 countries out of 54 which have implemented comprehensive data privacy legislation. Nine of them namely, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gabon, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal and Seychelles belong to sub-Saharan Africa. The other two countries, Morocco and Tunisia, belong to North Africa. Yet, there are seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa with either Bills or drafts on data privacy pending before their respective legislative or executive bodies. These include Ivory Coast (Cote d Ivoire), Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and South Africa. The rest of African countries have neither Bills nor drafts of such laws. The dominant discourse on privacy and data protection advances the culture of collectivism as the reason for the state of privacy and regulation in Africa. Founded on the normative assumptions of the old debates engraved in universalism and cultural relativism, the main argument held in this discourse is that Africa s collectivism denies an individual a space to advance claims for privacy. The present study sought to interrogate this dominant discourse and in particular investigating the emerging trends of adopting comprehensive data privacy legislation in Africa. To avert from the inherent pitfalls of normative assumptions, this study engaged a hybrid methodology. It triangulated the doctrinal, empirical and international comparative law methodologies. Moreover, in order to gain in-depth insights of the state of privacy, the study delimited to three sub-Saharan African countries: Mauritius, South Africa and Tanzania as cases. Based on documents collected and interviews held, this study has found that although collectivist culture is an important factor in explaining the limited state of privacy in Africa, it is not a catch-all phenomenon. Instead, technological, economic, political and social processes have significantly affected privacy consciousness and consequently the systems of privacy and data protection in the continent
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