Una metodología para la anotación automática de la factualidad en español

In the last decade, factuality has undeniably been an area of growing interest in Natural Language Processing. This paper describes a rule-based tool to automatically identify the factual status of events in Spanish text, understood with respect to the degree of commitment with which a narrator presents situations. Factuality is represented compositionally, considering the following semantic categories: commitment, polarity, event structure, and time. In contrast with neural machine learning approaches, this tool is entirely based on manually created lexico-syntactic rules that systematize semantic and syntactic patterns of factuality. Thus, it is able to provide explanations for automatic decisions, which are very valuable to guarantee accountability of the system. We evaluate the performance of the system by comparison with a manually annotated Gold Standard, obtaining results that are comparable, if not better, to machine learning approaches for a related task, the FACT 2019 challenge at the IBERLEF evaluation forum.La información factual es un área de investigación de creciente interés en el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. Este artículo describe una herramienta basada en reglas para la identificación automática en español de la clase factual de los eventos en un texto, entendida con respecto al grado de compromiso con el que un narrador presenta las situaciones. En esta aproximación la información factual se representa compositivamente, considerando las siguientes categorías semánticas: compromiso, polaridad, estructura del evento y tiempo. A diferencia de los enfoques de Machine Learning, esta herramienta se basa por completo en reglas léxico-sintácticas y semánticas creadas manualmente que sistematizan los patrones semánticos y sintácticos de la información factual. Así, este sistema es capaz de proporcionar explicaciones para las decisiones automáticas, que son muy valiosas para garantía de la responsabilidad del sistema. Evaluamos el rendimiento del sistema mediante la comparación con un Gold Standard anotado manualmente, obteniendo resultados que son comparables, si no mejores, a los enfoques de aprendizaje automático para una tarea relacionada: el reto FACT 2019 del foro de evaluación IBERLEF

Rapid maxillary expansion versus watchful waiting in pediatric OSA: A systematic review.

[EN] Spontaneous resolution of pediatric obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may stand behind the observed benefit of rapid maxillary expansion (RME), mainly supported by uncontrolled case series. We aimed to review the controlled, ideally randomized, evidence on the effectiveness of RME as compared to watchful waiting or alternative treatment of pediatric OSA. We only found one randomized clinical trial comparing RME with watchful waiting. The other four studies compared RME with the gold-standard treatment adenotonsillectomy, three of them in a non-randomized fashion. The results of the RCT showed no statistically significant differences in the enhancement of main (apnea hypopnea index, AHI) and secondary outcomes between RME and watchful waiting. Furthermore, reproducibility of the published studies was limited by insufficient description of their patients' inclusion criteria. We could not find convincing evidence of the benefit of RME over watchful waiting in patients with pediatric OSA. RCTs with reproducible inclusion criteria comparing RME with watchful waiting are still critically needed to support this intervention for the treatment of pediatric OSA. In the absence of solid evidence with RCT, RME should not be recommended for the treatment of pediatric OSA. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42021249261. RUNNING SUMMARY: This systematic review explores the benefits of rapid maxillary expansion compared to spontaneous resolution of pediatric obstructive sleep apnea

CARPANTA eats words you don't need from e-mail

[spa] Presentamos CARPANTA, un sistema de resumen automático de correo electrónico que aplica técnicas de conocimiento intensivo para obtener resúmenes coherentes. El uso de herramientas de PLN de amplia cobertura garantiza la robusteza y portabilidad del sistema, pero también se explota conocimiento dependiente de lengua y dominio. CARPANTA ha sido evaluado por comparación con un corpus de resúmenes confeccionados por jueces humanos, con resultados satisfactorios. [eng] We present CARPANTA, an e-mail summarization system that applies a knowledge intensive approach to obtain highly coherent summaries. Robustness and portability are guaranteed by the use of general-purpose NLP, but it also exploits language- and domain-dependent knowledge. The system is evaluated against a corpus of human-judged summaries, reaching, satisfactory levels of performance

Advances on the formulation of proteins using nanotechnologies

This is the accepted manuscript of the following article: Santalices, I., Gonella, A., Torres, D., & Alonso, M. (2017). Advances on the formulation of proteins using nanotechnologies. Journal Of Drug Delivery Science And Technology, 42, 155-180. doi: 10.1016/j.jddst.2017.06.018Therapeutic proteins and peptides are very attractive from the pharmaceutical point of view due to their high potency and selectivity. Nonetheless, their instability and low bioavailability make their adminis- tration through non parenteral routes very difficult, a fact that hampers their efficient exploitation in therapeutics. Since the 70's, significant amount of research in the area of drug delivery and nanotech- nology has been done with the final goal of overcoming those hurdles. In particular, biodegradable and biocompatible lipid and polymer-based nanocarriers have emerged as promising delivery platforms to enable the administration of proteins and peptides. This review provides an overview of the mostly explored nanotechnologies to date intended to produce lipidic and polymeric nanocarriers for protein/ peptide delivery. The basic principles of the different techniques are discussed, and the main factors involved in the drug association and release, are analyzed. Finally, a brief overview of the potential applications of these protein/peptide-loaded nanocarriers, highlighting the nanomedicines that have reached the market or the clinical development phase, is providedS

CARPANTA eats words you don't need from e-mail

Presentamos CARPANTA, un sistema de resumen automático de correo electrónico que aplica técnicas de conocimiento intensivo para obtener resúmenes coherentes. El uso de herramientas de PLN de amplia cobertura garantiza la robusteza y portabilidad del sistema, pero también se explota conocimiento dependiente de lengua y dominio. CARPANTA ha sido evaluado por comparación con un corpus de resúmenes confeccionados por jueces humanos, con resultados satisfactorios.We present CARPANTA, an e-mail summarization system that applies a knowledge intensive approach to obtain highly coherent summaries. Robustness and portability are guaranteed by the use of general-purpose NLP, but it also exploits language- and domain-dependent knowledge. The system is evaluated against a corpus of human-judged summaries, reaching, satisfactory levels of performance.This research has been conducted thanks to a grant associated to the X-TRACT project, PB98-1226 of the Spanish Research Department. It has also been partially funded by projects HERMES (TIC2000-0335-C03-02), PETRA (TIC2000-1735-C02-02) and by CLiC (Centre de Llenguatge i Computació)

Basement membrane-rich Organoids with functional human blood vessels are permissive niches for human breast cancer metastasis

Metastasic breast cancer is the leading cause of death by malignancy in women worldwide. Tumor metastasis is a multistep process encompassing local invasion of cancer cells at primary tumor site, intravasation into the blood vessel, survival in systemic circulation, and extravasation across the endothelium to metastasize at a secondary site. However, only a small percentage of circulating cancer cells initiate metastatic colonies. This fact, together with the inaccessibility and structural complexity of target tissues has hampered the study of the later steps in cancer metastasis. In addition, most data are derived from in vivo models where critical steps such as intravasation/extravasation of human cancer cells are mediated by murine endothelial cells. Here, we developed a new mouse model to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying late steps of the metastatic cascade. We have shown that a network of functional human blood vessels can be formed by co-implantation of human endothelial cells and mesenchymal cells, embedded within a reconstituted basement membrane-like matrix and inoculated subcutaneously into immunodeficient mice. The ability of circulating cancer cells to colonize these human vascularized organoids was next assessed in an orthotopic model of human breast cancer by bioluminescent imaging, molecular techniques and immunohistological analysis. We demonstrate that disseminated human breast cancer cells efficiently colonize organoids containing a functional microvessel network composed of human endothelial cells, connected to the mouse circulatory system. Human breast cancer cells could be clearly detected at different stages of the metastatic process: initial arrest in the human microvasculature, extravasation, and growth into avascular micrometastases. This new mouse model may help us to map the extravasation process with unprecedented detail, opening the way for the identification of relevant targets for therapeutic intervention

SenSem: sentidos verbales, semántica oracional y anotación de corpus

En este artículo presentamos el desarrollo del proyecto SenSem (BFF2003-06456), que tiene como objetivo describir y representar el comportamiento léxico, sintáctico y semántico de los verbos del español. En el desarrollo de este proyecto se están construyendo dos recursos: un corpus de oraciones asociadas a su interpretación sintáctico-semántica y un léxico donde cada sentido verbal se asocia a un conjunto de ejemplos anotados del corpus.This paper presents the development of the SenSem project (BFF2003-06456), which aims at describing and representing the lexical, semantic, and syntactical behaviour of Spanish verbs. Two resources are being developed in the course of this project: a corpus of sentences associated to their syntactic-semantic interpretation, and a lexicon where each verb meaning is linked to a number of annotated examples from the corpus