Please, sir, pull down your socks!

A 48-year-old male patient presented at the regular followupvisit seven months after a successful kidney transplant.After discussion of blood chemistries with the doctor, thepatient underwent a physical examination. As usual, heunbuttoned his shirt and undid his trouser belt. Inspectionof the limbs, after pulling up his trousers, confirmed thepresence of ankle oedema; the graft was quite firm, with nomurmurs in the area

Evaluation of Natural Language Tools for Italian: EVALITA 2007

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants? systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages

Evaluation of Natural Language Tools for Italian: EVALITA 2007

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants\u2019 systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages

Introduzione al KL-ONE

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A Dialogue Environment for Accessing Public Administration Data: the TAMIC-P System

The purpose of this paper is to show that with a combination of state of art technologies it is possible to realize effective and powerful dialogue systems for Information-Seeking applications. Tamic-P, a prototype natural language based interface will be described. The system is designed to support Public Administration desk operators during an information session with a citizen. Three aspects work together to determine the system's usability: (i) a strong multimodal approach, allowing full interchangeability between natural language and direct manipulaiton; (ii) a robust dialogue component, allowing complex sequences of turns; (iii) the adaptive integration of different information sources, such as personal data and related norm

Accesso in linguaggio naturale ai dati della Pubblica Amministrazione: il sistema TAMIC-P

L'obiettivo principale del progetto TAMIC-P è dimostrare le opportunità offerte dall'utilizzo di tecniche di Elaborazione del Linguaggio Naturale nell'interazione uomo-macchina, in particolare nell'accedere a dati in ambienti complessi. L'interfaccia in Linguaggio Naturale è proposta come modalità di accesso complementare ad altre tecniche, quali le interfacce basate su grafica, e dimostra tutta la sua potenzialità in scenari caratterizzati dalla presenza di un numero rilevante di informazioni distribuite. In questi scenari le attuali interfacce non forniscono soluzioni soddisfacenti ai problemi di complessità e di disorientamento nella navigazione. Problemi che risultano ancor più critici in presenza di utenti poco esperti, in possesso di minori conoscenze tecniche. L'impiego di una modalità come il linguaggio naturale, usata normalmente nella comunicazione tra persone, e pertanto più naturale, riduce i requisiti di competenza e rende il sistema facilmente utilizzabile. I test di valutazione realizzati sul sistema TAMIC-P confortano questa ipotesi, confermando che già dopo un breve training anche un operatore poco esperto è in grado di operare in modo efficace e complet

A high-performance xylene-free tissue-clearing agent for routine histology: Preliminary histomorphological results

: After the discovery of the hazardous effects of xylene, less toxic substitutes were proposed for routine histology in the last years. However, the introduction of new xylene-free substitutes in histological processes requires a careful evaluation of their performance in terms of morphological and microscopic details to permit a solid diagnosis as well as good quality immunohistochemical and biomolecular analyses. In this study, we analyzed the performance of a new commercially available xylene-free Tissue-Tek® Tissue-Clear® agent in comparison with another routine xylene-free solvent yet available and employed in routine histological process. Serial histological tissue samples (n = 300) were selected and processed with the two clearing agents. Comparison and evaluation were also performed on slides obtained 6 months after paraffin embedding and archive storage. Blinded semiquantitative analysis of technical performance and morphological details, including tissue architecture and nuclear and cytoplasmic details, was performed on Haematoxylin-Eosin stained sections by two technicians and two pathologists, respectively. Evaluation of tissue slides documented a good overall histological performance in slides obtained after processing with the two different clearing agents. Slides obtained with Tissue-Tek® Tissue-Clear® displayed a higher score in some quality parameters, further supporting its use as a valid alternative to the other commercial routine xylene-free solvents

The LME project: legislative metadata based on semantic formal models

The Law Making Environment (LME) system for planning, drafting and managing legislative sources is made up of editing and search support tools. To handle the semantics of legislative sources, two interacting models have been created: a rule model, which can describe the illocutionary profile of legislative texts through metadata, and a lightweight ontology. The search support tool, LMEmetaSearch, based on both models, is able to search for rules in legislative sources, and additionally to find implicit or complementary rules providing the user with a wide account on the subject