The relationality of the Holy One of Israel in the book of Isaiah

This dissertation explores the ways that “the Holy One of Israel” is used in the book of Isaiah to depict Yahweh, the powerful and unapproachable God, in his personal relationship with Israel. It investigates the actions and character of Yahweh as the Holy One of Israel and the nature and purpose of Yahweh’s holiness as reflected in the Holy One of Israel’s treatment of Israel. It considers how Yahweh seeks to manifest his holiness in the midst of rebellion through righteous actions. In particular, it examines how the Holy One of Israel rebukes, redeems, and restores Israel, despite her rebellious disposition and actions. This research affirms that Israel’s relationship with the Holy One is not contrived, but comes out of a genuine experience, as evidenced by Yahweh’s desire to empower Israel to live righteously. When God and his people act righteously, the Holy One has manifested his holiness. This thesis demonstrates that the Holy One of Israel is a relational God who has the spiritual and sanctifying power to transform unrighteous people to live righteously. Therefore, the prophet Isaiah calls Israel to return to the Holy One of Israel who, though he rebukes his people, does so in order to restore them, and transform them into “oaks of righteousness” (Isa 61:3). Thus the Isaianic use of the special epithet reminds Israel of the immanence of Yahweh who belongs to Israel, and it connotes: “the Holy One of Israel, the powerful righteous redeemer is with you.”https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1562/thumbnail.jp

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe