Command and Fula dum Pronominals

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 65-7

The Interaction of Relativization and Noun Incorporation in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu

This paper focuses on relativization in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu. Specifically, evidential expressions constitute the scope of this study since within this semantic domain a morphosyntactic layout reminiscent of internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) is found. Moreover, the structure of some evidential expressions suggests that what gives rise to an IHRC in those instances is classificatory noun incorporation (CNI). Following from past studies on Ainu, where IHRCs and CNI are never discussed, and with reference to cross-linguistic approaches to relativization and incorporation, this study addresses the interaction of these two processes in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu and suggests their reconsideration

Taking MT evaluation metrics to extremes : beyond correlation with human judgments

Automatic Machine Translation (MT) evaluation is an active field of research, with a handful of new metrics devised every year. Evaluation metrics are generally benchmarked against manual assessment of translation quality, with performance measured in terms of overall correlation with human scores. Much work has been dedicated to the improvement of evaluation metrics to achieve a higher correlation with human judgments. However, little insight has been provided regarding the weaknesses and strengths of existing approaches and their behavior in different settings. In this work we conduct a broad meta-evaluation study of the performance of a wide range of evaluation metrics focusing on three major aspects. First, we analyze the performance of the metrics when faced with different levels of translation quality, proposing a local dependency measure as an alternative to the standard, global correlation coefficient. We show that metric performance varies significantly across different levels of MT quality: Metrics perform poorly when faced with low-quality translations and are not able to capture nuanced quality distinctions. Interestingly, we show that evaluating low-quality translations is also more challenging for humans. Second, we show that metrics are more reliable when evaluating neural MT than the traditional statistical MT systems. Finally, we show that the difference in the evaluation accuracy for different metrics is maintained even if the gold standard scores are based on different criteria

Agreement and Fula pronouns

TIris paper is concerned with agreement patterns exhibited by pronouns in five varieties of Fula. It is argued that some pronouns show agreement in pronominality, which is an unusual type of agreement, but nonetheless extremely robust in Fula. Other types of agreement are also presented, and the consequences of the Fula data for theories of agreement is discussed

Using Dialog Corrections to Improve Speech Recognition

We propose a preliminary method for automatically correcting errors in spoken dialogue systems. Current spoken dialogue systems usually show a rather static and rigid behavior regarding recognition errors, therefore a feasible method of correcting system errors might be helpful to successfully support user requests. Moreover, a correction differs from non-correction prosodically [1]. Generally a user correction exhibits a greater prosodic difference the more distant it is from the initial error. In this case it is recognized more poorly, and it involves a longer human-machine interaction because this often leds to the same recognition errors. This pape

Management of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: Defining the Role of Nateglinide

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a progressive disease with an insidious onset. It is thought to affect up to 10% of European and North American populations with a significantly higher incidence in non-White than in White populations. Complications of the disease are associated with considerable morbidity and mortality and their management consumes significant healthcare resources. Data from the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study have shown that intensive glycemic control reduces the microvascular complications of type 2 disease and that intensive management of fasting plasma glucose (FPG) levels is insufficient over time to provide such control. Recent studies have demonstrated that lowering postprandial plasma (PPG) glucose levels provides some additional glycemic control and recent epidemiologic data suggest reducing PPG levels may be associated with a reduction in mortality. In patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus inadequately controlled by diet and exercise, nateglinide significantly improved glycemic control compared with placebo; a beneficial effect on both FPG and PPG levels was observed. In active comparator studies, nateglinide has been shown to be as effective as metformin (in pharmacotherapy-naive patients), acarbose and troglitazone in reducing glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels. When used in combination with metformin (in patients inadequately controlled on maximum dosages of metformin monotherapy) nateglinide significantly improves glycemic control compared with placebo. In addition, nateglinide has been shown to display pronounced additive effects when added to troglitazone or metformin in patients inadequately controlled by diet and exercise alone. Nateglinide was generally well tolerated in clinical trials. The most common adverse event was hypoglycemia, although the incidence was low in comparison with sulfonylureas. The incidence of hypoglycemia was increased in patients using nateglinide in combination with metformin. By controlling HbA1c and PPG, nateglinide has the potential to provide substantial health and quality-of-life benefits; however, long-term outcome data and validated quality-of-life assessments are lacking. In economic modelling studies, the estimated cost-effectiveness ratios observed with nateglinide were well within the range for therapies considered to be cost-effective. In conclusion, nateglinide is a useful addition to the available treatments for type 2 diabetes mellitus. It significantly improved glycemic control in pharmacotherapy-naive patients as well as in patients not adequately controlled by metformin alone; however, until long-term clinical data become available, nateglinide can only be considered as an adjunct to metformin in patients inadequately controlled on metformin alone in whom PPG levels are elevated. Nateglinide is well tolerated and has low potential to cause hypoglycemia and bodyweight gain.Antihyperglycaemics, Cost analysis, Drug evaluations, Nateglinide, Pharmacoeconomics, Quality of life, Type 2 diabetes mellitus