The interplay between genre and syntax in a historical Low German corpus

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Parsing the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG)

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Validity of the new backache index (BAI) in patients with low back pain

INTRODUCTION: The Backache-Index (BAI) is applied to patients with low back pain (LBP) in order to help doctors/surgeons perform physical examinations easily and it is carried out within a short space of time (< 2 min.) without using inclinometric instruments. PURPOSE/AIM: To explore reliability, validity and responsiveness of the BAI in patients with LBP, which can fulfil the existing need for a reliable routine examination in the clinical environment. MATERIALS & METHODS: In total, 75 patients with subacute LBP participated in a randomized controlled study (1). The BAI consisted of a scoring system that includes pain factors and stiffness estimation at the end of a series of five different lumbar movements of a patient standing in erect position. RESULTS: The (blinded) inter-observer reliability between 2 observers for the BAI was perfect (ICC = 0.96). A BAI change of one unit is able to exclude a measurement error. A significantly good correlation (P < 0.001) was found between BAI at baseline, and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI, R = 0.62) and MPQ-PRIT, as the total degree of pain rating index (R = 0.57). The effect size and discriminative ability were explored after two treatment sessions. The greatest level of distinction was found for MPQ-PRI-T and BAI (AUC > 0.93), followed by ODI (AUC = 0.92). A less distinction was found for MPQ-NWC-T and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS, AUC > 0.82). RELEVANCE: the BAI is available in different languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, ITALIAN, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Thais. www.roptrotherapy.info CONCLUSIONS: The Backache Index or BAI appears to be a reliable and valid assessment of overall restricted spinal movements in case of LBP and discriminates between successful and unsuccessful treatment outcome. DISCUSSION: The inter-observer reliability after a few minutes for the BAI was sufficient. The validity of the BAI was found to be good with the ODI and moderate with the VAS. A Backache Index change of one unit is able to exclude a measurement error. KEYWORDS: Low back pain; Outcome scales; Reliability; Validity; Impairment; Pain rating scales. IMPLICATIONS: In a Spanish study (2) the test-retest after 3 days of the same group (n=46) revailed that the reliability for the 5 outcome scores was good (ICC=0.73). No significant difference was found between BAI1 (4.65 ± 4.15 ) and BAI2 (4.72 ± 4.20) and the absolute reliability was perfect with an ICC=0.97.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them