Web 2.0, language resources and standards to automatically build a multilingual named entity lexicon

This paper proposes to advance in the current state-of-the-art of automatic Language Resource (LR) building by taking into consideration three elements: (i) the knowledge available in existing LRs, (ii) the vast amount of information available from the collaborative paradigm that has emerged from the Web 2.0 and (iii) the use of standards to improve interoperability. We present a case study in which a set of LRs for different languages (WordNet for English and Spanish and Parole-Simple-Clips for Italian) are extended with Named Entities (NE) by exploiting Wikipedia and the aforementioned LRs. The practical result is a multilingual NE lexicon connected to these LRs and to two ontologies: SUMO and SIMPLE. Furthermore, the paper addresses an important problem which affects the Computational Linguistics area in the present, interoperability, by making use of the ISO LMF standard to encode this lexicon. The different steps of the procedure (mapping, disambiguation, extraction, NE identification and postprocessing) are comprehensively explained and evaluated. The resulting resource contains 974,567, 137,583 and 125,806 NEs for English, Spanish and Italian respectively. Finally, in order to check the usefulness of the constructed resource, we apply it into a state-of-the-art Question Answering system and evaluate its impact; the NE lexicon improves the system’s accuracy by 28.1%. Compared to previous approaches to build NE repositories, the current proposal represents a step forward in terms of automation, language independence, amount of NEs acquired and richness of the information represented

Biologically inspired vision systems in robotics

During the last years, the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, under the Topic of Vision Systems, especially welcomes papers that cover any aspect of biologically inspired vision in robots. As Guest Editors of the Special Issue on “Biologically Inspired Vision Systems in Robotics,” we feel that living beings have still much to tell us about the design and development of robotics

Enrichment of the Phenotypic and Genotypic Data Warehouse analysis using Question Answering systems to facilitate the decision making process in cereal breeding programs

Currently there are an overwhelming number of scientific publications in Life Sciences, especially in Genetics and Biotechnology. This huge amount of information is structured in corporate Data Warehouses (DW) or in Biological Databases (e.g. UniProt, RCSB Protein Data Bank, CEREALAB or GenBank), whose main drawback is its cost of updating that makes it obsolete easily. However, these Databases are the main tool for enterprises when they want to update their internal information, for example when a plant breeder enterprise needs to enrich its genetic information (internal structured Database) with recently discovered genes related to specific phenotypic traits (external unstructured data) in order to choose the desired parentals for breeding programs. In this paper, we propose to complement the internal information with external data from the Web using Question Answering (QA) techniques. We go a step further by providing a complete framework for integrating unstructured and structured information by combining traditional Databases and DW architectures with QA systems. The great advantage of our framework is that decision makers can compare instantaneously internal data with external data from competitors, thereby allowing taking quick strategic decisions based on richer data.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860) and GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity. Alejandro Maté is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana under an ACIF grant (ACIF/2010/298)

The research assessment (sexenio) of accounting teaching staff in Spain

El objetivo inicial atribuido a la concesión de los tramos de investigación, los denominados sexenios, era reconocer la excelencia investigadora de los profesores universitarios. Sin embargo, la normativa ha ido vinculando su posesión a una serie de facetas universitarias que limitan diferentes áreas de la actividad del profesorado universitario. El sexenio condiciona la retribución, los créditos docentes a impartir, la promoción, los estudios de doctorado, la participación en los comités asesores de la Comisión Nacional Evaluadora de la Actividad Investigadora (CNEAI), así como formar parte de las comisiones de acreditación y acceso a los cuerpos docentes universitarios. Dada la importancia que ha adquirido y adquirirá en un futuro poseer un tramo de investigación, en el presente trabajo se estudiarán las diferencias que existen en el porcentaje de profesores con sexenio, no sólo entre campos científicos, sino también entre áreas pertenecientes a un mismo campo, mostrando un interesante resultado en las diferencias por áreas. Nuestra condición de profesores universitarios de contabilidad, hace que centremos el presente estudio en el campo 8, donde se ubica el área de conocimiento “Economía Financiera y Contabilidad”. El debate que se plantea de los resultados de este trabajo es: (I) cómo un área de conocimiento, con el peso que Economía Financiera y Contabilidad tiene dentro de las Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, tiene tan pocos representantes en los comités asesores que conceden los sexenios, y (II) hasta qué punto esta mínima representación conlleva unos peores resultados en la evaluación de los profesores del área, en la medida en que no hay expertos en la materia que evalúen atendiendo a las características particulares del área. Esto termina cerrando un círculo vicioso, ya que si no hay profesores con sexenios no pueden formar parte de las comisiones de expertos que los otorgan.The initial objective attributed to the research assessment granting of university teaching staff (the so-called sexenio) was to recognize research effort of the university professors. However, this assessment has been linked to numerous aspects university life: determines the remuneration, teaching load, the possibility of promotion, the participation as teacher in masters and doctoral courses, the possibility of being examiner or even supervisor of doctoral dissertations, participation in the Advisory Committees of the National Commission for Evaluating the Research Activity (CNEAI), as well as being a part of the accreditation commissions and a long etcetera. Given the importance that this evaluation has gained and will acquire in a future, in the present work we will study the differences in the percentage of teachers with sexenio. Not only between scientific fields, but also between areas belonging to the same field, showing an interesting result in the differences by areas. Our condition of university accounting teachers, makes us to focus in the field 8, where the knowledge area of "Accounting and finance" is located. The debate that arises from the results of this work is: Why Accounting and Finance has Sciences has so few representatives within the advisory committees in comparison with the importance in terms of teaching staff, students, etc.? Moreover, to what extent this minimal representation implies worse results in the evaluation of teachers of the area? This situation conforms a vicious circle: if there are no accounting teachers awarded with sexenio, they would not be able to be part of the Expert Commissions that grant those assessments

Internet of Things: A Review of Surveys Based on Context Aware Intelligent Services

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for devices around the world to acquire information and store it, in order to be able to use it at a later stage. However, this potential opportunity is often not exploited because of the excessively big interval between the data collection and the capability to process and analyse it. In this paper, we review the current IoT technologies, approaches and models in order to discover what challenges need to be met to make more sense of data. The main goal of this paper is to review the surveys related to IoT in order to provide well integrated and context aware intelligent services for IoT. Moreover, we present a state-of-the-art of IoT from the context aware perspective that allows the integration of IoT and social networks in the emerging Social Internet of Things (SIoT) term.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER) under the granted Project SEQUOIA-UA (Management requirements and methodology for Big Data analytics) TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R, by the University of Alicante, within the program of support for research, under project GRE14-10, and by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain, within the program of support for research, under project GV/2016/087. This work has also been partially funded by projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity TIN2015-65100-R and DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001)

An authoring tool for decision support systems in context questions of ecological knowledge

Decision support systems (DSS) support business or organizational decision-making activities, which require the access to information that is internally stored in databases or data warehouses, and externally in the Web accessed by Information Retrieval (IR) or Question Answering (QA) systems. Graphical interfaces to query these sources of information ease to constrain dynamically query formulation based on user selections, but they present a lack of flexibility in query formulation, since the expressivity power is reduced to the user interface design. Natural language interfaces (NLI) are expected as the optimal solution. However, especially for non-expert users, a real natural communication is the most difficult to realize effectively. In this paper, we propose an NLI that improves the interaction between the user and the DSS by means of referencing previous questions or their answers (i.e. anaphora such as the pronoun reference in “What traits are affected by them?”), or by eliding parts of the question (i.e. ellipsis such as “And to glume colour?” after the question “Tell me the QTLs related to awn colour in wheat”). Moreover, in order to overcome one of the main problems of NLIs about the difficulty to adapt an NLI to a new domain, our proposal is based on ontologies that are obtained semi-automatically from a framework that allows the integration of internal and external, structured and unstructured information. Therefore, our proposal can interface with databases, data warehouses, QA and IR systems. Because of the high NL ambiguity of the resolution process, our proposal is presented as an authoring tool that helps the user to query efficiently in natural language. Finally, our proposal is tested on a DSS case scenario about Biotechnology and Agriculture, whose knowledge base is the CEREALAB database as internal structured data, and the Web (e.g. PubMed) as external unstructured information.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860), GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03), LEGOLANGUAGE (TIN2012-31224) and DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity. Alejandro Maté is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana under an ACIF grant (ACIF/2010/298)

MergedTrie: Efficient textual indexing

The accessing and processing of textual information (i.e. the storing and querying of a set of strings) is especially important for many current applications (e.g. information retrieval and social networks), especially when working in the fields of Big Data or IoT, which require the handling of very large string dictionaries. Typical data structures for textual indexing are Hash Tables and some variants of Tries such as the Double Trie (DT). In this paper, we propose an extension of the DT that we have called MergedTrie. It improves the DT compression by merging both Tries into a single and by segmenting the indexed term into two fixed length parts in order to balance the new Trie. Thus, a higher overlapping of both prefixes and suffixes is obtained. Moreover, we propose a new implementation of Tries that achieves better compression rates than the Double-Array representation usually chosen for implementing Tries. Our proposal also overcomes the limitation of static implementations that does not allow insertions and updates in their compact representations. Finally, our MergedTrie implementation experimentally improves the efficiency of the Hash Tables, the DTs, the Double-Array, the Crit-bit, the Directed Acyclic Word Graphs (DAWG), and the Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automata (ADFA) data structures, requiring less space than the original text to be indexed.This study has been partially funded by the SEQUOIA-UA (TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R) and the RESCATA (TIN2015-65100-R) projects of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)

Pseudoartrosis del noveno arco costal : caso clínico

Se presenta un caso inusual de pseudoartrosis de la novena costilla en una mujer de 22 años de edad. La pseudoartrosis de la primera costilla ha sido descrita con relativa frecuencia, pero en el resto de los arcos costales es desconocida. El diagnóstico diferencial se hizo en base a las características clínicas y radiológicas. La persistencia del dolor y la imagen radioló- gica de pseudoartrosis obligó en este caso a la costectomía segmentaria.—An unusual case of rib pseudoarthrosis at the ninght rib in in a 22-year-old woman is presented. Pseudoarthrosis at the first rib has been previously reported, but this is the first case affecting other localisation in the chest wall. Differential diagnosis is made upon clinical presentation and radiological features. Usually ribs fractures and stress fractures heal with an adequate resting period but, if pain persist, segmental costectomy can be indicated

New measures for open-domain question answering evaluation within a time constraint

Previous works on evaluating the performance of Question Answering (QA) systems are focused on the evaluation of the precision. In this paper, we developed a mathematic procedure in order to explore new evaluation measures in QA systems considering the answer time. Also, we carried out an exercise for the evaluation of QA systems within a time constraint in the CLEF-2006 campaign, using the proposed measures. The main conclusion is that the evaluation of QA systems in realtime can be a new scenario for the evaluation of QA systems.This research has been partially supported by the framework of the project QALL-ME (FP6-IST-033860), which is a 6th Framenwork Research Programme of the European Union (EU), by the Spanish Government, project TEXT-MESS (TIN-2006-15265-C06-01) and by the Valencia Government under project number GV06-161