A Survey and Classification of Methods for (Mostly) Unsupervised Learning

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 292-296

Effective prophylaxis against rotavirus diarrhea using a combination of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG and antibodies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Rotavirus is a worldwide cause of infectious infantile diarrhea that claims over 600,000 lives annually. Recently, two new vaccine candidates have been developed but their efficacy in developing countries, still remains to be proven. Oral delivery of specific immunoglobulins provides passive immunity and is a fast acting treatment for rotavirus diarrhea. Probiotic bacteria have also gained considerable attention lately as treatment for rotavirus diarrhea. Here we report an evaluation of the therapeutic potential of different probiotics and their combination with anti – rotavirus antibodies in a mouse model of rotavirus diarrhea.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the six probiotic bacteria tested, <it>Lactobacillus rhamnosus </it>strain GG had the strongest influence in reducing prevalence, duration and severity of diarrhea and was therefore chosen for combination treatment with immunoglobulins. The combination treatment reduced the diarrhea outcome measures significantly, prevented histopathological changes and reduced the virus load in the intestines.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The advantages associated with immunoglobulins and probiotics based therapy is that the treatment provides a rapid therapeutic effect and is cost efficient. These components do not require special storage conditions and could potentially complement the rehydration therapy that is currently used.</p

History, contact and classification of Papuan languages, Part I

Harald Hammarström and Wilco van den Heuvel organized a conference on the History, contact, and classification of Papuan languages, and edited this peer-reviewed special issue of the journal Languages and Linguistics in Melanesia following the conference.Harald Hammarström and Wilco van den Heuvel organized a conference on the History, contact, and classification of Papuan languages, and edited this peer-reviewed special issue of the journal Languages and Linguistics in Melanesia following the conference

Linking endangerment databases and descriptive linguistics: An assessment of the use of terms relating to language endangerment in grammars

The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding of the language endangerment progression as well as its possible reversal. In the present paper, we explore the terminological correlates of this development as found in the descriptive linguistic literature, using a corpus of over 10,000 digitized grammatical descriptions. Comparing this with existing endangerment databases, we find that simply counting terms related to endangerment does signal endangerment, but the degree of endangerment is more difficult to assess from grammatical descriptions. The label endangered seems to be an umbrella term that covers different situations ranging from moribund languages with less than ten speakers to minority languages with several thousand speakers. For many languages considered endangered in existing databases, explicit terms to this effect cannot be found in their descriptions. The discrepancy is due to incompleteness of the searchterm set, gaps in the literature, and projected rather than observed information in the databases. Our explorations illustrate the potential for database curation assisted by computational searches both to maintain accuracy of the databases and to investigate assumed language endangerment. Future work includes a larger cloud of search terms, usage of term frequencies, and prescreening of descriptive literature for the existence of a relevant section. From the perspective of descriptive linguistics, this study calls for a more careful correlation between the language endangerment indexes, as developed in the global endangerment databases, and the treatment of the endangerment status of individual languages in descriptive grammars.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories

Human history is written in both our genes and our languages. The extent to which our biological and linguistic histories are congruent has been the subject of considerable debate, with clear examples of both matches and mismatches. To disentangle the patterns of demographic and cultural transmission, we need a global systematic assessment of matches and mismatches. Here, we assemble a genomic database (GeLaTo, or Genes and Languages Together) specifically curated to investigate genetic and linguistic diversity worldwide. We find that most populations in GeLaTo that speak languages of the same language family (i.e., that descend from the same ancestor language) are also genetically highly similar. However, we also identify nearly 20% mismatches in populations genetically close to linguistically unrelated groups. These mismatches, which occur within the time depth of known linguistic relatedness up to about 10,000 y, are scattered around the world, suggesting that they are a regular outcome in human history. Most mismatches result from populations shifting to the language of a neighboring population that is genetically different because of independent demographic histories. In line with the regularity of such shifts, we find that only half of the language families in GeLaTo are genetically more cohesive than expected under spatial autocorrelations. Moreover, the genetic and linguistic divergence times of population pairs match only rarely, with Indo-European standing out as the family with most matches in our sample. Together, our database and findings pave the way for systematically disentangling demographic and cultural history and for quantifying processes of shifts in language and social identities on a global scale

The status of the least documented language families in the world

This paper aims to list all known language families that are not yet extinct and all of whose member languages are very poorly documented, i.e., less than a sketch grammar’s worth of data has been collected. It explains what constitutes a valid family, what amount and kinds of documentary data are sufficient, when a language is considered extinct, and more. It is hoped that the survey will be useful in setting priorities for documentation fieldwork, in particular for those documentation efforts whose underlying goal is to understand linguistic diversity.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

The languages of Melanesia: Quantifying the level of coverage

The present paper assesses the state of grammatical description of the languages of the Melanesian region based on database of semi-automatically annotated aggregated bibliographical references. 150 years of language description in Melanesia has produced at least some grammatical information for almost half of the languages of Melanesia, almost evenly spread among coastal/non-coastal, Austronesian/non-Austronesian and isolates/large families. Nevertheless, only 15.4% of these languages have a grammar and another 18.7% have a grammar sketch. Compared to Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, the Papua-Austronesian region is the region with the largest number of poorly documented languages and the largest proportion of poorly documented languages. We conclude with some dicussion and remarks on the documentational challenge and its future prospects.National Foreign Language Resource Cente