EDBL: a General Lexical Basis for the Automatic Processing of Basque

EDBL (Euskararen Datu-Base Lexikala) is a general-purpose lexical database used in Basque text-processing tasks. It is a large repository of lexical knowledge (currently around 80,000 entries) that acts as basis and support in a number of different NLP tasks, thus providing lexical information for several language tools: morphological analysis, spell checking and correction, lemmatization and tagging, syntactic analysis, and so on. It has been designed to be neutral in relation to the different linguistic formalisms, and flexible and open enough to accept new types of information. A browser-based user interface makes the job of consulting the database, correcting and updating entries, adding new ones, etc. easy to the lexicographer. The paper presents the conceptual schema and the main features of the database, along with some problems encountered in its design and implementation in a commercial DBMS. Given the diversity of the lexical entities and the complex relationships existing among them, three total specializations have been defined under the main class of the hierarchy that represents the conceptual schema. The first one divides all the entries in EDBL into Basque standard and non-standard entries. The second divides the units in the database into dictionary entries (classified into the different parts-of-speech) and other entries (mainly non-independent morphemes and irregularly inflected forms). Finally, another total specialization has been established between single-word entries and multiword lexical units; this permits us to describe the morphotactics of single-word entries, and the constitution and surface realization schemas of multiword lexical units.A hierarchy of typed feature structures (FS) has been designed to map the entities and relationships in the database conceptual schema. The FSs are coded in TEI-conformant SGML, and Feature Structure Declarations (FSD) have been made for all the types of the hierarchy. Feature structures are used as a delivery format to export the lexical information from the database. The information coded in this way is subsequently used as input by the different language analysis tools

EUSLEM: A lemmatiser/tagger for Basque

This paper presents relevant issues that have been considered in the design and development of a general purpose lemmatiser/tagger for Basque (EUSLEM). The lemmatiser/tagger is conceived as a basic tool for other linguistic applications. It uses the lexical database and the morphological analyser previously developed and implemented. We will describe the components used in the development of the lemmatiser/tagger and, finally, we will point out possible further applications of this tool. 1. Introduction An automatic lemmatiser/tagger is a basic tool for applications such as automatic indexation, documental databases, syntactic and semantic analysis, analysis of text corpora, etc. Its job is to give the correct lemma of a text-word, as well as its grammatical category. This project is being carried out by two entities: a group of the Computer Science Faculty of The Basque Country University and UZEI (1), an association that works on Basque terminology and lexicography. It's not the fi..

Patient opinion of analgesia during external cephalic version at term in singleton pregnancy

To assess the opinion and the level of satisfaction of patients concerning analgesia during external cephalic version (ECV), we present the results of a survey of 120 women undergoing ECV at term during a randomised controlled trial (July 2012 to February 2013) comparing remifentanil and nitrous oxide. Overall, 110 (91.7%) women said they would repeat the procedure and 111 (92.5%) that they would recommend it to another pregnant woman, with no significant differences by type of analgesia. The administration and sense of comfort were rated better in the remifentanil group (p < .01). In conclusion, the use of analgesia during ECV is associated with a high rate of willingness among women to repeat the procedure and recommend it to other pregnant women.Impact statement What is already known on this subject? ECV is commonly a painful manoeuvre for the woman. This pain triggers maternal reactive abdominal muscle contraction and involuntary abdominal tensing, reducing the likelihood of successful version and causing some women to reject the technique. What do the results of this study add? The use of analgesia during ECV is associated with a high rate of willingness among women to repeat the procedure and recommend it to other pregnant women. The sense of comfort during ECV was also significantly better in the remifentanil group, probably because of its greater analgesic power and greater comfort during its administration. What are the implications of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? ECV should be carried out under analgesia, when available, not only to decrease pain but also to encourage wider adoption of the technique and enable more women to benefit from it