User-Needs Analysis and Design Methodology for an Automated Documentation Generator

Telephone network planning engineers routinely study feeder routes within the telephone network in order to create and refine network capacity expansion (relief) plans. In doing so they make use of a powerful software tool called LEIS-PLAN™. We are developing an extension to PLAN called PLANDoc that will automatically generate natural language narratives documenting the engineers ’ use of PLAN. In this paper, we present the user-needs analysis and design methodology we have used in developing the PLANDoc system. We describe our interviews with various end users to determine if such a system would be desirable and what design factors would make it useful. We show how we model the system on a set of iteratively-revised human-generated narratives. The model narratives determine the function and architecture of the documentation system, and they inform the development of the system components

An error tolerant memory aid for reduced cognitive load in number copying tasks

Number copying tasks are still common despite increased digitalization of services. Number copying tasks are cognitively and visually demanding, errors are easily introduced and the process is often perceived as laborious. This study proposes an alternative scheme based on dictionary coding that reduces the cognitive load on the user by a factor of five. The strategy has several levels of error detection and error correction characteristics and is easy to implemen

State-of-the-Art in Weighted Finite-State Spell-Checking

Proceeding volume: 2The following claims can be made about finite-state methods for spell-checking: 1) Finite-state language models provide support for morphologically complex languages that word lists, affix stripping and similar approaches do not provide; 2) Weighted finite-state models have expressive power equal to other, state-of-the-art string algorithms used by contemporary spell-checkers; and 3) Finite-state models are at least as fast as other string algorithms for lookup and error correction. In this article, we use some contemporary non-finite-state spell-checking methods as a baseline and perform tests in light of the claims, to evaluate state-of-the-art finite-state spell-checking methods. We verify that finite-state spell-checking systems outperform the traditional approaches for English. We also show that the models for morphologically complex languages can be made to perform on par with English systems.Peer reviewe

A UMLS-based spell checker for natural language processing in vaccine safety

BACKGROUND: The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient safety. Reports about adverse events following immunization (AEFI) from surveillance systems contain free-text components that can be analyzed using natural language processing. To extract Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts from free text and classify AEFI reports based on concepts they contain, we first needed to clean the text by expanding abbreviations and shortcuts and correcting spelling errors. Our objective in this paper was to create a UMLS-based spelling error correction tool as a first step in the natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for AEFI reports. METHODS: We developed spell checking algorithms using open source tools. We used de-identified AEFI surveillance reports to create free-text data sets for analysis. After expansion of abbreviated clinical terms and shortcuts, we performed spelling correction in four steps: (1) error detection, (2) word list generation, (3) word list disambiguation and (4) error correction. We then measured the performance of the resulting spell checker by comparing it to manual correction. RESULTS: We used 12,056 words to train the spell checker and tested its performance on 8,131 words. During testing, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV) for the spell checker were 74% (95% CI: 74–75), 100% (95% CI: 100–100), and 47% (95% CI: 46%–48%), respectively. CONCLUSION: We created a prototype spell checker that can be used to process AEFI reports. We used the UMLS Specialist Lexicon as the primary source of dictionary terms and the WordNet lexicon as a secondary source. We used the UMLS as a domain-specific source of dictionary terms to compare potentially misspelled words in the corpus. The prototype sensitivity was comparable to currently available tools, but the specificity was much superior. The slow processing speed may be improved by trimming it down to the most useful component algorithms. Other investigators may find the methods we developed useful for cleaning text using lexicons specific to their area of interest

Evaluating a Spelling Support in a Search Engine

The information in a database is usually accessed using SQL or some other query language, but if one uses a free text retrieval system the retrieval of text based information becomes much easier and user friendly, since one can use natural languages techniques such as automatic spell checking and stemming. The free text retrieval system needs first to index the database but then it is just to search the database

O wzniosłości w dyskursie religijnym (z perspektywy słownictwa)

The article is devoted to sublimity as one of the rule shaping religious discourse (especially in Christian religious tradition). In the first part the author presents three ways of understanding of the term sublime/sublimity, which have developed during historical reflection on this category: sublimity as a grand style (one of the three rhetoric styles); as a grand (high) speech (Pseudo-Longinus); as an ambivalent experience of dread and fascination (Rudolf Otto), that arouses in the believer feelings of numinous. The second part examines the lexis (vocabulary) as a mean to achieve sublimity in religious texts. The author points out however, that the effect of sublimity is achieved not only by means of lexis, hence further research is needed