Guidelines for normalising early modern English corpora:decisions and justifications

Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of years. With large scale digitisation activities gathering pace in the last decade, much more historical textual data is now available for research on numerous topics including historical linguistics and conceptual history. We summarise previous research which has shown that it is necessary to map historical spelling variants to modern equivalents in order to successfully apply natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. Manual and semiautomatic methods have been devised to support this normalisation and standardisation process. We argue that it is important to develop a linguistically meaningful rationale to achieve good results from this process. In order to do so, we propose a number of guidelines for normalising corpora and show how these guidelines have been applied in the Corpus of English Dialogues

A tribute to Matti Rissanen

Non peer reviewe

Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy in Finland: a cross-sectional registry study

OBJECTIVE:To investigate if progressive multifocal leucoencephalopathy (PML) incidence has increased in Finland like in the neighbouring Sweden.METHODS: National administrative registries were searched for all PML admissions aged 16 years or more in 2004-2014 on all neurological and internal medicine wards in Finland. The mortality data of the patients was extracted from the national causes of death registry. National level data on annual predisposing drug use was obtained from the national pharmaceutical authority.RESULTS: We identified 35 PML cases (57% male) with a peak in 2010-2011 that amounted to 49% of all cases. The annual incidence for the entire study period was 0.072/100,000 person-years (95% CI 0.050-0.10) with no temporal trend (p = 0.18). Mean age was 57 years (22-88 years) with no sex difference (p = 0.42). Neoplasms (60%), HIV infection (17%) and systemic connective tissue disorders (CTD, 14%) were the most common predisposing conditions. MS was recorded in three cases (9%). The national level use of drugs that predispose to PML increased during the study period, with the exceptions of alemtuzumab and fludarabine. Overall survival was 85% at 90 days, 79% at 1 year, and 66% at 5 years. Survival was worst in patients with malignancy and best in patients with CTD.CONCLUSIONS: PML most often occurs in patients with malignancies and patients with HIV or CTD cover a third. PML incidence in Finland is lower than in Sweden and shows no temporal trend despite increasing use of predisposing drugs. Mortality after PML varies according to the predisposing condition.</div

Epidemiology of Guillain-Barré syndrome in Finland 2004–2014

At total mean incidence of 0.84-1.1/100,000 the occurrence of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) is reported to be low in Finland compared to other Caucasian populations. However, a recent study from Southwestern Finland reported an incidence of 1.82/100,000 which is comparable to other Caucasian populations. We analyzed discharge data covering the years 2004 through 2014 on all neurological admissions in all Finnish university and central hospitals with a primary diagnosis of GBS. A total of 989 admissions due to GBS (917 individuals) were identified. The standardized (European population) annual incidence rate was 1.70/100,000 person-years (95% confidence interval 1.60-1.81). GBS incidence had an increasing trend with age. The likelihood of GBS was higher among girls and adolescent women than boys and men of same age (male:female incidence rate ratio [IRR] 0.56), while in the older age groups (>19years) the occurrence of GBS was higher among males than females (male:female IRR 1.59). The incidence of GBS remained stable during the study period. There was no seasonal variation in GBS admission frequencies (p=0.28). No significant effect of the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza or vaccination against it for GBS occurrence was observed. We suggest that GBS is as common, and has similar age-distribution in Finland as in other European countries. Sex-associated susceptibility for GBS appears to be different in children-adolescents and adults

Adult hospital admissions associated with multiple sclerosis in Finland in 2004-2014

Introduction: Treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) has developed significantly and several new immunotherapeutic drugs have become available in Finland since 2004. We studied whether this is associated with changes in hospital admission frequencies and healthcare costs and whether admission rates due to infection have increased.Methods: The national Care Register for Health Care was searched for all discharges from neurological, medical, surgical, neurosurgical and intensive care units with MS as a primary diagnosis or an auxiliary diagnosis for primary infection diagnosis in 2004-2014. Only patients >= 16 years of age were included.Results: We identified 12,276 hospital admissions for 4296 individuals. The number of admissions declined by 4.6% annually (p = .0024) in both genders. Proportion of admissions with an infection as the primary diagnosis increased but no change in their frequency was found. They were longer than admissions with MS as the primary diagnosis and were associated with increased in-hospital mortality. The annual aggregate cost of hospital admissions declined by 51% during the study period.Conclusions: This study shows that hospital admission rates and costs related to MS hospital admissions have markedly declined from 2004 to 2014 in Finland, which coincides with an increase in the use of disease-modifying therapies

Clausal and phrasal coordination in recent American English

Several studies have shown that there is considerable cross-genre variation as regards what linguistic units tend to be coordinated by and. While literate, expository writing favors coordination of phrasal units such as noun phrases, coordinated units are more often clausal (e.g., main or subordinate clauses) in speech-related texts. This difference has been attested in studies that focus exclusively on coordination as well as in macro-level studies of co-variation among a large number of linguistic features. However, this register differentiation has increased over time: studies of Early and Late Modern English point to less pronounced differences among registers than those attested in the present-day language. This study fills a gap in research by considering data on coordination by and from the middle of the 20th century, a period that does not belong fully to either Late Modern or Present-Day English, and the late 20th and early 21st century, and thus ties diachronic and synchronic research on register variation in coordination together. We also examine language from films and television in order to complement historical findings for speech-related language with data on registers that arose in the 20th century

A Standardization Process in its Final Stages: Mineand Thinein A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760

This study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MYand THINE/THYin the Early Modern English period. The -Nforms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell intodisuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the N-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining N-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining MINEand THINE forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on MINE/MYand THINE/THY variatio