Paraphrastic Reformulations in Spoken Corpora

International audienceOur work addresses the automatic detection of paraphrastic reformulation in French spoken corpora. The proposed approach is syn-tagmatic. It is based on specific markers and the specificities of the spoken language. Manual multi-dimensional annotation performed by two annotators provides fine-grained reference data. An automatic method is proposed in order to decide whether sentences contain or not paraphras-tic relations. The obtained results show up to 66.4% precision. Analysis of the manual annotations indicates that few paraphrastic segments show morphological modifications (inflection, derivation or compounding) and that the syntactic equivalence between the segments is seldom respected, as these usually belong to different syntactic categories

Making effective use of healthcare data using data-to-text technology

Healthcare organizations are in a continuous effort to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and enhance patient experience of care. Data is essential to measure and help achieving these improvements in healthcare delivery. Consequently, a data influx from various clinical, financial and operational sources is now overtaking healthcare organizations and their patients. The effective use of this data, however, is a major challenge. Clearly, text is an important medium to make data accessible. Financial reports are produced to assess healthcare organizations on some key performance indicators to steer their healthcare delivery. Similarly, at a clinical level, data on patient status is conveyed by means of textual descriptions to facilitate patient review, shift handover and care transitions. Likewise, patients are informed about data on their health status and treatments via text, in the form of reports or via ehealth platforms by their doctors. Unfortunately, such text is the outcome of a highly labour-intensive process if it is done by healthcare professionals. It is also prone to incompleteness, subjectivity and hard to scale up to different domains, wider audiences and varying communication purposes. Data-to-text is a recent breakthrough technology in artificial intelligence which automatically generates natural language in the form of text or speech from data. This chapter provides a survey of data-to-text technology, with a focus on how it can be deployed in a healthcare setting. It will (1) give an up-to-date synthesis of data-to-text approaches, (2) give a categorized overview of use cases in healthcare, (3) seek to make a strong case for evaluating and implementing data-to-text in a healthcare setting, and (4) highlight recent research challenges.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, book chapte

Honey, a Gift from Nature to Health and Beauty: A Review

Benefits of honey are contributed by the composition of its elements such as glucose, fructose, glucose oxidase, vitamins and phenolic compounds. For health, honey can be used to treat wounds due to the antibacterial activity conferred by the hydrogen peroxide produced by glucose oxidase in honey. Anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, deodorizing and tissue regeneration activities in honey also help in the wound healing process. It can also be an alternative sweetener for diabetic patients to ensure compliance to a healthy diet. Moreover, honey exerts several effects such as lowering low density lipids and increasing high density lipids, thus reducing risk of atherosclerosis. In terms of beauty, honey can be used on skin and hair. It moisturizes skin through its natural humectant properties contributed by high contents of fructose and glucose. Honey treats acne on the skin due to its antibacterial activity, anti-inflammatory action and tissue repair. The hair can benefit from honey in such a way that the hair has abundance, and becomes easier to comb. However, there have not been as many studies regarding the use of honey in skin in comparison to its use for health. Therefore, future studies on honey could research its use, action and benefits in both cosmetics and dermatology

Building Subjectivity Lexicon(s) From Scratch For Essay Data

Abstract. While there are a number of subjectivity lexicons available for research purposes, none can be used commercially. We describe the process of constructing subjectivity lexicon(s) for recognizing sentiment polarity in essays written by test-takers, to be used within a commercial essay-scoring system. We discuss ways of expanding a manually-built seed lexicon using dictionary-based, distributional indomain and out-of-domain information, as well as using Amazon Mechanical Turk to help “clean up ” the expansions. We show the feasibility of constructing a family of subjectivity lexicons from scratch using a combination of methods to attain competitive performance with state-of-art research-only lexicons. Furthermore, this is the first use, to our knowledge, of a paraphrase generation system for expanding a subjectivity lexicon

Towards mining sequences and dispersion of rhetorical moves in student written texts

© 2017 ACM. There is an increasing interest in the analysis of both student's writing and the temporal aspects of learning data. The analysis of higher-level learning features in writing contexts requires analyses of data that could be characterised in terms of the sequences and processes of textual features present. This paper (1) discusses the extant literature on sequential and process analyses of writing; and, based on this and our own first-hand experience on sequential analysis, (2) proposes a number of approaches to both pre-process and analyse sequences in whole-texts. We illustrate how the approaches could be applied to examples drawn from our own datasets of 'rhetorical moves' in written texts, and the potential each approach holds for providing insight into that data. Work is in progress to apply this model to provide empirical insights. Although, similar sequence or process mining techniques have not yet been applied to student writing, techniques applied to event data could readily be operationalised to undercover patterns in texts

Adult Vulvar Lichen Sclerosus: Can Experts Agree on the Assessment of Disease Severity?

Objective The objective of this study was to test the severity rating of the signs and architectural changes for interrater reliability among world experts via analysis of lichen sclerosus (LS) photographs. Methods A recent Delphi consensus exercise established a list of symptoms, signs, and architectural changes, which experts feel are important to include in a severity scale. Photographs of vulvar LS were manually extracted from patient charts and 50 photographs with a range of severity of signs and architectural changes were chosen. Lichen sclerosus experts were invited to take part in the study and 3 dermatologists and 3 gynecologists were selected for their expertise and geographic variety. Raters assessed the photographs for multiple signs and architectural changes as well as an overall impression of disease severity on a 4-point Likert scale. Intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated. Results The intraclass correlation coefficients were very poor for individual signs and architectural changes as well as for overall disease severity when analyzed for all 6 raters as well as when analyzed with dermatologists' and gynecologists' responses grouped separately. There were no statistically significant correlations found. Conclusions Global experts were unable to agree on any signs, architectural changes, or an overall global impression to assess vulvar LS disease severity based on analysis of vulvar photographs. Standardized descriptions regarding what constitutes mild, moderate, and severe signs and anatomical changes are required before further scale development can occur

Laparoscopic restorative proctocolectomy ileal pouch anal anastomosis: How I do it?

Surgery for ulcerative colitis is a major and complex colorectal surgery. Laparoscopy benefits these patients with better outcomes in context of cosmesis, pain and early recovery, especially in young patients. For surgeons, it is a better tool for improving vision and magnification in deep cavities. This is not the simple extension of the laparoscopy training. Starting from preoperative preparation to post operative care there are wide variations as compared to open surgery. There are also many variations in steps of laparoscopic surgery. It involves left colon, right colon and rectal mobilisation, low division of rectum, pouch creation and anastomosis of pouch to rectum. Over many years after standardisation of this technique, it takes same operative time as open surgery at our centre. So we present our standardized technique of laparoscopic assisted restorative proctocolectomy and ileal pouch anal anastomosis (IPAA)