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A new analysis of this passage shows that line 51 should not be deleted, as many editors have wrongly done in the past

Becoming JILDA

The difficulty in finding use-ful dialogic data to train a conversationalagent is an open issue even nowadays,when chatbots and spoken dialogue sys-tems are widely used. For this reason wedecided to build JILDA, a novel data col-lection of chat-based dialogues, producedby Italian native speakers and related to thejob-offer domain. JILDA is the first dia-logue collection related to this domain forthe Italian language. Because of its collec-tion modalities, we believe that JILDA canbe a useful resource not only for the Italianresearch community, but also for the inter-national one

Educational interventions alone and combined with port protector reduce the rate of central venous catheter infection and colonization in respiratory semi-intensive care unit.

Background: Central Line-Associated BloodStream Infections (CLABSIs) are emerging challenge in Respiratory semi-Intensive Care Units (RICUs). We evaluated efficacy of educational interventions on rate of CLABSIs and effects of port protector as adjuvant tool. Methods: Study lasted 18 months (9 months of observation and 9 of intervention). We enrolled patients with central venous catheter (CVC): 1) placed during hospitalization in RICU; 2) already placed without signs of systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) within 48 h after the admission; 3) already placed without evidence of microbiologic contamination of blood cultures. During interventional period we randomized patients into two groups: 1) educational intervention (Group 1) and 2) educational intervention plus port protector (Group 2). We focused on CVC-related sepsis as primary outcome. Secondary outcomes were the rate of CVC colonization and CVC contamination. Results: Eighty seven CVCs were included during observational period. CLABSIs rate was 8.4/1000 [10 sepsis (9 CLABSIs)]. We observed 17 CVC colonizations and 6 contaminations. Forty six CVCs were included during interventional period. CLABSIs rate was 1.4/1000. 21/46 CVCs were included into Group 2, in which no CLABSIs or contaminations were reported, while 2 CVC colonizations were found. Conclusions: Our study clearly shows that both kinds of interventions significantly reduce the rate of CLABSIs. In particular, the use of port protector combined to educational interventions gave zero CLABSIs rate. Trial registration: NCT03486093 [ ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier], retrospectively registered

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Distributed Representations of Lexical Sets and Prototypes in Causal Alternation Verbs

Lexical sets are sets of words filling a specific argument position of a verb in one of its senses. They can be extracted from corpora automatically. The purpose of this paper is demonstrating that the properties of lexical sets are mirrored by their distributed vector representations. This provides insights onto many linguistic phenomena, such as the causative-inchoative alternation in the verbal domain. A first experiment aims at investigating the internal structure of the sets, whose meanings are known to be radial and continuous categories cognitively. In particular, we establish an equivalence between the prototype of a set of words and the centroid of a set of vectors. A second experiment shows that the distance between the intransitive subject set and transitive object set is correlated with the spontaneity of the event expressed by the verb, defined in terms of morphological coding and frequency

Grounding the Lexical Sets of Causative-Inchoative Verbs with Word Embedding

Abstract English. Lexical sets contain the words filling the argument positions of a verb in one of its senses. They can be extracted from corpora automatically. The purpose of this paper is demonstrating that their vector representation based on word embedding provides insights onto many linguistic phenomena, such as causativeinchoative verbs. A first experiment aims at investigating the internal structure of the sets, which are known to be radial and continuous categories cognitively. A second experiment shows that the distance between the intransitive subject set and transitive object set is correlated with the spontaneity of the event expressed by the verb, defined according to morphological coding and frequency. Italiano. I set lessicali contengono le parole che occupano le posizioni argomentali di un verbo in una delle sue accezioni, e possono essere estratti in modo automatico dai corpora. L'obiettivo di questo articolo è dimostrare che la loro rappresentazione vettoriale illumina alcuni fenomeni linguistici, come i verbi ad alternanza causativo-incoativa. Un esperimento investiga la struttura interna degli insiemi, che a livello cognitivo sono ritenuti categorie radiali e continue. Inoltre, un secondo esperimento mostra che la distanza fra l'insieme dei soggetti intransitivi e l'insieme degli oggetti transitivi è correlata alla spontaneità dell'evento espresso dal verbo, definita secondo la marca morfologica e la frequenza

Toward Data-Driven Collaborative Dialogue Systems: The JILDA Dataset

Today’s goal-oriented dialogue systems are designed to operate in restricted domains and with the implicit assumption that the user goals fit the domain ontology of the system. Under these assumptions dialogues exhibit only limited collaborative phenomena. However, this is not necessarily true in more complex scenarios, where user and system need to collaborate to align their knowledge of the domain in order to improve the conversation and achieve their goals. To foster research on data-driven collaborative dialogues, in this paper we present JILDA, a fully annotated dataset of chat-based, mixed-initiative Italian dialogues related to the job-offer domain. As far as we know, JILDA is the first dialogic corpus completely annotated in this domain. The analysis realised on top of the semantic annotations clearly shows the naturalness and greater complexity of JILDA’s dialogues. In fact, the new dataset offers a large number of examples of pragmatic phenomena, such as proactivity (i.e., providing information not explicitly requested) and grounding, which are rarely investigated in AI conversational agents based on neural architectures. In conclusion, the annotated JILDA corpus, given its innovative characteristics, represents a new challenge for conversational agents and an important resource for tackling more complex scenarios, thus advancing the state of the art in this field

The quantitative insulin sensitivity check index is not able to detect early metabolic alterations in young patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome

Objective. To verify whether QUICKY is a suitable method for the identification of metabolic deterioration in normal weight patients affected by polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Design. Prospective clinical study. Patient(s). Seventy-nine PCOS normal weight adolescent subjects, 50 eumenorrheic, normal weight, non-hirsute controls matched for age and BMI. Method(s). Quantitative insulin sensitivity check index (QUICKY) and integrated secretory area under the curve of insulin values (I-AUC) during oral glucose tolerance test were calculated. Result(s). Seventy-nine PCOS and 50 controls were studied. Normal insulin sensitivity was defined as upper control 95th percentile by QUICKY values <0.31, I-AUC at 180 min < 16,645. When applying the calculated I-AUC cut-off, 41 PCOS were classified as normoinsulinemic and 38 as hyperinsulinemic, whereas using the calculated QUICKY cut-off, only 19 PCOS could be classified as insulin resistant (IR). Fifteen out of the 60 non-IR PCOS presented hyperinsulinemia; fasting glucose and insulin levels and QUICKY were not sufficient to identify these subjects. Thus, QUICKY displayed a low sensitivity (44%) and specificity (91%) in the diagnosis of the metabolic disorder disclosed by I-AUC. Conclusions. In young normal weight patients with PCOS the prevalence of early alterations of insulin metabolism are not detectable by QUICKY studies