An integrated architecture for shallow and deep processing

We present an architecture for the integration of shallow and deep NLP components which is aimed at flexible combination of different language technologies for a range of practical current and future applications. In particular, we describe the integration of a high-level HPSG parsing system with different high-performance shallow components, ranging from named entity recognition to chunk parsing and shallow clause recognition. The NLP components enrich a representation of natural language text with layers of new XML meta-information using a single shared data structure, called the text chart. We describe details of the integration methods, and show how information extraction and language checking applications for realworld German text benefit from a deep grammatical analysis

Dietary habits, traveling and the living situation potentially influence the susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection: results from healthcare workers participating in the RisCoin Study.

PURPOSE To explore occupational and non-occupational risk and protective factors for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in healthcare workers (HCWs). METHODS Serum specimens and questionnaire data were obtained between October 7 and December 16, 2021 from COVID-19-vaccinated HCWs at a quaternary care hospital in Munich, Germany, and were analyzed in the RisCoin Study. RESULTS Of 3,696 participants evaluated, 6.6% have had COVID-19 at least once. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified working in patient care occupations (7.3% had COVID-19, 95% CI 6.4-8.3, Pr = 0.0002), especially as nurses, to be a potential occupation-related COVID-19 risk factor. Non-occupational factors significantly associated with high rates of the disease were contacts to COVID-19 cases in the community (12.8% had COVID-19, 95% CI 10.3-15.8, Pr < 0.0001), being obese (9.9% had COVID-19, 95% CI 7.1-13.5, Pr = 0.0014), and frequent traveling abroad (9.4% had COVID-19, 95% CI 7.1-12.3, Pr = 0.0088). On the contrary, receiving the basic COVID-19 immunization early during the pandemic (5.9% had COVID-19, 95% CI 5.1-6.8, Pr < 0.0001), regular smoking (3.6% had COVID-19, 95% CI 2.1-6.0, Pr = 0.0088), living with the elderly (3.0% had COVID-19, 95% CI 1.0-8.0, Pr = 0.0475), and frequent consumption of ready-to-eat meals (2.6% had COVID-19, 95% CI 1.1-5.4, Pr = 0.0045) were non-occupational factors potentially protecting study participants against COVID-19. CONCLUSION The newly discovered associations between the living situation, traveling as well as dietary habits and altered COVID-19 risk can potentially help refine containment measures and, furthermore, contribute to new mechanistic insights that may aid the protection of risk groups and vulnerable individuals

Alternativen zu Säuglingsnahrungen auf Kuhmilchproteinbasis

Die natürliche Ernährung eines gesunden Säuglings ist das Stillen. Ist Stillen oder die Fütterung von Muttermilch nicht möglich, kann Frauenmilch für die Ernährung des Säuglings erwogen werden, sofern diese aus einer qualifizierten Humanmilchbank stammt. Vom Kauf von Frauenmilch aus dem Internet wird wegen Risiken einer Infektionsübertragung und einer unzureichenden Milchqualität strikt abgeraten. Aufgrund der geringen Verfügbarkeit, der hohen Kosten sowie möglicher Nachteile der Ernährung mit Spendermilch im Vergleich zum Stillen sind industriell gefertigte Säuglingsnahrungen das Mittel der Wahl zur Ernährung des gesunden, reifgeborenen Säuglings, wenn Stillen nicht oder nur partiell möglich ist. Kuhmilchprotein ist die am häufigsten verwendete Eiweißkomponente. Die Nachfrage nach anderen auf Tiermilchen basierten sowie vegetarischen bzw. veganen Alternativen steigt. Im Folgenden werden verschiedene Alternativen bezüglich ihrer Eignung betrachtet. Säuglingsnahrungen auf Basis von Ziegenmilchprotein stellen für gesunde, reifgeborene Säuglinge eine zugelassene und geeignete Alternative zu kuhmilchproteinbasierten Säuglingsnahrungen dar. Für Säuglingsnahrungen aus anderen Tiermilchen (z. B. Kamel‑, Schaf‑, Pferde- oder Büffelmilch) sind keine belastbaren Daten zu Eignung und Sicherheit bekannt, und sie sind in der Europäischen Union nicht zugelassen. Säuglingsnahrungen auf der Grundlage von Sojaproteinisolaten sind in der Europäischen Union zugelassen. Sie werden für die allgemeine Verwendung im 1. Lebenshalbjahr durch die Ernährungskommission nicht empfohlen, insbesondere weil potenziell nachteilige Effekte von enthaltenen Isoflavonen nicht ausgeschlossen werden können. Ab der Geburt und in den ersten Lebensmonaten sollte die Gabe von Sojanahrungen auf Indikationen wie eine bestehende Galaktosämie, die sehr seltene kongenitale Laktoseintoleranz sowie bei familiärem Wunsch nach veganer Ernährungsweise und aus anderen weltanschaulichen Gründen begrenzt werden. Im 2. Lebenshalbjahr ist die Zufuhrmenge pro Kilogramm Körpergewicht deutlich niedriger, sodass das Risiko unerwünschter Wirkungen als wesentlich geringer eingeschätzt wird. Zu neuerdings angebotenen Nahrungen auf der Grundlage einer Mischung aus Soja- und Kuhmilchprotein sind keine Daten zur Prüfung von Sicherheit und Eignung bekannt, sodass hierzu keine Empfehlung ausgesprochen werden kann. Von der Verwendung von Säuglingsnahrung auf der Grundlage von hydrolysiertem Reisprotein wird auch aufgrund hoher berichteter Arsengehalte abgeraten. Auch von einer häuslichen Selbstherstellung von Säuglingsnahrungen wird aufgrund eines erhöhten Risikos für eine nichtbedarfsgerechte Nährstoffzufuhr und für Infektionen abgeraten. // The natural nutrition of a healthy infant is breastfeeding. If breastfeeding or feeding of breast milk is not possible, feeding of donor human milk may be considered. The safety of donor milk can only be ensured if it is provided by a qualified human milk bank. The use of informally shared donor milk or the use of human milk purchased through the internet is strongly discouraged because of the risk of transmitting infections and of insufficient milk quality. Due to low availability, high costs and concerns about poorer nutritional quality of donor milk compared to breastfeeding, industrially manufactured infant formula is the preferred alternative for feeding healthy full-term infants that cannot or cannot be fully breastfed. Milk-based infant formula is most frequently made from cow’s milk protein; however, there is an increasing popularity of vegetarian or vegan formulas and of formulas based on different animal milks other than cow’s milk. Goat’s milk-based infant formulas represent an approved and suitable alternative to cow’s milk for healthy, full-term infants. Reliable data on the suitability and safety are unavailable for formulas based on other animal milks (e.g., camel, horse, sheep or buffalo milk), and these are not approved for infant feeding in the European Union. Infant formulas based on soybean protein isolates are approved in the European Union. They are not generally recommended by the Nutrition Committee for infant feeding in the first half year of life because potentially harmful effects of isoflavones derived from soybeans cannot be excluded; however, soybean protein isolate-based formulas may be reservedly used after birth and in the first months of life for infants affected by galactosemia, the very rare hereditary lactose intolerance manifest at birth, a vegan family lifestyle or other familial convictions. In the second half year of life the intake amount per kilogram body weight is much less so that the risk of undesired effects is estimated to be much lower. For the recently provided nutrition based on a mixture of soybean and cow’s milk proteins, no data on testing of the safety and suitability are known, so that no recommendations can be made on this. The use of infant formula based on hydrolyzed rice protein is not recommended because of concerns about possible high arsenic contamination. The use of homemade infant formulas is discouraged due to the high risk of introducing infections and of possible nutritional imbalances of macronutrients and micronutrients

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Regret Minimization for Online Buffering Problems Using the Weighted Majority Algorithm ∗

Suppose a decision maker has to purchase a commodity over time with varying prices and demands. In particular, the price per unit might depend on the amount purchased and this price function might vary from step to step. The decision maker has a buffer of bounded size for storing units of the commodity that can be used to satisfy demands at later points in time. We seek for an algorithm deciding at which time to buy which amount of the commodity so as to minimize the cost. This kind of problem arises in many technological and economical settings like, e.g., battery management in hybrid cars and economical caching policies for mobile devices. A simplified but illustrative example is a frugal car driver thinking about at which occasion to buy which amount of gasoline. Within a regret analysis, we assume that the decision maker can observe the performance of a set of expert strategies over time and synthesizes the observed strategies into a new online algorithm. In particular, we investigate the external regret obtained by the well-known Randomized Weighted Majority algorithm applied to our problem. We show that this algorithm does not achieve a reasonable regret bound if its random choices are independen

What did they say? How subgroup stereotypes influence memory for superordinate groups

Members of different groups often disagree when it comes to determining which group most accurately represents a shared superordinate group. Many studies have shown that the ingroup is often perceived as more prototypical of a superordinate category than the outgroup (i.e., relative prototypicality effect). This higher perceived congruence (overlap) between ingroup and superordinate group representations should be reflected in individuals' information processing and memory regarding the superordinate group. The authors hypothesized that in recall paradigms (H1), individuals would initially show better memory for information from the superordinate group that is inconsistent (rather than consistent) with the ingroup stereotype. We assumed that in recognition paradigms (H2), individuals would be more likely to attribute information to the superordinate group if the information was consistent with ingroup vs. outgroup stereotypes. Finally, we hypothesized that in recognition paradigms, individuals would confuse the ingroup with the superordinate group more often than they would confuse the outgroup with the superordinate group (H3). Five experiments testing these hypotheses (N = 314) and using different groups and stimulus modalities generally support these assumptions. The findings suggest that perceivers initially engage in inconsistency processing when confronted with information from a superordinate group that contradicts their ingroup-based expectation. However, even though perceivers initially recall such information particularly well, they are not able to integrate contradictory information successfully. More generally, our findings indicate that the perceived overlap between ingroup and superordinate group representations affects individuals' memory and thus helps explain why the relative prototypicality effect is such a robust phenomenon