LocLinkVis: A Geographic Information Retrieval-Based System for Large-Scale Exploratory Search

In this paper we present LocLinkVis (Locate-Link-Visualize); a system which supports exploratory information access to a document collection based on geo-referencing and visualization. It uses a gazetteer which contains representations of places ranging from countries to buildings, and that is used to recognize toponyms, disambiguate them into places, and to visualize the resulting spatial footprints.Comment: SEM'1

Coalition Formation under Uncertainty: The Stability Likelihood of an International Climate Agreement

Results derived from empirical analyses on the stability of climate coalitions are usually very sensitive to the large uncertainties associated with the benefits and costs of climate policies. This paper provides the methodology of Stability Likelihood that links uncertainty about benefits and costs of climate change to the stability analysis of coalitions in a stochastic, empirical setting. We show that the concept of Stability Likelihood improves upon the robustness and interpretation of stability analysis. Our numerical application is based on a modified version of the climate model STACO. It turns out that the only non-trivial coalition structure with a relatively high Stability Likelihood (around 25 percent) is a coalition between the European Union and Japan, though quantitative results depend especially on the variance in regional benefits from abatement.Climate change, Coalition formation, International environmental agreements, Uncertainty

A Hybrid Approach to Domain-Specific Entity Linking

The current state-of-the-art Entity Linking (EL) systems are geared towards corpora that are as heterogeneous as the Web, and therefore perform sub-optimally on domain-specific corpora. A key open problem is how to construct effective EL systems for specific domains, as knowledge of the local context should in principle increase, rather than decrease, effectiveness. In this paper we propose the hybrid use of simple specialist linkers in combination with an existing generalist system to address this problem. Our main findings are the following. First, we construct a new reusable benchmark for EL on a corpus of domain-specific conversations. Second, we test the performance of a range of approaches under the same conditions, and show that specialist linkers obtain high precision in isolation, and high recall when combined with generalist linkers. Hence, we can effectively exploit local context and get the best of both worlds.Comment: SEM'1

Good Applications for Crummy Entity Linkers? The Case of Corpus Selection in Digital Humanities

Over the last decade we have made great progress in entity linking (EL) systems, but performance may vary depending on the context and, arguably, there are even principled limitations preventing a "perfect" EL system. This also suggests that there may be applications for which current "imperfect" EL is already very useful, and makes finding the "right" application as important as building the "right" EL system. We investigate the Digital Humanities use case, where scholars spend a considerable amount of time selecting relevant source texts. We developed WideNet; a semantically-enhanced search tool which leverages the strengths of (imperfect) EL without getting in the way of its expert users. We evaluate this tool in two historical case-studies aiming to collect a set of references to historical periods in parliamentary debates from the last two decades; the first targeted the Dutch Golden Age, and the second World War II. The case-studies conclude with a critical reflection on the utility of WideNet for this kind of research, after which we outline how such a real-world application can help to improve EL technology in general.Comment: Accepted for presentation at SEMANTiCS '1

Nutritional Feeding Strategies in Pediatric Intestinal Failure

Intestinal failure is defined as a critical reduction of the gut mass or function, below the minimum needed to absorb nutrients and fluids. The ultimate goal in intestinal failure is to promote bowel adaptation and reach enteral autonomy while a healthy growth and development is maintained. The condition is heterogeneous and complex. Therefore, recommendations for the type and duration of parenteral, enteral, and oral nutrition are variable, with the child's age as an additional key factor. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of nutritional feeding strategies in this heterogeneous population. Different perspectives on nutritional management, nutrition and adaptation, and microbiome and nutrition will be discussed