Marco para parsing predictivo interactivo aplicado a la lengua castellana

El marco teórico de Parsing Predictivo Interactivo (IPP) permite construir sistemas de anotación sintáctica interactivos. Los anotadores humanos pueden utilizar estos sistemas de ayuda para crear árboles sintácticos con muy poco esfuerzo (en comparación con el trabajo requerido para corregir manualmente árboles obtenidos a partir de un analizador sintáctico completamente automático). En este artículo se presenta la adaptación a la lengua castellana del marco IPP y su herramienta de anotación IPP-Ann, usando modelos obtenidos a partir del UAM Spanish Treebank. Hemos llevado a cabo experimentación simulando al usuario para obtener métricas de evaluación objetivas para nuestro sistema. Estos resultados muestran que el marco IPP aplicado al UAM Spanish Treebank se traduce en una importante cantidad de esfuerzo ahorrado, comparable con el obtenido al aplicar el marco IPP para analizar la lengua inglesa mediante el Penn Treebank.The Interactive Predictive Parsing (IPP) framework allows us the construction of interactive tree annotation systems. These can help human annotators in creating error-free parse trees with little effort (compared to manually post-editing the trees obtained from a completely automatic parser). In this paper we adapt the IPP framework and the IPP-Ann annotation tool for parse of the Spanish language, by using models obtained from the UAM Spanish Treebank. We performed user simulation experimentation and obtained objective evaluation metrics. The results establish that the IPP framework over the UAM Treebank shows important amounts of user effort reduction, comparable to the gains obtained when applying IPP to the English language on the Penn Treebank.Work supported by the EC (FEDER, FSE), the Spanish Government and Generalitat Valenciana (MICINN, ”Plan E”, under grants MIPRCV ”Consolider Ingenio 2010” CSD2007-00018, MIT-TRAL TIN2009-14633-C03-01, ALMPR Prometeo/2009/014 and FPU AP2006-01363)

Multimodal Interactive Parsing

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_57Probabilistic parsing is a fundamental problem in Computational Linguistics, whose goal is obtaining a syntactic structure associated to a sentence according to a probabilistic grammatical model. Recently, an interactive framework for probabilistic parsing has been introduced, in which the user and the system cooperate to generate error-free parse trees. In an early prototype developed according to this interactive parsing technology, user feedback was provided by means of mouse actions and keyboard strokes. Here we augment the interaction style with support for (non-deterministic) natural handwritten recognition, and provide confidence measures as a visual aid to ease the correction process. Handwriting input seems to be a modality specially suitable for parsing, since the vocabulary size involved in the recognition of syntactic labels is fairly limited and thus intuitively errors should be small. However, errors may increase as handwriting quality (i.e., calligraphy) degrades. To solve this problem, we introduce a late fusion approach that leverages both on-line and off-line information, corresponding to pen strokes and contextual information from the parse trees. We demonstrate that late fusion can effectively help to disambiguate user intention and improve system accuracy.This research has received funding from the EC’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-13) under grant agreement No.287576- CasMaCat; from the Spanish MEC under the STraDA project (TIN2012-37475- C02-01) and the MITTRAL project (TIN2009-14633-C03-01); from the GV under the Prometeo project; and from the Universidad del Cauca (Colombia)Benedí Ruiz, JM.; Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Leiva, LA.; Sánchez Sáez, R.; Maca, M. (2013). Multimodal Interactive Parsing. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. Springer. 484-491. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_57S484491Afonso, S., Bick, E., Haber, R., Santos, D.: Floresta sintá(c)tica: a treebank for portuguese. In: Proc. LREC, pp. 1698–1703 (2002)Brants, T., Plaehn, O.: Interactive corpus annotation. In: Proc. LREC (2000)Guyon, I., Schomaker, L., Plamondon, R., Liberman, M., Janet, S.: UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and recognizer benchmarks. In: Proc. ICPR, pp. 29–33 (1994)Lease, M., Charniak, E., Johnson, M., McClosky, D.: A look at parsing and its applications. In: Proc. AAAI, pp. 1642–1645 (2006)Marcus, M.P., Santorini, B., Marcinkiewicz, M.A.: Building a large annotated corpus of English: the Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 313–330 (1993)Ortiz, D., Leiva, L.A., Alabau, V., Casacuberta, F.: Interactive machine translation using a web-based architecture. In: Proc. IUI, pp. 423–425 (2010)Romero, V., Leiva, L.A., Toselli, A.H., Vidal, E.: Interactive multimodal transcription of text images using a web-based demo system. In: Proc. IUI, pp. 477–478 (2009)Sánchez-Sáez, R., Leiva, L.A., Sánchez, J.A., Benedí, J.M.: Interactive predictive parsing using a web-based architecture. In: Proc. NAACL-HLT, pp. 37–40 (2010)Sánchez-Sáez, R., Sánchez, J.A., Benedí, J.M.: Interactive predictive parsing. In: Proc. IWPT, pp. 222–225 (2009)Sánchez-Sáez, R., Sánchez, J.A., Benedí, J.M.: Confidence measures for error discrimination in an interactive predictive parsing framework. In: Proc. COLING, pp. 1220–1228 (2010

The evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation for the last 700 years inferred from D/H isotopes in the sedimentary record of Lake Azul (Azores archipelago, Portugal).

TheD plant leaf wax variations provide insights on precipitation and evaporation evolution through time. This proxy has been used to reconstruct the temporal evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) climate mode since this mode rules most of the climate variability in the central North Atlantic area. A total lipid extraction preparation and the correspondent analyses in the IRMS have been done for 100 samples from the uppermost 1.5 m of the sedimentary infill of Lake Azul (Azores archipelago, Portugal). According to the chronological model, established by 210Pb profile and 4 AMS 14C dates, this record contains the environmental history of the last 730 years. The reconstructed precipitation variations obtained from D/H isotope values, suggest that this area has suffered significant changes in its distribution and intensity rainfall patterns through time. The end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, 1100- 1300 AD) is characterized by a progressive enrichmentof D/H isotope values which meant decreasing arid conditions. These rainfalls’ increase might be interpreted by a shift from positive to negative dominance of the NAO. The Little Ice Age (LIA, 1300 - 1850 AD) was characterized by two humid periods (1300- 1550 AD and 1650 - 1850 AD) separated by a relatively dry period. These precipitation oscillations are clearly visible by marked changes in the D/H isotope values. The LIA was followed by the persistence of the positive NAO mode, exhibited by the depletion of the D/H isotope signal, which indicated an overall decrease of the precipitation in the central North Atlantic area. Surprisingly, the D/H of the last 100 years, characterized by the present global warming and a persistent positive NAO mode, display large fluctuations most possibly linked to an enhancement of the storminess which is in concordance with the data fluctuations observed in the instrumental record for the last 80 years in the archipelago. This climatic evolution is in accordance with other NAO records of the North Atlantic region (Trouet et al., 2012) highlighting the validity of the D/H isotopes as precipitation proxy.Peer Reviewe

Extending magny-cours cache coherence

One cost-effective way to meet the increasing demand for larger high-performance shared-memory servers is to build clusters with off-the-shelf processors connected with low-latency point-to-point interconnections like HyperTransport. Unfortunately, HyperTransport addressing limitations prevent building systems with more than eight nodes. While the recent High-Node Count HyperTransport specification overcomes this limitation, recently launched twelve-core Magny-Cours processors have already inherited it and provide only 3 bits to encode the pointers used by the directory cache which they include to increase the scalability of their coherence protocol. In this work, we propose and develop an external device to extend the coherence domain of Magny-Cours processors beyond the 8-node limit while maintaining the advantages provided by the directory cache. Evaluation results for systems with up to 32 nodes show that the performance offered by our solution scales with the number of nodes, enhancing the directory cache effectiveness by filtering additional messages. Particularly, we reduce execution time by 47 percent in a 32-die system with respect to the 8-die Magny-Cours configuration.This work was supported by the Spanish MICINN, Consolider Programme and Plan E funds, as well as European Commission FEDER funds, under Grants CSD2006-00046 and TIN2009-14475-C04-01/03. It was also partly supported by (PROMETEO from Generalitat Valenciana (GVA) under Grant PROMETEO/2008/060).Ros Bardisa, A.; Cuesta Sáez, BA.; Fernández-Pascual, R.; Gómez Requena, ME.; Acacio Sánchez, ME.; Robles Martínez, A.; García Carrasco, JM.... (2012). Extending magny-cours cache coherence. IEEE Transactions on Computers. 61(5):593-606. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2011.65S59360661

Integrative Multi-omics Analysis to Characterize Human Brain Ischemia

Stroke is a major cause of death and disability. A better comprehension of stroke pathophysiology is fundamental to reduce its dramatic outcome. The use of high-throughput unbiased omics approaches and the integration of these data might deepen the knowledge of stroke at the molecular level, depicting the interaction between different molecular units. We aimed to identify protein and gene expression changes in the human brain after ischemia through an integrative approach to join the information of both omics analyses. The translational potential of our results was explored in a pilot study with blood samples from ischemic stroke patients. Proteomics and transcriptomics discovery studies were performed in human brain samples from six deceased stroke patients, comparing the infarct core with the corresponding contralateral brain region, unveiling 128 proteins and 2716 genes significantly dysregulated after stroke. Integrative bioinformatics analyses joining both datasets exposed canonical pathways altered in the ischemic area, highlighting the most influential molecules. Among the molecules with the highest fold-change, 28 genes and 9 proteins were selected to be validated in five independent human brain samples using orthogonal techniques. Our results were confirmed for NCDN, RAB3C, ST4A1, DNM1L, A1AG1, A1AT, JAM3, VTDB, ANXA1, ANXA2, and IL8. Finally, circulating levels of the validated proteins were explored in ischemic stroke patients. Fluctuations of A1AG1 and A1AT, both up-regulated in the ischemic brain, were detected in blood along the first week after onset. In summary, our results expand the knowledge of ischemic stroke pathology, revealing key molecules to be further explored as biomarkers and/or therapeutic targets. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].This work has been funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (PI15/00354, PI18/00804), MINECO (MTM2015-64465-C2-1R) and GRBIO (2014-SGR-464) and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). Neurovascular Research Laboratory takes part in the Spanish stroke research network INVICTUS + (RD16/0019/0021). L.R is supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (IFI17/00012).Peer reviewe

Stability of Three Different Sanitary Shoes on Healthcare Workers: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: The main purpose of this research was to determine the stability of three different sanitary shoes on nurses with eyes open and closed with respect to barefoot condition. In addition, the secondary aim was to determine the reliability of stability measurements under these different conditions. Methods: A crossover quasi-experimental study (NCT03764332) was performed. Twenty-six nurses who wore different sanitary shoes (Eva Plus Ultralight®, Gym Step® and Milan-SCL Liso®) were evaluated with respect to barefoot condition for stability measures on the Podoprint® podobarometric and stabilometry tool and with eyes open and closed. Furthermore, the reliability of stability measurements was determined by the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) under these different conditions. Results: Between-groups comparisons of the static and stabilometry podobarometric data with eyes open showed statistically significant differences (p < 0.05). Milan-SCL Liso® sanitary shoes improved podobarometric data of forefoot force and distribution with respect to barefoot condition. Eva Plus Ultralight® and Gym Step® sanitary shoes increased the stroke length mean, stroke surface mean, and anterior speed mean as well as reduced y axis displacement mean with respect to barefoot condition. Similar findings were determined for measurements with eyes closed. ICCs ranged from poor to excellent reliability (ICC = 0.010–0.995). Conclusions: Sanitary shoes improved podobarometric and stabilometry stability with respect to barefoot condition

Climate change facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times

Humans have made such dramatic and permanent changes to Earth's landscapes that much of it is now substantially and irreversibly altered from its preanthropogenic state. Remote islands, until recently isolated from humans, offer insights into how these landscapes evolved in response to human-induced perturbations. However, little is known about when and how remote systems were colonized because archaeological data and historical records are scarce and incomplete. Here, we use a multiproxy approach to reconstruct the initial colonization and subsequent environmental impacts on the Azores Archipelago. Our reconstructions provide unambiguous evidence for widespread human disturbance of this archipelago starting between 700 -60/+50 and 850 -60/+60 Common Era (CE), ca. 700 y earlier than historical records suggest the onset of Portuguese settlement of the islands. Settlement proceeded in three phases, during which human pressure on the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems grew steadily (i.e., through livestock introductions, logging, and fire), resulting in irreversible changes. Our climate models suggest that the initial colonization at the end of the early Middle Ages (500 to 900 CE) occurred in conjunction with anomalous northeasterly winds and warmer Northern Hemisphere temperatures. These climate conditions likelyinhibited exploration from southern Europe and facilitated human settlers from the northeast Atlantic. These results are consistent with recent archaeological and genetic data suggesting that the Norse were most likely the earliest settlers on the islands

The influences of the AMO and NAO on the sedimentary infill in an Azores Archipelago lake since ca. 1350 CE

The location of the Azores Archipelago in the North Atlantic makes this group of islands an excellent setting to study the long-term behavior of large oceanic and atmospheric climate dynamic patterns, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Here, we present the impacts of these patterns on Lake Empadadas (Azores Archipelago) from the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) - Little Ice Age (LIA) transition to the present based on sedimentological, geochemical and biological characterizations of the sedimentary record. Multivariate analyses of a number of proxies including X-ray fluorescence (XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), total organic and inorganic carbon (TOC and TIC) and diatom life forms abundance reveal that the sedimentary infill evolution has been controlled by (i) fluctuations in the lake level and (ii) variations in organic matter accumulation. Both processes are governed by climate variability and modulated by anthropogenic activities associated with changes on the lake catchment. Changes in these two sedimentary processes have been used to infer five stages: (i) the MCA-LIA transition (ca. 1350-1450 AD) was characterized by a predominantly positive AMO phase, which led to intermediate lake levels and high organic matter concentration; (ii) the first half of the LIA (ca. 1450 - 1600 AD) was characterized by predominant lowstand conditions and intermediate organic matter deposition mainly related to negative AMO phases; (iii) the second half of the LIA (ca. 1600 - 1850 AD) was characterized by negative AMO and NAO phases, implying intermediate lake levels and high organic matter deposition; (iv) the Industrial era (ca. 1850 - 1980 AD) was characterized by the lowest lake level and organic matter accumulation associated with negative AMO phases; and (v) the period spanning between 1980 AD and the present reveals the highest lake levels and low organic matter deposition, being associated with very positive AMO conditions. At decadal-to-centennial scales, the influence of the AMO on Azorean climate plays a larger role than previously thought. In fact, the AMO appears to exert a stronger influence compared to the NAO, which is the main mode of climate variability at shorter time scales

Healthcare workers hospitalized due to COVID-19 have no higher risk of death than general population. Data from the Spanish SEMI-COVID-19 Registry

Aim To determine whether healthcare workers (HCW) hospitalized in Spain due to COVID-19 have a worse prognosis than non-healthcare workers (NHCW). Methods Observational cohort study based on the SEMI-COVID-19 Registry, a nationwide registry that collects sociodemographic, clinical, laboratory, and treatment data on patients hospitalised with COVID-19 in Spain. Patients aged 20-65 years were selected. A multivariate logistic regression model was performed to identify factors associated with mortality. Results As of 22 May 2020, 4393 patients were included, of whom 419 (9.5%) were HCW. Median (interquartile range) age of HCW was 52 (15) years and 62.4% were women. Prevalence of comorbidities and severe radiological findings upon admission were less frequent in HCW. There were no difference in need of respiratory support and admission to intensive care unit, but occurrence of sepsis and in-hospital mortality was lower in HCW (1.7% vs. 3.9%; p = 0.024 and 0.7% vs. 4.8%; p<0.001 respectively). Age, male sex and comorbidity, were independently associated with higher in-hospital mortality and healthcare working with lower mortality (OR 0.211, 95%CI 0.067-0.667, p = 0.008). 30-days survival was higher in HCW (0.968 vs. 0.851 p<0.001). Conclusions Hospitalized COVID-19 HCW had fewer comorbidities and a better prognosis than NHCW. Our results suggest that professional exposure to COVID-19 in HCW does not carry more clinical severity nor mortality