Multi-Tier Annotations in the Verbmobil Corpus

In very large and diverse scientific projects where as different groups as linguists and engineers with different intentions work on the same signal data or its orthographic transcript and annotate new valuable information, it will not be easy to build a homogeneous corpus. We will describe how this can be achieved, considering the fact that some of these annotations have not been updated properly, or are based on erroneous or deliberately changed versions of the basis transcription. We used an algorithm similar to dynamic programming to detect differences between the transcription on which the annotation depends and the reference transcription for the whole corpus. These differences are automatically mapped on a set of repair operations for the transcriptions such as splitting compound words and merging neighbouring words. On the basis of these operations the correction process in the annotation is carried out. It always depends on the type of the annotation as well as on the position and the nature of the difference, whether a correction can be carried out automatically or has to be fixed manually. Finally we present a investigation in which we exploit the multi-tier annotations of the Verbmobil corpus to find out how breathing is correlated with prosodic-syntactic boundaries and dialog acts. 1

European surveillance of infections in cancer patients - ESIC

Major advances in cancer therapy result from development of multidrug chemotherapy regimens. Besides death from tumor progression, infections are currently one of the major causes of mortality and morbidity. Because of the risk of complications and mortality, the treatment for febrile neutropenia is admission to hospital and administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Response rates of initial antimicrobial treatment vary considerably (40-92%). Due to the heterogeneity of populations in randomized studies, comparison of efficacy and identification of risk factors is limited. This is the main reason why the European Society of Biomodulation and Chemotherapy (ESBiC) is conducting a surveillance study that concentrates more on the evaluation of risk factors than on the therapeutic outcome of prospective randomized antimicrobial regimens: European Surveillance of Infections in Cancer Patients (ESIC). The present contribution is to determine which cancer patients are at low risk for fever, and can benefit from first-line treatment with treatment options such as monotherapy as well as on an outpatient basis

Machine Learning of Probabilistic Phonological Pronunciation Rules from the Italian CLIPS Corpus

A blending of phonological concepts and technical analysis is proposed to yield a better modeling and understanding of phonological processes. Based on the manual segmentation and labeling of the Italian CLIPS corpus we automatically derive a probabilistic set of phonological pronunciation rules: a new alignment technique is used to map the phonological form of spontaneous sentences onto the phonetic surface form. A machine-learning algorithm then calculates a set of phonologi- cal replacement rules together with their conditional probabilities. A critical analysis of the resulting probabilistic rule set is presented and discussed with regard to regional Italian accents. The rule set presented here is also applied in the newly published web-service WebMAUS that allows a user to segment and phonetically label Italian speech via a simple web-interface

Predictability of the effects of phoneme merging on speech recognition performance by quantifying phoneme relations

To investigate whether the impact of phoneme merging on recognition rate can be predicted, different measures to quantify the relationship between two phonemes a and b were compared: (1) the functional load of their opposition, (2) the bigram type preservation, (3) their information radius, (4) their distance within an information gain tree induced from a distinctive feature matrix, and (5) the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence. For each of 25 phoneme pairs we trained a speech recognizer on data in which the respective pair was merged. Based on correlation analyses and predictor selection in stepwise regression modelling we found that the impact of phoneme merging on accuracy can tentatively be captured in terms of functional load and tree distance between the merged phonemes

Syntaxin 16 is a master recruitment factor for cytokinesis

Recently it was shown that both recycling endosome and endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) components are required for cytokinesis, in which they are believed to act in a sequential manner to bring about secondary ingression and abscission, respectively. However, it is not clear how either of these complexes is targeted to the midbody and whether their delivery is coordinated. The trafficking of membrane vesicles between different intracellular organelles involves the formation of soluble N-ethylmalei­mide–sensitive factor attachment protein receptor (SNARE) complexes. Although membrane traffic is known to play an important role in cytokinesis, the contribution and identity of intracellular SNAREs to cytokinesis remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that syntaxin 16 is a key regulator of cytokinesis, as it is required for recruitment of both recycling endosome–associated Exocyst and ESCRT machinery during late telophase, and therefore that these two distinct facets of cytokinesis are inextricably linked

RICE Limits on the Diffuse Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Flux

We present new limits on ultra-high energy neutrino fluxes above 100 PeV based on data collected by the Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment (RICE) at the South Pole from 1999-2005. We discuss estimation of backgrounds, calibration and data analysis algorithms (both on-line and off-line), procedures used for the dedicated neutrino search, and refinements in our Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, including recent in situ measurements of the complex ice dielectric constant. An enlarged data set and a more detailed study of hadronic showers results in a sensitivity improvement of more than one order of magnitude compared to our previously published results. Examination of the full RICE data set yields zero acceptable neutrino candidates, resulting in 95% confidence-level model dependent limits on the flux (E_\nu)^2(d\phi/dE_\nu)<10^{-6} GeV/(cm^2s~sr}) in the energy range 10^{17}< E_\nu< 10^{20} eV. The new RICE results rule out the most intense flux model projections at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to Astropart. Phy

An accurate determination of the Avogadro constant by counting the atoms in a 28Si crystal

The Avogadro constant links the atomic and the macroscopic properties of matter. Since the molar Planck constant is well known via the measurement of the Rydberg constant, it is also closely related to the Planck constant. In addition, its accurate determination is of paramount importance for a definition of the kilogram in terms of a fundamental constant. We describe a new approach for its determination by "counting" the atoms in 1 kg single-crystal spheres, which are highly enriched with the 28Si isotope. It enabled isotope dilution mass spectroscopy to determine the molar mass of the silicon crystal with unprecedented accuracy. The value obtained, 6.02214084(18) x 10^23 mol^-1, is the most accurate input datum for a new definition of the kilogram.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, 3 table