Development of Diachronic Terminology from Japanese Statutory Corpora

This paper reports our ongoing research on the development of diachronic legal terminology, which deals with temporal changes in legal terms. We started by compiling statutory corpora for them. Focusing on articles that define legal terms, we defined a set of regular expression rules. Our experimental result showed that we successfully extracted legal terms, their explanations, and their relations. Our terminology consists of 26,661 terms and 35,201 relations, in which the precision of the relations was 88.0\% with 100 samples chosen at random. Graphical output will enrich our understanding of the dynamics of legal terms

Daily News on Japanese Legislation toward Global Sharing of Japanese Legal Information

Our purpose in this paper is to develop a system for the international sharing of Japanese legal information. We plan to promptly provide the Outlines of all the newly promulgated Japanese statutes in English, using machine translation. Structured documents in XML format made it possible to achieve various functions concerning machine translation, text search, and display style. We developed the Document Type Definition for the Outlines based on our investigation of their structure. We also developed a rule-based annotator for the Outlines, which adequately marked up 87.2% on the Outlines of Japanese acts

Improvement of Translation Accuracy for the Outlines of Japanese Statutes by Splitting Parenthesized Expressions

To globally share Japanese legal information, we translate the Outlines of Japanese statutes. These outlines are the official summaries of Japanese statutes and are useful to quickly understand their contents. In a previous statistical machine translation system for the outlines, we found that the training corpus consisted of both statutes and their outlines, including many long sentences that reduced the translation quality. To solve this problem, we shortened the length of sentences and focused on parenthesized expressions. In this paper, we propose a translation method that splits off parenthesized expressions from the sentences. Experimental result shows the effectiveness of our method

Radiosynthesis and in vivo evaluation of two imidazopyridineacetamides, [11C]CB184 and [11C]CB190, as a PET tracer for 18 kDa translocator protein: direct comparison with [11C](R)-PK11195

Objective: We report synthesis of two carbon-11 labeled imidazopyridines TSPO ligands, [11C]CB184 and [11C]CB190, for PET imaging of inflammatory process along with neurodegeneration, ischemia or brain tumor. Biodistribution of these compounds was compared with that of [11C]CB148 and [11C](R)-PK11195. Methods: Both [11C]CB184 and [11C]CB190 having 11C-methoxyl group on an aromatic ring were readily prepared using [11C]methyl triflate. Biodistribution and metabolism of the compounds were examined with normal mice. An animal PET study using 6-hydroxydopamine treated rats as a model of neurodegeneration was pursued for proper estimation of feasibility of the radioligands to determine neuroinflammation process. Results: [11C]CB184 and [11C]CB190 were obtained via O-methylation of corresponding desmethyl precursor using [11C]methyl triflate in radiochemical yield of 73 % (decay-corrected). In vivo validation as a TSPO radioligand was carried out using normal mice and lesioned rats. In mice, [11C]CB184 showed more uptake and specific binding than [11C]CB190. Metabolism studies showed that 36 % and 25 % of radioactivity in plasma remained unchanged 30 min after intravenous injection of [11C]CB184 and [11C]CB190, respectively. In the PET study using rats, lesioned side of the brain showed significantly higher uptake than contralateral side after i.v. injection of either [11C]CB184 or [11C](R)-PK11195. Indirect Logan plot analysis revealed distribution volume ratio (DVR) between the two sides which might indicate lesion-related elevation of TSPO binding. The DVR was 1.15 ± 0.10 for [11C](R)-PK11195 and was 1.15 ± 0.09 for [11C]CB184. Conclusion: The sensitivity to detect neuroinflammation activity was similar for [11C]CB184 and [11C](R)-PK11195