Tapes, transcripts and trials:The routine contamination of police interview evidence

This article addresses a serious, but currently unacknowledged, problem of evidential consistency regarding police-suspect interview evidence. It sheds light on flaws in current criminal procedure through the lens of linguistics, focusing on key stages of currently accepted practice which fly in the face of what linguists have long known about language. It demonstrates that, in stark contrast to the strict principles of preservation applied to physical evidence, interview data go through significant transformation between their creation in the interview room and their presentation in the courtroom, especially through changes in format between written and spoken text. It argues that, despite the safeguards provided by PACE 1984, there is nonetheless a level of routine distortion and contamination unintentionally built in to the current system of presenting police interviews as evidence in England & Wales

Two integrated and highly predictive functional analysis-based procedures for the classification of MSH6 variants in Lynch syndrome

Purpose: Variants in the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) gene MSH6, identified in individuals suspected of Lynch syndrome, are difficult to classify owing to the low cancer penetrance of defects in that gene. This not only obfuscates personalized health care but also the development of a rapid and reliable classification procedure that does not require clinical data. Methods: The complete in vitro MMR activity (CIMRA) assay was calibrated against clinically classified MSH6 variants and, employing Bayes’ rule, integrated with computational predictions of pathogenicity. To enable the validation of this two-component classification procedure we have employed a genetic screen to generate a large set of inactivating Msh6 variants, as proxies for pathogenic variants. Results: The genetic screen-derived variants established that the two-component classification procedure displays high sensitivities and specificities. Moreover, these inactivating variants enabled the direct reclassification of human variants of uncertain significance (VUS) as (likely) pathogenic. Conclusion: The two-component classification procedure and the genetic screens provide complementary approaches to rapidly and cost-effectively classify the large majority of human MSH6 variants. The approach followed here provides a template for the classification of variants in other disease-predisposing genes, facilitating the translation of personalized genomics into personalized health care

On the Automatic Analysis of Rules Governing Online Communities

Trabajo presentado en la 16th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, celebrada en Trujillo (Perú), del 13 al 16 de noviembre de 2018The automatic translation of rules or legal text from natural language into formal language has gained interest in the natural language processing domain, especially in the field of law and AI. Our research goal is to be able to automatically extract, from rules in natural language, the necessary elements that define these rules, such as the action in question, its modality (duty, right, privilege, ...), the first person the rule addresses, the second person affected by the rule, and the condition (if the rule was a conditional rule). As a first step toward identifying these elements, we start by identifying the semantic subjects, verbs, and objects in sentences of online normative texts. This paper presents the SVO+ model that achieves this, and our evaluation illustrates the model’s high precision when tested with the terms of use from websites like Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewe