An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

Role and Importance of Chlamydia Trachomatis in Pregnant Patients

AIM: The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of chlamydial infection among pregnant women and to determine the role of this infection in the fetus.MATERIAL AND METHODS: In the first phase of this study were reported 58 pregnant women with a positive test for active chlamydial infection by applying immunofluorescence. In the second phase of the study were reported pregnant with premature burst membranes (PBM), postnatal complications associated with chlamydial infection as puerperal endometritis, and newborns are monitored for low birth weight and growth retardation at birth.RESULTS: With a positive test are 58 patients in the first trimester or pregnancy registration in our consultation. After regimen with Sumamed (2 x 500 mg for three days and after 10 days again same scheme for them and their partner) at the beginning of the third trimester, the PCR test was made again. Of these, 5 were positive again, participants are between 20 and 30 years old. With premature rupture of OM are 20 patients. There was no increased incidence of premature births. Infants born to infected mothers have a higher risk of developing respiratory symptoms in the first 60 days of life. 3 of them have low for his age bodyweight.CONCLUSIONS: The scarcity of data on manifestations of chlamydial infection during pregnancy and neonatal outcomes justifies this study. Early diagnosis for registration of pregnancy and timely treatment of chlamydial infection as well as scrutinising the infection during the third trimester of pregnancy can prevent infection of the newborn. Therefore, preventive examinations should be considered as a priority for early detection of asymptomatic chlamydial infection in the conduct of antenatal care

Taking social networks to the next level

Since the boom of social networking lead to people using multiple account on many platforms in order to keep in touch with hundreds of contacts, managing one's contacts risks becoming a burden for many users. Following and finding information about friends and family has become an issue too. Guided by these observations and by careful research of existing adaptive web technologies, our team worked on the development of SNAP - an adaptive social network integrator which aimed to amalgamate various social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr) in one adaptive environment, which unobtrusively sorts the users' feed according to his/her preference. To achieve data transfer and authorisation, SNAP uses the newest version of the OAuth protocol. Adaptivity was achieved through statistical filtering. The initial field tests show that the system works, however there is definitely room for improvement in terms of Social Network Integration, and testers generally expressed an interest in the idea of using an adaptive social integrator such as SNAP. On top of this, we will be suggesting a number of improvements which will change the way we use social networks forever.peer-reviewe

SNAP : the social network adaptive portal

Since the boom of social networking lead to people using multiple account on many platforms in order to keep in touch with hundreds of contacts, managing one's contacts risks becoming a burden for many users. Following and finding information about friends and family has become an issue too. Guided by these observations and by careful research of existing adaptive web technologies, our team worked on the development of SNAP - an adaptive social network integrator which aimed to amalgamate four social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Buzz) in one adaptive environment, which to unobtrusively sort the users' feed according to his/her preference. To achieve data transfer and authorisation, SNAP used APIs and the newest version of the OAuth protocol. Adaptivity was achieved through statistical filtering. Despite efforts, the initial field tests show that the system is not as yet ready to be launched for wider use. However, there is room for improvement in terms of Social Network Integration, and tester users expressed an interest in the idea of using an adaptive social integrator such as SNAP.peer-reviewe

Optimal design of water treatment processes

Predicted water shortages assign water treatment a leading role in improving water resources management. One of the main challenges associated with the processes remains early stage design of techno-economically optimised purification. This work addresses the current gap by undertaking a whole-system approach of flowsheet synthesis for the production of water at desired purity at minimum overall cost. The optimisation problem was formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear programming model. Two case studies were presented which incorporated the most common commercial technologies and the major pollution indicators, such as chemical oxygen demand, dissolved organic carbon, total suspended solids and total dissolved solids. The results were analysed and compared to existing guidelines in order to examine the applicability of the proposed approach