Verbosity and Interface Design

Users pose very short queries to information retrieval systems. This study shows that the apparent length of the query field has an effect on the length of the query users enter

WEST: A Web Browser for Small Terminals

We describe WEST, a WEb browser for Small Terminals, that aims to solve some of the problems associated with accessing web pages on hand-held devices. Through a novel combination of text reduction and focus+context visualization, users can access web pages from a very limited display environment, since the system will provide an overview of the contents of a web page even when it is too large to be displayed in its entirety. To make maximum use of the limited resources available on a typical hand-held terminal, much of the most demanding work is done by a proxy server, allowing the terminal to concentrate on the task of providing responsive user interaction. The system makes use of some interaction concepts reminiscent of those defined in the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), making it possible to utilize the techniques described here for WAP-compliant devices and services that may become available in the near future

Human Grid: En förstudie

Vi har granskat förutsättningarna och möjligheterna att implementera Human Grid: en så kallad mellanprogramvara för att integrera samarbetsfrämjande IT-lösningar som redan idag finns i datorer och telefoner, med hänsyn tagen till formella och informella sociala nätverk

HEALTH RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG PERSONS 65 YEARS OR OLDER WITH CHRONIC HEART FAILURE: AN EMPIRICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL STUDY

The aim of this thesis was to empirically and methodologically investigate health related quality of life (HRQoL) among persons 65 years or older with chronic heart failure. The design was cross-sectional and the sample was recruited from a southeast region of Sweden. The sample included 357 respondents in Paper I, II and IV and 349 respondents in Paper III. For all respondents the mean age was 79 years. Collection of data was through use of a questionnaire that included demographic data, self-rated disease severity, the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (LHFQ), the Short Form-12 Health Survey (SF-12) and the Interview Schedule for Social Interactions (ISSI). Univariate, bivariate and multivariate statistical methods were used to analyse data. The empirical results demonstrated that the impact of chronic heart failure on daily life was extensive. Physical limitations due to chronic heart failure were rated to be more common and have a higher impact on daily life compared to emotional limitations, even though these limitations were also common. In addition, physical and emotional dimensions of HRQoL correlated significantly with each other (Paper I). Age, sex, comorbidity, living accommodation and cohabiting had a subordinate role in explaining variations in HRQoL when analysed together with self-rated disease severity in multiple regression analyses. Self-rated disease severity was the only predictor related to all HRQoL outcomes (Paper II). Low rated social network and social support demonstrated relationships to low HRQoL in emotional and physical dimensions (Paper III). The methodological results demonstrated that overall the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire has satisfactory psychometric properties among persons 65 years or older, when the instrument was tested according to classical test theory. However, there were two methodological concerns with the results. The first concern was the high frequency of internal missing values for the two items that asked about difficulties in performing sexual and leisure activities. These finding may indicate such items were not viewed as appropriate by this age group. Another concern was that discriminant validity could not be established for the physical and emotional subscales (Paper I). In contrast, the Rasch analysis revealed that the original physical and emotional subscales lacked unidimensionality, lacked in targeting, that the response scales did not work as intended and that four items demonstrated differential item functioning for sex and/or age (Paper IV). In conclusion, even though physical limitations were most common and had greatest impact on daily life, the relationship between physical and emotional dimensions of HRQoL implies an effect on each other. Thus, both physical and emotional limitations related to chronic heart failure are equally important to highlight for nurses to recognize when caring for elderly persons in order to improve their HRQoL. While the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire demonstrated satisfactory validity and reliability according to classical test theory, the Rasch analysis revealed a need for further development in the physical and emotional subscales in order to measure HRQoL in a sound psychometric way among persons 65 years or older

Adapting an English Information Extraction System to Swedish

This paper presents work on adapting the Proteus Information Extraction system to Swedish. It turned out that the cross-lingual adaptation as such was fairly straight-forward; however, the Proteus system design did not render itself that well to reconguration at such a low level as needed. To evaluate the adaptation, the system was tested on a Swedish version of the MUC-6 Scenario Template Task. The Swedish version performed excellently on a training corpus, but quite discouragingly on an unseen test corpus. As a consequence of that work, a new Information Extraction system is being designed and the layout of that system is described. 1 Introduction A well-known problem in the area of Information Extraction regards the adaptation of an extraction system to handle a new class of events (Yangarber and Grishman, 1997). With the increasing interest in multi-lingual and cross-lingual information extraction, it becomes necessary to construct systems that are easily adaptable, not o..

The FetchProt Corpus: Documentation and Annotation Guidelines

The FetchProt Corpus has been built within the FetchProt project in order to work as training and test data for the FetchProt system

Using heuristics, syntax and a local dynamic dictionary for protein name tagging

This paper presents work on a method to detect names of proteins in running text. The detection and categorisation of named entities, such as names of people, organisations and places, in classical MUC-style information extraction tasks (Borthwick 1998) might be regarded a solved problem. But names of proteins present a slightly different challenge because of their variant structural characteristics and the specifics of the text domains in which they appear. This certainly holds true for other biological substances, and probably for many other kinds of terminology as well. We will present the different steps involved in our approach to this problem, and show how combinations of them influence recall and precision

Quantifying the notion of ' clumpiness' within alignments obtained from BLAST similarity searches

There are numerous methods utilised in the determination of the function of newly sequenced DNA or proteins. One such method is the use of sequence similarity searches, such as BLAST. However, due to the speed at which sequences can be produced and the ever-increasing size of the databases against which they are searched, it is becoming progressively more difficult for the scientist to carry out the necessary data analysis manually. Therefore, an automation of the analysis of the BLAST results should greatly reduce the amount of labour for the scientist and so improve the chances of accelerating research progress or indicate new fields of investigation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo