Portions Of Text Research Articles

The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe by Michael W. Fazio, Patrick A. Snadon

Book Reviews Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon. The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Baltimore:TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 816 pp., 349 black-and-white photographs, 22 color plates, 241 line drawings, hardcover, $75.00, ISBN 0-8018-8104-8. B y analyzing extant building fabric, surviving drawings, primary texts, and historic photographs, Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon address a fundamental need in architectural history: the creation of a canon of Benjamin Henry Latrobe's domestic designs. Most ofLatrobe's houses are lost, and his drawings often represent designs only partially adopted by clients. By interpreting the evidence, the authors establish an authoritative list of Latrobe's domestic work and provide insight into the design theory of this important American architect. The structure of this volume is only partially chronological. The text begins with a brief but intriguing biography of Latrobe, which is followed by detailed discussions of the designs of individual houses organized according to the location of Latrobe's practice. The epilogue recounts the disheartening preservation history of these buildings, which the authors attribute both to his unconventional designs and to urban growth. The book ends with a catalogue of the architect's domestic projects. Into this general scheme, the authors interject analytical chapters summarizing Latrobe's design theories and an overview of his career. Because these summary chapters are more narrative in style, they can be read independently. Illustrations comprise one of the book's most attractive features. Latrobe's drawings are juxtaposed with contemporary plans and historical photographs so that readers can readily follow the authors' line of reasoning. The book's reconstructed drawings represent an especially useful contribution to Latrobe scholarship. Overall, the book's organization suggests multiple audiences: specialized academic audiences can focus on specific design conditions and solutions, while a broader readership can find a more general account of Latrobe's place in English and American architectural history. Fazio and Snadon bring expertise in both design and architectural history to this work. Fazio, a professor emeritus at the School ofArchitecture at Mississippi State University, is a practicing preservation architect and a published authority on Latrobe. Snadon teaches interior design as an associate professor at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. Both authors earned Ph.D.'s in architectural history from Cornell University. As Latrobe might have preferred, the authors emphasize aesthetic inspiration as the most important part of the architectural process. Large portions of the voluminous text describe in detail the stylistic character and origins of the plans and elevations of Latrobe's elegant habitations. However, Fazio and Snadon also approach their subject from a less traditional perspective. They explain how Latrobe's designs responded to the economic status of individual clients and where he preferred to locate spaces inhabited by 70 ARRIS Volume Eighteen BOOK REVIEWS servants. Acknowledging Latrobe's reputation as an engineer, the authors deftly describe how he brought his innovative skills to architectural systems, such as suspended ceilings and sliding doors. The authors stress several themes in Latrobe's professional development. In addition to his consummate skill in creating picturesque interiors, Latrobe is portrayed as adept at articulating an architectural theory rooted in Enlightenment rationality, even though he was forced to compromise those ideals because ofa conservative clientele. According to the authors, Latrobe accommodated regional traditions, such as the emphasis in Virginia on dining as a theater for social hierarchy, but rejected others, such as the widespread, but not universal, preference for the central passage plan. Contrary to our present understanding of the architect's motivation, the authors argue successfully that while catering to many of his clients' social ambitions and often disparaging their lack of design sophistication, Latrobe shared their compulsion to achieve distinction through the use of accumulated wealth. Fazio and Snadon's book does not aim to replace Talbot Hamlin's outdated but wonderfully readable biography, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1955). Likewise, it does not supplant Jeffrey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell's The Architectural Drawings ofBenjamin Henry Latrobe (1994), because it does not address Latrobe's civic architecture. Yet, because of its exhaustive analysis of both extant and lost domestic buildings attributed to...

How can information extraction ease formalizing treatment processes in clinical practice guidelines?: A method and its evaluation

Formalizing clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for a subsequent computer-supported processing is a challenging, but burdensome and time-consuming task. Existing methods and tools to support this task demand detailed medical knowledge, knowledge about the formal representations, and a manual modeling. Furthermore, formalized guideline documents mostly fall far short in terms of readability and understandability for the human domain modeler. We propose a new multi-step approach using information extraction methods to support the human modeler by both automating parts of the modeling process and making the modeling process traceable and comprehensible. This paper addresses the first steps to obtain a representation containing processes which is independent of the final guideline representation language. We have developed and evaluated several heuristics without the need to apply natural language understanding and implemented them in a framework to apply them to several guidelines from the medical subject of otolaryngology. Findings in the evaluation indicate that using semi-automatic, step-wise information extraction methods are a valuable instrument to formalize CPGs. Our evaluation shows that a heuristic-based approach can achieve good results, especially for guidelines with a major portion of semi-structured text. It can be applied to guidelines irrespective to the final guideline representation format.

Delacroix and Sculpture

Editor of a new, more complete edition of Delacroix's Journals, Hannoosh studies the Romantic artist's comments on sculpture from two recently discovered notebooks, showing an evolution in his view that sculpture and painting should remain within the limits set by their media and that painting, not sculpture, is the art most appropriate to modernity. Hannoosh shows that Delacroix, in the process of viewing and writing about medieval and Renaissance sculpture, conceives of both an authentic modern sculpture and a sculptural treatment of color in painting. He even imagines a style of colorist painting that would be imbued with the force, grandeur, and immediacy of ancient sculpture.

Whatever Happened to Polio? (review)

Reviewed by: Whatever Happened to Polio? Manon Parry Whatever Happened to Polio? Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., 12 April 2005-12 April 2006. http://americanhistory.si.edu/polio/ On 12 April 1955 the Salk polio vaccine was pronounced safe and effective. Fifty years later, the National Museum of American History launched a yearlong exhibition entitled "Whatever Happened to Polio?" to commemorate the event. Jonas Salk received great public recognition for his inactivated-virus vaccine—but scientists [End Page 574] and historians continue to debate his methods and the precise significance of his contribution, and Albert Sabin's live-virus version became the primary choice for use in the United States. In 2000, however, after several live-virus vaccinations caused cases of polio, Sabin's vaccine was superseded by Salk's. While the sponsors of the anniversary exhibition include the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Salk and Sabin receive comparable coverage in the section on the development of polio vaccines. In fact, Whatever Happened to Polio? offers an interpretation that should appeal to both camps—namely, that "the global end to polio transmission would have been inconceivable without both the 'killed' (Salk) and 'live' (Sabin) vaccines." The exhibition touches upon other controversial issues in the history of polio, including trials of the vaccine on incarcerated prisoners, the quarantining of polio patients, and charitable fund-raising campaigns featuring young polio survivors as "poster children." For the exhibition team, one of the main challenges was to present each issue in all its complexity, incorporating competing interpretations. Lead curator Katherine Ott was mindful of the need to include the voices of polio survivors and their families, who have often been excluded from histories that focus instead on researchers and their discoveries. Whatever Happened to Polio? juxtaposes the experiences of parents, scientists, polio survivors, activists, and policymakers to present the history of polio from a broad range of viewpoints. The experts describing medical procedures, for example, are as likely to be people who underwent the treatment as those who administered it. With so much to include, the final product is sometimes lacking in depth and the kind of detailed analysis that many aspects of this history deserve. Nonetheless, the exhibition was very well attended, and visitors responded positively in their discussions with museum staff and on comment cards left in the gallery. The two main audiences for the exhibition were older visitors who lived through polio epidemics, and school-age children who know very little about the disease or the development of vaccines. The result is groundbreaking in many ways, reflecting a concerted effort to better include people with disabilities in the history of polio and as visitors to the museum. The layout of the exhibition gallery was based upon the seven principles of Universal Design 1 (Equitable Use, Flexibility in Use, Simple and Intuitive Use, Perceptible Information, Tolerance for Error, Low Physical Effort, Size and Space for Approach and Use), and Braille and sight maps were located at the entrances. They contained a key to a series of "listening stations" placed throughout the exhibition, where audio recordings described the artifacts and visual materials on display and gave directions to the [End Page 575] other sections. The look and feel of the gallery appeared to have been designed to appeal primarily to a young audience, with each themed section displaying bright colors and bold graphics. Information was presented in a variety of formats to accommodate different learning styles, with "Factoids" and "Tough Choices" slotted in alongside narrative text. "Tough Choices" addresses problem issues, like the quarantining of people infected with polio during epidemics, in the format of an either/or dilemma; competing for attention alongside all the other elements, and reduced to "Individual Rights versus the Public's Health," for example, these sections seemed to trivialize the issues and lead the visitor toward simplistic "right or wrong" conclusions. On the Web site, however, where the streamlined design means that visitors are more likely to read all the different portions of text, these sections are better integrated with the narrative and are much more effective. Overall, the exhibition provides an interesting look at a complex subject. At the museum, the fast...

On the Communion of Damasus and Meletius: Fourth-Century Synodal Formulae in the Codex Veronensis LX. Edited and translated by Lester L. Field, Jr. Pp. xii + 304. (Studies and Texts, 145.) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004. isbn 0 88844 145 2. CAN$69.95.

This book has two aims: firstly, to provide new critical texts of the Roman synodical formulae and accompanying Eastern subscriptions found in the Codex Veronensis LX and dating from the 370s; secondly, to establish that these fragments demonstrate that communion was restored between Damasus of Rome and Meletius of Antioch before the latter's death while presiding at the Council of Constantinople in 381. The Codex Veronensis has been in the possession of the cathedral chapter of Verona since the tenth century. The portion which relates to the schism at Antioch consists of 130 lines (in this edition) of Latin text, purporting to be the exemplar from an imperial rescript of a Roman synod held under Pope Damasus addressed to the bishops of the East, known from its title as the Exemplum Synodi. The first portion of text, Confidimus Quidem, has an authenticating subscription appended by the Milanese deacon Sabinus, and is also preserved by Theodoret and Sozomen in their histories, in a Greek translation of a different redaction. Three further portions of synodal decrees deal with controversial doctrinal points (Ea Gratia; Illut sane; Non nobis), to which is appended a list of Eastern bishops who subscribed to a doctrinal formulary at a synod held in Antioch in 379, headed by Meletius of Antioch himself. Previous critical editions of all or part of the Exemplum Synodi, most notably those of Schwartz, Richard, and Scheidweiler, have been hampered by lack of access to the manuscript itself, and there has been no consensus regarding the status of the texts as either the original Latin or retroversions from Greek.

Segmentation and alignment of parallel text for statistical machine translation

We address the problem of extracting bilingual chunk pairs from parallel text to create training sets for statistical machine translation. We formulate the problem in terms of a stochastic generative process over text translation pairs, and derive two different alignment procedures based on the underlying alignment model. The first procedure is a now-standard dynamic programming alignment model which we use to generate an initial coarse alignment of the parallel text. The second procedure is a divisive clustering parallel text alignment procedure which we use to refine the first-pass alignments. This latter procedure is novel in that it permits the segmentation of the parallel text into sub-sentence units which are allowed to be reordered to improve the chunk alignment. The quality of chunk pairs are measured by the performance of machine translation systems trained from them. We show practical benefits of divisive clustering as well as how system performance can be improved by exploiting portions of the parallel text that otherwise would have to be discarded. We also show that chunk alignment as a first step in word alignment can significantly reduce word alignment error rate.

Impoliteness in Early Modern English courtroom discourse

The paper investigates whether the notion of impoliteness worked out for synchronic pragmatics is also applicable in diachronic pragmatics. An analysis of two Early Modern English court trial records demonstrates that the answer is positive provided some new dimensions are added. My model of impoliteness cuts across the following axes: structural, semantic, and pragmatic. Structural impoliteness ranges from words and phrases to portions of texts, thus the syntactic dimension cuts across the complexity dimension. The semantic/pragmatic dimension includes numerous non-literal meanings of impoliteness. An utterance can be judged as impolite on the basis of its surface representations (“overt impoliteness”), or the impoliteness of an expression has to be inferred and takes the form of an implicature (“covert impoliteness”). Thus, the final interpretation would depend both on the speaker’s intention when producing an utterance, its (perlocutionary) effect(s) on the addressee, and the overall context. Finally, all these variables cut across the socio-historical dimension.

Extraction of Semantic Text Portion Related to Anchor Link

Recently, semantic text portion (STP) is getting popular in the field of Web mining. STP is a text portion in the original page which is semantically related to the anchor pointing to the target page. STPs may include the facts and the people's opinions about the target pages. STPs can be used for various upper-level applications such as automatic summarization and document categorization. In this paper, we concentrate on extracting STPs. We conduct a survey of STP to see the positions of STPs in original pages and find out HTML tags which can divide STPs from the other text portions in original pages. We then develop a method for extracting STPs based on the result of the survey. The experimental results show that our method achieves high performance.

Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (review)

Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. By John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr.; edited by Robert Gordon and Brace Nemerov. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. [xvi, 343 p. ISBN 0-82651485-5. $34.95.] Indices, appendices, illustrations, music examples. The immediate attraction of Lost Delta Found is the inclusion of John W. Work III (1901-1967) among the authors. His American Negro Songs and Spirituals (New York: Bonanza, 1940) sold well on its initial publication and may still be found in many music libraries. It remains in print as American Negro Songs through Dover Books. That collection was the product of a talented mind with a wide interest in many kinds of southern African American music and a facile skill in music transcription. Having been raised within a distinguished African American musical family and being on the faculty of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee-home of the internationally famous Fisk Jubilee Singers-placed Work in an advantageous position to view, listen, and report on the music of his people, region, and time. Any additional research of his should be of high interest. That presented in Lost Delta Found is cause for celebration and careful, responsive study. Three studies by Work and two other Fisk African American scholars, Lewis Jones and Samuel C. Adams, are presented here. All were products of a series of field trips to Coahoma County (including its seat Clarksdale) in the Mississippi Delta in 1941-1942, undertaken in collaboration with white researcher Alan Lomax (1915-2002) of the Library of Congress (LC). The main purpose of the research was to study the rural African American residents of the Delta, recording their traditional ways and expressions, and then to assess the retention of such traditions when people moved to towns and cities. Sound recording was a means to the fieldwork, yet the blues performances captured by the field technology, especially those by Son House, Muddy Waters, and David Honeyboy Edwards, have nearly overshadowed the reasons why the Fisk/LC team came to the Delta. The Library of Congress initially issued selections of their blues during the 1940s and 1950s, and reissues of the same music on the Flyright, Biograph, MCA/Chess, and Document labels have continued through the present day. In his account of the 1942 trip in his memoir The Land Where The Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993; winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), Lomax focused on the blues, to which he made cultural and musical associations with the other types of African American music he had heard. Yet the scope of the Fisk/LC recordings encompassed more than just blues, and the social classes of the recorded African American performers included not only the poor on cotton plantations but also the lower and middle classes in Clarksdale. A basic check of the listings for these field recordings, issued and unissued, in Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye's Blues and Gospel Records 1890-1943 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) shows that the number of field discs devoted to church services (including sermons and sacred music), children's game songs and chants, and women's home songs greatly exceeds that of blues. Such a broad scope suggests that the Fisk researchers (if not also Lomax) felt at the time of the field trips that there was much Mississippi Delta musical culture in general to collect, assess, and discuss. Work, Jones, and Adams prepared their individual studies of the 1941-1942 fieldwork and duly sent them to LC where they were misplaced. Plans for publication were then set aside. The location of the studies remained unknown if not uncertain for many years. As it turned out, copies of the Jones and Work text portions were kept in Lomax's archives at Hunter College, New York City. The Franklin Library at Fisk University contained Work's microfilms of his music transcriptions and indexes, and Adams's M. …

Computer-assisted translation using speech recognition

Current machine translation systems are far from being perfect. However, such systems can be used in computer-assisted translation to increase the productivity of the (human) translation process. The idea is to use a text-to-text translation system to produce portions of target language text that can be accepted or amended by a human translator using text or speech. These user-validated portions are then used by the text-to-text translation system to produce further, hopefully improved suggestions. There are different alternatives of using speech in a computer-assisted translation system: From pure dictated translation to simple determination of acceptable partial translations by reading parts of the suggestions made by the system. In all the cases, information from the text to be translated can be used to constrain the speech decoding search space. While pure dictation seems to be among the most attractive settings, unfortunately perfect speech decoding does not seem possible with the current speech processing technology and human error-correcting would still be required. Therefore, approaches that allow for higher speech recognition accuracy by using increasingly constrained models in the speech recognition process are explored here. All these approaches are presented under the statistical framework. Empirical results support the potential usefulness of using speech within the computer-assisted translation paradigm.

Strabons Geographika (review)

Reviewed by: Strabons Geographika, 1. Prolegomena, Buch I-IV: Text und Übersetzung, and: Strabons Geographika, 2. Buch V-VIII: Text und Übersetzung James Romm Stefan Radt (ed.). Strabons Geographika, 1. Prolegomena, Buch I-IV: Text und Übersetzung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002. Pp. xxvi, 563. €141.00. ISBN 3-525-259506. Stefan Radt (ed.). Strabons Geographika, 2. Buch V-VIII: Text und Übersetzung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003. Pp. 560. €156.00. ISBN 3-525-25951-4. Strabo's Geography is one of few remaining major classical works not yet published in a complete critical edition. The great length of his text and the complexity of its manuscript tradition have tended to wear out the lives of his editors: Wolfgang Aly, generally considered the most reliable of these, died before completing the first third of the project (after himself inheriting the posthumous materials of Benedict Niese), and Francesco Sbordone progressed only slightly further in the Rome edition before his death. The Budé version, begun in the 1960s by Germaine Aujac and François Lassère and now apparently halted after reaching book 12, has been deemed sorely deficient (see, e.g., the review by Dicks of the first volume, CR n.s. 21 [1971] 88–94). No Oxford Classical Text has ever existed nor is one planned, to my knowledge, while the Loeb edition begun by J. R. S. Sterrett and completed by Horace Leonard Jones lacks a critical apparatus. What is more, no complete commentary on the Geography has been produced since that of Casaubon in the seventeenth century. A group of scholars who first assembled at Groningen in 1982, led by Stefan Radt, set out to fill these gaps, and the first two of their projected ten-volume text, translation, and commentary have now appeared. To judge by these initial volumes, which contain the text of Geography books 1–8 with facing German translation, and by the sample section of commentary Radt published in a 1991 article in Mnemosyne, the project will undoubtedly succeed in giving us a definitive, reliable, comprehensive edition of Strabo. Radt and his team are proceeding with consummate care, both in their editorial choices and in the overall design and presentation of the series and its individual volumes. Many innovations have been made here to assist scholars grappling with the immensity of Strabo's work and the great variety of material it contains. Headings at the top of each page situate us both in the text (referenced both by book/chapter numbers and by "C" page numbers derived from Casaubon's 1620 edition) and in geographic space. Line numbers at the edge of the page are arranged in such a way that each new Casaubon page starts at line 1, making it possible, for the first time, for scholars to cite Strabo passages by a precise and uniform system (e.g., "Strabo 266C4" designates a single line of text). Cross-references to fragment collections of, say, Eratosthenes—of which there are a great number in book 1 in particular—are given in parentheses within both the Greek text and the facing translation, rather than in footnotes as in the Budé edition. The critical apparatus is extremely clear and complete, and judicious choices have been made from among the variant readings. In general Radt follows the theory of manuscript transmission put forward by Diller, but he also chooses, unlike his predecessors, to avoid grouping manuscripts together and assigning them common sigla on the basis of shared errors or omissions. All sigla used by Radt, that is, refer to individual, extant manuscripts—a sensible precaution against the dangers of creating phantom exemplars which then go on to influence editorial judgments. Another [End Page 204] sensible choice has relegated minor, inconsequential textual variants to an appendix at the back of each volume, where they do not distract the reader from the more important cruces. The exacting methodology employed by Radt and his team can be judged by their decision to publish the Epitome and Chrestomathy, short redactions of portions of Strabo's text, in the ninth volume of the series (tentatively scheduled to appear in 2010), and by the elegant arrangement that they have made...

Method for incorporating multiple cursors in a speech recognition system

In a speech recognition system, a method for using multiple cursors for dictation and correction of text can include a series of steps. The steps can include detecting whether a correction marker has been included within a body of text and searching for a user specified portion of text to be corrected within the body of text. The method further can include selecting the user specified portion of text and substituting an alternate user specified portion of text for the user specified portion of text within the body of text. The step of locating the correction marker within the body of text at a location defined by the alternate user specified portion of text further can be included. Additionally, the method can include the step of relocating an insertion cursor to the end of the body of text.

Voice activated text strings for electronic devices

A system and method for associating text with a voice command and entering the associated text into an electronic device is disclosed. In one embodiment, the invention is a system for entering text into an electronic device, comprising, an input element for entering a text portion into the electronic device, a first memory for storing the text portion, a software code segment for recording a voice portion into the electronic device, and a second memory for storing the voice portion. The system also includes a software code segment for associating the voice portion with the text portion, a software code segment for associating the text portion with information to be entered in the electronic device, and voice recognition software to recall the text portion that is associated with the voice portion, where the input element inserts the text portion associated with the information to be entered into the electronic device.

Exploring the Blogosphere: Use of Web Logs in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract: The words blog, blogger, blogging, and blogosphere have entered online technological dictionaries in the last decade. Recently, these personal electronic journals have received more attention and their increased popularity has led to their regular use in many different settings including the news, the political arena, and even in education. This article offers an overview of this relatively new technological tool, which serves as a form of micropublishing, and then discusses its potential uses in language classes. Two projects integrating blogs are highlighted and the steps on how to author a blog are outlined.

Toward automatic video-based whiteboard reading

The increasing popularity of whiteboards as a popular tool in meeting rooms has been accompanied by a growing interest in making use of the whiteboard as a user interface for human-computer interaction. Therefore, systems based on electronic whiteboards have been developed in order to serve as meeting assistants for, e.g., collaborative working. However, as special pens and erasers are required, natural interaction is restricted. In order to render this communication method more natural, it was proposed to retain ordinary whiteboard and pens and to visually observe the writing process using a video camera [22, 25]. In this paper a prototype system for automatic video-based whiteboard reading is presented. The system is designed for recognizing unconstrained handwritten text and is further characterized by an incremental processing strategy in order to facilitate recognizing portions of text as soon as they have been written on the board. We will present the methods employed for extracting text regions, preprocessing, feature extraction, and statistical modeling and recognition. Evaluation results on a writer-independent unconstrained handwriting recognition task demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

A robust video text extraction method for character recognition

AbstractThis paper proposes a method for extracting text portions occurring in video images with high accuracy for reading by OCR. Past studies have produced methods of extracting text in a video image from its background by binarization based on a threshold, utilizing the fact that the intensity of the text is higher than that of the background. One method for determining the threshold is Shio's application of Otsu's method, assuming the distribution of two intensities of the background and characters in local blocks. However, methods based on various intensities of the background such as those of video images have the problem of not yielding a good threshold due to assumptions that are not necessarily valid. In addition, in reality, they cannot extract characters with accuracy sufficient for OCR readability because the intensity around the characters is not necessarily high due to the effects of shadowing, edge elimination, and signal conversion processing. Thus, this paper proposes a method of extracting only the text portions by robustly estimating the intensity distribution of the text portions, initially extracting high‐reliability areas as text portions, and extending the areas based on the estimated distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed method extracts text portions with higher accuracy and better OCR readability than the conventional methods. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(9): 87–96, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10148

Proposal of two-stage patent retrieval method considering the claim structure

The importance of patents is increasing in global society. In preparing a patent application, it is essential to search for related patents that may invalidate the invention. However, it is time-consuming to identify them among the millions of patents. This article proposes a patent-retrieval method that considers a claim structure for a more accurate search for invalidity. This method uses a claim text as input; it consists of two retrieval stages. In stage 1, general text analysis and retrieval methods are applied to improve recall. In stage 2, the top N documents retrieved in stage 1 are rearranged to improve precision by applying text analysis and retrieval methods using the claim structure. Our two-stage retrieval introduces five precision-oriented analysis and retrieval methods: query-term extraction from a portion of a claim text that describes the characteristics of a claim; query term-weighting without term frequency; query term-weighting with “measurement terms”; text retrieval using only claims as a target; and calculating the relevant score by “partially” adding scores in stage 2 to those in stage 1. Evaluation results using test sets of the NTCIR4 Patent Retrieval Task show that our methods are effective, though the degree of the effectiveness varies depending on the test sets.

A Genetic Algorithm For Text Mining

Text workers should find ways of representing huge amounts of text in a more compact form. Textual documents can be represented by concepts. One way to define the concepts is by the terms, keywords extracted from the textual documents and cleaned by several processes like stopwords and stemming. Using the frequencies of the terms, one can quantify the relations between documents or portions of text. These relations can serve many applications, like information retrieval or automatic text classification. Another way to define the concepts is by the sets of correlated terms rather then by raw terms. Correlated terms usually have a more specific meaning. Finding meaningful concepts within a huge collection of corpuses in a reasonable timeframe is a difficult task to accomplish. This paper describes a new text mining process to uncover interesting term correlations. The process uses a genetic algorithm to cope with the combinatorial explosion of the term sets. The genetic algorithm identifies combinations of terms that optimize an objective function, which is the cornerstone of the process. We have tested a function designed to optimize the discriminating power of the term sets. The genetic model was tested on a TREC sub-collection. The parameters were set to discover a thousand combinations of correlated terms. These sets of terms were further added to the basic index and applied to the information retrieval problem. The experiment revealed that the augmented index was unable to improve the effectiveness of the retrieval, when compared with the vector space model.

The Daily Offering Meal in the Ritual of Amenhotep I: An Instance of the Local Adaptation of Cult Liturgy

AbstractThis article reexamines a limestone ostrakon of the Ramesside period, incompletely published by its previous editors, that was originally part of the Michaelides collection and is now owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The ostrakon contains a small portion of a long text known as the "Ritual of Amenhotep I." The ostrakon lists a "menu" of items to be presented to Amen-Re and the deified Amenhotep I as part of the offering meal (dbh htp.w) during the daily offering ritual. This ritual meal awakens the god from a wounded state, empowering his body and thus his divine agency. Through repeated and patterned actions of offering accompanied by chanted speech imbued with symbolic meaning, the participants are given experience of hidden cosmological processes that lie beyond the boundaries of normal knowledge. The ritual meal can be described as a liminal rite of awakening and healing for the god and, by extension, for the entire community of which this god is a patron. We present this ritual performance as a case study examining how mythological narrative and state rituals can be adapted for local cult use.

Struggling Readers and Content Area Text: Interactions with and Perceptions of Comprehension, Self, and Success

This year-long case study examines how a struggling reader in a sixth-grade social studies class, a seventh grade mathematics class, and an eighth grade science class “transacted” with the reading task demands of her specific classroom. Through regular classroom observations and interviews, the researcher documents how each student responded to and worked with text and reading instruction provided by her respective content area teacher.The results suggest that each student attempted to be engaged with text as much as possible and was interested in learning course content. However, the ways in which the students approached text was heavily influenced by how she saw herself as a reader. Students who believed they could comprehend a piece of text were more willing to engage with it than if they believed it was too difficult. However, even when a student chose not to read a portion of text, she considered other ways in which she might learn the content being presented. Overall, the results suggest that there is more to working with struggling readers than considering the type of instruction they need. The case presented here suggests that teachers and researchers need to find ways to understand the connections between identity and instruction.