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Copyright of Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural is the property of Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Categorical verbal fluency tests (CFT) are commonly used to assess the integrity of semantic memory in individuals with brain damage. Persons with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type display a reduced output on CFT, and a similar pattern has been reported in persons with amnesic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). The aims of the present study were to assess whether the semantic relations between lexical entries produced on a categorical fluency test were different between healthy persons and those with aMCI, and whether this difference was more pronounced in individuals who converted to dementia during a 3-year follow-up period. Methods: We recruited 34 individuals with aMCI and 29 matched healthy persons. During the follow-up period, 10 individuals converted to Dementia (aMCI-conv). Two measures assessing semantic relations between consecutively produced word pairs (Path length and Extended Gloss Overlap) were obtained from the Wordnet database. Results: The number of word pairs analyzed among the healthy participants (HP) and persons with aMCI were 498 (birds: 262; pieces of furniture: 236) and 395 (birds: 174; pieces of furniture: 221), respectively. Path length was lower in aMCI-conv than in HP (p = 0.035), but no differences were found between stable aMCI and HP, and between aMCI-stable and aMCI-conv. The ANOVA for lexical entries belonging to the "birds" category showed a significant effect of group (F = 5.630; p = 0.004); the post hoc analysis showed a significant difference between HP and aMCI-conv (p = 0.003). The "pieces of furniture" category was significantly affected by group (F = 4.107; p = 0.017); the post hoc test showed significant differences between aMCI-conv and healthy individuals (p = 0.049), and between aMCI-conv and stable aMCI (p = 0.001). Discussion: Individuals with aMCI who convert to dementia show a deterioration in the semantic relations between lexical entries, produced on a CFT. This phenomenon may be interpreted as a marker of a very early disruption of semantic memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Geomatics & Information Science of Wuhan University is the property of Geomatics & Information Science of Wuhan University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Traitement Automatique des Langues is the property of Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues (ATALA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a system designed to help deciders manage cases of crisis. The system represents, characterises and interprets the dynamic evolution of a given situation and displays the results of its analysis. The core of the system is made of three multiagent systems (MAS): the data representation MAS for the static and dynamic representation of the current situation, the characterisation MAS for dynamically regrouping sets of agents of the data representation MAS and the interpretation MAS for matching results between the characterisation MAS and previous scenarios stored in the persistent memory of the system in order to have a deeper analysis of the situation. The case based reasoning of the interpretation MAS sends its results to the user as a view of the current situation linked to some views of similar situations. This article will focus on the data representation MAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies an application of distributional similarity techniques to the problem of structural organization of biomedical terminology. The application domain is the relatively small GENIA corpus. Using terms that have been accurately marked-up by hand within the corpus, the problem of automatically determining semantic proximity is considered. Terminological units are defined as normalized classes of individual terms. Syntactic analysis of the corpus data is carried out using the Pro3Gres parser and provides the data required to calculate distributional similarity using a variety of measures. Evaluation is performed against a hand-crafted gold standard for this domain in the form of the GENIA ontology. The paper shows that distributional similarity can be used to predict semantic type with a good degree of accuracy, reaching an optimal value of 63.1 percent.