Aron Henriksson obtained two scholarships, Donationsstipendier from Stockholms universitet (John Söderberg) and Google grant to participate at two different summer schools!
Congratulation Aron!
Hideyuki Tanushi presented the paper “Negation Scope Delimitation in Clinical Text Using Three Approaches: NegEx, PyConTextNLP and SynNeg” at NoDaLiDa 2013, the 19th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, which was held in Oslo this time. Co-authors to the paper by Hideyuki were Hercules Dalianis, Martin Duneld, Maria Kvist, Maria Skeppstedt and Sumithra Velupillai. The paper was presented as a poster and, (as it was one of the best short papers) also with an oral presentation.
Among other interesting papers can be mentioned “Normalisation of Historical Text Using Context-Sensitive Weighted Levenshtein Distance and Compound Splitting” (as these methods are now applied on our clinical texts); Two readability papers: “Statistical Machine Translation with Readability Constraints” and “Features Indicating Readability in Swedish Text”; One paper about terminology extraction “IPhraxtor: A Linguistically Informed System for Extraction of Term Candidates”; and “The Automatic Identification of Discourse Units in Dutch Text”, which presented a rule-based method for identifying discourse units.
This year I have submitted an application to Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT) for requesting funds for a Ph.D. student at DSV/Stockholm University that is performing research in IT Management with a focus on IT Governance. The application has been successfully, and in the next five years we will receive 1500000 SEK from MIT for financing together with our department the Ph.D. position at DSV of Parisa Aasi. For more information about Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT) please access the following link: http://www.forskarskolan-mit.nu/
Gustaf Juell-Skielse visited Nick Guldemond at T/U Delft and Hajo Reijers at T/U Eindhoven last week. The purpose of the visits were twofold: to prepare for the start of the SALIG++ project and to discuss collaboration in the area of business process management.
SALIG++ is a project within call 5 of the Europan joint programme of Ambient Assisted Living. Stockholm University together with T/U Delft and six other European partners are to develop a service platform for supporting informal carers. Informal care, such as care given by relatives and friends, respresents the major portion of all care while so far most research attention has been paid to support formal care. SALIG++ is planned to start before the summer and will last for three years.
Stockholm university and the Unit of Information Systems are part of the European BPM Roundtable of which Hajo Reijers is the managing director. The BPM Roundtable is very active in the Netherlands and we discussed how Stockholm university could build a stronger local practice in Sweden. No clear answers at this stage but a mutual interest in future collaboration.
On April 4, 2013 at DSV, Dr. Radu Mihalache from VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada has given a seminar regarding Strategic Sourcing. The seminar was organized by the Center for Service Science and Innovation and IT Management group at DSV and is available on http://play.dsv.su.se.
Speaker:
Dr. Radu Mihalache is Assistant Professor at VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He has received his doctoral degree from Erasmus University in 2012. The topic of his doctoral dissertation was concerning “Stimulating Innovation: The Roles of Offshoring and Leadership”. The finds of his research shows that firms’ innovation can be greatly increased through offshoring of services, but too much can cause harm. He also shows how leadership and sourcing of resources can hamper or enhance innovation competitiveness. Dr. Mihalache’s research work has been published in Strategic Management Journal and presented at international conferences such as Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and Academy of International Business.
Last week, Jörg Tiedemann gave an IS-seminar on “Machine Translation for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains”. Jörg Tiedemann is a visiting Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University, doing research in parallel corpora and machine translation. He is probably best know at DSV for Uplug, a collection of tools for processing parallel corpora, which has been used in several DSV student thesis projects.
The main topic of the seminar was how a closely related language can be of use for an under-resourced language, or for an under-resourced domain of a language. For statistical machine translation between two languages, you need parallel corpora, that is original and translated texts in these two languages. This does not always exist, especially not in the domain you need, and in those cases you can use an intermediate language. There are for instance many legal texts that exist both in an English and a Danish version (since both countries are in the EU), whereas there are not that many for the language pairs English/Norwegian. Standard machine translation techniques, using word alignment, can be used for constructing a machine translation system between English and Danish. To translate between Norwegian and Danish, a new method in form of character alignment, is instead used. Thereby, Danish can be used as an intermediate language for creating automatic translations between English and Norwegian.
Jörg Tiedemann
Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai and Aron Henriksson participated in the Louhi 2013 Workshop on Health Document Text Mining and Information Analysis. This year it was hosted by NICTA in Sydney, Australia on February 11-12. Sumithra presented the paper “Porting a Rule-based Assertion Classifier for Clinical Text from English to Swedish” by Sumithra Velupillai, Maria Skeppstedt, Maria Kvist, Danielle Mowery (University of Pittsburgh), Brian Chapman (UCSD), Hercules Dalianis and Wendy Chapman (UCSD). Aron presented the paper “Optimizing the Dimensionality of Clinical Term Spaces for Improved Diagnosis Coding Support”, co-authored with Martin Hassel. Hercules was invited to give a keynote, where he talked about detecting hospital-acquired infections from patient records and the results from the Detect-HAI project. A workshop report (in Swedish) is available on request from the author.
Aron Henriksson and Maria Skeppstedt presented at the Southern California Workshop on Medical Text Analysis and Visualization during their visit at the Division of Biomedical Informatics, University of California, San Diego. There were many interesting presentations at the workshop, which also led to interesting discussions. The presentation topics most closely related to what is being done in our Clinical Text Mining Group at DSV were “Using Twitter to examine smoking behaviour & tobacco products” by Mike Conway (Division of Biomedical Informatics, UCSD), “Encoding Semantic and Discourse Features for Problem List Generation” by Danielle Mowery (Division of Biomedical Informatics, UCSD) and “Evidence-based Reduction of Perceived and Actual Text Difficulty Using Natural Language Processing” by Gondy Leroy (School of Information Systems & Technology Claremont Graduate University), all of them giving much useful input to our current projects.
Inspiring talks were also given by the other speakers, giving new ideas to text mining and visualisation approaches, e.g. by Andre Skupin (Department of Geography, SDSU) who talked about “Visualizing the topical structure of the medical sciences: A self-organizing
map approach” and Ricky Taira (Department of Radiological Sciences, UCLA) who talked about “Defining and organizing medical NLP tasks”.
Aron talking about automatic synonym extraction using random indexing
Maria talking about features for named entity recognition
