The HEXAnord-HEalth teXt Analysis network in the Nordic and Baltic countries signed today!
The research network that is funded by Norfa (Nordic council) obtained funding for three years. The partners in addition to DSV/KTH-Stockholm University are the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTU, the Danish Technical University, DTU, University of Turku, Finland, University of Tartu, Estonia and Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. The aim of the network is to construct synthetic patient records for the development and evaluation of textmining tools to be used on real electronic health records as well as give PhD-courses in the area of clinical text mining.
IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2009
Earlier this summer, in June, I participated in the IADIS conference on Web Based Communities, part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2009. The conference was held in Algarve, Portugal. I presented a paper titled “The Use of an Online Health Community on Overweight: A Member Perspective”. I was also committee member of the IADIS conference on e-Health, a conference that took place in parallel with the one on Web Based Communities.
The conference was truly a nice experience. It was inspiring to meet so many people interested in the development of online communities. Social aspects, issues of trust, learning, services and health were elaborated on during the days of the conference. One evening was also dedicated for some local culture events.
Value Modeling in Healthcare
Erik Perjons and I have written an article on value modeling in healthcare, which was published in Healthcare IT Management, which is the official journal of the European Association of Healthcare IT Managers. The journal has a wide audience and is distributed in about 30,000 copies.
Abstract
Politicians, health care managers, and systems designers need new instruments for managing the complexity of today’s health care systems. One of the most promising instruments is a recent enterprise modelling technique called value models. A value model is a graphical representation of a network of cooperating actors that together create value through resource exchanges and transformations. Value models have their origin in commercial contexts, where they have been used for analysing the economic viability of networks and their participants. Value models can be extended to cater for the special requirements of health care networks, thereby facilitating the design of new forms of collaboration in healthcare as well as innovative health care services.
Anchor Modeling
Lars Rönnbäck, Olle Regardt, Maria, Petia, and I have written a paper on a novel approach to database modeling, called anchor modeling. Lars and Olle, who work at Affecto, have developed this approach for some years now and they have applied it in several industrial projects. In the paper, we formalised, assessed, and evaluated anchor modeling. The paper was accepted at ER 2009.
Abstract
Maintaining and evolving data warehouses is a complex, error prone, and time consuming activity. The main reason for this state of affairs is that the environment of a data warehouse is in constant change, while the warehouse itself needs to provide a stable and consistent interface to information spanning extended periods of time. In this paper, we propose a modeling technique for data warehousing, called anchor modeling, that offers non-destructive extensibility mechanisms, thereby enabling robust and flexible management of changes in source systems. A key benefit of anchor modeling is that changes in a data warehouse environment only require extensions, not modifications, to the data warehouse. This ensures that existing data warehouse applications will remain unaffected by the evolution of the data warehouse, i.e. existing views and functions will not have to be modified as a result of changes in the warehouse model.
Publication written by EMIS student accepted to MCIS 2009, September 25-27, Athens
Theodora Zarmpou, a prior EMIS student (2006-2008), got accepted to present a scientific paper, initially done as her Master Thesis in DSV, at the 4th The Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, MCIS 2009. The thesis work ended up in a publication with the title: Data migration between web content management systems, conducted in cooperation with associate professor Hercules Dalianis and Professor Maro Vlachopoulou (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece).
Two papers accepted at RANLP 2009
Today I recieved notification that two papers where I am one of the authors have been accepted as posters at the international conference RANLP 2009 – Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, which is in Borovets, Bulgaria in September 14-16.
Apart from being an exceptionally pleasant conference, RANLP is ranked among the most influential NLP conferences by the site Computer Science Conference Ranking. According to this list it is one of the top 67 conferences among 701 considered in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning,Robotics and Human Computer Interaction.
The two accepted papers are:
Identification of Parallel Text Pairs Using Fingerprints by Martin Hassel and Hercules Dalianis.
Global Evaluation of Random Indexing through Swedish Word Clustering Compared to the People’s Dictionary of Synonyms by Magnus Rosell, Martin Hassel and Viggo Kann.
Dr. Magnus Rosell and Professor Viggo Kann both reside at the School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH – Royal Institute of Technology.
Paper accepted to ACL-IJCNLP 2009, 2-7 August 2009, Singapore
The paper Automatic training of lemmatization rules that handle morphological changes in pre-, in- and suffixes alike written by Bart Jongejan, CST University of Copenhagen and Hercules Dalianis was accepted to ACL-IJCNLP 2009,Singapore. Out of 571 valid submissions only 121 were accepted, which gives an acceptance rate of 21%.
Project proposal submitted to VR: VESPTEC
Today I submitted a project proposal to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) with the title “VESPTEC – Vector space representations of textual content”. Collaborating with me on this proposal are Magnus Rosell and Viggo Kann at KTH CSC as well as Jussi Karlgren at SICS and Hercules Dalianis here at DSV.
Abstract:
Since the 1960s vector space models have been used extensively for representation of semantics, especially in information-retrieval systems such as Google. These vector spaces are usually multi-dimensional and the terms and documents are represented by very large matrices. There is no greater regard to context. For instance, how a term occurs in a document is almost completely disregarded. Texts are thus viewed as mere bags-of-words. Much of the research so far has either focused on the application of these representations on specific tasks, or on the efficiency of this application by reducing the dimensionality of the original space in some way. This project proposes the study of vector space representations of textual content in a more systematic manner.
We have identified two main tasks. One is to explore the notion of intrinsic dimensionality and the spatial metaphor often used in describing “likeness” between documents. The other, and perhaps more intriguing task is that of moving from a bag-of-words representation to a more informed document space, modeling more than just the cooccurrence of lexical items within documents. These models will be systematically validated on a diverse array of text processing tasks and well established test sets with built-in success criteria. A better representation of textual content is interesting in itself, but will also lead to better underlying models that will improve applications, such as search engines and text summarization.