SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Natural Language Processing”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,585 records · Page 88Linked to original sources

PubMed1980

[An evaluation of the metabolic profile of dairy cows and determination of frequency of its abnormalities using an electronic computer].

A system was worked out for an electronic computer evaluation of metabolic profile tests. The computer output included percentual diagrams, histograms, and tables of abnormities. The programme for the TESLA 200 computer was prepared in the FORTRAN IV language. The input data were punched in IBM code by the CONSUL-253 electronic organizational data-processing device, using the punched tape. The results of computer processing provide a clear picture of the metabolism state of the tested animals from the view-point of diagnostic data in sampling time, together with the determination of the occurrence rate of abnormities. The system of the processing of the metabolic profile enables the evaluation of an individual as well as the whole set of animals. The general nature of the programme enables the determination of the occurrence rate of abnormities in several herds at the same time. This will provide important data for the assessment of the health condition of animals on a selected territory (district, region, or a larger unit).

Animals↗

PubMed2002

Developing a diagnostic and intervention package for 2- to 3-year-olds with autism: outcomes of the frameworks for communication approach.

The aim of the research was to develop and evaluate a model of good practice which would make an explicit link between diagnosis and intervention, and so give parents a very clear rationale for the autism-specific yet individualized programme that they were carrying out. It employed an action research design, which essentially is responsive to participants, thus developing a user-friendly model of service. The programme was based on the developmental perspective that the pragmatics of language are the precursors of speech itself and enable both communication and relationship between child and parents. Since these are impaired in autism they should therefore be prioritized in early intervention. Ten children aged 1:10 to 2:9 at assessment, and with a diagnosis of autism, underwent an intervention based on home visits, modelling, workshops and written information, with parents as 'therapists' in naturally occurring situations. Within 18 months all children made substantial progress in social interaction and expressive communication, including gestural and verbal communication.

Autistic Disorder↗

PubMed1996

The nature and prevalence of memory disorder late after stroke.

This study aimed to investigate the incidence and nature of memory impairment late after stroke. Out of 193 patients between 12 to 36 months post-cerebrovascular accident contacted in a postal survey, 113 replied that they had experienced memory impairment following the stroke. Seventy of these patients were assessed on an adapted version of the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test, Warrington's Recognition Memory Test for words and faces, and an every day memory questionnaire. The Token Test and the Benton Facial Recognition Test were also administered as measures of language and visuoperceptual processing. Thirty-five of the patients were impaired on one or more of the memory measures. Of these, 16 showed no evidence of dysphasia or visuoperceptual impairment. The 16 cases of selective memory impairment typically had mild to moderate deficits, and only three were impaired across all three tests. The results suggest that memory impairment following stroke does not necessarily involve general memory impairment. The evidence for material-specific memory deficits was much weaker.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Jealousy: the pathology of passion.

Emotions may be rooted in biology but the process of cultural construction gives those emotions form and a language for their expression. The changing construction of jealousy in Western societies has transformed a socially sanctioned response to infidelity into a form of personal pathology which is the mere outward expression of immaturity, possessiveness and insecurity. This is a history of the stripping away of social, ethical and finally interpersonal meanings from an experience, to leave it as a piece of individual psychopathology. Fidelity and jealousy are constructed as they are because of the nature of the social and economic realities which drive our culture. The erosion of the area of human experience which could be identified with normal jealousy leaves the boundary between the pathological jealousy of psychiatry and normal experience increasingly problematic.

Delusions↗

PubMed1996

The early parenting of twins.

The anticipatory guidance for the parents of twins involves information on feeding, the parent-twin relationship, and promoting a sense of self. Parents optimally attach to one infant only, a concept known as monotropy. Ambivalence, anxiety, and unequal attachments may result from the stressful nature of raising twins. The early diagnosis of twins, visualization via ultrasound, and postpartum identification of the distinctive aspects of each infant help establish separate bonds. This individualization promotes a sense of self, self-esteem, and enhances individuation, the process by which the personality is differentiated, developed, and expressed. The twin situation is triadic; the infants develop attachments to the primary care giver and their co-twin. Problems with this complex association include delayed onset of speech, decreased speech production, and cryptophasia (secret language) between twins. Strategies to prevent speech delay include as much one-on-one time as possible and consistent intervention and correction of speech errors. Anticipatory guidance seeks to identify potential sources of stress with the goal of seeking out advice, accepting any assistance offered, and attending to twins at the desired level of individualization.

Child Development↗

PubMed1998

Conversation analysis of communication breakdown after closed head injury.

This single case study investigated the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) in assessing pragmatic language difficulties after closed head injury (CHI). The aim was to see if CA captures the types of communication breakdown observed after CHI and whether results from CA can be directly related to scores on formal tests more typically applied after CHI. The results suggested that CA was a sensitive tool for identifying and investigating pragmatic deficits in this case. It facilitated an exploration of whether language impairments identified on formal tests manifest themselves in functional communication; it revealed how different interlocutors adapt to these language difficulties in conversation and also explained why some conversational partners were more successful than others. Considered together, formal test results and CA insights facilitated an in-depth analysis into the precise nature of the communicative impairments of the speaker in this exploratory study, suggesting that CA is a promising approach to the assessment of pragmatic impairments in the CHI population.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1995

Distributed representations of semantic knowledge in the brain.

Category-specific language impairments have been postulated to require the existence of an explicit category organization within semantic memory. However, it may be possible to demonstrate analytically that this is not necessary. We hypothesize that category-specific organization can emerge from perceptual, functional, and associative feature information about objects that is maintained in order to process language. In this paper, we conduct several experiments to test the computational validity of this hypothesis. Physical objects were encoded in terms of semantic features, based on basic perceptual and motor modalities and higher level knowledge of function, for use in artificial neural networks. Mathematical methods were used to analyse the encodings and the neural networks. The results demonstrate the emergence of semantic categories in the networks, although such information was not preprogrammed. We conclude that category-specific language organization can emerge from the inherent nature of semantic features themselves, and does not require special internal categorical organization of semantic memory.

Brain↗

PubMed2006

Effects of language experience and stimulus complexity on the categorical perception of pitch direction.

Whether or not categorical perception results from the operation of a special, language-specific, speech mode remains controversial. In this cross-language (Mandarin Chinese, English) study of the categorical nature of tone perception, we compared native Mandarin and English speakers' perception of a physical continuum of fundamental frequency contours ranging from a level to rising tone in both Mandarin speech and a homologous (nonspeech) harmonic tone. This design permits us to evaluate the effect of language experience by comparing Chinese and English groups; to determine whether categorical perception is speech-specific or domain-general by comparing speech to nonspeech stimuli for both groups; and to examine whether categorical perception involves a separate categorical process, distinct from regions of sensory discontinuity, by comparing speech to nonspeech stimuli for English listeners. Results show evidence of strong categorical perception of speech stimuli for Chinese but not English listeners. Categorical perception of nonspeech stimuli was comparable to that for speech stimuli for Chinese but weaker for English listeners, and perception of nonspeech stimuli was more categorical for English listeners than was perception of speech stimuli. These findings lead us to adopt a memory-based, multistore model of perception in which categorization is domain-general but influenced by long-term categorical representations.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2000

The Ensemble/Legacy Chimera extension: standardized user and programmer interface to molecular Ensemble data and Legacy modeling programs.

Ensemble/Legacy is a toolkit extension of the Object Technology Framework (OTF) that exposes an object oriented interface for accessing and manipulating ensembles (collections of molecular conformations that share a common chemical topology) and driving Legacy programs (such as MSMS, AMBER, X-PLOR, CORMA/MARDIGRAS, Dials and Windows, and CURVES). Ensemble/Legacy provides a natural programming interface for running Legacy programs on ensembles of molecules and accessing the resulting data. Using the OTF reduces the time cost of developing a new library to store and manipulate molecular data and also allows Ensemble/Legacy to integrate into the Chimera visualization program. The extension to Chimera exposes the Legacy functionality using a graphical user interface that greatly simplifies the process of modeling and analyzing conformational ensembles. Furthermore, all the C++ functionality of the Ensemble/Legacy toolkit is "wrapped" for use in the Python programming language. More detailed documentation on using Ensemble/Legacy is available online (http:¿picasso.nmr.ucsf.edu/dek/ensemble. html).

Computer Graphics↗

PubMed2003

A functional-anatomical model for lipreading.

Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) PET scans were used to study the physiological bases of lipreading, a natural skill of extracting language from mouth movements, which contributes to speech perception in everyday life. Viewing connected mouth movements that could not be lexically identified and that evoke perception of isolated speech sounds (nonlexical lipreading) was associated with bilateral activation of the auditory association cortex around Wernicke's area, of left dorsal premotor cortex, and left opercular-premotor division of the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area). The supplementary motor area was active as well. These areas have all been implicated in phonological processing, speech and mouth motor planning, and execution. In addition, nonlexical lipreading also differentially activated visual motion areas. Lexical access through lipreading was associated with a similar pattern of activation and with additional foci in ventral- and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally and in left inferior parietal cortex. Linear regression analysis of cerebral blood flow and proficiency for lexical lipreading further clarified the role of these areas in gaining access to language through lipreading. The results suggest cortical activation circuits for lipreading from action representations that may differentiate lexical access from nonlexical processes.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Rethinking the word frequency effect: the neglected role of distributional information in lexical processing.

Attempts to quantify lexical variation have produced a large number of theoretical and empirical constructs, such as Word Frequency, Concreteness, and Ambiguity, which have been claimed to predict between-word differences in lexical processing behavior. Models of word recognition that have been developed to account for the effects of these variables have typically lacked adequate semantic representations, and have dealt with words as if they exist in isolation from their environment. We present a new dimension of lexical variation that is addressed to this concern. Contextual Distinctiveness (CD), a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. Experiment 1 demonstrates that CD is a significantly better predictor of lexical decision latencies than occurrence frequency, suggesting that CD is the more psychologically relevant variable. We additionally explore the relationship between CD and six subjectively-defined measures: Concreteness, Context Availability, Number of Contexts, Ambiguity, Age of Acquisition and Familiarity and find CD to be reliably related to Ambiguity only. We argue for the priority of immediate context in determining the representation and processing of language.

Databases, Factual↗

PubMed2002

Counting in sign language.

Do the visuomanual modality and the structure of the sequence of numbers in sign language have an impact on the development of counting and its use by deaf children? The sequence of number signs in Belgian French Sign Language follows a base-5 rule while the number sequence in oral French follows a base-10 rule. The accuracy and use of sequence number string were investigated in hearing children varying in age from 3 years 4 months to 5 years 8 months and in deaf children varying in age from 4 years to 6 years 2 months. Three tasks were used: abstract counting, object counting, and creation of sets of a given cardinality. Deaf children exhibited age-related lags in their knowledge of the number sequence; they made different errors from those of hearing children, reflecting the rule-bound nature of sign language. Remarkably, their performance in object counting and creating sets of given cardinality was similar to that of hearing children who had a longer sequence number string, indicating a better use of counting than predicted by their knowledge of the linguistic sequence of numbers.

Child↗

PubMed2005

Activity and functional connectivity of inferior frontal cortex associated with response conflict.

The traditional Stroop test of cognitive interference requires overt speech responses. One alternative, the counting Stroop, generates cognitive interference similar to the traditional Stroop test but allows button press responses. Previous counting Stroop studies have used concrete words in the control condition, which may have masked inferior frontal activation. We studied 7 healthy young adults using fMRI on a counting Stroop condition, with a nonlinguistic control condition (geometric shapes). As expected, we found activation in bilateral inferior frontal gyri, as well as in lateral and medial prefrontal, inferior parietal, and extrastriate cortices. Additional functional connectivity analyses using inferior frontal activation clusters (right area 44, left area 47) as seed volumes showed connectivity with superior frontal area 8 and anterior cingulate gyrus, suggesting that the role of inferior frontal cortex was related to response conflict and inhibition. Connectivity with left perisylvian language areas was not observed, which further underscores the nonlinguistic nature of inferior frontal activity. We conclude that bilateral inferior frontal cortex is involved in response suppression associated with interference in the counting Stroop task.

Adult↗

PubMed1995

Relevance and definition.

The study examined whether the use of superordinate terms in children's definitions was predicted by relevance theory. Two hundred and six children aged five to ten years gave definitions for 16 basic-level words and four superordinate words from natural kind and artefact semantic domains. Superordinate terms were used more frequently when they supported more inferences. This was evidenced by their more frequent use in natural kind than in artefact domains, and more frequent use when the superordinate was itself defined by a semantically complex expression. When used, superordinates also usually occurred at the beginning of the definitional expression. It is argued that these findings reflect the speaker's intention to achieve optimal relevance, that is, to achieve maximum contextual effects with the least processing effort.

Child↗

PubMed2000

Wide-coverage probabilistic sentence processing.

This paper describes a fully implemented, broad-coverage model of human syntactic processing. The model uses probabilistic parsing techniques, which combine phrase structure, lexical category, and limited subcategory probabilities with an incremental, left-to-right "pruning" mechanism based on cascaded Markov models. The parameters of the system are established through a uniform training algorithm, which determines maximum-likelihood estimates from a parsed corpus. The probabilistic parsing mechanism enables the system to achieve good accuracy on typical, "garden-variety" language (i.e., when tested on corpora). Furthermore, the incremental probabilistic ranking of the preferred analyses during parsing also naturally explains observed human behavior for a range of garden-path structures. We do not make strong psychological claims about the specific probabilistic mechanism discussed here, which is limited by a number of practical considerations. Rather, we argue incremental probabilistic parsing models are, in general, extremely well suited to explaining this dual nature--generally good and occasionally pathological--of human linguistic performance.

Cognition↗

PubMed2005

A meta-analysis of working memory impairments in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the empirical evidence for deficits in working memory (WM) processes in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHOD: Exploratory meta-analytic procedures were used to investigate whether children with ADHD exhibit WM impairments. Twenty-six empirical research studies published from 1997 to December, 2003 (subsequent to a previous review) met our inclusion criteria. WM measures were categorized according to both modality (verbal, spatial) and type of processing required (storage versus storage/manipulation). RESULTS: Children with ADHD exhibited deficits in multiple components of WM that were independent of comorbidity with language learning disorders and weaknesses in general intellectual ability. Overall effect sizes for spatial storage (effect size = 0.85, CI = 0.62 - 1.08) and spatial central executive WM (effect size = 1.06, confidence interval = 0.72-1.39) were greater than those obtained for verbal storage (effect size = 0.47, confidence interval = 0.36-0.59) and verbal central executive WM (effect size = 0.43, confidence interval = 0.24-0.62). CONCLUSION: Evidence of WM impairments in children with ADHD supports recent theoretical models implicating WM processes in ADHD. Future research is needed to more clearly delineate the nature, severity, and specificity of the impairments to ADHD.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Consciousness and psychotherapy.

The origins and resistance to change of neurotic procedures are considered with particular reference to the nature and role of consciousness. It is argued that the traditional opposition between conscious and unconscious systems provides an unsatisfactory model. The crucial role of language in the formation of human self-consciousness is emphasized. The restricted procedural repertoire of neurotic subjects, and their deficient self-consciousness, can be attributed to a number of factors. It is argued that the main use of consciousness in therapy should be to heighten the patient's awareness of his or her damaging or restricting procedural repertoire through the process of reformulation, which allows recognition, and in due course revision to be achieved.

Anxiety Disorders↗

PubMed2003

Enhanced extrastriate activation during observation of distorted finger postures.

Hand and finger postures of other people are important body language cues that strongly contribute to the observer's decision about the person's intentions, thoughts, and attentional state. We compared neuromagnetic cortical activation elicited by color images of natural and distorted finger postures. The distorted postures contained computer-deformed joint angles and thereby easily caught the observer's attention. From about 260 msec onwards, extrastriate occipital areas of both hemispheres were activated more strongly by distorted than natural finger postures. We interpret this result as an early top-down effect of emotional valence on the processing of unusual hand shapes in the extrastriate visual cortex.

Adult↗