Abstract This study discusses some problematic issues around comparability and equivalence in empirical research, particularly focusing on the case of indicators taking a cross-national linguistic skills use foreign languages scientific production researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile as reference. The discussion is framed within broader epistemological methodological debates concerning sta...

We sharpen the result that polarity and monopolarity are NP-complete problems by showing that they remain NP-complete if the input graph is restricted to be a 3-colourable comparability graph. We start by presenting a construction reducing 1-3-SAT to monopolarity of 3-colourable comparability graphs. Then we show that polarity is at least as hard as monopolarity for input graphs restricted to a...

Standardisation of quantitative data obtained by several types of rheumatoid factor test was achieved by the use of a reference serum preparation. Interlaboratory comparability improved for the latex fixation test, the Waaler-Rose test, the IgM RF test by an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and for the antiperinuclear factor test. Use of a common method and latex preparation was not s...

The epidemiological concept of confounding has had a convoluted history. It was first expressed as an issue of group non-comparability, later as an uncontrolled fallacy, then as a controllable fallacy named confounding, and, more recently, as an issue of group non-comparability in the distribution of potential outcome types. This latest development synthesised the apparent disconnect between ph...

In this paper we describe recent work carried out in the context of the TTC project1 towards the automatic construction of comparable corpora for multilingual terminology extraction. We focus on the communicative intention as the variable of discourse analysis that is best suited to select Web documents valuable for terminology applications and propose a classifier based on language independent...