Information-extraction (IE) research typically focuses on clean-text inputs. However, an IE engine serving real applications yields many false alarms due to less-well-formed input. For example, IE in a multilingual broadcast processing system has to deal with inaccurate automatic transcription and translation. The resulting presence of non-target-language text in this case, and non-language mat...

To the Editor: The excellent article on measures for controlling plague in Alghero, Sardinia, describes the procedures introduced by the Calabrian doctor Quinto Tiberio Angelerio (1532–1617) to combat an outbreak during 1582–1583 (1). The authors cite 2 works published by Angelerio relating to these events, Ectypa (1588) (2) and Epidemiologìa (1598) (3). To say that Epidemiologìa was written on...

The rapidly growing biomedical literature has been a challenging target for natural language processing algorithms. One of the tasks these algorithms focus on is called named entity recognition (NER), often employed to tag gene mentions. Here we describe a new approach for this task, an approach that uses graphbased semi-supervised learning to train a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model. Bench...

In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the 'first-mention bias'. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order...