Materials and methods: Two L intracellularis isolates were tested for susceptibility to several classes of disinfectants, including iodine, a biguanide, phenol, an oxidizing agent, a quaternary ammonium compound (QAC), and the combinations of QACs with aldehydes (formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde). All disinfectants were diluted with simulated hard water by adding 400 or 1000 ppm of calcium carbo...

We developed a method for producing statistical language models for speech-driven question answering, which recognizes spoken questions with high accuracy. Our method uses a target collection (i.e., a document set from which answers are derived) to extract N-grams, and adapts them to the questionanswering task by way of frozen patterns typically used in interrogative questions. In addition, our...

This paper tackles issue on comparing evaluation results using multiple QA test collec-tions(NTCIR QAC1 and 2). We identify two features that have moderate correlation with the performance of systems in QAC1 and 2 and evaluate the difficulty of the two test collections using the features. Answer categories of questions also affect the performance of systems. The evaluation results suggest that ...

Quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) have outstanding antimicrobial effect, but covalent immobilization of plentiful QAC onto cotton fiber surface to realize a durable function remains challenge. Herein, quaternary monomer, [2-(methacryloyloxy) ethyl] trimethylammonium chloride (DMC) was co-polymerized with methyl acrylate (MA) prepare an antibacterial copolymer, poly(DMC-co-MA). To graft the c...

Toshiba participated in NTCIR-4 QAC2 Subtask 1: this is our first QAC participation. Using our newly developed Japanese QA system called ASKMi, we submitted two runs, one using Okapi/BM25 for document retrieval (TSB-A) and the other using Boolean AND constraints before applying Okapi/BM25 (TSB-B). We achieved the 5th best performance among the 17 participants (8th and 9th among the 25 submitted...

This paper describes our Question Answering system participated in QAC Task1 of NTCIR3 and reports the results with some observations. Through analyzing the previous TREC QA data, we defined passage and developed passage selection method suitable for Question Answering. Using LexicoSemantic Patterns (LSP), we identify answer type of a question and detect answer candidates without any deep lingu...