Merchant, J. A., Lumsden, J. C., Kilburn, K. H., Germino, V. H., Hamilton, J. D., Lynn, W. S., Byrd, H., and Baucom, D. (1973). British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 30, 237-247. Preprocessing cotton to prevent byssinosis. A fundamental approach of cleaning or deactivating cotton prior to manufacturing has long been advocated to prevent byssinosis, but no trial had been conducted to test the ...

In this paper we describe our text preprocessing modules for English text-to-speech synthesis. These modules comprise rule-based text normalization subsuming sentence segmentation and normalization of non-standard words, statistical part-of-speech tagging, and statistical syllabification, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and word stress assignment relying in parts on rule-based morphological ana...

Problems with the lexical substitution mechanism of the C preprocessor are well known. We resolve these problems with a new syntax-based substitution mechanism for C++ based on meta-variables and metafunctions. Implementation of these meta-concepts in a C++ style leads naturally to meta-expressions and then meta-statements and a generalisation of C++ syntax. We show how meta-compilation renders...

This paper is concerned with preprocessing techniques for propositional model counting. We have implemented a preprocessor which includes many elementary preprocessing techniques, including occurrence reduction, vivification, backbone identification, as well as equivalence, AND and XOR gate identification and replacement. We performed intensive experiments, using a huge number of benchmarks com...

State-of-the-art algorithms for industrial instances of MaxSAT problem rely on iterative calls to a SAT solver. Preprocessing is crucial for the acceleration of SAT solving, and the key preprocessing techniques rely on the application of resolution and subsumption elimination. Additionally, satisfiability-preserving clause elimination procedures are often used. Since MaxSAT computation typicall...

Metabolomics involves the large scale analysis of metabolites and thus, provides information regarding cellular processes in a biological sample. Independently of the analytical technique used, a vast amount of data is always acquired when carrying out metabolomics studies; this results in complex datasets with large amounts of variables. This type of data requires multivariate statistical anal...

This paper compares four preprocessing approaches for word alignment: 1) sentence removal approach, 2) good points approach, 3) sentence duplication approach, and 4) removal of doubtful alignments approach. Two are statistically motivated and the other two are heuristics. We focus on the ability of a word aligner of IBM Model 4 that it should often face with troubles when handling paraphrase, m...

In this thesis, we study the preprocessing phase of the ALT algorithm. ALT is a well known preprocessing-based speed-up technique for Dijkstra’s algorithm, which allows fast computations of shortest paths in large scale road networks. The preprocessing of the ALT algorithm has some degree of freedom, in that it must select a subset of nodes in the graph, called landmarks, that fulfill a special...

Face color information can play an important role in face recognition (FR) and it can be used to considerably improve FR performance obtained using only grayscale images. The color-based FR methods involve a preprocessing step where a color image is converted into either a monochromatic image or an image having a different color representation. In practical FR systems, the recording or transmis...

The processing of EEG data routinely involves subjective removal of artifacts during a preprocessing stage. Preprocessing inter-rater reliability (IRR) and how differences in preprocessing may affect outcomes of primary event-related potential (ERP) analyses has not been previously assessed. Three raters independently preprocessed EEG data of 16 cognitively healthy adult participants (ages 18-3...