Usually we do not know the domain of an arbitrary text from the Internet, or the semantics of the relations it conveys. While humans identify such information easily, for a computer this task is far from straightforward. The task of detecting relations of arbitrary semantic type in texts is known as Open Information Extraction (Open IE). The approach to this task based on heuristic constraints ...

BACKGROUND Although antimicrobial prophylaxis for infective endocarditis (IE) is common practice for many dental procedures, there is little information on whether it represents value for money. A study was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of prophylaxis for all at risk patients in routine dental practice with published data from the United Kingdom. METHODS The risk of contracting infe...

BACKGROUND Infective endocarditis (IE) is frequently suspected but infrequently diagnosed in children. Clinicians often order echocardiograms to "rule out" IE. In an era of cost constraint, clinically efficient strategies must be developed to eliminate unnecessary tests. We hypothesized that transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) is only useful in children in whom there is a high clinical suspici...

The convergence of communications and information technology within education, as well as more widely, means that concepts developed within ITS & AIED are now applicable to a wider range of wired, and more interestingly 'wireless', technologies. Interactive TV, supported by broadband broadcasting, offers interesting possibilities for education. The use of TV (and radio) in education has a long ...

We survey the evaluation methodology adopted in Information Extraction (IE), as defined in the MUC conferences and in later independent efforts applying machine learning to IE. We point out a number of problematic issues that may hamper the comparison between results obtained by different researchers. Some of them are common to other NLP tasks: e.g., the difficulty of exactly identifying the ef...

BACKGROUND In May 2011, the Food and Drug Administration approved fidaxomicin for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). It has been found to be noninferior to vancomycin; however, its cost-effectiveness for the treatment of CDI remains undetermined. METHODS We developed a decision analytic simulation model to determine the economic value of fidaxomicin for CDI treatment from...