In this paper, we give an overview of our questionanswering system for the NTCIR-3 QAC. Our system is based on an information-retrieval technique and an information-extraction technique by pattern matching. The system has three main stages: question analysis, passage retrieval, and answer extraction. In the passage-retrieval stage, two types of retrieval method are applied sequentially to narro...

Objective. To study the sensitivity to chemical disinfectants against Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolated from HIV-infected individuals and patients with monotuberculosis in comparison reference strain of terrae.
 Materials methods. The 12 M. strains HIV-associated (n = 6) chlorine-containing quaternary ammonium compound (QAC) was studied. terrae used as a reference. Seedings microbial sus...

In this paper, we describe RitsQA: Ritsumeikan question answering system. In our QA system, input query sentence is firstly analyzed using question patterns consist of description of NE elements, POS of words and surface expressions. Then, query type and some clue words, which are used for document retrieval, are determined. For answer extraction, our system uses word distance between answer ca...

The objective of this investigation was to identify the lineages of MRSA and MSSA with reduced susceptibility to chlorhexidine in Kuwaiti hospitals. 121 clinical MRSA and 56 MSSA isolates were included in this study. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed for a selection of agents including chlorhexidine and resistance genes were amplified and sequenced. PFGE, spa typing, and MLST w...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the susceptibility of metallo-β-lactamase (MBL)-producing Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) clinical isolates to biocides. We also determined the prevalence and correlation of efflux pump genes, class 1 integron and MBL encoding genes. In addition, blaVIM, blaNDM-1, qacE and qacEΔ1 nucleotide sequence analysis was performed and compared to sequen...

Resistance of Staphylococcus species to quaternary ammonium compounds, frequently used as disinfectants and biocides, can be attributed to qac genes. Most qac gene products belong to the Small Multidrug Resistant (SMR) protein family, and are often encoded by rolling-circle (RC) replicating plasmids. Four classes of SMR-type qac gene families have been described in Staphylococcus species: qacC,...