Kristofer Franzén

WEST: a Web browser for small terminals

We describe WEST, a WEb browser for Small Terminals, that aims to solve some of the problems associated with accessing web pages on hand-held devices. Through a novel combination of text reduction and focus+context visualization, users can access web pages from a very limited display environment, since the system will provide an overview of the contents of a web page even when it is too large to be displayed in its entirety. To make maximum use of the limited resources available on a typical hand-held terminal, much of the most demanding work is done by a proxy server, allowing the terminal to concentrate on the task of providing responsive user interaction. The system makes use of some interaction concepts reminiscent of those defined in the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), making it possible to utilize the techniques described here for WAP-compliant devices and services that may become available in the near future.

Protein names and how to find them

A prerequisite for all higher level information extraction tasks is the identification of unknown names in text. Today, when large corpora can consist of billions of words, it is of utmost importance to develop accurate techniques for the automatic detection, extraction and categorization of named entities in these corpora. Although named entity recognition might be regarded a solved problem in some domains, it still poses a significant challenge in others. In this work we focus on one of the more difficult tasks, the identification of protein names in text. This task presents several interesting difficulties because of the named entities variant structural characteristics, their sometimes unclear status as names, the lack of common standards and fixed nomenclatures, and the specifics of the texts in the molecular biology domain in which they appear. We describe how we approached these and other difficulties in the implementation of Yapex, a system for the automatic identification of protein names in text. We also evaluate Yapex under four different notions of correctness and compare its performance to that of another publicly available system for protein name recognition.

Notions of correctness when evaluating protein name taggers

This paper introduces four different notions of correctness to be used when measuring the performance of protein name taggers, each of which reflects certain characteristics of the tagger under evaluation. The discussion regarding the different notions is centered around the evaluation of two protein name taggers; Yapex, developed by the authors, and KeX developed by Fukuda et al. (1998). For the purpose of illustrating the difference between the ways of evaluation, both taggers are applied to a test corpus of 101 MEDLINE abstracts in which all occurrences of protein names have been marked up by domain experts.

Where Attitudinal Expressions Get their Attitude

A number of attitudinal expressions are identified and analyzed using dependency based syntactic analysis. A claim is made that attitudinal loading of lexical items is dynamic rather than lexical and that attitudinal loading of individual lexical items is acquired through their use in attitudinally loaded structures.