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Exposure to environmental contaminants might play an important role in neurodegenerative disease pathogenesis, such as Parkinson ' s disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). For the first time in Spain, the plasmatic levels of 19 mycotoxins from patients diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease (44 PD and 24 AD) and from their healthy companions (25) from La Rioja region were analyzed. The studied mycotoxins were aflatoxins B1, B2, G1, G2 and M1, T-2 and HT-2, ochratoxins A (OTA) and B (OTB), zearalenone, sterigmatocystin (STER), nivalenol, deoxynivalenol, 3-acetyldeoxynivalenol, 15-acetyldeoxynivalenol, deepoxy-deoxynivalenol, neosolaniol, diacetoxyscirpenol and fusarenon-X. Samples were analyzed by LC-MS/MS before and after treatment with beta-glucuronidase/arylsulfatase in order to detect potential metabolites. Only OTA, OTB and STER were detected in the samples. OTA was present before (77% of the samples) and after (89%) the enzymatic treatment, while OTB was only detectable before (13%). Statistically significant differences in OTA between healthy companions and patients were observed but the observed differences might seem more related to gender (OTA levels higher in men, p-value = 0.0014) than the disease itself. STER appeared only after enzymatic treatment (88%). Statistical analysis on STER, showed distributions always different between healthy controls and patients (patients' group > controls, p-value < 0.0001). Surprisingly, STER levels weakly correlated positively with age in women (rho = 0.3384), while OTA correlation showed a decrease of levels with age especially in the men with PD (rho = -0.4643).

The information retrieval (IR) world has changed immensely in recent years, with the enormous increase in availability of searchable full text and of powerful engines for searching the text. In this new framework a semantic tool like the thesaurus still continues to be of value and can be seen as a successful tool in facilitating a punctual IR. Traditionally, a thesaurus is defined as a controlled vocabulary in which semantic relationships between terms (hierarchy, association and equivalence) are made explicit and employed to improve recall and precision in the retrieval of information. Taking into account information access on a planetary scale, a thesaurus is also primarily a cultural product reflecting the peculiarities of the environment in which it has been built and is culturally embedded. In building a multilingual thesaurus, one represents knowledge and establishes links between not only different languages, but different cultures and worldviews, so that relationships between terms could be not universally valid. Not rarely apparently exact equivalences are indeed closer to a relation of similarity. Words extrapolated from a language are, in fact, verbal expressions for concepts engraved in the culture of that language, that do not necessarily have an exactly corresponding concept and term in any other language/culture. Against this background the focus of this paper will be on how to structurally organize knowledge for operational purposes, not betraying any of the treated languages. Transposing this inside a thesaurus implies choosing how to plan the thesaural semantic structurization and can lead to designing a multilingual thesaurus in which the semantic structures of all languages are managed symmetrically or non-symmetrically. In the former, identical versions for each language are established, so that each descriptor has an equivalent one in any of the linguistic versions of the tool, presupposing a high level of compatibility between all idioms represented in the tool, and all terms are connected through the same relationships. In the latter case, the semantic structure of each language version reflects the conceptual organization of the culture expressed through that idiom, i.e. every language has a separately developed semantic structure, which is compared to the other languages/cultures registered in the thesaurus only in a second stage, in order to identify equivalences where they exist, without presupposing them, and apparently allowing a more faithful cultural representativeness. Both approaches will be examined also in the framework of examples with the aim of highlighting their respective peculiarities, supporting arguments and those against their adoption.

This paper will touch upon the issue of meaning representation and organization in multilingual thesauri. More than ever before, these tools have the chance to play a significant role in facilitating access to information in the globally interrelated world, but have to cope with the issue of how the diversity of languages is related to the diversity of cultures, of ways of living and conceptualizing reality. In order to fulfil their function of representing a domain cross-linguistically, and thus cross-culturally, the way in which thesauri are conceived matters significantly. This paper analyses two different approaches on how to develop a multilingual thesaurus: one based on a symmetrical semantic structuring of the terms and a second one on a non-symmetrical organization. The first approach implies a high level of compatibility between languages, defining an equivalent term for each descriptor of the thesaurus as well as an identical semantic arrangement, in all the languages of the tool, as opposed to the second one which does not presuppose this equivalence in all cases and where semantic structures are allowed to differ. The implications that these different approaches have on the possibility to design thesauri with an authentic multilingual/multicultural character are also evaluated.

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International audience

International audience