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This paper's point of departure is that business families are permanently confronted with a dual function: They engage in typical family relations yet also have formal decision‐making processes for business and family strategy. However, large business families—which may consist of several hundred shareholders who own one or more family businesses—are confronted with an additional challenge. Alongside being simultaneously a family and an organization, they also have to establish and maintain notions of membership and modes of communication between distantly related shareholders. This we have called family network or family 3.0. The challenges involved in initiating, shaping and maintaining such networks require new strategic reconsideration in the family itself and an extension of the existing theoretical observations regarding family businesses, thereby establishing the basis for a better understanding of large‐scale business families. For this, we try to combine family business research, organization studies and systems theory.

Our previous analysis on 26 languages which represent over 2.9 billion speakers and 8 language families demonstrated that cross-lingual automatic short answer grading allows students to write answers in exams in their native language and graders to rely on the scores of the system [1]. With lower deviations than 14% (0.72 points out of 5 points) on the corpus of the short answer grading data set of the University of North Texas [2], our natural language processing models show better performances compared to the human grader variability (0.75 points, 15%). In this paper we describe our latest analysis of the integration and application of a multilingual model in interactive training programs to optimally prepare students for exams. We present a multilingual interactive conversational artificial intelligence tutoring system for exam preparation. Our approach leverages and combines learning analytics, crowdsourcing and gamification to automatically allow us to evaluate and adapt the system as well as to motivate students and increase their learning experience. In order to have an optimal learning effect and enhance the user experience, we also tackle the challenge of explainability with the help of keyword extraction and highlighting techniques. Our system is based on Telegram since it can be easily integrated into massive open online courses and other online study systems and has already more than 400 million users worldwide [3].

Background: Progressing androgenetic alopecia (AGA), in both sexes, can result in severe distress. Treatments with the capacity to slow down the progression of AGA, or even to bring it to a halt, and at the same time don’t come with side effects are consequently highly sought for. Therefore this study investigates the effect of an over-the-counter nutritional supplement and a similarly formulated topical hair lotion on the progression of AGA. Methods: Seventy-nine healthy study participants of both sexes, who were diagnosed with AGA were divided into 4 study groups. The subjects of the first group were treated with the nutritional supplement, the subjects of the second group with the topical hair lotion, the subjects of the third group with both products, and the subjects of the fourth group served as a no-treatment control. At the beginning and at the end of this nine-month study, the participants were evaluated for their hair loss status. They also answered a questionnaire for self-assessment. A part of the subjects from each study group were further analysed by phototrichography, in order to measure the number of anagen and telogen hairs. Results: It turned out that the supplement, the lotion as well as the treatment with both products not only lead to a reduction in hair loss but also to an increased anagen to telogen hair ratio, whereas no such effects could be measured for the control group. Conclusion: The results show that a systemic delivery via a nutritional supplement, as well as a follicular delivery via a topically applied lotion, both resulted in a reduced hair loss rate as well as in an increased anagen to telogen hair ratio. This demonstrates that the tested formulation is effectively slowing down the progression of AGA.

Suitable personnel selection is crucial in setting up boards: the challenges for the management of dynastic business families are enormous, so it is crucial to find and select competent people, train them and put them in appropriate positions. In this context, the organisational logic of competence and the family logic of equality also collide in dynastic families. Questions of competence promotion and personnel selection can become tense issues that need to be addressed sensitively. If the political logic of democratic majority decisions is added and there is an expectation that committee representatives should be not only competent but also popular, then it becomes clear what a mammoth task it is to successfully recruit suitable people for the management and representation of the business family. The task is made somewhat easier by the fact that the large number and diversity of shareholders increase the likelihood that at least some candidates will be found who are both willing and able to help shape the dynastic business family.

In this chapter, we address a key challenge facing family management in dynastic business families: establishing “optimal” governance structures while also providing a wide range of opportunities for family members to participate. This requires setting up smooth and legally compliant processes covering how decisions are made and how the large community of owners effectively performs tasks of governance control. At the same time, family management must develop formal and informal structures, processes and activities that enable individual shareholders to express their views on directional developments and decisions regarding the business as well as the community of owners. In this way, the members of the dynastic business family should feel involved in central decisions—within the framework of required structures—and feel that their views are heard. Establishing preconditions for decision-making while also enabling wider participation represents a fundamental and potentially paradoxical area of tension for family management in dynastic business families.

This chapter deals with core issues and challenges facing dynastic business families or business families 3.0: in addition to exercising the ownership function, central elements in family management include maintaining the cohesion of and meeting the expectations of family members. The explanations offered here are based on our initial, already published, ideas on the central starting points for family management in dynastic business families and represent a further development of these ideas (Rusen et al., Die Soziologie der Unternehmerfamilie. Grundlagen, Entwicklungslinien, Perspektiven, 2019b). Based on six identified fields of action, the chapter depicts the central questions that Big Family Management has to address systematically.

Communication is the basis of all social life. Different areas of life each have their own logic of communication: people speak differently within families than in companies or in the public sphere. While the logic of family communication takes place intuitively in smaller family structures, in dynastic business families, it is necessary to create explicit opportunities in which the extended family can still feel itself a family. The formats used are diverse; what they have in common is the revival of the family bond and relationship logic, which can no longer be experienced in families of this size without the business to hold them together. The point of all these measures is to preserve the special resource that offers the business, as a family business, a special competitive advantage: the positive “familiness,” that the family brings to the business. Ensuring this feeling by actively promoting family cohesion is one of the essential tasks of family management.

In dynastic business families, one thing above all is expected from the many shareholders: that they understand, protect and look after their inherited shares in the family business in a fiduciary capacity to pass them on to the next generation. The family strategic measures that go hand in hand with this fiduciary attitude, and how they work in the families we studied, are explained below based on four areas of tension where wealth management must be handled. They repeatedly involve the question of how a balance between family community, corporate orientation and the individual responsibilities of the partners regarding the assets resulting from distributions can be achieved. These areas of tension are appropriately balanced when it is possible to consider the family, entrepreneurial and individual expectations of those involved in a traditional and future-oriented manner.

This chapter looks at how business families can achieve a sense of fairness in their decision-making. Given the contradictory systems of logic at work, ensuring legitimation is no easy task. Precisely because so much is decided in a paradox-friendly manner, it is vital for decisions to be legitimated, i.e. they are felt to be justified rather than arbitrary. One way of achieving this is to follow the advice that appears in the title of this chapter: decisions can be made to look as if they are not decisions at all but simply self-evident developments. The decision is taken without it being recognisable as such. In the course of this chapter, we will present strategies that we have found through our research to be intelligent forms of legitimation and, finally, suggest how business families can be differentiated according to their patterns of legitimation.

Much of the content of the family strategy of small and medium-size business families has long since been resolved by dynastic business families, who face completely different tasks and challenges. Through established structures, it is important to counteract centrifugal dynamics so that identification, bonding and motivation can always be renewed within the large family network. At the same time, communication in these large families follows a more “political” network logic and less of a family logic based on bonding. Successful family management takes this difference into account and is organised according to the logic of a family investor relations unit. However, dealing professionally with different interest groups also requires the different wishes of the various family members to be balanced, regarding participation, communication and development opportunities, and transferred into structured processes. The structural logic of the dynastic business family implies a specific type of family management, with a “chancellor” rather than a “patriarch/matriarch” or “boss”.

Family businesses, the oldest form of business, are constantly changing. However, it is only in recent years that a recognisable development in German business families has led to a range of visible results: the increasing social acceptance of an egalitarian inheritance of shares by all descendants within a business family has given rise to a special type of owning family: the dynastic business family, understood to mean the circle of family business owners numbering at least 50 related persons. Such business families are not only founding families or nuclear families (business families 1.0) or formally organised families with corresponding governance structures (business families 2.0) but, rather, network-like business family structures with many diverse members (business families 3.0). Typically, business families reach this size with a correspondingly large number of shareholders in the fifth generation, since each successor generation has an average of three to four children to whom the shares are passed.

In presenting an inside view of the decision-making processes in business families, we should like to start with what is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks facing family strategy, namely, decisions regarding appointments. To some extent, the real art here is to strike a balance between the demands of bonding logic—the need for equality and equal treatment—and the requirements of decision-making logic to establish clear differences. The question of who is deemed to belong to the business family and shareholder group is important in this connection, but the structures used to secure affiliation are also vital, i.e. how contact, information and input are enabled. The issues under examination here are how appointments to positions and committees are made and how the boundaries that can develop between different branches of the family are addressed. We will constantly return to our image of the reversible figure introduced in the last chapter: questions are put to the family, and these are then answered differently by the family and by the business family.

Diversification of fonts in video captions based on the voice characteristics, namely loudness, speed and pauses, can affect the viewer receiving the content. This study evaluates a new method, WaveFont, which visualizes the voice characteristics for captions in an intuitive way. The study was specifically designed to test captions, which aims to add a new experience for Arabic viewers. The results indicate that our visualization is comprehensible and acceptable and provides significant added value—for hearing-impaired and non-hearing impaired participants: Significantly more participants stated that WaveFont improves their watching experience more than standard captions.

Die Wundheilung kann in 3 Phasen unterteilt werden. 1) Exsudationsphase, 2) Granulationsphase, 3) Regenerationsphase. Der Regenerationsphase kommt besondere Bedeutung zu mit dem Ziel, die naturliche Barrierefunktion der Haut schnellstmoglich wiederherzustellen. Ziel der Studie war die Analyse der Reepithelisierungskinetik von unbehandelten sowie mit 0,5 % Natriumhyaluronat (NHA) behandelten humanen 3‑D-Vollhautmodellen. Es wurden 10 µl der Testsubstanz 2‑mal taglich topisch appliziert. Die Analyse der Reepithelisierungskinetik erfolgte an den Tagen 2 bis 6. Die Beurteilung des Einflusses der Testsubstanz auf die Immunantwort erfolgte durch Quantifizierung von IL-1α und IL-10. Die 2‑mal tagliche Applikation von 0,5 % NHA resultiert in einer erhohten Reepithelisierungsgeschwindigkeit zu allen Zeitpunkten (p < 0,001). Diese Beobachtung geht einher mit einer geringeren Expression von IL-10 sowie einer erhohten Expression von IL-1α an den Tagen 2 bis 4 (p < 0,001). Die Behandlung der humanen Hautmodelle mit NHA zeigte eine – verglichen mit unbehandelten Modellen – signifikant erhohte Reepithelisierungsgeschwindigkeit des verwundeten Gewebes und fuhrte zu einem schnelleren Wundschluss. Es liegt die Vermutung nahe, dass die Herunterregulation von IL-10 zu einer durch IL-1α mediierten, erhohten Immunantwort fuhrt und in der schnelleren Wundheilung resultiert. Folgestudien werden zeigen, ob die schnellere Wundheilung sowie die Modulation der Immunantwort durch die Applikation von NHA auch in vivo belegt werden kann.

The purpose of this randomized, placebo-controlled, blind study was to investigate the effects of the drinkable nutraceutical ELASTEN&reg, (QUIRIS Healthcare, G&uuml, tersloh, Germany) on skin aging and skin health. Drinking ampoules provides a blend of 2.5 g of collagen peptides, acerola fruit extract, vitamin C, zinc, biotin, and a native vitamin E complex. This controlled interventional trial was performed on 72 healthy women aged 35 years or older. They received either the food supplement (n = 36) or a placebo (n = 36) for twelve weeks. A skin assessment was carried out and based on objective validated methods, including corneometry (skin hydration), cutometry (elasticity), the use of silicon skin replicas with optical 3D phase-shift rapid in-vivo measurements (PRIMOS) (roughness), and skin sonography (density). The verum group was followed for an additional four weeks (without intake of the test product) to evaluate the sustainability of the changes induced by the intake of the test product. The test product significantly improved skin hydration, elasticity, roughness, and density. The differences between the verum group and the placebo group were statistically significant for all test parameters. These positive effects were substantially retained during the follow-up. The measured effects were fully consistent with the subjective assessments of the study participants. The nutraceutical was well tolerated.

Skeletal muscle architecture significantly influences the performance capacity of a muscle. A DTI-based method has been recently considered as a new reference standard to validate measurement of muscle structure in vivo. This study sought to quantify muscle architecture parameters such as fascicle length (FL), pennation angle (PA) and muscle thickness (tm) in post-stroke patients using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and to quantitatively compare the differences with 2D ultrasonography (US) and DTI. Muscle fascicles were reconstructed to examine the anatomy of the medial gastrocnemius, posterior soleus and tibialis anterior in seven stroke survivors using US- and DTI-based techniques, respectively. By aligning the US and DTI coordinate system, DTI reconstructed muscle fascicles at the same scanning plane of the US data can be identified. The architecture parameters estimated based on two imaging modalities were further compared. Significant differences were observed for PA and tm between two methods. Although mean FL was not significantly different, there were considerable intra-individual differences in FL and PA. On the individual level, parameters measured by US agreed poorly with those from DTI in both deep and superficial muscles. The significant differences in muscle parameters we observed suggested that the DTI-based method seems to be a better method to quantify muscle architecture parameters which can provide important information for treatment planning and to personalize a computational muscle model.

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsHuman translations guided language discovery for speech processing.Pronunciation extraction for non-written languages using cross-lingual information.Alignment model Model 3P for cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment.Algorithm to deduce phonetic transcriptions of words from Model 3P alignments.Analysis of appropriate source languages based on efficient evaluation measures. In this paper, we study methods to discover words and extract their pronunciations from audio data for non-written and under-resourced languages. We examine the potential and the challenges of pronunciation extraction from phoneme sequences through cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment. In our scenario a human translator produces utterances in the (non-written) target language from prompts in a resource-rich source language. We add the resource-rich source language prompts to help the word discovery and pronunciation extraction process. By aligning the source language words to the target language phonemes, we segment the phoneme sequences into word-like chunks. The resulting chunks are interpreted as putative word pronunciations but are very prone to alignment and phoneme recognition errors. Thus we suggest our alignment model Model?3P that is particularly designed for cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment. We present two different methods (source word dependent and independent clustering) that extract word pronunciations from word-to-phoneme alignments and compare them. We show that both methods compensate for phoneme recognition and alignment errors. We also extract a parallel corpus consisting of 15 different translations in 10 languages from the Christian Bible to evaluate our alignment model and error recovery methods. For example, based on noisy target language phoneme sequences with 45.1% errors, we build a dictionary for an English Bible with a Spanish Bible translation with 4.5% OOV rate, where 64% of the extracted pronunciations contain no more than one wrong phoneme. Finally, we use the extracted pronunciations in an automatic speech recognition system for the target language and report promising word error rates - given that pronunciation dictionary and language model are learned completely unsupervised and no written form for the target language is required for our approach.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is widely used in wildlife research to study animal movement and habitat use. In order to evaluate the quality and reliability of GPS data, the factors influencing the performance of these devices must be known, especially for semiaquatic species, because terrestrial and aquatic habitat might affect GPS performance differently. We evaluated the location error and fix success rate of three GPS receiver models in stationary tests and on a semi-aquatic mammal, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber). The location error during stationary tests was on average 15.7 m, and increased with increasing canopy closure, slope, and horizontal dilution of precision, potentially leading to the erroneous classification of GPS positions when studying habitat use in animals. In addition, the position of the GPS antenna (flat versus 90˚ tilted) affected the location error, suggesting that animal behavior affects GPS performance. The fix success rate was significantly higher during stationary tests compared to when GPS units were deployed on beavers (94% versus 86%). Further, GPS receivers did not obtain any positions underwater and underground, the latter potentially allowing the estimation of activity periods in animals that use lodges or burrows as shelter. We discuss the possibilities for data screening, the use of buffer zones along the shoreline, and combination with other data loggers to avoid the erroneous classification of GPS positions when studying habitat use.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative study with a twofold focus: on highly escalated family business (FB) conflicts and on the interactions between conflicts and the failure of the company as FB. The authors devoted this paper to the question of how family-related conflicts are connected with the demise of FB. Conflicts constitute an essential part of every FB and may definitely have the power to superimpose the performance of the FB as well as the family life in a destructive way. Especially, highly escalated so called relationship conflicts can be seen as one reason for the failure of FB.Design/methodology/approach– The research aims at analysing the meaning of conflict in FB with respect to the failure of the FB. Therefore, the authors use an explorative case study approach. The study is based on a total of five case studies. As the authors use theory of social systems as a theoretical background, the authors focused in the analysis in all cases on patterns rather than on individual characteristics.Findings– As an essential part of the study the authors formulated eight hypotheses describing specific patterns of the conflict process as a communicative system. These hypotheses convey a comprehensible impression of the effects conflicts may have within FB and present a number of new facets of conflict dynamics and patterns of escalation in FB.Originality/value– In particular, the authors provide new insights into the dynamics of highly destructive forms of conflicts in FB and the relationship between family-related conflicts and the failure of FB. The authors also pave the way for future research that aim to develop a more holistic understanding about when and why the outcomes from family and business systems will conflict or be harmonious.

In this paper we study the potential as well as the challenges of using the World Wide Web as a seed for the rapid generation of pronunciation dictionaries in new languages. In particular, we describe Wiktionary, a community-driven resource of pronunciations in IPA notation, which is available in many different languages. First, we analyze Wiktionary in terms of language and vocabulary coverage and compare it in terms of quality and coverage with another source of pronunciation dictionaries in multiple languages (GlobalPhone). Second, we investigate the performance of statistical grapheme-to-phoneme models in ten different languages and measure the model performance for these languages over the amount of training data. The results show that for the studied languages about 15k phone tokens are sufficient to train stable grapheme-to-phoneme models. Third, we create grapheme-to-phoneme models for ten languages using both the GlobalPhone and the Wiktionary resources. The resulting pronunciation dictionaries are carefully evaluated along several quality checks, i.e. in terms of consistency, complexity, model confidence, grapheme n-gram coverage, and phoneme perplexity. Fourth, as a crucial prerequisite for a fully automated process of dictionary generation, we implement and evaluate methods to automatically remove flawed and inconsistent pronunciations from dictionaries. Last but not least, speech recognition experiments in six languages evaluate the usefulness of the dictionaries in terms of word error rates. Our results indicate that the web resources of Wiktionary can be successfully leveraged to fully automatically create pronunciation dictionaries in new languages.

P 158 - A method to estimate passive mechanical properties of the soleus and gastrocnemius aspects of Achilles tendon.

Gerrit Schlippe,1 Werner Voss,1 Lars Christian Brenn2 1Dermatest Medical Research Company, Münster, Germany; 2RIEMSER Pharma GmbH, Greifswald, Germany Abstract: Genital herpes is the manifestation of a herpes simplex virus 2 infection. Standard treatment uses both local and systemic approaches. Here, we report on the results of a local therapy approach with 31 female patients at a gynecological practice. In the here-described approach, established genital herpes infection was treated with the medical device Herpotherm®, with or without virostatic drugs. Herpotherm® is a certified medical device operating on the basis of local heat application. Parameters evaluated during the approach were (i) subjective patient assessments and (ii) objective assessment of the physician. In the described therapy approach a positive effect in terms of nature and severity in the course of the disease using Herpotherm® could be demonstrated. It could be shown that Herpotherm® can also be used for genital herpes and that it is well tolerated. In relation to other therapies using topical treatment for genital herpes, an extremely rapid reduction of pain and herpetic symptoms could be observed. Intolerances or discontinued use as a result of complications were not observed. Keywords: herpes simplex virus, local heat, virostatic

Background Psoriasis and atopic dermatitis (AD) are challenging to treat due to the absence of suitable monitoring procedure and their recurrences. Alteration of skin hydrophilic biomarkers (SHB) and structural elements occur in both disorders and may possess a distinct profile for each clinical condition. Objective To quantify skin cytokines and antioxidants non-invasively in psoriatic and in AD patients and to evaluate skin auto-fluorescence in psoriatic patients. Methods A skin wash sampling technique was utilized to detect the expression of SHB on psoriatic and AD patients and healthy controls. Inflammatory cytokine (TNFα, IL-1α and IL-6) levels, total antioxidant scavenging capacity and uric acid content were estimated. Additionally, measurement of the fluorescent emission spectra of tryptophan moieties, collagen cross-links and elastin cross-links were performed on psoriatic patients and healthy controls. Results Our findings demonstrate significant alterations of the SHB levels among psoriasis, AD and healthy skin. Differences were also observed between lesional and non-lesional areas in patients with psoriasis and AD. Ultra-structural changes were found in psoriatic patients both in lesional and non-lesional areas. Conclusion Employing non-invasive measurements of skin wash sampling and skin auto-fluorescence might serve as complementary analysis for improved diagnosis and treatment of psoriasis and AD. Furthermore, they may serve as an additional monitoring tool for various diseases, in which skin dysfunction is involved.

PurposeFamily businesses (FBs) play an important role in economies across the world. FBs are consistently associated with specific attributes and expectations, which is something that points towards the notion that FBs can be regarded as a “brand” on their own. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether FBs have actually become a “brand” in the eyes of the wider population.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical investigation is based on the “Personal Construct Theory” (PCT), developed by George R. Kelly. According to this theory, human beings categorise and evaluate the world by building “personal constructs” that reflect their unconscious attitudes and value systems. To find out about the attitudes towards FBs, we used the “Nextexpertizer”® program, which exploits the PCT as a computer‐based survey instrument. Finally, these results are connected with two different brand theories: the identity‐oriented brand theory of Heribert Meffert and a sociological‐based understanding of brands. The study was conducted in two stages: in 2007/2008 the authors interviewed a randomised sample of 80 people across Germany. In 2009 they interviewed 30 people with almost identical socio‐demographic characteristics, to assure the comparability of the two surveys.FindingsThe analysis of the aforementioned brand theories shows that FBs can be indeed described as a brand on their own. In order to speak of a strong brand, the identity‐oriented approach requires the compliance between the intro‐perspective and the external‐perspective of brands. The perceptions of FBs exhibit a remarkable stability in both surveys. In sum, FBs are perceived as the most sustainable and social type of company. Nevertheless, FBs are also associated with certain negative attributes: for example, middle‐size FBs are regarded as particularly inflexible.Originality/valueThe study shows that FBs address the identity myths of stability and safety like no other company type. Yet the identity myths also evoke other societal needs, such as egoistic self‐fulfillment motives, or the will to live free and without boundaries. For these needs, FBs are perceived as inflexible and stiff.

UNLABELLED Height and weight in children with Prader-Willi syndrome, diagnosed by standard clinical criteria, follow a specific developmental pattern resulting in early childhood obesity, absent pubertal growth spurt and adolescent short stature. New molecular techniques (methylation analysis, fluorescence in situ hybridization) now allow the unequivocal diagnosis of Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS). We investigated the possibility of a bias in syndrome-specific growth standards based on clinically diagnosed patients by comparing these standards with new standards derived from 100 German patients with molecularly confirmed PWS, none of whom had received a growth-promoting therapy. Height centile curves of the German patients fall in the tall range of standards derived from American patients. This is mainly due to an elevation of the lower centile ranges in both sexes. When the height standards derived from German patients are compared to those of a large multinational cohort of patients, 78% of whom were not confirmed by genetic testing, only minor differences in the height centiles become apparent. The population background therefore does not appear to play a major role for the observed differences. In a marked proportion of patients a decreased sitting height/height ratio is found. This was usually associated with scoliosis. Weight standards from our study group show that after 14 y of age German girls with PWS are heavier than their American counterparts. Standards for the body mass index of German patients of both sexes are increased over normal reference standards (p < 0.0001) and do increase with age (boys: p = 0.0038; girls: p = 0.0004). PWS genotypes or sex had no apparent influence on SDS for height, weight and body mass index. CONCLUSIONS Because of the observed differences to other growth standards, use of the newly constructed centile curves is advocated in German patients with molecularly confirmed PWS to avoid delay in the diagnosis of additional growth-compromising conditions.

Zero-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ZR ASR) addresses target languages without given pronunciation dictionary, transcribed speech, and language model. Lexical discovery for ZR ASR aims to extract word-like chunks from speech. Lexical discovery benefits from the availability of written translations in another source language [1, 2, 3]. In this paper, we improve lexical discovery even more by combining multiple source languages. We present a novel method for combining noisy word segmentations resulting in up to 11.2% relative F-score gain. When we extract word pronunciations from the combined segmentations to bootstrap an ASR system, we improve accuracy by 9.1% relative compared to the best system with only one translation, and by 50.1% compared to monolingual lexical discovery.

Die Befundlage zum Zusammenhang von Kortisonangst und Therapieakzeptanz ist sparlich. In 2 vorliegenden Untersuchungen wurde angegeben, Kortisonangst sei nicht weit verbreitet. Der verwendete Fragebogen („Deuchert-Skala“, DS) scheint jedoch eher kognitive Aspekte abzubilden. Daher wurde ein neuer Fragebogen („Osnabruck-Skala“, OS) fur die affektive Seite der Kortisonangst entwickelt. 110 Eltern asthmakranker Kinder beantworteten beide Fragebogen und machten Angaben zu Informationsquellen, auf die sie zuruckgreifen. Die OS erbrachte signifikant hohere Angstwerte. Eine Faktorenanalyse bestatigte die inhaltliche Verschiedenheit: Die OS lud auf: „Angste und Sorgen bzgl. einer Kortisonbehandlung“, die DS auf: „Negative Meinungen bzgl. Kortison“. Kognitive und affektive Aspekte der Kortisonangst sollten unterschieden werden, um nicht vorschnell anzunehmen, das Merkmal sei nur unwesentlich ausgepragt. Bei Eltern asthmakranker Kinder scheinen nicht unerhebliche Angste bezuglich Kortison zu bestehen. Mehr als 1/4 der Befragten wurden vom Haus-/Kinderarzt nicht uber das Medikament aufgeklart, 6 von 89 Medizinern lehnen Kortison uberwiegend ab, ebenso eine grose Zahl von Verwandten oder Bekannten (78,6%).

The ‘Skin Detective’ is a tool for self-assessment regarding the condition of the skin for children and adolescents with atopic dermatitis (AD). Background: An increased awareness of one’s current skin condition and a realistic assessment of the severity of the illness constitute important aspects of good illness management in AD patients. Until recently, only one expert tool for the assessment of a patient’s dermatological condition has existed: the SCORAD. Since an improvement in the management of the illness can be considered a success criterion of an AD training for patients, a tool enabling patients’ self-assessment was developed, tested, and implemented in the German Atopic Dermatitis Intervention Study (GADIS), a multicentre study. Method: Based on the SCORAD, a survey tool was developed which was tested in a pilot study (n = 22, aged 7–21) and applied during the multicentre study GADIS (n = 324, aged 8–13). The patients’ statements about their current skin condition were compared with the experts’ assessments expressed by SCORAD. Results: Regarding the current spread of the illness, no congruence could be found between the assessment by the patients and that by the experts. The assessments of the severity, however, correlated to a significant degree. Conclusion: The ‘Skin Detective’ is suited as a tool for recording the current severity of the skin condition of children and adolescents suffering from AD. At the latest after participation in a standardised training, patients are able to realistically assess their skin condition.

In this paper we propose efficient methods which contribute to a rapid and economic semi-automatic pronunciation dictionary development and evaluate them on English, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Haitian Creole. First we determine optimal strategies for the word selection and the period for the grapheme-to-phoneme model retraining. In addition to the traditional concatenation of single phonemes most commonly associated with each grapheme, we show that web-derived pronunciations and cross-ligual grapheme-to-phoneme models can help to reduce the initial editing effort. Furthermore we show that our phoneme-level combination of the output of multiple grapheme-to-phoneme converters reduces the editing effort more than the best single converters. Totally, we report on average 15% relative editing effort reduction with our phonemelevel combination compared to conventional methods. An additional reduction of 6% relative was possible by including initial pronunciations from Wiktionary for English, German, and Spanish.

In order to ascertain the incidence and prognosis of cisplatin-induced neurotoxicity in testis cancer patients undergoing combination chemotherapy, 29 patients with metastatic disease were studied prospectively. Assessments included enquiry into neurological symptoms, measurement of sural nerve sensory action potential and conduction velocity, and vibration threshold in the left big toe. At the end of chemotherapy (3 to 4 cycles) only 3 out of 26 (11%) patients had paraesthesiae, but 3 months later the proportion rose to 65%. Resolution occurred in the majority over the ensuing 12 months so that only 17% had persistent symptoms. None of the 11 patients treated with 3 cycles of chemotherapy had persisting symptoms. Vibration thresholds showed a significant deterioration during chemotherapy (P = 0.032), further deterioration in the 3 months following chemotherapy (P = 0.009) and significant improvement between 3 and 12 months after chemotherapy (P = 0.038). Sural nerve sensory action potentials and conduction velocities were unhelpful.© 2001 Cancer Research Campaignhttp://www.bjcancer.com

BACKGROUND: Morbid obesity develops as a result of hyperphagia and compulsive eating behavior in patients with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), if caloric intake is not rigorously controlled. PWS-specific centile curves for adiposity indices constructed in the past were based on clinically diagnosed patients. With the advent of molecular genetic methods, allowing for an unequivocal diagnosis, new PWS curves based exclusively on molecularly diagnosed patients are becoming available, eliminating a potential diagnostic bias. OBJECTIVE: To compare fat distribution in molecularly confirmed German PWS patients to that of clinically diagnosed American PWS patients and a healthy reference population DESIGN: Cross-sectional anthropometric study. SUBJECTS: One hundred German patients (49 F) with molecularly confirmed PWS (age: < 30y). MEASUREMENTS: Triceps (subscapular) skinfold thickness, waist and hip circumference. RESULTS: Skinfold thickness was massively elevated in the majority of the molecularly confirmed German PWS patients compared to a healthy reference population. Whereas triceps skinfold thickness was in good agreement with American PWS patients, subscapular skinfold thickness in German girls rose earlier than in American PWS girls, indicating possible differences between caloric intake or the proportion of patients entering puberty spontaneously. Waist circumference and waist-hip ratio (n = 89) were elevated in a relative small proportion of patients only and did not reflect lower abdominal fat. This may be due to the peculiar shape of many patients with a typical fat accumulation around the buttocks. CONCLUSIONS: In addition to body mass index, use of skinfold thickness is recommended for follow-up of dietary interventions in PWS.

The aim of this phase II study was to examine the efficacy of combination chemotherapy comprising epirubicin, cisplatin and protracted infusion 5-fluorouracil in patients with metastatic prostate cancer. 21 patients were treated, of whom 9 (43%) responded for a minimum of 7 months. Continuation of previously effective second-line hormone therapies appeared to be a determinant of response; only 1 of 6 patients responded after its discontinuation. In a further 3 patients, response was only seen after re-introduction of previously effective hormone treatments. In patients of 70 years and under with prostate cancer resistant to androgen-deprivation therapy and who still have good performance status, ECF chemotherapy can achieve useful remissions.

In [1], we have proposed systems for text normalization based on statistical machine translation (SMT) methods which are constructed with the support of Internet users and evaluated those with French texts. Internet users normalize text displayed in a web interface in an annotation process, thereby providing a parallel corpus of normalized and non-normalized text. With this corpus, SMT models are generated to translate non-normalized into normalized text. In this paper, we analyze their efficiency for other languages. Additionally, we embedded the English annotation process for training data in Amazon Mechanical Turk and compare the quality of texts thoroughly annotated in our lab to those annotated by the Turkers. Finally, we investigate how to reduce the user effort by iteratively applying an SMT system to the next sentences to be edited, built from the sentences which have been annotated so far.

We report on our efforts toward an LVCSR system for the Slavic language Ukrainian. We describe the Ukrainian text and speech database recently collected as a part of our GlobalPhone corpus [1] with our Rapid Language Adaptation Toolkit [2]. The data was complemented by a large collection of text data crawled from various Ukrainian websites. For the production of the pronunciation dictionary, we investigate strategies using grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models derived from existing dictionaries of other languages, thereby reducing severely the necessary manual effort. Russian and Bulgarian g2p models even decrease the number of pronunciation rules to one fifth. We achieve significant improvement by applying state-of-the art techniques for acoustic modeling and our day-wise text collection and language model interpolation strategy [3]. Our best system achieves a word error rate of 11.21% on the test set on read newspaper speech.

This paper describes the advances in the multilingual text and speech database GlobalPhone, a multilingual database of high-quality read speech with corresponding transcriptions and pronunciation dictionaries in 20 languages. GlobalPhone was designed to be uniform across languages with respect to the amount of data, speech quality, the collection scenario, the transcription and phone set conventions. With more than 400 hours of transcribed audio data from more than 2000 native speakers GlobalPhone supplies an excellent basis for research in the areas of multilingual speech recognition, rapid deployment of speech processing systems to yet unsupported languages, language identification tasks, speaker recognition in multiple languages, multilingual speech synthesis, as well as monolingual speech recognition in a large variety of languages.

Code-switching is a very common phenomenon in multilingual communities. In this paper, we investigate language modeling for conversational Mandarin-English code-switching (CS) speech recognition. First, we investigate the prediction of code switches based on textual features with focus on Part-of-Speech (POS) tags and trigger words. Second, we propose a structure of recurrent neural networks to predict code-switches. We extend the networks by adding POS information to the input layer and by factorizing the output layer into languages. The resulting models are applied to our task of code-switching language modeling. The final performance shows 10.8% relative improvement in perplexity on the SEAME development set which transforms into a 2% relative improvement in terms of Mixed Error Rate and a relative improvement of 16.9% in perplexity on the evaluation set which leads to a 2.7% relative improvement of MER.

With the help of written translations in a source language, we cross-lingually segment phoneme sequences in a target language into word units using our new alignment model Model 3P [17]. From this, we deduce phonetic transcriptions of target language words, introduce the vocabulary in terms of word IDs, and extract a pronunciation dictionary. Our approach is highly relevant to bootstrap dictionaries from audio data for Automatic Speech Recognition and bypass the written form in Speech-to-Speech Translation, particularly in the context of under-resourced languages, and those which are not written at all. Analyzing 14 translations in 9 languages to build a dictionary for English shows that the quality of the resulting dictionary is better in case of close vocabulary sizes in source and target language, shorter sentences, more word repetitions, and formal equivalent translations.

The concept of primitive neuroectodermal tumour (PNET) has been evolving for many years, as has its nomenclature. It was first described as a tumour arising in peripheral nerve, when it was called neuroepithelioma. These tumours are part of the differential diagnosis of malignant small round cell tumours, which include Ewing's sarcoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, neuroblastoma and lymphoma, and which appear as sheets of monotonous small round cells on light microscopy, staining dark blue with haematoxylin and eosin. In the 1970's, reports of tumours displaying neural features introduced new terms such as primitive neuroectodermal tumour and peripheral neuroectodermal tumour. A relationship to the undifferentiated primitive neuroectodermal tumours of the central nervous system in children was assumed by the title of these tumours, although it was recognised that they were not necessarily related to peripheral nerves.

We present our new alignment model Model 3P for cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment, and show that unsupervised learning of word segmentation is more accurate when information of another language is used. Word segmentation with cross-lingual information is highly relevant to bootstrap pronunciation dictionaries from audio data for Automatic Speech Recognition, bypass the written form in Speech-to-Speech Translation or build the vocabulary of an unseen language, particularly in the context of under-resourced languages. Using Model 3P for the alignment between English words and Spanish phonemes outperforms a state-of-the-art monolingual word segmentation approach [1] on the BTEC corpus [2] by up to 42% absolute in F-Score on the phoneme level and a GIZA++ alignment based on IBM Model 3 by up to 17%.

In this paper, we evaluate grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models among languages and of different quality. We created g2p models for Indo-European languages with word-pronunciation pairs from the GlobalPhone project and from Wiktionary [1]. Then we checked their quality in terms of consistency and complexity as well as their impact on Czech, English, French, Spanish, Polish, and German ASR. While the GlobalPhone dictionaries were manually cross-checked and have been used successfully in LVCSR, Wiktionary pronunciations have been provided by the Internet community and can be used to rapidely and economically create pronunciation dictionaries for new languages and domains.