BACKGROUND To test the psychometric properties of the Persian version of Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI-12) in the Iranian population. METHODS After translating and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire into Persian, 100 caregiver spouses of Iran- Iraq war (1980-88) veterans with chronic spinal cord injury who live in the city of Mashhad, Iran, invited to participate in the study. The Persian...

The global blogging phenomenon has caught researchers by surprise. While past research has focused on the motivations behind blogging, since the number of weblogs is growing at such an unprecedented rate, the roles played by their visitors should not be overlooked. This chapter presents an empirical analysis of weblogs from a methodological perspective that demonstrates empirical advances in th...

WordNet is used extensively as a major lexical resource in information retrieval tasks. However, the qualities of existing Persian WordNets are far from perfect. They are either constructed manually which limits the coverage of Persian words, or automatically which results in unsatisfactory precision. This paper presents a fully-automated approach for constructing a Persian WordNet: A Bayesian ...

BACKGROUND To validate the Persian version of the simple shoulder test in patients with shoulder joint problems. METHODS Following Beaton`s guideline, translation and back translation was conducted. We reached to a consensus on the Persian version of SST. To test the face validity in a pilot study, the Persian SST was administered to 20 individuals with shoulder joint conditions. We enrolled ...

Development of robust spoken language technology ideally relies on the availability of large amounts of data preferably in the target domain and language. However, more often than not, speech developers need to cope with very little or no data, typically obtained from a different target domain. This paper focuses on developing techniques towards addressing this challenge. Specifically we consid...

The phenomenal rise of Internet weblogging has created new opportunities for people to tell personal stories of their life experience, and the potential to share these stories with those who can most benefit from reading them. One barrier to this new mode of storytelling is the lack of accessibility; existing Internet search tools are not tailored to the unique characteristics of this textual g...

INTRODUCTION In recent years, outcome assessment related to orthopedic surgeries has increasingly focused on patient-reported questionnaires. The Oxford Hip Score (OHS), self-administered questionnaire, is a reliable, valid, and responsive instrument for assessing hip in patients undergoing Arthroplasty. METHODS The study involved 105 adult Persian-speaking patients admitted for primary Total...

BACKGROUND The Oxford Knee Score (OKS) is a short patient-reported outcome instrument that measures pain and physical activity related to knee osteoarthritis. The purpose of this study is to evaluate, construct validity and consistent reliability of the Persian version of the OKS. METHODS The case series consisted of 80 patients who were clinically diagnosed with having knee osteoarthritis. A...

In this position paper we present a vision of how the stories that people tell in Internet weblogs can be used directly for automated commonsense reasoning, specifically to support the core envisionment functions of event prediction, explanation, and imagination.