BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) have rarely been studied because they rarely accept interferon-based therapy (IBT) and have been difficult to follow up. We investigated long-term outcomes of IBT on the population. METHODS This population-based cohort study used the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database as its data source. HCV...

Much attention has been given to the impact of informativeness and similarity measures on distributional thesauri. We investigate the effects of context filters on thesaurus quality and propose the use of cooccurrence frequency as a simple and inexpensive criterion. For evaluation, we measure thesaurus agreement with WordNet and performance in answering TOEFL-like questions. Results illustrate ...

We present an unsupervised method for detecting grammatical errors by inferring negative evidence from edited textual corpora. The system was developed and tested using essay-length responses to prompts on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The errorrecognition system, ALEK, performs with about 80% precision and 20% recall.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to analyze the results of exclusive interstitial brachytherapy (IBT) as a conservative approach in the treatment of penile cancer confined to the glans or the shaft with long-term follow-up in a single institution. MATERIALS/METHODS Between July 1992 and November 2013, 73 consecutive patients with non-metastatic invasive penile cancer were treated b...

This research is aiming at revealing the strength and weaknesses of applying learning by teaching strategy in TOEFL. Since TOEFL regarded as a challenging English proficiency test, students need to find suitable mastering belongs survey research. It utilizes descriptive qualitative data analysis. Several steps were taken this study, namely: designing survey, writing questions, sample, conductin...

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors limiting Midwifery students' performance on TOEFL, particularly in Structure and Written Expression sections. This qualitative research conducted as a case two classes midwifery program. Document analysis 89 student response sheets interviews with four students constituted data. Brown (2004)'s difficulty index (IF) formula used analyze quant...

Resources such as WordNet are useful for NLP applications, but their manual construction consumes time and personnel, and frequently results in low coverage. One alternative is the automatic construction of large resources from corpora like distributional thesauri, containing semantically associated words. However, as they may contain noise, there is a strong need for automatic ways of evaluati...