Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining are receiving increasing attention in many sectors because knowing and predicting opinions of people is considered a strategic added value. In the last years an increasing attention has also been devoted to Emotion Recognition, often by developing automated systems that can associate user’s emotions to texts, music or artworks. Zazie is an Italian social ne...

Text processing is an important computer application. Due to its importance, a number of text manipulation programming languages have been devised, e.g. Icon. These programming languages are very useful for applications such as natural language processing, text analysis, text editing, document formatting, text generation, ... etc. However, they were mainly designed to handle English texts and a...

Icon is a high-level programming language with extensive facilities for processing strings and structures. Icon has several novel features, including expressions that may produce sequences of results, goal-directed evaluation that automatically searches for a successful result, and string scanning that allows operations on strings to be formulated at a high conceptual level. Icon also provides ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine whether an enrichment method would improve the performance of an enzyme imunoassay test, the ICON Strep B, for detection of group B streptococci (GBS) in vaginoperineal swabs. METHODS The study was done in 3 phases. First, in 250 maternity patients, 2 swabs per patient were tested simultaneously by an overnight selective broth culture metho...

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness after age 55 in the industrialized world. Severe loss of central vision frequently occurs with the exudative (wet) form of AMD, as a result of the formation of a pathological choroidal neovasculature (CNV) that damages the macular region of the retina. We tested the effect of an immunotherapy procedure, which had been show...

The analysis of emoticon (emotional icon) use in online newsgroups appears to reinforce the stereotype of the emotional female and the inexpressive male until further examination suggests otherwise. The most interesting finding of this study is illustrated by the pattern of change that develops for both genders when they move from a predominantly same gender newsgroup to a mixed-gender newsgrou...

BACKGROUND This study evaluated psychometric properties of the Iconographical Falls Efficacy Scale (Icon-FES) to measure fear of falling in cognitively impaired older people. Icon-FES uses pictures as visual cues to prompt responses. METHODS A total of 50 community-dwelling older people with moderate cognitive impairment were assessed on Icon-FES, Falls Efficacy Scale-International, and vario...

In recent years, we have developed an icon-based communication interface to represent concepts and ideas. Users can create messages to communicate with others using a spatial arrangement of visual symbols. We deployed our icon-based interface in a serious game environment of a disaster and rescue simulator, which is capable of simulating real disaster situations using information from human use...

Forty-one individuals with moderate-to-severe vision loss participated in a study to determine the minimum distance they required to correctly identify three different pedestrian traffic icon symbols, one of which was presented with an augmented light source. We found that subjects could identify the WALK icon without the augmented light source information, or animated eyes, from farther away t...

Icons, or pictorial and graphical objects, are commonly used in human-computer interaction (HCI) fields as the mediator in order to communicate information to users. However, there have been little studies focusing on the majority of the world’s population – semi-literate communities – in terms of icon design. In this study, a new icon taxonomy of four quadrants, namely abstract-general, abstra...