Discourse structure and coherence relations are one of the main inferential challenges addressed by computational pragmatics. The present study focuses on discourse markers as key elements in guiding the inferences of the statements in natural language. Through a rule-based approach for the automatic identification, classification and annotation of the discourse markers in a multilingual parall...

To understand the interactions between innate and adaptive immunity, and specifically how virally infected macrophages impact T cell function, novel assays examining the ability of macrophages to present antigen to CD8(+) T cells are needed. In the present study, we have developed a robust in vitro assay to measure how antigen presentation by human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) affects th...

Macrophages are a major component of the innate immune response, comprising the first line of defense against various intracellular pathogens, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In this report, we studied the factors that regulate growth of M. tuberculosis H37Rv in subpopulations of human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs). In healthy donors, M. tuberculosis H37Rv grew 5.6-fold more rapidly...

BACKGROUND Tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) is a novel investigational prodrug of tenofovir (TFV) that permits enhanced delivery of TFV into peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and lymphatic tissues. A critical step in the intracellular metabolic activation of TAF is mediated by the lysosomal protease cathepsin A (CatA). Here, we investigated CatA levels together with intracellular metabolism...

The use of discourse structure was shown to be effective in various applications. Meta-discourse is often used as an expression to signal discourse structure. Previous work focused on using the meta-discourse structure in written texts, or spoken material in very clean conditions. This paper presents a metadiscourse annotated corpus in a more challenging educational context. The corpus comprise...

Macrophages play an important role in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pathogenesis and contribute to establishment of a viral reservoir responsible for continuous virus production and virus transmission to T cells. In this study, we investigated the differences between various monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) generated through different differentiation protocols and evaluated different ce...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

A long-standing linguistic hypothesis asserts that the meanings of words are related to the contexts in which they appear (Miller and Charles 1991). This paper explores this hypothesis by showing that co-occurrences of discourse markers reflect the meanings of the discourse markers themselves. An experiment in classifying discourse markers by their semantic class, e.g. temporal or causal, was c...