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- Ramasamy, Adaikalavan, et al.
(författare)
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Genome-Wide Association Studies of Asthma in Population-Based Cohorts Confirm Known and Suggested Loci and Identify an Additional Association near HLA
- 2012
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 7:9, s. e44008-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Rationale: Asthma has substantial morbidity and mortality and a strong genetic component, but identification of genetic risk factors is limited by availability of suitable studies. Objectives: To test if population-based cohorts with self-reported physician-diagnosed asthma and genome-wide association (GWA) data could be used to validate known associations with asthma and identify novel associations. Methods: The APCAT (Analysis in Population-based Cohorts of Asthma Traits) consortium consists of 1,716 individuals with asthma and 16,888 healthy controls from six European-descent population-based cohorts. We examined associations in APCAT of thirteen variants previously reported as genome-wide significant (P < 5x10(-8)) and three variants reported as suggestive (P < 5 x 10(-7)). We also searched for novel associations in APCAT (Stage 1) and followed-up the most promising variants in 4,035 asthmatics and 11,251 healthy controls (Stage 2). Finally, we conducted the first genome-wide screen for interactions with smoking or hay fever. Main Results: We observed association in the same direction for all thirteen previously reported variants and nominally replicated ten of them. One variant that was previously suggestive, rs11071559 in RORA, now reaches genome-wide significance when combined with our data (P = 2.4x10(-9)). We also identified two genome-wide significant associations: rs13408661 near IL1RL1/IL18R1 (PStage1+Stage2 = 1.1x10(-9)), which is correlated with a variant recently shown to be associated with asthma (rs3771180), and rs9268516 in the HLA region (PStage1+Stage2 = 1.1x10(-8)), which appears to be independent of previously reported associations in this locus. Finally, we found no strong evidence for gene-environment interactions with smoking or hay fever status. Conclusions: Population-based cohorts with simple asthma phenotypes represent a valuable and largely untapped resource for genetic studies of asthma.
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- Thomas, Kavita Elisheba, 1974-
(författare)
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But What Do They Mean? : Modelling Contrast Between Speakers in Dialogue Signalled by “But”
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Understanding what is being communicated in a dialogue involves determining how it is coherent, that is, how the successive turns in the dialogue are related, what the speakers’ intentions, goals, beliefs, and expectations are and how they relate to each other’s responses. This thesis aims to address how turns in dialogue are related when one speaker indicates contrast with something in the preceding discourse signalled by “but”. Different relations cued by “but” will be distinguished and characterised when they relate material spanning speaker turns and an implementation in a working dialogue system is specified with the aim of enabling a better model of dialogue understanding and achieving more precise response generation.A large amount of research in discourse addresses coherence in monologue, and much of it focuses on cases in which the coherence relation is explicitly signalled via a cue-phrase or discourse marker (e.g., “on the other hand”, “but”, et cetera) which provides an explicit cue about the nature of the underlying relation linking the two clauses. However despite research on Speech Acts, planning research into speakers’ intentions, and semantic approaches to question-answering dialogues, very little work has focused on coherence relations across turns in dialogue even given the presence of a cue-phrase.This thesis will explore what sorts of relations the speaker of the “but” perceives between elements in the dialogue, and in particular, it will focus on “but”s communicating Denial of Expectation, Concession, and Correction by determining what underlying cross-turn expectations are denied in the former two, and what is being corrected in the latter case. We will extend work by Lagerwerf (1998) in monologue which presents a treatment for Denial of Expectation and Concession arguing that “but” implicates a defeasible expectation which is then denied (in Denial of Expectation) or argued against (in Concession). We also follow Knott’s approach (Knott, 1999a) of describing the semantics of a cue-phrase algorithmically from the agent’s mental model of the related utterances.Task-oriented and nontask-oriented spoken dialogues involving turn-initial “but” are examined, motivating a logical scheme whereby Denial of Expectation, Concession and Correction can be distinguished. These relations are then modelled in the PTT (Poesio and Traum, 1998) Information State (Matheson, Poesio and Traum, 2000) model of dialogue, enabling more relevant response generation in dialogue systems. A systematic response deliberation scheme based on the speakers’ underlying beliefs is proposed based on the analysis and modelling of relations presented in this thesis.
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- Thomas, Kavita Elisheba, 1974-, et al.
(författare)
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Modelling Concession Across Speakers in Task-Oriented Dialogue
- 2003
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Ingår i: DiaBruck 2003. - : Universität des Saarlandes.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We determine criteria for modellingconcession signalled via plan-based“but” in task-oriented dialogue (TOD)(following (Thomas, 2003)) basedon some examples from the corpora,analysing where Speech Act (SA) andplanning information fails to predictconcession. In our approach we focuson cases involving cross-speakerconcession, where the speaker acceptspart of the previous speaker’s turn butsignals contrast via “but”, and we arguethat this contrast can (in the examplesshown) be modelled as concessive.Then given a representation of task-planhistory in the Information State (IS)model of the dialogue, we present aninitial framework for an algorithm thatpredicts concessive interpretation acrossspeakers in two situations encounteredin the corpora. We motivate this workby showing how it updates beliefs in thePTT (Poesio and Traum, 1998) modelof dialogue and can be used to facilitaterecognition of planning mismatches andpotentially avoid misunderstandings,and more generally improve discourseunderstanding and natural languagegeneration (NLG).
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- Thomas, Kavita Elisheba, 1974-, et al.
(författare)
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Modelling Denial of Expectation in Dialogue
- 2004
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop in Computational Semantics.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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- Thomas, Kavita Elisheba, 1974-, et al.
(författare)
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Modelling Denial of Expectation in Dialogue: Issues in Interpretation and Generation
- 2002
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Computational Linguistics United Kingdom Research Colloquium.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We aim to model the semantics of “but” in dialogue, focusing on cases in which it signals denial of expectation (DofE) across speakers. We present an algorithm that predicts the defeated expectation from the perspective of the hearer of the DofE, and we consider differences between task-oriented dialogue (TOD) and non-task-oriented dialogue (NTOD). We motivate this work by showing how it updates beliefs in an Information State (IS) model of dialogue and can be used to facilitate discourse understanding and natural language generation (NLG).
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