1,720,963 research outputs found
Logic-Based Approaches to Scheduling and Their Enhancement through Controlled Natural Languages
No full textIn the healthcare domain, the effective management of healthcare operations, such as patient
scheduling, staff rostering, and resource allocation, remains a persistent challenge due to
complex constraints and dynamic environments. Artificial Intelligence offers promising
methods for optimizing these processes, particularly through Knowledge Representation
and Reasoning (KRR) approaches that ensure explainable and logically grounded solutions.
Among these, Answer Set Programming (ASP), also thanks to the presence of efficient
solvers, has proven to be particularly suitable for modeling complex healthcare scheduling
problems. Thus, in this thesis, we present solutions to two healthcare scheduling problems:
the Pre-Operative Assessment Clinic scheduling problem, which involves assigning patients
to days for examination and surgical preparation, and the scheduling of Periodic Treatments
problem, where patients must follow predetermined treatment plans over a period of several
weeks. The use of formal KRR languages like ASP, however, often requires specialized
expertise, limiting accessibility for domain experts. To bridge this gap, Controlled Natural
Languages (CNLs) have emerged as a means to express formal logic in a more intuitive
and human-readable format. CNLs can enhance readability, reduce development time, and
facilitate communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders. In this thesis, we
propose a set of tools in this regard. First, we introduce CNL2ASP, which is able to convert
sentences written in CNL into an ASP encoding. Then, the second tool is CNL2TEL. It
extends CNL2ASP with temporal operators, and is able to convert CNL specifications into the
TELINGO input language. Similarly, SBVR2ASP is a tool that translates specifications written
in the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) into ASP. A recent
survey has highlighted several limitations in current approaches to SBVR conflict detection
and analysis, and in our approach based on ASP, we address most of these limitations. Finally,
the last tool we propose is CNLWizard, a framework that generates grammars for target
representation languages, enabling the translation of problems stated in CNL into formal
representations. This tool offers a flexible, high-level approach to defining desired grammars,
significantly reducing the time and effort needed to create custom grammars
Scheduling pre-operative assessment clinic with answer set programming
No full textThe problem of scheduling pre-operative assessment clinic (PAC) consists of assigning patients to a day for the exams needed before a surgical procedure, taking into account patients with different priority levels, due dates and operators availability. Realizing a satisfying schedule is of upmost importance for a hospital, since delay in PAC can cause delay in the subsequent phases, thus lowering patients' satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a two-phase solution to the PAC problem: in the first phase, patients are assigned to a day taking into account a default list of exams; then, in the second phase, having the actual list of exams needed by each patient, we use the results of the first phase to assign a starting time to each exam. We first present a mathematical formulation for both problems. Further, we present a solution where modeling and solving are done via answer set programming. We then introduce a rescheduling solution that may come into play when the scheduling solution cannot be applied fully. Experiments employing synthetic benchmarks on both scheduling and rescheduling show that both solutions provide satisfying results in short time. We finally show the implementation and usage of a web application that allows to run our scheduling solution and analyze the results graphically in a transparent way
CNL2ASP: Converting Controlled Natural Language Sentences into ASP
No full textAnswer set programming (ASP) is a popular declarative programming language for solving hard combinatorial problems. Although ASP has gained widespread acceptance in academic and industrial contexts, there are certain user groups who may find it more advantageous to employ a higher-level language that closely resembles natural language when specifying ASP programs. In this paper, we propose a novel tool, called CNL2ASP, for translating English sentences expressed in a controlled natural language (CNL) form into ASP. In particular, we first provide a definition of the type of sentences allowed by our CNL and their translation as ASP rules and then exemplify the usage of the CNL for the specification of both synthetic and real-world combinatorial problems. Finally, we report the results of an experimental analysis conducted on the real-world problems to compare the performance of automatically generated encodings with the ones written by ASP practitioners, showing that our tool can obtain satisfactory performance on these benchmarks
A General Framework for Representing Controlled Natural Language Sentences and Translation to KR Formalisms
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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