131,321 research outputs found

    Acting Governor of Washington Territory, L. Jay S. Turney, letter to Reverend Daniel Bagley, John Webster, and Edward Carr, regarding the sale and acquisition of lands for the University of Washington Territory, August 29, 1861

    No full text
    Acting governor of Washington Territory and territorial secretary, L. Jay S. Turney, writes to the commissioners in charge of selecting a site for the territorial university, Reverend Daniel Bagley, John Webster and Edmund Carr. Turney asks for information regarding how many acres have been selected, how many acres have been sold, descriptions and prices of land tracts, a list of expenditures and any other information the commission can offer. Turney also asks for the specific law that gives them the legal authority to manage the school land.In 1854, territorial governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens, suggested that a university for Washington Territory be established and Congress passed an act reserving the land for the school. The territorial legislature settled on Seattle as the setting for the school in 1858 but it was not until 1861 when appointed commissioners, Methodist minister Reverend Daniel Bagley, John Webster and Edmund Carr looked for a 10-acre site. Arthur A. Denny, Edward Lander and Charlie Terry eventually donated land for the school in downtown Seattle. As president of the commission and major manager of university land sales, Bagley faced several challenges from different individuals, as seen through this letter from L. Jay S. Turney (d. 1881) questioning the commissioners' authority in their actions. Common practice in the territories reserved lands for schools but did not sell the lands until the territory became a state. In this case, Bagley was authorized by the territorial legislature to sell the land work with land office officials as well. When Bagley received this letter from Turney, construction of school buildings had already begun. Situated between 4th Avenue, 6th Avenue, Union Street and Seneca Street, the Territorial University of Washington officially opened on November 4, 1861 with 30 students. In 1862, the Washington territorial legislature incorporated the school and appointed a Board of Regents. Throughout the university's early years, the university consisted not only of college curricula but preparatory school curricula as well. The school also faced constant changes in administration, enrollment and financial support. In 1863, the school had to close due to lack of students. In 1867 and 1876, the school closed again, this time due to lack of funds. Throughout the late 1870s and 1880s, strong leadership from school presidents helped the university form a stable base of students and a strong reputation. The school started to draw pupils from various parts of the territory and even Oregon and California. In 1889, the number of students approximated 300. About this time, discussion arose regarding a new site for the growing school. A graduate of the school and later professor, Edmond Meany, served as head of a committee to choose a new site off of Union Bay, further north and east of its current site. In 1895, the school formally moved to this new campus. Daniel Bagley was born in Pennsylvania in 1818. Bagley was a Methodist minister in the 1840s. In 1852, he was chosen to act as a missionary in Oregon Territory. With his wife, Susannah Rogers Whipple, he headed along the Oregon Trail to Oregon Territory. In his wagon train he met a number of men who were to become prominent citizens in Washington Territory including Dexter Horton, Thomas Mercer, Aaron Mercer, William Shoudy and John Pike. Following a number of years serving throughout the Williamette Valley, Bagley and his family settled in Seattle in 1860. In 1861, Bagley was appointed president of the commission on the new territorial university and became the manager of acquiring and selling university lands. This letter to Captain Blinn indicates his power in deciding who had claim to university lands. Bagley was also a major member of the Republican Party and was heavily involved in Seattle's real estate. Bagley died in 1905

    Human-Level Performance on Word Analogy Questions by Latent Relational Analysis

    No full text
    This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason/stone is analogous to the pair carpenter/wood; the relations between mason and stone are highly similar to the relations between carpenter and wood. Past work on semantic similarity measures has mainly been concerned with attributional similarity. For instance, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can measure the degree of similarity between two words, but not between two relations. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to the task of measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus (they are not predefined), (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data (it is also used this way in LSA), and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore reformulations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying noun-modifier relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM, while using a smaller corpus

    Learning algorithms for keyphrase extraction

    No full text
    Many academic journals ask their authors to provide a list of about five to fifteen keywords, to appear on the first page of each article. Since these key words are often phrases of two or more words, we prefer to call them keyphrases. There is a wide variety of tasks for which keyphrases are useful, as we discuss in this paper. We approach the problem of automatically extracting keyphrases from text as a supervised learning task. We treat a document as a set of phrases, which the learning algorithm must learn to classify as positive or negative examples of keyphrases. Our first set of experiments applies the C4.5 decision tree induction algorithm to this learning task. We evaluate the performance of nine different configurations of C4.5. The second set of experiments applies the GenEx algorithm to the task. We developed the GenEx algorithm specifically for automatically extracting keyphrases from text. The experimental results support the claim that a custom-designed algorithm (GenEx), incorporating specialized procedural domain knowledge, can generate better keyphrases than a general-purpose algorithm (C4.5). Subjective human evaluation of the keyphrases generated by GenEx suggests that about 80% of the keyphrases are acceptable to human readers. This level of performance should be satisfactory for a wide variety of applications

    MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations

    Get PDF
    Information overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Get PDF
    The 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

    "Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"

    Get PDF
    Both spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.

    Similarity of Semantic Relations

    No full text
    There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason:stone is analogous to the pair carpenter:wood. This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, and information retrieval. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus, (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data, and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore variations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying semantic relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM

    A. D. Fricke, author

    No full text
    Black and white photograph of author, A. D. Fricke
    corecore