Statins: have we found the Holy Grail?

Abstract

In coronary artery disease, cardiovascular risk factors are the main targets for primary and secondary prevention. Statins prevent cardiovascular events in patients at risk. However, despite the proven efficacy and safety of statins, relevant side effects exist and should be considered when treating patients.

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MT Summit IX, New Orleans, Sep. 23-27, 2003
Panel Discussion
HAVE WE FOUND THE HOLY GRAIL ?
Hermann Ney
Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition
Lehrstuhl für Informatik VI
Computer Science Department
RWTH Aachen – University of Technology
D-52056 Aachen, Germany
Ney: Statistical Speech Translation
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Contents
1Specific Questions3
2Recent Projects: Speech and Language Translation4
3 The Statistical Approach to NLP and MT5
4State of the Art in SMT10
5Answers 14
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1Specific Questions
1. Have we found the holy grail?
2. Will progress in data-driven MT continue unabated?
3. Has the data-driven paradigm been able to model information
that was not present in rule-based systems?
4. Was the metric used to rank participating systems in the NIST competition fair ?
5. Is it correct that SMT has indeed surpassed traditional rule-based systems?
6. Are there niche applications for which SMT is well suited?
7. Is there a danger that SMT’s recent success gives the impression
that MT is a solved problem?
8. Would the NIST evaluation have been different for the language pair English-French?
9. What about rule-based component’s in today’s and future data-driven systems?
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2Recent Projects: Speech and Language Translation
spoken language translation: joint projects (national, European, international:
ATR, C-Star, Verbmobil, Eutrans, Nespole!, Fame, LC-Star, PF-Star, ...):
• restricted domains:
appointment scheduling, conference registration, travelling, tourism information, ...
• vocabulary size: 3000 – 10000 words
• best performing systems and approaches: data-driven
– example-based methods
– finite-state transducers
– statistical approaches
e.g.: Verbmobil evaluation [June 2000]: better by a factor of 2
written language translation: US Tides project 2001-2004
• unrestricted domain: press news, vocab.size∼
• language pairs: Chinese → English, Arabic → English
• performance [July 2003]:
best statistical systems are better than conventional/commercial systems
= 50000 words
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3The Statistical Approach to NLP and MT
principles:
• MT and other NLP tasks are complex tasks,
for which perfect solutions are difficult
(compare: all models in physics are approximations!)
• consequence: use imperfect and vague knowledge
and try to minimize the number of decision errors
• statistical decision theory and Bayes decision rule
using probabilistic dependencies between input x and decision c:
x → ˆ c = arg max
= arg max
c
?
pr(c|x)
?
?
c
pr(c) · pr(x|c)
?
• resulting concept:
NLP = Statistics + (Linguistic ?) Modelling
Ney: Statistical Speech Translation
c ?RWTH Aachen
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26-Sep-03