We need to talk about standard splits.

It is standard practice in speech & language technology to rank systems according to performance on a test set held out for evaluation. However, few researchers apply statistical tests to determine whether differences in performance are likely to arise by chance, and few examine the stability of system ranking across multiple training-testing splits. We conduct replication and reproduction experiments with nine part-of-speech taggers published between 2000 and 2018, each of which reports state-of-the-art performance on a widely-used "standard split".

Quantitative analysis of disfluency in children with autism spectrum disorder or language impairment.

Deficits in social communication, particularly pragmatic language, are characteristic of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Speech disfluencies may serve pragmatic functions such as cueing speaking problems. Previous studies have found that speakers with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) speakers in the types and patterns of disfluencies they produce, but fail to provide sufficiently detailed characterizations of the methods used to categorize and quantify disfluency, making cross-study comparison difficult.

Algorithmic Classification of Five Characteristic Types of Paraphasias.

Purpose: This study was intended to evaluate a series of algorithms developed to perform automatic classification of paraphasic errors (formal, semantic, mixed, neologistic, and unrelated errors).

Method: We analyzed 7,111 paraphasias from the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistics Project Database (Mirman et al., 2010) and evaluated the classification accuracy of 3 automated tools.

Dexmedetomidine during total knee arthroplasty performed under spinal anesthesia decreases opioid use: a randomized-controlled trial.

Background: It remains unclear whether the opioid-sparing effects of dexmedetomidine seen in patients undergoing general anesthesia are reproducible in patients undergoing spinal anesthesia. We hypothesized that the administration of intravenous dexmedetomidine for sedation during total knee arthroplasty under spinal anesthesia would decrease postoperative morphine consumption in the first 24 hr following surgery.

Methods: We conducted this prospective double-blind randomized-controlled trial in 40 patients (American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status I-III) undergoing total knee arthroplasty with a standardized spinal anesthetic.

Uh and um in children with autism spectrum disorders or language impairment.

Atypical pragmatic language is often present in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), along with delays or deficits in structural language. This study investigated the use of the "fillers" uh and um by children ages 4-8 during the autism diagnostic observation schedule. Fillers reflect speakers' difficulties with planning and delivering speech, but they also serve communicative purposes, such as negotiating control of the floor or conveying uncertainty.

Memory in language-impaired children with and without autism.

Background: A subgroup of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have significant language impairments (phonology, grammar, vocabulary), although such impairments are not considered to be core symptoms of and are not unique to ASD. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) display similar impairments in language. Given evidence for phenotypic and possibly etiologic overlap between SLI and ASD, it has been suggested that language-impaired children with ASD (ASD + language impairment, ALI) may be characterized as having both ASD and SLI.

Automated morphological analysis of clinical language samples.

Quantitative analysis of clinical language samples is a powerful tool for assessing and screening developmental language impairments, but requires extensive manual transcription, annotation, and calculation, resulting in error-prone results and clinical underutilization. We describe a system that performs automated morphological analysis needed to calculate statistics such as the mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUM), so that these statistics can be computed directly from orthographic transcripts. Estimates of MLUM computed by this system are closely comparable to those produced by manual annotation.

Post-discharge outcomes after resuscitation from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: A ROC PRIMED substudy.

Importance: Assessment of morbidity is an important component of evaluating interventions for patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA).

Objective: We evaluated among survivors of OHCA cognition, functional status, health-related quality of life and depression as functions of patient and emergency medical services (EMS) factors.

Design: Prospective cohort sub-study of a randomized trial.

The cost of overtriage: more than one-third of low-risk injured patients were taken to major trauma centers.

Regionalized trauma care has been widely implemented in the United States, with field triage by emergency medical services (EMS) playing an important role in identifying seriously injured patients for transport to major trauma centers. In this study we estimated hospital-level differences in the adjusted cost of acute care for injured patients transported by 94 EMS agencies to 122 hospitals in 7 regions, overall and by injury severity. Among 301,214 patients, the average adjusted per episode cost of care was $5,590 higher in a level 1 trauma center than in a nontrauma hospital.

Out-of-hospital decision making and factors influencing the regional distribution of injured patients in a trauma system.

Background: The decision-making processes used for out-of-hospital trauma triage and hospital selection in regionalized trauma systems remain poorly understood. The objective of this study was to assess the process of field triage decision making in an established trauma system.

Methods: We used a mixed methods approach, including emergency medical services (EMS) records to quantify triage decisions and reasons for hospital selection in a population-based, injury cohort (2006-2008), plus a focused ethnography to understand EMS cognitive reasoning in making triage decisions.

Increased survival after EMS witnessed cardiac arrest. Observations from the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) Epistry-Cardiac arrest.

Background: Out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is common and lethal. It has been suggested that OHCA witnessed by EMS providers is a predictor of survival because advanced help is immediately available. We examined EMS witnessed OHCA from the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) to determine the effect of EMS witnessed vs.