Abstract. During the 2002During the -2003 Exotic Newcastle Disease (END) outbreak in Southern California, a highthroughput real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RRT-PCR) system was developed to respond to the large diagnostic and surveillance sample workload. A 96-well RNA extraction method, using magnetic bead technology, combined with a 96-well RRT-PCR assay, allowed 1 technician to process and test more than 400 samples per day. A 3-technician team could complete testing on approximately 1,900 samples per day. The diagnostic sensitivity of the high-throughput RRT-PCR assay was 0.9967 (95% CI 0.9937-0.9997) based on 926 virus isolation confirmed positive samples. Diagnostic specificity using an initial 434 virus isolation confirmed negative samples was 100%. A diagnostic specificity of 0.9999 (95% CI 0.9999, Ͼ0.9999) was subsequently calculated on the basis of 2 false-positive results among 65,343 surveillance samples collected after the final END-positive case was confirmed in May 2003. Assay performance over 500 replicates, including reproducibility of the combined extraction and RRT-PCR amplification steps yielded a standard deviation of 0.70 RRT-PCR cycle thresholds (Ct) and a standard deviation of 0.59 Ct for the RRT-PCR steps alone. The high-throughput RRT-PCR developed for END contributed significantly to the 2002-2003 END control effort, reducing the predicted timeline for eradication from 3 years to just 11 months, primarily because of the large number of samples that could be rapidly tested. The 96-well approach described for high-throughput END RRT-PCR could be adapted to other rapid, high-volume testing needs, as required for potential foreign animal disease responses or intensive surveillance efforts.

In French, quite a number of words and expressions are frequently used as discourse particles in spoken language, especially in spontaneous speech. The semantic load of these words or expressions differ whether they are used as discourse particles or not. Therefore, the correct identification of their discourse function remains of great importance. In this paper the distribution of the discourse function (or not discourse function), and of the detailed discourse functions of some of these words, is studied on a large set of French corpora ranging from prepared speech (e.g. storytelling and broadcast news) to spontaneous speech (e.g. interviews and interactions between people). The paper is focused on a subset of discourse particles that are recurrent in the considered corpora. The discourse function of a few thousand occurrences of these words have been manually annotated. A statistical analysis of the functions of the words is presented and discussed with respect to the types of spoken corpora. Finally, some statistics with respect to a few prosodic correlates of the discourse particles are presented, as well as some results of automatic classification and detection of the word function (discourse particle or not) using prosodic features.

This paper analyses prosodic properties of three discourse particles (DP) in French: 'alors' ('so'), 'bon' ('well') and 'donc' ('thus'), according to their different pragmatic functions. DP occurrences of these words extracted from a large speech database have been annotated manually with pragmatic labels. For each DP, prosodic characteristics of occurrences of each pragmatic function (conclusive, introductive, etc.) are automatically extracted. Then, for each DP and each pragmatic function, the most frequent F0 forms are retained as the representative forms. Results show that a pragmatic function, common to several discourse particles, gives rise to a uniform prosodic marking, and this lead to suppose that such DPs are most of the time commutable.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.