We present a stochastic parsing system consisting of a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a constraint-based parser and a stochastic disambiguation model. We report on the results of applying this system to parsing the UPenn Wall Street Journal (WSJ) treebank. The model combines full and partial parsing techniques to reach full grammar coverage on unseen data. The treebank annotations are used to provide partially labeled data for discriminative statistical estimation using exponential models. Disambiguation performance is evaluated by measuring matches of predicate-argument relations on two distinct test sets. On a gold standard of manually annotated f-structures for a subset of the WSJ treebank, this evaluation reaches 79% F-score. An evaluation on a gold standard of dependency relations for Brown corpus data achieves 76% F-score.

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the unique RET mutations was not possible when the derivative curves overlapped. Although not all pathogenic RET mutations were available for analysis, a recent systematic study of high-resolution melting detection of heterozygous point mutations within a PCR amplicon found a sensitivity and specificity of 100% for amplicons Ͻ400 bp in size (15 ). High-resolution melting analysis for mutation scanning is a rapid (1-2 min after PCR), costeffective assay that requires no processing or separation steps. As applied to RET mutation scanning, accuracy of heterozygote detection appears to be 100%, and some (but not all) sequence variations can be distinguished from each other. Because samples are immediately available for further processing after high-resolution melting analysis, the detected variant samples can be sequenced for confirmation of genotype.

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Identification of chromosomal markers for rapid detection of Bacillus anthracis is difficult because significant chromosomal homology exists among B. anthracis, Bacillus cereus, and Bacillus thuringiensis. We evaluated the bacterial gyrA gene as a potential chromosomal marker for B. anthracis. A real-time PCR assay was developed for the detection of B. anthracis. After analysis of the unique nucleotide sequence of the B. anthracis gyrA gene, a fluorescent 3' minor groove binding probe was tested with 171 organisms from 29 genera of bacteria, including 102 Bacillus strains. The assay was found to be specific for all 43 strains of B. anthracis tested. In addition, a test panel of 105 samples was analyzed to evaluate the potential diagnostic capability of the assay. The assay showed 100% specificity, demonstrating the usefulness of the gyrA gene as a specific chromosomal marker for B. anthracis.