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We have developed a technique for automatic transliteration of named entities for English-Chinese cross-language spoken document retrieval (CL-SDR). Our retrieval system integrates machine translation, speech recognition and information retrieval technologies. An English news story forms a textual query that is automatically translated into Chinese words, which are mapped into Mandarin syllables by pronunciation dictionary lookup. Mandarin radio news broadcasts form spoken documents that are indexed by word and syllable recognition. The information retrieval engine performs matching in both word and syllable scales. The English queries contain many named entities that tend to be out-of-vocabulary words for machine translation and speech recognition, and are omitted in retrieval. Names are often transliterated across languages and are generally important for retrieval. We present a technique that takes in a name spelling and automatically generates a phonetic cognate in terms of Chinese syllables to be used in retrieval. Experiments show consistent retrieval performance improvements by including the use of named entities in this way.

This is a prospective study to assess the psychiatric morbidity in Chinese infertile women who underwent treatments with assisted reproductive technology and also the impact of treatment failure. The 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were employed before and 3 weeks after the assisted reproductive technology treatment. Data from 372 patients who completed the questionnaires and failed the treatment were analyzed. Before treatment, 33% of the participants scored above the GHQ cutoff, and 8% had a BDI score of 20 or above, signifying moderate to severe depression. Following failed treatment, 43% scored above GHQ cutoff, and 8% had BDI scores 20 or above. The posttreatment GHQ and BDI scores were significantly higher than the corresponding scores at baseline (p < 0.001). About 13% of the participants reported self-harm ideas. The severity of depression following a failed treatment was positively associated with the duration of infertility (p < 0.05), but not with the posttreatment BDI scores, age, education, and number of previous treatment episodes. Our results show that one third of the women who sought infertility treatment had an impaired psychological well-being. Following failed treatment, there was a further deterioration in mental health, and about 10% of the participants were moderately to severely depressed. Proper psychological care and counseling should be an integral part of infertility management among the Chinese population.

Objective To evaluate the efficacy and safety of paracervical anaesthesia in reducing pain during outpaDesign Prospective, randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind study.Population One hundred women undergoing outpatient hysteroscopy and endometrial biopsy for abnormal uterine bleeding.Interventions Paracervical block using 10 mL of either 2% lignocaine or normal saline before the procedure.Main outcome measures Evaluation of pain at different stages of hysteroscopy using a visual analogue scale together with blood pressure and heart rate monitoring.Results Compared with placebo, paracervical anaesthesia significantly reduced the pain only at the time of insertion of the hysteroscope, but not at the subsequent stages of the procedure. However, paracervical injection of lignocaine resulted in a higher incidence of bradycardia and hypotension.Conclusions Paracervical anaesthesia not only fails to reduce pain during outpatient hysteroscopy and endometrial biopsy, but also carries a risk of inducing bradycardia and hypotension, which is probably a result of inadvertent intravascular injection.tient hysteroscopy and endometrial biopsy.