A system, method, and computer program product for domain-independent natural language understanding, including at least one of forming pairs of words and/or phrases in a sentence, wherein each word and/or phrase is paired with every other word and/or phrase; determining meanings for the words and/or phrases; assigning numeric codes that uniquely identify semantic concepts to those word and/or phrase meanings; comparing the numeric code of each word and/or phrase with each numeric code of the other word and/or phrase in the pair; selecting the pairs with the best relationships; combining highly-related pairs with other highly-related pairs to form longer groups of words; exchanging numeric codes for the longer groups with numeric codes having a weaker relationship to determine if the exchanged numeric codes provide an overall stronger relationship; and forming longer and longer groups until the sentence is understood.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems for natural language understanding (NLU), and more particularly to a method and system for relationship analysis for semantic disambiguation of natural language. The present invention can include one or more technologies described and referenced throughout the present specification in brackets and listed in the LIST OF REFERENCES, the entire disclosures of which are incorporated by reference herein.
2. Discussion of the Background
Current approaches to natural language understanding (NLU) involve statistical analyses to select meanings from a "world knowledge" database, to interpret the contextual meaning of messages. Natural language understanding can include the analysis of communication between a speaker and a listener, whether those individuals are communicating via literature, voice or another medium. The listener interprets the intentions of the speaker, picking the one meaning for each of the words and/or phrases that best matches the overall meaning of the message. Since people do this with apparent ease, the approach to computerizing NLU typically has been to mimic the human communications environment. Such an environment has been assumed to be based on the world knowledge of the listener, gleaned from a lifetime of experiences.
For more than 10 years, a major research effort has been undertaken to collect, categorize, and store this massive amount of often contradictory world knowledge information. However, the best analyses seem to rely on statistical methods, and nearly all NLU research in recent years has been to find the most successful statistical approach. But what if human communication does not rely on the analysis by the listener of the intentions of the speaker at all? What if the speaker, in the construction of the message, has (invisibly) inserted the actual single meaning of each word and/or phrase within the message? Then, the listener can extract such natural intelligence from the message and recognize the overall meaning from the collection of individual meanings. In other words, for sensible sentences the listener does not need world knowledge, and computers do not need such knowledge either.
Consider the following sentence:
They met at the bank.
Such a sentence is ambiguous and therefore cannot be understood. For NLU (either human or machine) to be successful, the sentence must be further explained, such as:
They met at the bank to withdraw money.
They met at the bank where the fishing was best.
They met at the bank of spotlights.
As these examples illustrate, a message is ambiguous unless each of the words and/or phrases has a single distinct meaning. That meaning, that natural intelligence, makes sense if the speaker constructed the message with distinct meanings for each word and/or phrase, otherwise the message would be ambiguous and neither human nor computer could understand the message. The following Table lists the major approaches to NLU for which projects have been attempted and results have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
TABLEMajor Approaches to natural language understanding (NLU).ApproachDescriptionCase GrammarSyntactical relationship of a noun, pronoun, oradjective to other wordsConceptualConcept relationships between wordsDependencyDependencyRelationships making some words dependent onAnalysisthe meaning of othersFulcrum AnalysisRecognition of grammatical patternsHeuristic ParsingBased on punctuation, prepositions, andconjunctionsLexical AnalysisBased on the words or phrases and definableitems in a vocabulary, irrespective of grammarLogical AnalysisUses common sense inference rules to understandwhat is meantMorphologicalBased on the smallest meaningful unit of aAnalysislanguageNumber LanguageTransforms words into numeric strings forProcessingcomputer processingPhilosophicalConsiders the thoughts behind the meaning, ratherAnalysisthan the words themselvesPivot LanguageCreation of an artificial language in place of anatural languagePredictive SyntaxMakes predictions about the category of a wordfrom earlier wordsPreferenceIncludes procedures for natural languageSemanticsunderstandingPrinciple-BasedGrammar is viewed as principles rather than rulesSemantic AnalysisBased on the meaning of words or phrasesSemantic GrammarGroups of semantic factors are used to indicatesyntactic elementsStatisticalBased on probabilistic analysis of relationshipsAnalysisbetween words or phrasesSyntacticBased on the grammatical relationships of wordsAnalysisand phrasesText PredictionAnticipates what the following words mean basedon past wordsTransferSystems using an intermediate language todescribe the source language before finaltranslationWord ExpertEach word is understood in context with theothers
The topics most relevant to the present invention include conceptual dependency, dependency analysis, lexical analysis, number language, semantic analysis, semantic grammar, statistical analysis, transfer systems, and word experts. Many of these studies are combinations of the linguistic approaches shown in the above Table.
To appreciate the historical perspective of useful NLU theories and suggestions that were abandoned because it was too much trouble to convert them to the latest computers, this review describes projects in a time ordered sequence within the general linguistic approach. The linguistic approaches are semantics-based systems, category-based systems, interlingual systems, artificial intelligence systems, and statistical systems. The systems were all developed for machine translation (MT) because that was (and still is) the area of natural language understanding of interest to funding organizations.
Research using syntactic, semantic, and morphological rules known at the time was done at Georgetown University from 1952-1963. This project found that:
1. Pre- and post-editing were not necessary;
2. The main problem was linguistic analysis;
3. Semantic feature codes were needed in dictionaries;
4. Intermediate languages for multilingual systems seemed feasible.
These investigations resulted in the Georgetown Automatic Translation (GAT) system, capable of limited translation of French, Russian, and Chinese to English (Dostert, 1955 [8]; Zarechnak & Brown, 1961) [55].
A replacement for the GAT system was developed by Latsec, Inc., in the mid-1960s. This bilingual system (Russian/English, French/English, Italian/English), named Systran, was used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Apollo-Soyuz mission with Russia. The main components of Systran were two bilingual dictionaries (single word and multi-word) containing grammatical and semantic information. In addition, a high frequency dictionary, a limited semantics dictionary, a conditional limited semantics dictionary, and a main dictionary were referenced. Syntactic analysis required seven passes through the source language, as follows:
1. Resolution of homographs;
2. Identification of compound nouns;
3. Identification of phrase groups;
4. Recognition of primary syntactic relations;
5. Identification of coordinate structures within phrases;
6. Identification of subjects and predicates;
7. Recognition of prepositional structures.
Organization seemed to be the main problem with Systran. Information about either the source or target language lexicons or grammar was included in any mixture that seemed convenient. As a consequence, there was no uniformity, the methods were inconsistent, coverage and quality were uneven, and modifications of one section of the dictionary often had unexpected consequences in other parts of the system (Pigott, 1983 [35]). Also, the raw output of English to French was considered inadequate to provide detailed information to a French reader (Arthem, 1979 [3]). Nonetheless, Systran produced (and continues to produce) successful limited translations, and the system is still under development. For example, Xerox Corporation is using Systran to improve the clarity of their manuals (Hutchins, 1991 [17]), and the European Union is using it to aid their translation of documents (Reid, 2002 [37]).
Other work based on GAT was done at the Pan American Health Organization in the mid-1970s. Two working systems, ENGSPAN for translating English to Spanish, and SPANAM for translating Spanish to English, were developed. These systems used separate source language and target language dictionaries linked by lexical numbers and semantic markers (human, mass, etc.), and the mainframe computer system was integrated with a word processor. These systems do not deal with disambiguation beyond syntactic homographs, and post editing is essential (Vasconcellos, 1985 [47]).
Dependency analysis for Russian-to-English translations was investigated at the RAND Corporation from 1957-1960 (Hays, 1967 [15]). In this system, the relationships between words were determined by a series of iterations through the text. For example, in "He ate the green pepper" the relationship of "pepper" to "ate" was established after "green" to "pepper." This project was limited by lack of a computational linguistic theory and never resulted in an operational system.
Investigations into common syntagmatic structures (possession, etc.) for Hungarian-to-Russian translations were carried out at the Institute of Linguistics, Moscow from 1955-1967. This program chose Hungarian as the translating language due to the special difficulties it shared with English, German, and the Turkic languages. Algorithms for morphological analysis, dictionary searching, homograph resolution, and recognition of sentence structure were given special emphasis. An attempt was made to produce theoretical sets of interlingual semantic features (Papp, 1966 [34]).
The fulcrum method of analysis for Russian-to-English translation was investigated at the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation from 1958-1967. This project was designed for linguistic studies emphasizing semantics. Researchers tried to solve problems that occur frequently, not those of greatest intellectual difficulty. The system started with a crude word-for-word translation, followed by a syntactic analysis from grammatical information provided by the dictionary. Multiple meanings of words were eliminated, and idioms were recognized. The approach was problem-solving rather than theory-oriented. The fulcrum parser, essentially a linguistic pattern recognition algorithm to identify grammatical patterns, required strict sequencing for the searches and was language-specific (Garvin, 1968 [11], 1980 [12]; Mersel, 1961 [29]).
An ambitious German-to-English (later interlingual) project was begun at the University of Texas Linguistics Research Center (LRC) in 1958. This project was designed as a typical transfer system, in which the source language is analyzed, transferred to an intermediate form, and synthesized into the target language. The LRC model emphasized semantic translation, establishing bi-directional phrase-structured analyses of the source and target languages lexical senses.
A fully automatic interlingual system was attempted after 1970, based on the universal base hypothesis in which the surface structure of any language can be related to a universal base. The ultimate goal was a system which could recognize and produce synonymous sentences by deriving canonical form (i.e. semantic interlingual) representations from sentences and generating all surface realizations of such representations. The LRC could not overcome differences they found in world views reflected in the vocabularies and semantic relationships of languages.
After 1978 the various research projects were collected into the Mechanical Translation and Analysis of Languages (METAL) system for translating telecommunication and data processing texts. METAL is not fully automatic (post-editing is required) and is bilingual rather than interlingual. The LRC concluded that an MT interlingua or pivot language is probably impossible (Hutchins, 1986 [16]; White, 1985 [48]).
A German-to-English MT system with interlingual intentions was investigated at the Forschungsgmppe Linguistik und Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (LIMAS) in Bonn, West Germany from 1964-1976. The basic premise was that computer natural language processing, including MT, must be based on a language-independent semantic syntax, a communicative grammar, expressing content elements and their relations. A classification of content elements or semantic factors was developed (about 80 factors). Translation involved the comparison and matching of matrices of coded factors both between and within languages. In reality, the research became bogged down in the laborious establishment of a lexicon of semantic factors and the construction of factor matrices for English and German vocabulary (Lehmann & Stachowitz, 1972 [26]).
A rather successful transfer-based approach was pursued at the University of Montreal, Traduction Automatique de l'Universite de Montreal (TAUM) in the 1970's. Two systems were developed. TAUM-METEO was limited to English-to-French translations of public weather forecasts; TAUM-AVIATION was an English-to-French translation of aircraft maintenance manuals. METEO implemented a semantic grammar in which rules operated on semantic categories. The system was limited in scope and used a very restricted language subset, failing to translate only 20% of unedited reports mostly because of human typing errors. Failures from non-recognition of syntactic patterns were very rare. METEO was the only MT system regularly producing translations, which were not edited before being made available to the public. AVIATION was much more ambitious with a larger range of language. Although initial results were promising, the project ran out of development time and was canceled (Isabelle & Bourbeau, 1984 [18]; Thouin, 1982 [44]).
Studies on the effects of context versus definition for vocabulary retention of English for speakers of other languages (ESL) students were conducted by Markham (1989 [28]). He found that context-imbedded vocabulary exercises facilitate better long-term retention of words, however knowledge of the definition of a word is important in the initial phase of vocabulary development. Contextual meaning is also the natural word-building method observed in reading.
Research using the predictive syntactic analyzer approach was done for a Russian-to-English translation system at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) from 1959-1963 (Rhodes, 1961 [39]). In this project, grammatical, lexical, and physical predictions were made for words further in a sentence by using categories and the success of earlier predictions. Only some syntactic problems were studied; semantic difficulties were considered to be beyond MT. The investigators concluded that only sentence parsing is mechanizable.
A theoretical investigation of interlingual semantic analysis using a thesaurus approach was pursued at Cambridge University, England from 1956-1967. With the goal of producing good-quality fully automatic idiomatic translations, the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) developed a structured conceptual classification of vocabulary as the basis for an interlingua Words were separated into lexical items (stems) and grammatical operators (e.g., endings or function words). The lexical items were accessed in the dictionary. The researchers concluded that a phrase-by-phrase translation might be a more natural approach than traditional sentence-by-sentence translation. This research was hampered by the lack of access to a computer and the difficulty with synonymy, polysemy, and the establishment of proper interlingual semantic components (Needham & Joyce, 1958 [31]). Tosh (1969 [45]) suggested using the categories already contained in Roget's Thesaurus to overcome these difficulties. Begun in 1805, Roget's Thesaurus has classified English words semantically into general classes and associated categories. Tosh pointed out that the various meanings of a word are given distinct numerical identifiers in the thesaurus that include considerably more detail than might be assumed at first glance. Using a thesaurus as a basis for MT, however, was never pursued.
The U.S.S.R. has pursued theoretical interlingual investigations at the First Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages since 1957 and at the Leningrad University Experimental Laboratory of Machine Translation (ELMP) since in 1958. The Moscow program involved semantic analyses in which relationships were devised from dictionary entries of words formed as combinations of elementary semantic factors and relations. The emphasis was on problems of synonymy and paraphrase rather than homonymy, and on subtle semantic differences rather than crude lexical transfer (Zholkovskii, Leont'eva, & Martem'yanov, 1961 [56]).
The Leningrad program proposed an interlingua that was a complete artificial language, including morphology and syntax. Decisions about the inclusion of particular features were to be based on the averaging of phenomena of various languages with preference given to the major languages manifesting those features. Although the synthesis was for Russian only, theoretical studies were done for Russian, Chinese, Czech, German, Rumanian, Vietnamese, Serbo-Croatian, English, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Arabic, Hindustani, Japanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Turkish, and Swahili (Andreev, 1967 [2]; Papp, 1966 [34]). The strategy of using an artificial language to model natural language was bound to fail because natural languages, in contrast to artificial languages, are nondeterministic, ambiguous, and largely unrestricted (Su & Chang, 1990 [43]).
The Cambridge Language Research Unit studies on phrase-structured semantic grammars were continued at Stanford University from 1970-1974. In an artificial intelligence (AI)-oriented interlingual MT system, semantic frame templates based on triples of semantic features were used. The approach was purely semantic using common-sense inference rules. No syntactic structures (not even the boundaries of sentences) were considered. As a result, discourse analysis across sentence boundaries was a natural feature of the system (Wilks, 1972 [49], 1973 [50], 1975 [51]).
A more recent phrase-structured semantic MT system is under development for the Indian languages in the Dravidian family group (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) and the Indo-European family group (Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarathi, and Bengali). This system is centered on using verbs to delimit sentence phrases and to build the representational structure. The meaning of the verbs is determined by using a frame template analysis but, unlike the CLRU system, syntactic analysis is also included (Raman & Alwar, 1990 [36]). As in other frame-based systems, until a large number of real world descriptions have been included in the knowledge base, the vocabulary is severely restricted.
The only MT project using a full-fledged interlingua as an intermediate language has been pursued at the Buro Voor Systeemontwikkeling, Utrecht, Holland since 1979. The intermediate language is Esperanto. MT processing involves a direct translation of the source language to Esperanto and a transfer from Esperanto to the target language. The system emphasizes technical material translations using artificial intelligence in a word processing environment with personal computers, but the lack of technical vocabulary in Esperanto has been a problem. A working system, named DLT (Distributed Language Translation), was developed using the computer language Prolog and tested for English-to-French translations. The long-term aim is a multilingual system for translation between European languages (French, German, English, Italian), with eventual extensions to other languages (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic) (Papegaaij, Sadler, & Witkam 1986 [33]; Witkam, 1984 [52]).
Another interlingual MT system based on a word processing environment has been under development at Logos Corporation since 1982. A working product, the Logos Intelligent Translation System using a proprietary Semantic Abstraction Language, has been shown to translate over 20,000 words in 24 hours. Dynamic dictionary software asks questions concerning the syntactic and semantic properties of unknown words and ensures compatibility with the rest of the dictionary. Semantic information is categorized and put in a hierarchical tree structure, with source language and target language data separation. This system works best with highly specialized texts, generating less clear translations for general correspondence material (Hawes, 1985 [14]; Tschira, 1985 [46]).
The Commission of the European Communities also started an interlingual project, named EUROTRA, in 1982. It was conceived as a distributed system, with researchers in each of the member countries responsible for translating from their own languages into a common linguistic representation. A modest transfer component for each language pair was intended, but never realized. This project coordinates the work of about 150 researchers in 12 countries, and progress has been disappointingly slow. Work continues, however, as a basis for continued research and because no other project seems to be better (Hutchins, 1991 [17]).
An interlingual approach based on philosophical, rather than linguistic, foundations was considered at the University of Milan from 1959-1966. In this approach, the contents of thought were regarded as activities and not, as in traditional philosophy, as objects. Four fundamental operations were identified; differentiation, figuration, categorization, and correlation. The researchers contended that since traditional linguistics could not deal with discontinuous structures or with homography and polysemy, additional linguistic theory was needed before machine translation was possible. The new theory that resulted was an early version of conceptual dependency networks (Shank, 1975 [40]), in which correlation conditions and classifications were proposed. Unfortunately, nearly all correlations were open for certain words. The system only translated three small examples of Russian-to-English sentences. The philosophical foundations proposed could be interpreted as grammatical categories and classifications, and the correlational grammar was effectively just another version of phrase structure grammar (Albani, Ceccato, & Maretti, 1961 [1]; Ceccato, 1966 [6], 1967 [7]).
Artificial intelligence interlingual approaches have been investigated since 1973 at the Institut fur Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft, University of Heidelberg, West Germany; since 1975 at Kyoto University in Japan; and from 1984-1987 at the Centre for Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and at the University of Sheffield, England. Results from these efforts have formed the basis for many of the current commercial R&D projects.
In the Heidelberg project, the interlingual features are restricted to syntactic (based on logico-semantic foundations) and structural relations. A working system named SALAT (System for Automatic Language Analysis and Translation) has been developed using knowledge database and inference rule aspects of AI. The clear objective is to devise logical formulae both for the deep structure component of transformational grammar and for knowledge base representations, both using an interlingua (Hauenschild, Huckert, & Maier, 1979 [13]).
The relevant Kyoto research includes two different approaches. The first project is an experimental interactive English/Japanese system, written in LISP, using a logico-semantic interlingua based on Montague's semantic theory (Montague, 1974 [30]). The second approach is a learning MT system, with the system developing it's own analysis based on the sentences presented to it (Hutchins, 1986 [16]).
The British effort intended to use the computer to help in translation, rather than as an independent translator. Based on the transfer approach with an interlingua for future expansion and written in Prolog, this system required human support for resolving ambiguities. Pre-editing, post-editing, and interactive assistance was used, in which the computer displayed alternative parses and requested the user to select the correct one (Wood, 1991 [53]).
The classical conceptual dependency theory was developed at Yale University from 1978-1982 as the foundation for an interlingual semantic-based artificial intelligence MT system. This theory asserts that human language understanding represents meaning in primitive semantic relationships (conceptual dependencies), expressing both explicit information and implied/inferred information. These relationships may be described with language-independent scripts which produce retellings rather than translations. In this theory, it is more important to convey the sense unambiguously than to preserve the structure and style of the original. A working system, named MOPTRANS (Memory Organization Packets-based Translator), was developed (Carbonell, Cullingford, & Gershman [4], 1981; Shank, 1975 [40]).
Conceptual dependency research was continued at the Georgia Institute of Technology beginning in 1982 under Richard Cullingford. Designed as an interlingual system, the first application of this work was for Ukrainian-to-English translations. The approach uses lexical entries containing information on case, gender, number, and semantic knowledge to predict and build representations. This system uses AI techniques with a refinement of case-frame parsers without the syntactic information, and is closely related to the word expert systems (Small, 1983 [41]).
Ishikawa, Izumida, Yoshio, Hoshiai, & Makinouchi (1987 [19]) are using a domain model, linguistic knowledge, and a database mapping scheme (collectively called a knowledge base) to semantically interpret queries. By continuously culling the possible areas of search, they try to avoid combinatorial explosion (a rapidly increasing number of possible combinations), the most common problem in semantic processors. An eventual goal for semantic processing systems is to make expert systems easier to use.
A more substantial knowledge-based effort to understand and translate sentences has been started by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and involves the complimentary expertise of three universities. New Mexico State University has two tasks, building vocabularies and parsing sentences; Carnegie-Mellon University is concentrating on the concept lexicons; and the University of Southern California is developing routines to translate an interlingua into a target language (Stone, 1991 [42]). The system, called Pangloss, is intended to produce flawless translations of documents as complex as newspapers articles from Spanish, German, and Japanese into English.
A practical attempt at word-for-word translation was pursued at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1958-1966. English was the target language, with Russian, French, and Chinese as source languages. The method of best equivalents based on probabilistic criteria with some backtracking was used to try to produce something readable. No attempt was made to attack hard linguistic problems. The system had difficulty with syntactic parsing and encountered considerable problems in semantics. The result was a translation with poor clarity that required extensive post-editing (Kay, 1973 [21]).
Attempts to predict the meaning of future words based on selected meanings of past words are current research efforts at the University of Montreal (Langlais, et al., 2000 [24]; Foster et al., 2002 [10]). Intended as a tool to speed translation by humans, the prototype system seems to have had the opposite effect. This is probably because system selections sometimes do not correspond with translator expectations, requiring additional work by them. Efforts at improving the statistical model continue. Additional work at the University of Illinois (Even-Zohar & Roth, 2000 [9]) has tried to provide a focus of attention mechanism to help the statistical prediction.
Statistical studies with parallel English and French texts are currently being undertaken by the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at IBM. Hundreds of millions of words from the Canadian Parliament's English and French proceedings are being placed in a computer database to find statistical relationships between words. New texts refer to this statistical knowledge to yield the most probable translation. This system uses no linguistic theory, but is reputed to be quite good within its domain (Hutchins, 1991 [17]; Stone, 1991 [42]).
With similar intentions, DARPA established a Linguistic Data Consortium (now funded by the National Science Foundation) to collect raw text (naturally occurring text from a wide range of sources, 5 to 10 billion words), annotated text (syntactic and semantic labeling of some parts of raw text, upwards of 20 million words), raw speech (spontaneous speech from a variety of interactive tasks, 400 hours, 2000 speakers), read speech (1,000 hours, 10,000 speakers), annotated speech (phonetic and prosodic labeling, 20 hours), a lexicon (a computational dictionary of 200,000 entries plus a term bank containing geographical, individual, and organizational names, 200,000 to 300,000 entries), and a broad coverage computational grammar. All of these sources will be statistically analyzed for both natural language processing and MT (Joshi, 1991 [20]).
A study of how a statistical system performs when translating text far different from the sources used to collect vocabulary and to train it found a significant drop in performance due to unknown words (Langlais, 2002 [25]). The researchers plan to overcome this problem with non-statistical resources.
Classification systems have also been investigated to try to determine text content and to limit the statistical analyses (Even-Zohar & Roth, 2000 [9]; Rennie, 2003 [38]), but the classifications noted have focused on example problems. No comprehensive classification has been proposed.
Theoretical research into the straification of grammar for Russian-to-English MT (and later Russian-to-Spanish and Chinese-to-English) was conducted at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958-1964. The theory posited a series of levels within which and between which linguistic units were related. The levels identified were phonemic, morphemic, lexemic, and sememic. Machine translation was visualized as a system of decoding and encoding through the levels (Lamb, 1961 [22]). The project concentrated on the lexical and semantic aspects of translation, the development of research tools, and maximally efficient routines for dictionary lookup. The major problem seemed to be the resolution of lexical ambiguities (Lamb, 1965 [23]).
Pivot language research projects have dominated efforts at the University of Grenoble since 1961. Artificial pivot languages were developed to avoid the morphological and syntactic problems of natural languages. The Centre d'Etudes pour la Traduction Automatique (CETA) system conjoined the lexical units of whichever two languages were being processed, with as many pivot languages as there were source/target language pairs. The main features were a transfer lexicon between languages, semantic analysis of dependency relations, and an interlingual syntax. The analysis methods were rather rigid, with only 42% of the sentences correctly translated and only 61% comprehensible (Hutchins, 1986 [16]).
The CETA system evolved into the Groupe d'Etudes pour la Traduction Automatique (GETA), a multilingual system in which linguistic data were separated from programming procedures to allow linguists to work with linguistic concepts rather than programming concepts. GETA was particularly strong in morphological and syntactic analysis and transformation, with good quality translations. Major weaknesses were the lack of semantic processing and the non-portable nature of the assembly language in which GETA was written. Investigations into the minimum amount of subject matter understanding necessary to translate a text from Russian to Bulgarian were conducted at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences from 1964-1976. The premise was that knowledge of how to select the appropriate target language expressions for a given source language text was sufficient. A large part of the research program was devoted to quantitative and statistical studies of Bulgarian, from which the necessary translation information consisting of the basic lexical information and additional contextual information necessary for interpretation was proposed (Ljudskanov, 1968 [27]).
A different approach has been pursued towards a bilingual English/Japanese system at Hitachi in Japan since 1975. Called the Heuristic Parsing Model, the method is based on a non-standard grammar in which detailed parsing is avoided in favor of elementary grammatical knowledge of language learners. English sentences are segmented into phrasal elements and clausal elements on the basis of punctuation, prepositions, and conjunctions. Syntactic pattern matching is used with little consideration for semantic issues. The Hitachi theory is that syntax-directed parsers are best for English, but semantics-based approaches are better for Japanese. A working system, named ATHENE (Automatic Translation of Hitachi from English into Nihongo with Editing Support), has been developed. Ambiguous English constructions and multiple meanings of words are not included, and the system requires post-editing (Nitta, 1982 [32]).
A recent focus has been to identify the correct meaning of specialty terms in languages (Zanger & Stertzbach, 1991). For example, the word chip generally refers to a piece of something, but when used as a chip shot in golf it conveys an entirely different meaning. A computerized dictionary for lexically ambiguous sport terms is under development at Bowling Green State University. While useful to explain the meanings of these words to foreign language learners, this dictionary would not be needed for a machine translation system based on synonym comparisons.
An effort to incorporate advances in speech recognition with MT has resulted in a continuous-speech translation system named Janus for English, German, and Japanese speakers. A collaboration between Siemens A. G., ATR (Kyoto, Japan), the University of Karlsruhe, and Carnegie Mellon's Center for Machine Translation has demonstrated a system with a 400-word vocabulary that helped speakers register for a 1991 conference. Operating on a standard workstation with a relatively slow 7-30 second response time, Janus is based on a neural network and is accurate even when the meaning and sounds of a sentence are not clear (Carlson, 1992 [5]).
However, the various approaches to natural language understanding, as described above, suffer from a range of problems and can involve complex analysis, often based on complex statistical models and relationships, which may be the reason why many of such systems have yet to be commercially exploited.

Relationship analysis system and method for semantic disambiguation of natural language


Methods of manufacturing and implanting corneal inlays, such as small diameter corneal inlays, are provided. The methods include manufacturing an implant body to have a meniscus shape with a small diameter and an index of refraction, and implanting the implant body in a corneal bed of a cornea. The inlays cause a change in an anterior surface of the cornea after implantation due to the implant body.

Abnormalities in the human eye can lead to vision impairment. Some typical abnormalities include variations in the shape of the eye, which can lead to myopia (near-sightedness), hyperopia (far-sightedness) and astigmatism as well as variations in the tissue present throughout the eye, such as a reduction in the elasticity of the lens, which can lead to presbyopia. A variety of technologies have been developed to try and address these abnormalities, including corneal implants.
Corneal implants can correct vision impairment by altering the shape of the cornea. Corneal implants can be classified as an onlay or an inlay. An onlay is generally considered an implant that is placed over the cornea such that the outer layer of the cornea, e.g., the epithelium, can grow over and encompass the implant. An inlay is generally considered an implant that is implanted in the cornea beneath a portion of the corneal tissue by, for example, cutting a flap in the cornea and inserting the inlay beneath the flap. Because the cornea is the strongest refracting optical element in the human ocular system, altering the cornea's anterior surface is a particularly useful method for correcting vision impairments caused by refractive errors. Inlays are also useful for correcting other visual impairments including presbyopia.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.


A device for determining the quality of a part includes a sensor for detecting a strain on a selected portion of a part forming machine. A controller utilizes the detected amount of strain to make a determination regarding the quality of a corresponding part. In one example, the sensor detects a compressive or tensile strain on a machine frame when the sensor is aligned to detect a strain parallel to a direction of a force applied during the part formation process. The controller uses one or more characteristics of the sensor output and determines whether the detected amount of strain is within an acceptable range. In one example, monitoring the strain during the formation of a plurality of acceptable parts provides information for determining the acceptable range. The disclosed arrangements allow for making part quality determinations without requiring a sensor to be “in line” with the load.

There are a variety of manufacturing processes that require tight tolerances and part quality control. One example is the wire harness industry where wire stripping and crimping operations must be accurate to achieve appropriate and acceptable end products. Another example is the tubing industry and in particular the tubing industry that is related to fluid systems on automotive vehicles.
Typical automobile fluid systems include many tubes and hoses. Example systems include the brake system, fuel system, cooling system, steering system, air conditioning system, among others. Each of these systems handles a specific fluid and typically must operate in a relatively wide range of pressure and temperature conditions. Each of the systems has certain operating parameters that must be met to achieve adequate system operation over the life of the vehicle.
It is important, regardless of the specific system, that the fluid system junctions are 100% reliable for as long as possible. In most instances, the tubes are formed to have a specifically designed end to establish a connection with another portion of the fluid system. The ends of most of the tubes are specially formed to ensure that there are no leaks in the system, even under extreme pressure conditions. In some examples, a hose may be crimped over a formed tube end or the tube may be fastened using a nut compressing a flared end to a mating fitting. In almost all instances, the connection between the tube and the other portion of the fluid system requires the tube end to be specifically and properly formed for that specific purpose. The integrity of the overall fluid handling system depends upon many such tube ends.
Conventional manufacturing processes include forming tube ends using pressing operations on machinery. Appropriate tooling is selected to apply an appropriate amount of force to the raw material to establish the desired end configuration for the tube. A variety of presses and tooling for accomplishing such manufacturing are common.
One method of ensuring appropriate part quality is to inspect the tube ends after the parts are made. This approach has limitations in that it is time consuming, labor intensive and introduces an additional step during the manufacturing process, which reduces the economies of the overall process.
It has not been possible to achieve appropriate measurements during the forming process to obtain part quality information simultaneous with the formation of the parts. One barrier to such an approach has been that it is difficult to obtain a reliable force measurement signal utilizing known force measurement technology. In the wire harness field, for example, a sensor is situated "in line" with the load and is exposed to full load forces. Tube forming processes, however, include peak forces, vibration, speed and other physical factors that make it impractical or not cost-effective for using traditional load sensors for such an application. Additionally, the machine design, variety of machines and the lubricants involved with such machines render traditional sensing arrangements unuseful for the tube end forming process.
Another factor that has contributed to the inability to adequately measure part quality during a tube end forming process is that many tubes have a coating or jacket on an outer surface of the tube. Such coatings or jackets assist in the eventual fluid system reliability, however, they interfere with the ability to accurately measure and compare forces used during end forming operations. Depending on the thickness and integrity of the coating, for example, the forces applied during an end forming operation may appear different because of the coating, which has no necessary connection with the quality of the formed end. Direct peak force measurement is not useful where a tube has a jacket of coating material because a defect in one area may be compensated for by another defect in an unrelated area. For example, a tube with a reduced wall thickness should appear to fail a test, but may pass an inspection test if the coating material was not appropriately stripped in that area such that the coating caused the measured peak force to be inaccurate compared to what it would have been if just the thin-walled metal were present.
There is a need for an improved arrangement that allows for monitoring part quality during a tube end forming process. This invention addresses that need while avoiding the shortcomings and drawbacks of previous attempts.

Strain monitoring for part quality analysis


A piezoelectric element 300 includes a first electrode 60, a piezoelectric layer 70 which is provided on the first electrode, and a second electrode 80 which is provided on the piezoelectric layer, and the piezoelectric layer is made of a piezoelectric material expressed as a mixed crystal including a first component formed of a complex oxide containing Bi and Fe and having a rhombohedral perovskite structure and a complex oxide containing Ba and Ti and having a tetragonal perovskite structure, a second component formed of a complex oxide containing Bi, K, and Ti and having a tetragonal perovskite structure, and a third component formed of a complex oxide containing Bi, Mg, and Ti and having a rhombohedral perovskite structure.

There are piezoelectric elements having a configuration in which a piezoelectric layer made of a piezoelectric material having an electromechanical conversion function, for example, a crystallized piezoelectric material is placed between two electrodes. Such piezoelectric elements are mounted on liquid ejecting heads as, for example, a flexure-mode actuator device. As a representative example of the liquid ejecting head, for example, there are ink jet recording heads in which a vibrating plate configures a part of a pressure generation chamber communicating with a nozzle opening which discharges ink droplets, and this vibrating plate is deformed by a piezoelectric element to pressurize an ink in the pressure generation chamber to thus discharge ink droplets from the nozzle opening.
As a piezoelectric material used in such piezoelectric elements, for example, lead-based piezoelectric ceramics represented by lead zirconate titanate (PZT) are usually used (for example, see JP-A-2001-223404). However, the development of a piezoelectric material containing no lead, that is, a lead-free piezoelectric material advances from the viewpoint of environmental problems. Examples of the lead-free piezoelectric material include barium titanate (BaTiO3) having a perovskite structure represented by ABO3 and bismuth ferrate (BiFeO3) (for example, see JPA-2009-252789).
However, in the case of the lead-free piezoelectric material, the leak current is large and the displacement amount is insufficient as compared to lead zirconate titanate (PZT). Accordingly, for example, ink jet recording heads have a problem in that large liquid droplets are not easily discharged. In order to improve leakage characteristics and displacement characteristics of such a lead-free piezoelectric material, a technology of substituting a part of an element occupying the A-site of the perovskite structure and an element occupying the B-site with an element having different ion valency and a different ionic radius is proposed (for example, see JP-A-2010-214841 and JP-A-2011-035385).
However, in order to obtain leakage characteristics and displacement characteristics comparable to a lead (Pb)-based piezoelectric material, it is necessary to further examine and optimize the selection of a substitution site or a substitution element in the perovskite structure, a substitution amount and the like. Such a problem is not limited to piezoelectric elements which are mounted on ink jet recording heads, but exists also in other liquid ejecting heads which discharges liquid droplets other than an ink, liquid ejecting apparatuses, and piezoelectric elements which are mounted on sensors.
An object of the invention is to provide a piezoelectric element, a liquid ejecting head, a liquid ejecting apparatus, an actuator, a sensor, and a piezoelectric material in which the leak current can be reduced and the displacement amount can be improved in view of the circumstances.

Piezoelectric element, liquid ejecting head, liquid ejecting apparatus, actuator, sensor, and piezoelectric material


The disclosure relates to a carpet, a process for manufacturing a carpet and a method for recycling a carpet. The carpet of the present disclosure includes a primary backing having tufts of synthetic carpet fibers protruding from a top surface and, optionally, a secondary backing, with an extruded sheet of an isotactic polyolefin polymer between and integrally fused to a bottom surface of the primary backing and an upper surface of the secondary backing. The process for manufacturing the recyclable carpet includes contacting the extruded sheet with the primary backing and, optionally, the secondary backing, at a temperature sufficiently high to integrally fuse the extruded sheet to the respective backing. The method for recycling synthetic carpet of the type described includes manufacturing the carpet, collecting portions of the carpet, and melting the collected portions to make a feedstock.

1. Field of the Disclosure
The present invention relates to carpets and methods for making and recycling carpets. More specifically, the carpet may be tufted and possess one or more backing layers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Tufted carpets are composite structures in which the face fiber forming the pile, i.e., the surface of the carpet, is needled through a primary backing and the base of each tuft extends through the primary backing and is exposed on the bottom surface of the primary backing.
The basic manufacturing approach to the commercial production of tufted carpeting is to start with a woven scrim or primary carpet backing and to feed this into a tufting machine or a loom. The carpet face fiber is needled through and embedded in the primary carpet backing thus forming a tufted base or griege goods.
Griege goods are typically backed with an adhesive coating in order to secure the face fiber to the primary backing. Low cost carpet often receives only a latex adhesive coating as the backing. This type of carpet is widely used in boats and is called marine backed carpet. Typically, the marine backed carpets are backed with a latex adhesive coating that is water and/or mildew resistant. Higher cost carpet often receives both a secondary backing and a latex adhesive coating.
The face fiber or yarn used in forming the pile of a tufted carpet is typically made of any one of a number of types of fiber, e.g., nylon, acrylics, polypropylene, polyethylene, polyamides, polyesters, wool, cotton, rayon and the like.
Primary backings for tufted pile carpets are typically woven or non-woven fabrics made of one or more natural or synthetic fibers or yarns, such as jute, wool, polypropylene, polyethylene, polyamides, polyesters, and rayon. Films of synthetic materials, such as polypropylene, polyethylene and ethylene-propylene copolymers may also be used to form the primary backing.
Likewise, secondary backings for tufted pile carpets are typically woven or non-woven fabrics made of one or more natural or synthetic fibers or yarns. Preferably, secondary backings for tufted pile carpets are open weave or leno weave, i.e., tape yarn in the warp direction and spun staple fiber in the fill direction. The spun staple fiber is more costly but desirable to increase adhesion between the backing and the latex adhesive.
The application of the latex adhesive coating involves preparing griege goods by stitching a primary carpet backing material with face fiber in a manner so as to form on the top surface of the material a pile composed of numerous closely spaced, up-standing loops of yarn. Thereafter, the bottom surface of the thus formed griege goods is coated with a latex polymer binder such as a styrene-butadiene copolymer. The coated griege goods are then passed through an oven to dry the latex adhesive coating to bond the face fibers to the primary backing which causes the bonding of and which is the principal reason for adding the latex binder.
If desired, a secondary backing may be bonded to the undersurface of the primary backing. To produce tufted carpets with a secondary backing, the bottom surface of the griege goods is coated with a latex polymer binder. Then, the secondary backing is applied to the coated bottom surface and the resulting structure is passed through an oven to dry the latex adhesive coating to bond the secondary backing to the griege goods.
The above-described method for making carpet is used in 80 to 90% of all carpet made in the United States. This carpet-making method has disadvantages in that it requires a drying step and thus an oven to dry the latex polymer binder. The drying step increases the cost of the carpet and limits production speed. Furthermore, it has recently been reported that latex adhesive compositions generate gases that may be the cause of headaches, watery eyes, breathing difficulties and nausea, especially when used in tightly sealed buildings. See Herligy, The Carpet & Rug Industry, October 1990. In addition, overheating of the carpet may occur during drying of the latex which in turn may affect the shade of the carpet.
Consequently, carpet manufacturers have been attempting to develop a new approach for the preparation of tufted carpets. One new approach is the preparation of tufted carpets with a hot-melt adhesive. composition instead of a latex composition.
Hot-melt adhesives are amorphous polymers that soften and flow sufficiently to wet and penetrate the backing surfaces and tuft stitches of carpets upon application of sufficient heat. Furthermore, hot-melt adhesives tend to adhere to the backing surfaces and/or tuft stitches. That is, hot-melt adhesives stick to backing surfaces and tuft stitches.
By the use of hot-melt adhesive, the necessity of drying the composition after application is eliminated and further, when a secondary backing material is desired, it can be applied directly after the hot-melt composition is applied with no necessity for a drying step.
Application of a hot-melt composition is generally accomplished by passing the bottom surface of the griege goods over an applicator roll positioned in a reservoir containing the hot melt composition in a molten state. A doctor blade is ordinarily employed to control the amount of adhesive which is transferred from the application roll to the bottom surface of the structure. After application of the hot-melt composition to the bottom surface of the griege goods, and prior to cooling, the secondary backing, if desired, is brought into contact with the bottom surface, and the resulting structure is then passed through nip rolls and heated.
The activation temperature of a hot-melt adhesive, i.e., the temperature at which the adhesive softens and flows sufficiently to wet and penetrate the backing surfaces and tuft stitches, is below the temperature at which the backing and face yarns melt or otherwise distort. Otherwise, the backing and face yarns may suffer other damage due to heating.
Hot-melt adhesives also must have low enough viscosities at temperatures employed in finishing to achieve good wetting of the backings and sufficient encapsulation of tuft stitches to make the tuft yarns resistant to pull-out, pilling and fuzzing. In addition, for commercial practice, economics of a carpet manufacturing process utilizing hot-melt adhesive must be at least as good as those of conventional latex lamination techniques which remain the dominant lamination process in commercial carpet manufacture.
A number of hot-melt adhesives and processes using the hot-melt adhesive have been proposed for use in carpet lamination. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,551,231, issued Dec. 29, 1970 to Smedberg, discloses a hot-melt adhesive carpet lamination process in which molten adhesive consisting of an ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer and, optionally, waxes (e.g., microcrystalline and polyethylene waxes), fillers (e.g., calcium carbonate), resin extenders (e.g., dicyclopentadiene alkylation polymers) and antioxidant is applied to a tufted primary backing and then a secondary backing is contacted with the molten adhesive under pressure after which the assembly is cooled to solidify the adhesive.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,583,936, issued Jun. 8, 1971 to Stahl, discloses a hot-melt adhesive for tufted carpet lamination comprising about 10-35 weight percent ethylene copolymer comprising about 60-85 weight percent ethylene, and about 15-40 weight percent lower vinyl ester, acrylate or methacrylate; about 10-25 weight percent wax, such as microcrystalline petroleum, polyolefin, or paraffin wax having a melting point sufficient to give an adhesive composition with a softening point greater than 190.degree. F.; and about 50-70 weight percent resin extender composed of a base resin prepared from reactive olefins and diene monomers of 5-7 carbons.
The hot-melt compositions are selected for their adhesive properties. That is, the hot-melt composition may be selected for their suitability in adhering the tufts of face yarn to the primary backing and to adhere the secondary backing to the primary backing. Such compositions are generally amorphous or substantially non-crystalline due to the adhesive properties of such polymers.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,982,051, issued Sep. 21, 1976 to Taft et al., discloses a carpet containing a hot-melt composition of ethylene copolymer, atactic polypropylene and vulcanized rubber. The atactic, substantially non-crystalline, polypropylene used in the hot-melt composition may be obtained as a by-product from the preparation of substantially crystalline, isotactic, polypropylene. Atactic polypropylene is particularly suitable as a hot-melt composition due to its adhesive nature whereas isotactic polypropylene is not particularly suitable as a hot-melt composition due to its lack of adhesive properties.
Other patents that disclose various hot-melt compositions used in the manufacture of carpet include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,875,954; 4,844,765; 4,576,665; 4,522,857; RE 31,826; 3,940,525; B 501,415; 3,676,280; 3,537,946; 3,390,035; and British Patent Publication 971,958.
While the hot-melt compositions and processes heretofore known are considerably simpler than the latex process, the preparation of carpets of non-uniform quality has, at times, been encountered. Specifically, such carpets using hot-melt adhesives cannot, with reproducible consistency, be prepared with high scrim bonds (force required to remove the secondary backing from the finished carpet), high tuft pull strength (force required to pull one of the tufts out of the carpet), and high fuzz resistance (an indication of the individual carpet yarns to fuzz and form pills). Thus, while such hot-melt compositions are appealing from a standpoint of cost, speed and safety, some difficulties have been encountered in preparing completely satisfactory carpet. See U.S. Pat. No. 3,551,231, issued Dec. 29, 1970 to Smedberg.
Furthermore, neither the latex adhesive based carpet nor the hot-melt adhesive based carpet may be recycled. Thus, large quantities of carpet trimmings and scrap produced during the manufacture of carpet and used carpet are sent to landfills. Consequently, carpet manufacturers spend a substantial sum on landfill costs.
Thus, while conventional carpet and carpet manufacturing processes are known, these carpets and manufacturing processes have inherent problems due to the compositions employed therein. Specifically, the adhesives used to adhere the tufts of face fiber to the primary backing and to adhere the secondary backing to the primary backing include compositions which require lengthy drying times thus slowing down the manufacturing process. In addition, the latex compositions may produce noxious off gases which create health hazards. Likewise, many of the hot-melt compositions conventionally employed in the manufacture of carpet do not result in reproducible consistency regarding scrim bonds, tuft pull strength and fuzz resistance. Finally, and most importantly, the use of conventional latex adhesives and hot-melt adhesives prevent carpet from being recycled.
From the above background, it is quite apparent that there is need in the art for an improved carpet and method for producing carpet as well as a method for recycling carpet.

Carpet and techniques for making and recycling same

Tennessee Valley Performance Products, Inc.


An organic electroluminescence display device made by a laser induced thermal imaging process has a substrate having first and second electrode layers, and an organic layer having red, green, and blue light-emitting layers between the electrode layers. Thermosetting light-emitting materials are used to form the red, green, and blue light-emitting layers, and a laser is then selectively irradiated onto a light-to-heat conversion layer formed on the substrate to deliver heat energy converted from light energy through the light-to-heat conversion layer to the thermosetting light-emitting materials so that curing is progressed to form patterned light-emitting layers. In accordance with the fabrication method of the present invention, the light-emitting materials may be patterned using a laser, thereby fabricating a large scaled organic electroluminescence display device and simplifying the process by not using a mask when the light-emitting layers are formed.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to, an organic electroluminescence (EL) device, more particularly to a full color organic electroluminescence (EL) display device, which enables light-emitting layers to be patterned by introducing a thermosetting light-emitting material and a light-to-heat conversion layer capable of converting light energy of a laser to heat energy and a method for manufacturing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, an organic EL display device is composed of several layers such as an anode, a cathode, a hole injecting layer, a hole transporting layer, a light-emitting layer, an electron transporting layer, and an electron injecting layer. The organic EL display devices may be classified into polymeric and small molecular types based on materials to be used, and each layer may be formed by vacuum deposition in the case of small molecular organic EL devices and by spin coating in the case of polymeric organic EL devices to form light-emitting devices.
In the case of single color devices, the organic EL device using the polymer may be simply fabricated using the spin coating process, however, it has a disadvantage that efficiency and lifetime are degraded in spite of a low driving voltage compared to the small molecular type.
When a full color device is fabricated, each of the red, green, and blue color polymers should be patterned, which causes luminous properties including efficiency and lifetime to be degraded when an inkjet printing method or a laser induced thermal imaging (LITI) method is used. In order to apply the LITI method, a light source, a transfer film, and a substrate are at least required, and light emitted from the light source should be absorbed by a light-absorbing layer of the transfer film, and should be converted to heat energy. The transfer materials of the transfer film should be transferred onto the substrate by means of the converted heat energy to form a desired image. (See U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,220,348, 5,256,506, 5,278,023, and 5,308.737 for its reference.)
The LITI method uses a donor film which is not a proper material when it is applied to a substrate with a complicated structure having stepped regions, and in particular, it is not preferable to use the donor film because external physical force is applied to surfaces of the substrate and the light-emitting layer when it is attached or detached thereto to thereby deteriorate interfacial properties. In addition, in the case of the polymer which forms the light-emitting layer, molecular weight is large so that adhesive strength of the film becomes higher after the LITI process is performed, which causes transfer properties to be deteriorated.
As a result, R, G, B patterning for the full color organic EL display device generally uses shadow mask technology to the latest, which is not suitable for patterning a large scaled display device.
In recent years, polymer types having a structure suitable for a photolithography process have been developed to pattern red, green, and blue light-emitting layers to fabricate the full color organic EL display device. However, in this method, a photo-acid generator which is blended to cure an exposed portion may cause impurities to infiltrate inside, and super acid resulted from curing may cause active materials to be damaged so that reliability or lifetime of the device may be adversely affected.

Full color organic electroluminescence display devices by thermal patterning using laser and method for manufacturing the same


A method for producing a protein adsorbent comprising a substrate and a molecular chain fixed on the surface of the substrate is disclosed. The method comprises, in this order: a dry-heat treatment step of heating a pretreatment adsorbent comprising the substrate and the molecular chain fixed on the surface of the substrate, in which the molecular chain contains a weak electrolytic ion-exchange group; and a wet-heat treatment step of heating the pretreatment adsorbent in a moistened state with a liquid or steam to obtain the protein adsorbent.

Technologies relating to a protein adsorbent for large-scale purification of a protein are disclosed in, for example, Patent Literature 1 to 5.
Patent Literature 1 discloses a purification method of a protein, which comprises a filtering step using a porous membrane having a graft chain on a pore surface, in which an anion-exchange group is fixed to the graft chain.
Patent Literature 2 discloses a porous adsorption medium in which a porous substrate is covered with an adsorption material having a cross-linked polymer to which a primary amine group is bonded.
Patent Literature 3 discloses a composite material comprising: a support structural member in which a plurality of holes extends; and macroporous cross-linked gel arranged in the holes of the support structural member and filling the holes of the support structural member, and states that it is suitable for use in separation of substances by adsorption.
Patent Literature 4 provides a positively-charged porous membrane composed of: a cross-linked coating film having a cation functional group; and a porous substrate, and states that it can be used for filtration and purification of biomolecules such as proteins, nucleic acids, and endotoxins.
Patent Literature 5 discloses an adsorption body capable of performing high-speed adsorptive purification of a protein or the like, in which a functional group having protein adsorption ability is fixed on the surface of polymer substrate particles through a polymer chain, and a producing method thereof.
An example in which surface modification of a substrate was performed by a coating film into which an amino group or a sulfonate group generally known as a functional group that can interact with a protein is introduced is disclosed in Patent Literature 6. Patent Literature 6 discloses a method in which graft polymerization is performed on the substrate by forming a coating film of an N-halogenated compound (polymer or polymer precursor) on the surface of a polymer porous substrate film and bringing a graft initiator into contact with a monomer. Furthermore, a film obtained by graft polymerization of glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) as the monomer, and subsequent introduction of a tertiary amino group/quaternary ammonium group into the epoxy group of GMA by a secondary/tertiary amine or sulfonation of the epoxy group by treatment with a sulfonate ion is described.


A laminate type battery includes a power generating element and an outer casing body. The power generating element is formed by electrically laminating in series a plurality of single battery layers in which a single battery layer is formed by sequentially laminating a positive electrode current collector, a positive electrode active material layer, an electrolyte layer, a negative electrode active material layer, and a negative electrode current collector. The power generating element is disposed inside the outer casing body. At least one of the positive electrode current collector or the negative electrode current collector includes a resin layer having conductivity. The single battery layer including the resin layer is electrically connected to an adjacent single battery layer via at least one resistance reduction layer.

In recent years, expectations are growing for widespread use of various electric vehicles with a view to solving environment and energy problems. As a key to wide spread use of these electric vehicles, vigorous development of secondary batteries as an in-vehicle power source such as a power source for driving a motor is under way. However, in order for the electric vehicles to gain wide acceptance, the batteries need to have higher performance and be less expensive. Further, there is a need for the single-charge travel distance of the electric vehicles to approach that of gasoline engine vehicles, giving rise to the demand for batteries having higher energy density. Therefore, particularly, non-aqueous electrolyte secondary batteries such as secondary batteries expecting a high capacity and high output are attracting attention.
Further, various studies on respective members (a current collector, an active material layer, and the like) of the above-described secondary batteries have been made in order to further improve output characteristics of batteries such as higher output. For example, in order to improve output density per weight of a secondary battery, in JP 2006-190649 A (corresponding to US 2008/220330 A), it has been proposed that a current collector containing a polymer material and a conductive filler (hereinafter, also referred to as the "resin current collector") is used as a current collector of a bipolar type secondary battery.

Laminate type battery and method for producing the same


An integrated modular and scalable fogponics crop growth system for cultivating a crop includes an upper growth chamber housing a leafy portion of a crop, a lower growth chamber housing a root portion of the crop, a nutrient tank and dispenser, and an environmental system. The nutrient dispenser is coupled to the nutrient tank holding a nutrient mixture for sustaining the crop. The dispenser atomizes the nutrient mixture into a nutrient fog using a booster pump and a high pressure pump capable of generating approximately 800 PSI to 1500 PSI. The high pressure pump is operatively coupled to a nozzle configured to dispense the atomized nutrient fog, substantially between 6 microns and 15 microns droplet size, into the lower growth chamber. Temperature and humidity are separately controlled in the leaf area.

The present invention relates to systems and methods for high pressure fogponics in agriculture.
Fogponics is the process of growing plants in an air and fog environment without the use of soil or an aggregate medium, also known as geoponics. Fogponics agriculture also differs from conventional hydroponics. Unlike hydroponics, which uses a liquid nutrient solution as a growing medium and essential minerals to sustain plant growth, fogponics is conducted without a growing medium.
Fogponics agriculture has been stubbornly resistant to cost effective commercialization with scale. Low and high pressure aeroponics requires an excessive number of nozzles per plant/tree to produce an evenly distributed mist and delivering nutrients at low pressure has a tendency to clog these nozzles. Traditional aeroponics has been prohibitively high cost, being challenging to design and also to operate and maintain on a commercial grow scale.
It is therefore apparent that an urgent need exists for cost effective and environmentally-friendly fogponics system. These improved systems and methods achieve highly efficient growth for large scale agriculture operations while substantially eliminating the maintenance problems associated with aeroponics.

Systems and methods for efficient fogponic agriculture


A system and method for managing bad blocks that utilizes a remapping pool formed across an array of disks to remap bad blocks formed on individual disks. When a bad block is discovered in a particular disk the bad block is then remapped within the remapping pool and is stored across multiple disks.

As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information storage is invaluable to organizations and critical to the effective use and operation of information handling systems. A basic component of storage systems are individual storage components such as hard drives. However, hard drives are susceptible to so-called bad blocks which are damaged, corrupted or malfunctioning portions of a memory which can jeopardize data availability or otherwise degrade the data integrity of a storage system. Bad blocks may result from a variety of factors such as damage to a media surface, manufacturing defects, environmental factors, excessive grown defect list (GLIST) entries, etc. These bad blocks may compromise the data integrity of a storage system such as a RAID system.
Current hard drives provide a mechanism for mapping bad blocks to another location within the drive. However, with the increasing size of disk drives the area used for remapping bad blocks has also increased. However, the actual number of blocks that will be remapped to this reserved location will vary with each individual drive. As a result, for information handling systems that employ multiple drives, in any particular drive the reserved location may be used entirely while, for another drive, the reserved location may largely go unused. For a drive with a larger number of bad blocks the reserved location may not be large enough to accommodate remapping all of the bad blocks and the hard drive must be replaced.

Method and system for bad block management in RAID arrays


An image forming apparatus of the present invention includes a first identification section for identifying whether a print target page in a print target document is color or monochrome and its page attribute, a second identification section for identifying a system speed during printing of an immediately preceding page of the print target page, a third identification section for identifying a presence of a subsequent page of the print target page and its page attribute, and a system speed determination section for selecting a print mode in conformity to a monochrome/color discrimination result based on an identification result in the first identification section and determining a system speed of the print target page based on the page attribute identified by the first identification section and identification results in the second and third identification sections.

The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as color copiers and printers.
Conventionally, so-called tandem-type color laser printers have large advantage of being able to process image data including monochrome pages and color pages both at the same print speed because latent image formation and toner image formation are executed independently by each of colors Y (yellow), M (magenta), C (cyan) and K (black). In the case of printing a document including both monochrome and color pages, printing all the pages in a color print mode causes increased load or wear of a color processing section, and therefore it is preferable to switch between a color print mode and a monochrome print mode depending on each page.
However, depending of a mixture rate of color and monochrome pages, the print mode should be switched frequently and a time taken for this switchover increases as a loss time. With respect to determination of the print mode in which the monochrome pages should be printed, various technologies (see e.g., JP 2003-237189 A) aiming at reducing the loss time have conventionally been proposed.
In a paragraph 0049 of JP 2003-237189 A, print speeds for the monochrome mode and for the color mode are varied. However, the print speed is just the "print speed" and not necessarily refers to a system speed. Generally, the print speed is not uniquely determined by the system speed but is largely influenced by other elements such as sheet intervals, and it is known that changing such elements increase the print speed.
In the meanwhile, in the tandem-type image forming apparatus supporting monochrome and color printing, the monochrome print mode which does not need to drive a color processing section can increase the system speed and consequently increase the print speed proportionally because the power consumption of the color processing section can be allotted to other sections. However, in a document including both monochrome and color pages, if the print mode is switched depending on the monochrome/color identification of each page in the document, then the system speed should also be switched accordingly. In switching the system speed, the system speed cannot be changed until the latest sheet leaves a fixing device, and this waiting period is a print stop time during which image forming process cannot be started. In the case where frequency of switchover between monochrome and color pages in the document is high, the print stop time increases cumulatively every time the print mode is switched, and this decreases the printing number per time less than a specified value.

Image forming apparatus having monochrome and color print modes and a plurality of system speeds

Konica Minolta Business Technologies, Inc.


A termination for a light guide having optical cladding tubing and a liquid core includes a volumetric change device configured to allow fluid flow out of the tubing whenever the liquid core expands and to allow fluid flow into the tubing whenever the liquid core contracts, an end plug fixed to the tubing to retain the liquid in the liquid core within the tubing and the end piece and a crimping piece for holding the end plug in place.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a design for core liquid retention for liquid core light guides and more particularly to a design for core liquid retention during temperature cycling between 0.degree. F. and 140.degree. F. for liquid core light guides.
2. Related Prior Art
In the use of liquid core light guides problems exist in temperature induced volumetric variations. Typically, the liquids that are used significantly change volume as a function of temperature, specifically the range of 0.degree. F. (-18.degree. C.) to 140.degree. F. (60.degree. C.). During the heating of a LLG (Liquid-core Light Guide) containing such a fluid, the pressure created by volumetric expansion of the liquid is sufficient to slightly deform (i.e., elongate) the Teflon.TM. tubing. This deformation is permanent, resulting in the formation of a small bubble when the liquid core light guide is returned to normal room temperature and the liquid undergoes volumetric contraction. This effect is rooted in the significant difference between the larger volumetric expansion coefficient of the liquid as compared to that of the FEP (Teflon.TM.) tubing. The resultant bubble is large enough to drastically reduce the delivered light intensity from the liquid core light guide.
In a present commercial liquid core light guides, most commonly Series 300 from Lumatec of Munich Germany, the core liquid has a volumetric expansion coefficient that closely matches that of the Teflon.TM. tubing.
Several liquids are available that can be used to make a liquid core light guide transmit efficiently over a range from 350 to 800 nm., namely Dupont Syltherm XLT, General Electric SF-96-50, and Fluka UV-grade mineral oil. The first two are silicone oils (poly-dimethyl-siloxanes) and have been found to be radiation-hard under a 1,000 hour irradiation from ultra-violet (UV) light (centered at 365 nm) that varied in intensity from 1-4 W/cm.sup.2. The third is not radiation-hard, but is a very efficient transmitter of visible and near-IR light. All three are relatively inexpensive. However, none of these possible liquids have a volumetric expansion coefficient that closely matches that of the Teflon.TM. tubing and were undesirable for operational use throughout the aforementioned temperature range because of the deleterious effects due to this difference.
In addition, three new high index of refraction fluids (1.49-1.58) have been identified that can be used for efficient visible light transmission, and moreover, these fluids can used as low toxicity, non-flammable liquid scintillator bases. These are first, phenyl-xylyl-ethane (PXE), second, linear alkylbenzene (LAB) and third, isopropyl-biphenyl (IPB). With the addition of typical scintillator fluors such as PTP, BPBD, POPOP, bis-MSB, TPB, BBQ, Y7 and 3HF, one can create an active scintillating medium for use in Nuclear Science applications requiring the flexibility afforded by the liquid core light guide. In the case of PXE and LAB, such liquid scintillators can be obtained from Fisher Scientific under the Scintisafe.TM. trademark.
When compared to a commercial reference standard liquid core light guide such as series 300 from Lumatec of Germany, a UV-grade liquid core light guide can deliver up to 85% of the UV intensity (365 nm) of the Lumatec liquid core light guide at a much lower cost. However, the liquid core light guide cannot withstand a temperature cycling test such as the following. First, from room temperature, cool the liquid core light guide to 0.degree. F. for 72 hours, and then return to room temperature. Second, proceed to heat the liquid core light guide to 1400.degree. F. for 72 hours, and then return to room temperature.
During the cooling cycle, the liquid is seen to contract leaving a vacuum air bubble. Upon reheating (slowly) to room temperature, the bubble disappears and the liquid core light guide operates normally. However, after the light guide is heated and then allowed to cool as in the second step, one sees a bubble developing even though no leakage of fluid is detected. Studies of the volumetric expansion coefficient and measurements of the pressure developed during the heating of the light guide suggest strongly that the FEP Teflon.TM. is permanently deformed during the heating. This apparent increase in the tubing volume results in a slight underfilling of the tubing after the cooling to room temperature.
If the light guide can be used in normal room temperatures, for example from 600.degree. to 80.degree. F., then the normal design of the light guide can be used. For cases where the light guide operates in normal temperature conditions, but may be exposed to extreme temperatures for a short time, such as during shipping, or in cases where the light guide may have to operate in abnormal temperature conditions, an alternate design is required.
The following patents are indicative of the state of the art addressing this problem of bubble formation during the cooling process after heating.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,33,227, titled "Optical Waveguide Hose", issued to Minoru Ishiharada et al., relates to an optical waveguide hose including a hollow tubular cladding, a fluid core in the cladding, the fluid having a higher index of refraction than the cladding, and sealing plugs mated with opposite end opening of the cladding. In one form, the core fluid is filled in the cladding under positive pressure. In another form, a sheath of gas barrier material encloses the outer periphery of the cladding. The pressurized fluid core of the gas barrier sheath prevents air from penetrating into the core, allowing the hose to maintain its light transmission function.
International Patent Application, PCT publication number WO 95/121138, published on May 4, 1995, titled "Liquid Core Optical Waveguide", applied for by Frederick Harold Eastgate, relates to an optical waveguide for transmitting radiation. In one embodiment the waveguide includes a flexible tube of a material that is substantially transparent to the radiation, and a liquid core filling the tube having a refractive index greater than that of the tube material. In another embodiment the waveguide includes a tube having an inner lining, and a liquid core filling the tube and having a refractive index greater than that of the lining material. In a still further embodiment there is an optical waveguide for transmitting radiation and functioning as a non-imaging concentrator. The waveguide includes a tube having an input end and/or an output end that is greater than the diameter of the tube body.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,995,934, titled "Flexible Light Guide", issued to Gunther Nath, relates to a flexible light guide of the liquid filled type with a liquid supply container outside the light guide. In accordance with one form of the device described, a flexible light guide has a column, operating as an optic fiber or a liquid, which absorbs as little as possible of the wavelength range to be transmitted, with a predetermined index of refraction. This column is surrounded by a flexible tube of plastics material, which, in the wavelength range to be transmitted, has a somewhat lesser index of refraction than the liquid. In accordance with the device described, such a light guide has a supply container filled at least partly with the liquid and connected with the interior of the flexible tube.
The presence of the supply container ensures that the flexible tube is always completely filled with the light conducting liquid, even if in the course of time liquid should be lost from the tube. The supply container furthermore ensures satisfactory filling of the flexible tube and high transmission of the light guide even on bending of the flexible tube and in the case of high thermal loading of the liquid column owing to high intensities of radiation.
The foregoing methods and apparatus, although each effective for its limited purpose, do not solve the problem presented of permanent deformation of the Teflon.TM. tubing caused by the pressure created by the volumetric expansion of the liquid during the heating of a liquid-core light guide, resulting in the formation of a small bubble when the light guide is returned to normal room temperature.

Liquid-core light guide designed to withstand interior bubble formation from temperature-induced volumetric variations


A radial flow heat exchanger for heating or cooling a fluid includes a sealed fluid manifold for passage of fluid. A sealed fluid receiving hub is spaced interiorly of the interior peripheral portion of the manifold and includes a passageway for passage of fluid into or out of the heat exchanger. A plurality of separate and spaced fluid flow tubes are disposed between the manifold and the hub. Each of the tubes are in sealed fluid communication with the manifold at one end and the other end is in sealed fluid communication with the hub. A fin assembly is positioned between the manifold and the hub and includes a heat conducting material arranged at spaced intervals between the manifold and the hub, the heat conducting material including a plurality of spaced apertures through which tubes pass. The heat conducting material is in intimate heat conducting contact with the tubes whereby fluid flowing between the manifold and the hub flows into each of the tubes in a radial direction between the manifold and the hub and wherein the heat conducting material of the fin assembly operates to give up or pick up heat from the fluid through the wall of the tubes.

This invention relates to heat exchangers and more particularly to an improved radial flow heat exchanger in which the fluid to be heated or cooled flows between an outer peripheral portion of the heat exchanger, through a plurality of radially extending tubes, and a center hub, the tubes passing through a fin arrangement.
Various types of heat exchangers are known such as shell in tube heat exchangers and radial flow heat exchangers. In the radial flow heat exchangers of the prior art, fluid flow tubes are arranged in a helical manner with the flow of fluid being in a spiral fashion through the helically formed tubes. Typical of the prior art patents related to radial flow heat exchangers are the following: Kissinger, U.S. Pat. No. 4,182,423 of 1980; Gilli et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,712,370 of 1973; Tipman et al, U.S. Pat. No. 5,088,550 of 1992; Borjesson et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,128,125 of 1978; Dobbins et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,883,117 of 1989, by way of example.
In addition to the above, there are numerous patents dealing with heat exchangers such as those with radial baffles, U.S. Pat. No. 4,642,149; spiral heat exchangers, U.S. Pat. No. 4,993,487; circumferential flow heat exchangers, U.S. Pat. No. 5,343,936; finned tube heat exchangers, U.S. Pat. No. 5,355,944, as an example.
While most of the prior art heat exchangers generally operate satisfactorily for their intended purpose, in some cases, the heat exchanger is of a complex shape, relatively expensive to manufacture, sometimes have a relatively large profile and has an efficiency less than that desired.
Thus, there is a need for an improved radial flow heat exchanger which is relatively easy to manufacture, of a relatively small profile and which operates efficiently.


A method and to a system can be used for measuring electric voltages in batteries with a number of battery cells. A measuring circuit includes at least one digital analog converter that constitutes, in combination with a number of comparators, an analog digital converter to determine the electric voltages of the battery cells. The comparators compare a reference voltage generated by the digital analog converter with the electric voltage of the battery cells over a number of separate measuring channels to the individual battery cells.

For applications in electric vehicles, a plurality of battery cells is usually combined with one another, wherein the battery cells are as a rule lithium ion (LION) cells. To this end, the battery cells are connected with each other in series, so that a battery stack of a plurality of cells with voltages of some hundred volts results. This battery stack is in turn divided into so-called battery blocks that may each be controlled and monitored by a separate control.
A so-called ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip may, for instance, be used as a control. The object of these chips is to detect differences between the individual LION cells which are due to manufacturing and aging so as to be able to react appropriately, for instance, by specifically discharging some cells or blocks (passive balancing) or specifically redistributing charge between the cells or blocks (active balancing).
For an optimum control of the battery, as exact measuring values as possible about the voltages of the individual battery cells (cell voltages) have to be provided. Furthermore, any cell voltages have to be measured and monitored individually in such battery stacks with series connections alone for safety reasons. In doing so, a preferably simultaneous measuring of all cell voltages has to be aimed at.
In the corresponding battery blocks that comprise a number of 12 battery cells, for instance, different total voltages (common mode voltages) up to 60V may occur, which cause high demands to signal processing and measuring accuracy also for integrated circuits with high voltage technology.
The common mode voltage is defined as the average voltage of the positive and the negative voltage of a battery cell and hence corresponds to half the sum of the positive potential and the negative potential with respect to ground. The common mode voltage results, for instance, from the measured voltage of a battery cell with respect to ground, wherein a differential voltage is detected as a difference from the amount of the positive and the negative voltage. The common mode voltage interferes with cell voltages, so that one intends to eliminate it from the measurement procedure.
The common mode voltage is therefore no directly measurable voltage, but a mathematical voltage value that is used by the battery control. With the batteries in question, the common mode voltage may amount to up to 60 volts. Only the cell voltage can be measured, wherein the voltage of each battery may be different and each cell voltage may also have a different common mode level.
For measuring cell voltages in battery series connections, an analog digital converter (ADC) with a successive approximation register (SAR) or an ADC pursuant to the Sigma Delta (SD) method is used, wherein a respective HV multiplexer is used at the input thereof.
The construction of a measuring circuit with an analog digital converter and a successive approximation register has, however, as a consequence that a HV multiplexer is present in the signal path, which may have a disadvantageous effect on measuring accuracy. Moreover, the HV circuits of the multiplexer and the sample and hold members for the buffering of input voltages have a high space requirement on the integrated circuit.

System and device for determining electric voltages