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Extracting temporal information from raw text is fundamental for deep language understanding, and key to many applications like question answering, information extraction, and document summarization. Our long-term goal is to build complete temporal structure of documents and use the temporal structure in other applications like textual entailment, question answering, visualization, or others. In this paper, we present a first step, a system for extracting events, event features, main events, temporal expressions and their normalized values from raw text. Our system is a combination of deep semantic parsing with extraction rules, Markov Logic Network classifiers and Conditional Random Field classifiers. To compare with existing systems, we evaluated our system on the TempEval-1 and TempEval-2 corpus. Our system outperforms or performs competitively with existing systems that evaluate on the TimeBank, TempEval-1 and TempEval-2 corpus and our performance is very close to inter-annotator agreement of the TimeBank annotators.

Commentary on the relationship between the Convention on Biological Diversity and the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

Susan Finston is Executive Director of the American BioIndustry Alliance (ABIA), a new advocacy organization that seeks enabling conditions for biotechnology through sustainable, mutually beneficial Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) policies. Previously, she worked for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), where she was Associate Vice President for Intellectual Property, Middle East/Africa and South Asian Affairs. Prior to joining PhRMA in 1999, Finston served in the U.S. Foreign Service, specializing in intellectual property and international trade policy. She received two meritorious Honor Awards for work on bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations. From 1986 -1988, Finston served as a Motions Clerk working with active judges at the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, Illinois. She was admitted to practice before the Illinois Bar, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1986 with a joint J.D./M.P.P. degree and with a B.S. in Philosophy in 1982. Her recent article, “The Relevance of Genetic Resources to the Pharmaceutical Industry—The Industry Viewpoint,” appeared in the March 2005 Journal of World Intellectual Property.

Commentary on the Doha Development Round from a representative of Merck.

Thomas Bombelles is Director, International Government Relations, for Merck & Co., Inc. His responsibilities include definition and advocacy on important international business and policy issues for the company focusing on government agencies and other institutions in Washington, DC. Prior to joining Merck, Bombelles was the Assistant Vice President International at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the professional association representing the American research-based pharmaceutical industry globally. He has also worked as a private sector consultant, as a trade analyst in the Department of Commerce, and in the US Congress. He received an M.A. degree from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and a B.A. degree from the honors program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Health and economics have a symbiotic relationship. Although this is often examined at the individual level, it is less often examined at the more macro-level. Yet, the health sector itself is a major economic sector, in terms of employment for instance. It is linked to other sectors of the economy, in terms of the consumption of intermediate goods and services, and is integrated within the global market for goods, services and people that are subject to considerable international trade. This chapter considers these wider links, exploring the evidence for economic interactions between health and the wider macroeconomy, and considers the issues of trade and health in some detail. The chapter also introduces some macro-economic approaches that have been used in health, such as Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling, before presenting some specific examples and results. Capturing the macroeconomic implications of health policies on other sectors and the wider economy is essential if health policies are to be considered and weighed against non-health policies. Macroeconomic modeling provides an even playing field for policy assessments and a medium through which health and non-health policy implications can be jointly assessed using the same framework.

This paper develops a North-South model to evaluate the South’s incentive for patent protection when a Northern firm’s investment in quality-enhancing research and development (R&D) is affected by its patent policy. The model is used to (a) evaluate the impact of requiring the South to fulfill its key WTO obligation of instituting patent protection and (b) to address the role of two major flexibilities that WTO members enjoy with respect to their patent policies: the freedom to implement exhaustion policies of their choosing and the right to use compulsory licensing (CL) subject to certain stipulations. Two forces drive the model: how much the firm invests in R&D and whether or not selling in the South maximizes its global profit. CL improves consumer access in the South and can even raise innovation and global welfare. Provided the South implements patent protection, innovation and welfare are higher if the North follows national as opposed to international exhaustion. However, the South’s incentive for patent protection is not necessarily stronger under national exhaustion. Not only is CL more likely to be used under international exhaustion, the welfare gain resulting from its application is also higher relative to that under national exhaustion.