In this paper, we aim at the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to historical research endeavors, particularly addressing the study of religious invectives in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Tudor England. We outline a workflow spanning from raw data, through pre-processing and data selection, to an iterative annotation process. As a result, we introduce the InviTE corpus -- a corpus of almost 2000 Early Modern English (EModE) sentences, which are enriched with expert annotations regarding invective language throughout 16th-century England. Subsequently, we assess and compare the performance of fine-tuned BERT-based models and zero-shot prompted instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), which highlights the superiority of models pre-trained on historical data and fine-tuned to invective detection.

Clinically acquired brain MRIs and radiology reports are valuable but underutilized resources due to the challenges of manual analysis and data heterogeneity. We developed fine-tuned language models (LMs) to classify brain MRI reports as normal (reports with limited pathology) or abnormal, fine-tuning BERT, BioBERT, ClinicalBERT, and RadBERT on 44,661 reports. We also explored the reasoning capabilities of a leading LM, Gemini 1.5-Pro, for normal report categorization. Automated image processing and modeling generated brain growth charts from LM-classified normal scans, comparing them to human-derived charts. Fine-tuned LMs achieved high classification performance (F1-Score >97%), with unbalanced training mitigating class imbalance. Performance was robust on out-of-distribution data, with full text outperforming summary (impression) sections. Gemini 1.5-Pro showed a promising categorization performance, especially with clinical inference. LM-derived brain growth charts were nearly identical to human-annotated charts (r = 0.99, p < 2.2e-16). Our LMs offer scalable analysis of radiology reports, enabling automated classification of brain MRIs in large datasets. One application is automated generation of brain growth charts for benchmarking quantitative image features. Further research is needed to address data heterogeneity and optimize LM reasoning.

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. You are likely highly literate. As you learned to read, probably as a child, your brain reorganized itself to better accommodate your efforts, which had both functional and inadvertent consequences for your mind. So, to account for these changes to your brain--e.g,

Five hundred years ago, a man named Martin Luther questioned the teachings of the Catholic Church at the time. His actions lead to what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. Centuries after this event, a robot called BlessU-2 has been revealed in Germany to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The robot is intended to trigger debate about the future of the church and the looming potential of artificial intelligence, reports The Guardian. "We wanted people to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine, or if a human being is needed," said Stephan Krebs of the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau.

Five hundred years after revolutionary printing presses spread news of Martin Luther's radical call for church reform across Europe, technology is again challenging religious tradition in the small German town of Wittenberg. A robot priest that delivers blessings in five languages and beams light from its hands has been unveiled as part of an exhibition to mark the anniversary of the start of the Reformation, a Europe-wide religious, political and cultural upheaval sparked when Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in the town. Half a millennium later, the robot, called BlessU-2, is intended to trigger debate about the future of the church and the potential of artificial intelligence. "We wanted people to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine, or if a human being is needed," Stephan Krebs of the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau, which is behind the initiative, told the Guardian. The robot has a touchscreen chest, two arms and a head.