LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A training-based speech regeneration approach with cascading mapping models

Computational speech reconstruction algorithms have the ultimate aim of returning natural sounding speech to aphonic and dysphonic patients as well as those who can only whisper. In particular, individuals who have lost glottis function due to disease or surgery, retain the power of vocal tract modulation to some degree but they are unable to speak anything more than hoarse whispers without prosthetic aid. While whispering can be seen as a natural and secondary aspect of speech communications for most people, it becomes the primary mechanism of communications for those who have impaired voice production mechanisms, such as laryngectomees. In this paper, by considering the current limitations of speech reconstruction methods, a novel algorithm for converting whispers to normal speech is proposed and the efficiency of the algorithm is explored. The algorithm relies upon cascading mapping models and makes use of artificially generated whispers (called whisperised speech) to regenerate natural phonated speech from whispers. Using a training-based approach, the mapping models exploit whisperised speech to overcome frame to frame time alignment problems that are inherent in the speech reconstruction process. This algorithm effectively regenerates missing information in the conventional frameworks of phonated speech reconstruction, ∗Corresponding author Email address: hsharifzadeh@unitec.ac.nz (Hamid R. Sharifzadeh) Preprint submitted to Journal of Computers & Electrical Engineering February 15, 2016 and is able to outperform the current state-of-the-art regeneration methods using both subjective and objective criteria.
Comment on "Reduced system dynamics from the N-body Schrödinger equation"

We argue that the "reduced wave function", proposed recently [Phys.Rev.Lett. {\bf 75}, 2255 (1995)], contains conditional and restricted information on the reduced system. The concept of "reduced wave function" can thus not represent a relevant alternative to the common reduced dynamics methods.
Religious coping and use of intensive life-prolonging care near death in patients with advanced cancer.

CONTEXT
Patients frequently rely on religious faith to cope with cancer, but little is known about the associations between religious coping and the use of intensive life-prolonging care at the end of life.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the way religious coping relates to the use of intensive life-prolonging end-of-life care among patients with advanced cancer.


DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
A US multisite, prospective, longitudinal cohort of 345 patients with advanced cancer, who were enrolled between January 1, 2003, and August 31, 2007. The Brief RCOPE assessed positive religious coping. Baseline interviews assessed psychosocial and religious/spiritual measures, advance care planning, and end-of-life treatment preferences. Patients were followed up until death, a median of 122 days after baseline assessment.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Intensive life-prolonging care, defined as receipt of mechanical ventilation or resuscitation in the last week of life. Analyses were adjusted for demographic factors significantly associated with positive religious coping and any end-of-life outcome at P < .05 (ie, age and race/ethnicity). The main outcome was further adjusted for potential psychosocial confounders (eg, other coping styles, terminal illness acknowledgment, spiritual support, preference for heroics, and advance care planning).


RESULTS
A high level of positive religious coping at baseline was significantly associated with receipt of mechanical ventilation compared with patients with a low level (11.3% vs 3.6%; adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 2.81 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 1.03-7.69]; P = .04) and intensive life-prolonging care during the last week of life (13.6% vs 4.2%; AOR, 2.90 [95% CI, 1.14-7.35]; P = .03) after adjusting for age and race. In the model that further adjusted for other coping styles, terminal illness acknowledgment, support of spiritual needs, preference for heroics, and advance care planning (do-not-resuscitate order, living will, and health care proxy/durable power of attorney), positive religious coping remained a significant predictor of receiving intensive life-prolonging care near death (AOR, 2.90 [95% CI, 1.07-7.89]; P = .04).


CONCLUSIONS
Positive religious coping in patients with advanced cancer is associated with receipt of intensive life-prolonging medical care near death. Further research is needed to determine the mechanisms for this association.
Testing and validating high level components for automated driving: simulation framework for traffic scenarios

Current advances in the research field of autonomous driving demand advanced simulation methods for testing and validation. By combining versatile foci of different simulations, we can provide an increased amount and diversity of realistic traffic scenarios, which are relevant to the development and verification of high level automated driving functions. The focus of the present paper is to propose a concept for realistic simulation scenarios, which is capable of running in different integration levels, from software- to vehicle-in-the-loop. Its application is demonstrated, exposing an experimental vehicle, which is used for autonomous driving development, to a traffic scenario with virtual vehicles on a real road network.
Reasoning with !-Graphs

The aim of this thesis is to present an extension to the string graphs of Dixon, Duncan and Kissinger that allows the finite representation of certain infinite families of graphs and graph rewrite rules, and to demonstrate that a logic can be built on this to allow the formalisation of inductive proofs in the string diagrams of compact closed and traced symmetric monoidal categories. String diagrams provide an intuitive method for reasoning about monoidal categories. However, this does not negate the ability for those using them to make mistakes in proofs. To this end, there is a project (Quantomatic) to build a proof assistant for string diagrams, at least for those based on categories with a notion of trace. The development of string graphs has provided a combinatorial formalisation of string diagrams, laying the foundations for this project. The prevalence of commutative Frobenius algebras (CFAs) in quantum information theory, a major application area of these diagrams, has led to the use of variable-arity nodes as a shorthand for normalised networks of Frobenius algebra morphisms, so-called “spider notation”. This notation greatly eases reasoning with CFAs, but string graphs are inadequate to properly encode this reasoning. This dissertation firstly extends string graphs to allow for variable-arity nodes to be represented at all, and then introduces !-box notation – and structures to encode it – to represent string graph equations containing repeated subgraphs, where the number of repetitions is abitrary. This can be used to represent, for example, the “spider law” of CFAs, allowing two spiders to be merged, as well as the much more complex generalised bialgebra law that can arise from two interacting CFAs. This work then demonstrates how we can reason directly about !-graphs, viewed as (typically infinite) families of string graphs. Of particular note is the presentation of a form of graph-based induction, allowing the formal encoding of proofs that previously could only be represented as a mix of string diagrams and explanatory text.
The role of self-construal in consumers' electronic word of mouth (eWOM) in social networking sites: A social cognitive approach

The current study reconceptualized self-construal as a social cognitive indicator of self-observation that individuals employ for developing and maintaining social relationship with others. From the social cognitive perspective, this study investigated how consumers’ self-construal can affect consumers’ electronic word of mouth (eWOM) behavior through two cognitive factors (online community engagement self-efficacy and social outcome expectations) in the context of a social networking site. This study conducted an online experiment that directed 160 participants to visit a newly created online community. The results demonstrated that consumers’ relational view became salient when the consumers’ self-construal was primed to be interdependent rather than independent. Further, the results showed that such interdependent self-construal positively influenced consumers’ eWOM behavioral intentions through their community engagement self-efficacy and their social outcome expectations. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Conducting an acute intense interval exercise session during the Ramadan fasting month: what is the optimal time of the day?

This study examines the effects of Ramadan fasting on performance during an intense exercise session performed at three different times of the day, i.e., 08:00, 18:00, and 21:00 h. The purpose was to determine the optimal time of the day to perform an acute high-intensity interval exercise during the Ramadan fasting month. After familiarization, nine trained athletes performed six 30-s Wingate anaerobic test (WAnT) cycle bouts followed by a time-to-exhaustion (T(exh)) cycle on six separate randomized and counterbalanced occasions. The three time-of-day nonfasting (control, CON) exercise sessions were performed before the Ramadan month, and the three corresponding time-of-day Ramadan fasting (RAM) exercise sessions were performed during the Ramadan month. Note that the 21:00 h session during Ramadan month was conducted in the nonfasted state after the breaking of the day's fast. Total work (TW) completed during the six WAnT bouts was significantly lower during RAM compared to CON for the 08:00 and 18:00 h (p < .017; effect size [d] = .55 [small] and .39 [small], respectively) sessions, but not for the 21:00 h (p = .03, d = .18 [trivial]) session. The T(exh) cycle duration was significantly shorter during RAM than CON in the 18:00 (p < .017, d = .93 [moderate]) session, but not in the 08:00 (p = .03, d = .57 [small]) and 21:00 h (p = .96, d = .02 [trivial]) sessions. In conclusion, Ramadan fasting had a small to moderate, negative impact on quality of performance during an acute high-intensity exercise session, particularly during the period of the daytime fast. The optimal time to conduct an acute high-intensity exercise session during the Ramadan fasting month is in the evening, after the breaking of the day's fast.
Feasibility study of an optimised person-centred intervention to improve mental health and reduce antipsychotics amongst people with dementia in care homes: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND
People living in care homes often have complex mental and physical health problems, disabilities and social needs which are compounded by the use of psychiatric and other drugs. In the UK dementia care is a national priority with a vast impact on services. WHELD combines the most effective elements of existing approaches to develop a comprehensive but practical intervention. This will be achieved by training care staff to provide care that is focused on an understanding of the individual and their needs; and by using additional components such as exercise, activities and social interaction to improve mental health and quality of life (QoL) and reduce the use of sedative drugs.


DESIGN
Work Package 3 (WP3) is the pilot randomised trial and qualitative evaluation to help develop a future definitive randomised controlled clinical trial. The study design is a cluster randomised 2x2x2 factorial design with two replications in 16 care homes. Each care home is randomized to receive one of the eight possible permutations of the four key interventions, with each possible combination delivered in two of the 16 homes. Each cluster includes a minimum of 12 participants (depending upon size of the care home, the number of people with dementia and the number consenting).


DISCUSSION
The overarching goal of the programme is to provide an effective, simple and practical intervention which improves the mental health of, and reduces sedative drug use in, people with dementia in care homes and which can be implemented nationally in all UK care homes as an NHS intervention.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
Current controlled trials ISRCTN40313497.
Capacity of Wireless Multi-hop Networks Using Physical Carrier Sense and Transmit Power Control

In this paper, we investigate the capacity of CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) based wireless multi-hop networks with random topologies described by the hop length distribution. First we develop an analytical model for the effective link capacity as a function of transmit power adaptation policy, physical carrier sense threshold, hop length distribution and medium access probability of p−persistent CSMA. Secondly, we devise an optimal transmit power control scheme that maximizes the network capacity by adjusting the transmit power and the corresponding physical carrier sense threshold. Thereafter, it is extended for the joint optimization of these parameters with the medium access probability of CSMA. Finally we compare the optimal power control scheme with the minimum transmit power policy in [1]. Results show that the proposed power control scheme optimally trades off the spatial reuse (number of interfering links) to the link SIR (Signal-to-Interference Ratio) and achieves an amount of ∼%15 increase in network capacity when both schemes employ joint optimization.
Learning to Classify Documents According to Formal and Informal Style

This paper discusses an important issue in computational linguistics: classifying texts as formal or informal style. Our work describes a genreindependent methodology for building classifiers for formal and informal texts. We used machine learning techniques to do the automatic classification, and performed the classification experiments at both the document level and the sentence level. First, we studied the main characteristics of each style, in order to train a system that can distinguish between them. We then built two datasets: the first dataset represents general-domain documents of formal and informal style, and the second represents medical texts. We tested on the second dataset at the document level, to determine if our model is sufficiently general, and that it works on any type of text. The datasets are built by collecting documents for both styles from different sources. After collecting the data, we extracted features from each text. The features that we designed represent the main characteristics of both styles. Finally, we tested several classification algorithms, namely Decision Trees, Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machines, in order to choose the classifier that generates the best classification results. 1 LiLT Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2012. Learning to Classify Documents According to Formal and Informal Style. Copyright c © 2012, CSLI Publications. 2 / LiLT volume 8, issue 1 March 2012
Reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes with lifestyle intervention or metformin.

BACKGROUND
Type 2 diabetes affects approximately 8 percent of adults in the United States. Some risk factors--elevated plasma glucose concentrations in the fasting state and after an oral glucose load, overweight, and a sedentary lifestyle--are potentially reversible. We hypothesized that modifying these factors with a lifestyle-intervention program or the administration of metformin would prevent or delay the development of diabetes.


METHODS
We randomly assigned 3234 nondiabetic persons with elevated fasting and post-load plasma glucose concentrations to placebo, metformin (850 mg twice daily), or a lifestyle-modification program with the goals of at least a 7 percent weight loss and at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week. The mean age of the participants was 51 years, and the mean body-mass index (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) was 34.0; 68 percent were women, and 45 percent were members of minority groups.


RESULTS
The average follow-up was 2.8 years. The incidence of diabetes was 11.0, 7.8, and 4.8 cases per 100 person-years in the placebo, metformin, and lifestyle groups, respectively. The lifestyle intervention reduced the incidence by 58 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 48 to 66 percent) and metformin by 31 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 17 to 43 percent), as compared with placebo; the lifestyle intervention was significantly more effective than metformin. To prevent one case of diabetes during a period of three years, 6.9 persons would have to participate in the lifestyle-intervention program, and 13.9 would have to receive metformin.


CONCLUSIONS
Lifestyle changes and treatment with metformin both reduced the incidence of diabetes in persons at high risk. The lifestyle intervention was more effective than metformin.
Visual and statistical comparison of metagenomes

BACKGROUND
Metagenomics is the study of the genomic content of an environmental sample of microbes. Advances in the through-put and cost-efficiency of sequencing technology is fueling a rapid increase in the number and size of metagenomic datasets being generated. Bioinformatics is faced with the problem of how to handle and analyze these datasets in an efficient and useful way. One goal of these metagenomic studies is to get a basic understanding of the microbial world both surrounding us and within us. One major challenge is how to compare multiple datasets. Furthermore, there is a need for bioinformatics tools that can process many large datasets and are easy to use.


RESULTS
This article describes two new and helpful techniques for comparing multiple metagenomic datasets. The first is a visualization technique for multiple datasets and the second is a new statistical method for highlighting the differences in a pairwise comparison. We have developed implementations of both methods that are suitable for very large datasets and provide these in Version 3 of our standalone metagenome analysis tool MEGAN.


CONCLUSION
These new methods are suitable for the visual comparison of many large metagenomes and the statistical comparison of two metagenomes at a time. Nevertheless, more work needs to be done to support the comparative analysis of multiple metagenome datasets.


AVAILABILITY
Version 3 of MEGAN, which implements all ideas presented in this article, can be obtained from our web site at: www-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/software/megan.


SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Segmented snake for contour detection

The active contour model, called snake, has been proved to be an effective method in contour detection. This method has been successfully employed in the areas of object recognition, computer vision, computer graphics and biomedical images. However, this model suffers from a great limitation, that is, it is difficult to locate concave parts of an object. In view of such a limitation, a segmented snake is designed and proposed in this paper. The basic idea of the proposed method is to convert the global optimization of a closed snake curve into local optimization on a number of open snake curves. The segmented snake algorithm consists of two steps. In the first step, the original snake model is adopted to locate the initial contour near the object boundary. In the second step, a recursive split-and-merge procedure is developed to determine the final object contour. The proposed method is able to locate all convex, concave and high curvature parts of an object accurately. A number of images are selected to evaluate the capability of the proposed algorithm and the results are encouraging. ( 1998 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Active contour model Contour detection Convex and concave parts Snake model Open snake Global and local optimization
The Use of Phrases and Structured Queries in Information Retrieval

Both phrases and Boolean queries have a long history in information retrieval, particularly in commercial systems. In previous work, Boolean queries have been used as a source of phrases for a statistical retrieval model, This work, like the majority of research on phrases, resulted in little improvement in retrieval effectiveness, In this paper, we describe an approach where phrases identified in natural language queries are used to build structured queries for a probabilistic retrieval model. Our results show that using phrases in this way can improve performance, and that phrases that are automatically extracted from a natural language query perform nearly as well as manually selected phrases. 1 Introduction The use of phrases as part of a text representation or indexing language has been investigated since the early days of information retrieval research. Cleverdon, for example, included phrase-based indexing in the Cran-field studies (1966). Salton (1968) also described a variety of experiments using phrases in the SMART system. Certainly, there has always been the feeling that phrases, if used correctly, should improve the specificity of the indexing language and, consequently, the quality of the text representation. The experimental results obtained with phrases do not, however, support this intuition. These results have been very mixed, ranging from small improvements in some collections to decreases in * Current address: West F'ubtishing Company, Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Aeeociation for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. @ 1991 ACM O-8979 J-448-J/9 j[O009/0032... $J .50 effectiveness in othersl, Fagan's recent theeis (1987) is one of the most comprehensive studies of automatic indexing ueing phrases, in that he used both " statistical " and " syntactic " phrasee and varied a number of factors in the phrase formation process. A statistical phrase is defined by constraints on the number of occurrences and co-occurrences of its component words and/or the proximity between occurrences of components in a document. A syntactic phrase may be characterized by some of the came criteria as a statistical phrase, but in addition must obey some constraint on the syntactic relationships among its component words. Fagan's results showed …
Effect of the humidification device on the work of breathing during noninvasive ventilation

Abstract Objective. Heat and moisture exchangers (HME) increase circuitry deadspace compared to heated humidifiers (HH). This study compared the effect of HH and HME during noninvasive ventilation (NIV) on arterial blood gases and patient's effort assessed by respiratory muscles pressure-time product and by work of breathing (WOB). Design and setting. Randomized cross-over study in a medical intensive care unit. Patients. Nine patients receiving NIV for moderate to severe acute hypercapnic respiratory failure. Measurements. HME was randomly compared to HH during periods of 20 min. Each device was studied without (ZEEP) and with a PEEP of 5 cmH2O. At the end of each period arterial blood gases, ventilatory parameters, oesophageal and gastric pressures were recorded and indexes of patient's effort calculated. Results. Minute ventilation was significantly higher with HME than with HH (ZEEP: 15.8±3.7 vs. 12.8±3.6 l/min) despite a similar PaCO2 (60±16 vs. 57±16 mmHg). HME was associated with a greater increase in WOB (ZEEP: 15.5±7.7 vs. 8.4±4.5 J/min and PEEP: 11.3±5.7 vs. 7.3±3.8 J/min) and indexes of patient effort. NIV with HME failed to decrease WOB compared to baseline. Addition of PEEP reduced the level of effort, but similar differences between HME and HH were observed. Conclusions. In patients receiving NIV for moderate to severe acute hypercapnic respiratory failure, the use of HME lessens the efficacy of NIV in reducing effort compared to HH.