Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effective Bilingual Constraints for Semi-Supervised Learning of Named Entity Recognizers

Most semi-supervised methods in Natural Language Processing capitalize on unannotated resources in a single language; however, information can be gained from using parallel resources in more than one language, since translations of the same utterance in different languages can help to disambiguate each other. We demonstrate a method that makes effective use of vast amounts of bilingual text (a.k.a. bitext) to improve monolingual systems. We propose a factored probabilistic sequence model that encourages both crosslanguage and intra-document consistency. A simple Gibbs sampling algorithm is introduced for performing approximate inference. Experiments on English-Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) using the OntoNotes dataset demonstrate that our method is significantly more accurate than state-ofthe- art monolingual CRF models in a bilingual test setting. Our model also improves on previous work by Burkett et al. (2010), achieving a relative error reduction of 10.8% and 4.5% in Chinese and English, respectively. Furthermore, by annotating a moderate amount of unlabeled bi-text with our bilingual model, and using the tagged data for uptraining, we achieve a 9.2% error reduction in Chinese over the state-ofthe- art Stanford monolingual NER system.
VEGF-B Levels in the Vitreous of Diabetic and Non-Diabetic Patients with Ocular Diseases and Its Correlation with Structural Parameters

Vascular endothelial growth factor B (VEGF-B) is one of the enigmatic members of the VEGF family. The knowledge gap about VEGF-B expression and how its levels are altered in diabetic eyes were the focus of this investigation that was addressed by comparing and correlating vitreous VEGF-B between diabetic and non-diabetic patients. VEGF-B levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in vitreous samples (n = 33) from diabetic (n = 25) and non-diabetic (n = 8) patients. Results were compared between groups. Optical coherence tomography from diabetic patients was evaluated for central retinal thickness (CRT) and macular volume (MV). Mean vitreous VEGF-B concentration was higher in diabetic (18.82 ± 1.44 pg/mL) vs. non-diabetic patients (17.90 ± 0.32 pg/mL) (p = 0.006), and in proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) (19.03 ± 1.52 pg/mL) vs. non-PDR (NPDR) patients (18.18 ±0.96 pg/mL) (p = 0.025). In diabetic retinopathy (DR) patients, correlation between VEGF-B and CRT (μm) was positive and moderate: rs = 0.441 (p ≤ 0.05) and the correlation between VEGF-B and MV (mm3) was positive and robust: rs = 0.716 (p ≤ 0.01). VEGF-B levels are overexpressed in vitreous of diabetic patients, and the levels are higher in developed stages of DR. Correlation results show that CRT and MV increase with increased levels of VEGF-B. Targeting VEGF-B inhibition may have therapeutic beneficial implications.
The Consequences of Seniors Seeking Health Information Using the Internet and Other Sources

The internet is viewed as an important channel for patient empowerment, enabling patients to feel more knowledgeable and take action to improve their own health. Internet use among seniors in the Netherlands is increasing, but it is not known if they also use it for health information, nor if seeking information on the internet has different consequences for empowerment than seeking information from other sources. We sought to investigate seniors' use of the internet compared to other resources for health information, and the consequences in terms of both subjective responses and actions taken. Using an email invitation and a web survey, we surveyed 100 elderly internet users, of which 85% had used the internet for health information. The consequences were similar for information found via internet and other sources, and generally positive. Over half reported feeling more knowledgeable and 51% reported making lifestyle changes, but fewer reported having taken other actions (e.g. discussing the information with their doctor). Encouraging the translation of knowledge into action represents an opportunity for empowerment in this population.
Monte Carlo Variational Method and the Ground-State of Helium

The Variational Monte Carlo method is used to evaluate the energy of the ground state of the helium atom. The relativistic effect is taken into account. Trial wave functions depending on the variational parameters are constructed for this purpose. Energies as well as standard deviations are plotted versus the variational parameters. The experimental data are presented for comparison.
Determinant quantum Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional single-band Hubbard-Holstein model

We have performed numerical studies of the Hubbard-Holstein model in two dimensions using determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC). Here, we present details of the method, emphasizing the treatment of the lattice degrees of freedom, and then study the filling and behavior of the fermion sign as a function of model parameters. We find a region of parameter space with large Holstein coupling where the fermion sign recovers despite large values of the Hubbard interaction. This indicates that studies of correlated polarons at finite carrier concentrations are likely accessible to DQMC simulations. We then restrict ourselves to the half-filled model and examine the evolution of the antiferromagnetic structure factor, other metrics for antiferromagnetic and charge-density-wave order, and energetics of the electronic and lattice degrees of freedom as a function of electron-phonon coupling. From this we find further evidence for a competition between charge-density-wave and antiferromagnetic orders at half-filling.
Adherence to climate change-related ingroup norms: Do dimensions of group identification matter?

Recent research provides evidence that group norms influence intentions to engage in pro-climate behaviour and that identification with the group moderates the norm effects. However, past studies have neglected to examine if the effects on norm adherence vary among different identification aspects. The present studies close this gap by investigating group-level self-investment (i.e. the importance of and satisfaction with the group) and self-definition (i.e. perceived similarities among group members) as possible moderators of group norm effects. We used two experimental studies to test our assumption that self-investment but not self-definition would moderate the norm-intention relation. The results support our assumption and show that group members who were highly self-invested in the group (but did not necessarily perceive themselves as similar to other group members) adhered more strongly to climate-related ingroup norms than less self-invested group members. However, perceived similarity among group members (i.e. self-definition) did not positively contribute to respondents' decision to conform to a group norm. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Chemical Composition and Rheological Properties of Set Yoghurt Prepared from Skimmed Milk Treated with Horseradish Peroxidase

Summary The aim of this work is to determine the impact of an enzymatic treatment on the fermentation and rheological properties of set yoghurt prepared from skimmed milk. Skimmed bovine milk was treated with horseradish peroxidase added at the level of 645 U per g of proteins in the presence (addition level of 7.8 mmol per L of milk) or absence of ferulic acid as a cross-linking agent, and used to prepare set yoghurt with commercial direct vat set starter culture. The evaluation showed that the treatment of skimmed milk with horseradish peroxidase enhanced its apparent viscosity, and storage and loss moduli. The prepared yoghurt contained protein, fat and total solids at 3.49–3.59, 0.46–0.52 and 15.23–15.43 %, respectively, had titratable acidity of 0.83–0.88 %, and no significant difference in the composition was found among the yoghurt samples (p>0.05). Compared to the control yoghurt, the yoghurt prepared from the milk treated with horseradish peroxidase had a higher apparent viscosity, storage and loss moduli and flow behavior indices, especially when ferulic acid was added. Yoghurt samples from the skimmed milk treated either with horseradish peroxidase only or with the additional ferulic acid treatment had better structural reversibility, because their hysteresis loop area during rheological analysis was larger (p<0.05).
Exploring the Role of Laughter in Multiparty Conversation

Conversation is widely studied through corpus analysis, often concentrating on ‘task-based’ interactions such as information gap activities (map-tasks [1], spot the difference [2], ranking items [3]) and real or staged business meetings [4], [5]. This task-based dialogue (on which spoken dialogue technology is based [6]) relies heavily on verbal information exchange. However, the immediate task in natural conversation is often not so clear and the purpose of some interaction may be best described as social bonding. Laughter is universally observed in human interaction. It is multimodal: a stereotyped exhalation from the mouth in conjunction with rhythmic head and body movement [7]. It is part of the gesture call system, older than language [8], predominantly social rather than solo, and aiding social bonding [9]. It punctuates speech [10], and manifests in a range of forms [11]. We investigate laughter in situ, using corpora of nonscripted (spontaneous) multiparty interaction: the task-oriented AMI meetings corpus [5], and the conversational TableTalk [12], d64 [13], and DANS corpora. We address laughter and topic change, multimodal aspects of laughter, and the interplay of laughter and bio-signals. In earlier work on topic change in AMI and TableTalk we found that laughter, and especially shared laughter, is likely near topic change in both corpora, with a stronger effect in TableTalk, and that the number of people laughing together grows with proximity to topic change in TableTalk [14], [15]. These results on multiparty interaction reflect the literature on laughter in two-party dialogue [16], [17], which points towards discourse functions for laughter as a topic termination mechanism. To investigate whether these findings reflect a general phenomenon we extend this temporal analysis to the DANS Corpus. We speculate that laughter may function as a strategy to instigate a topic change, or as a marker of topic exhaustion providing a buffer against an embarrassing silence. We are examining laughter in terms of speaker role (who speaks/laughs first and last, etc.) and turn-taking activity to better understand its function. Our work on multimodality investigates the perception of audio and visual laughter cues by naive annotators, to investigate whether they can reliably spot unimodally. We are also exploring the interplay of laughter and electro-dermal activity (EDA), linked to levels of emotional arousal [18] and to cognitive load [19]. Social chat has been linked to implicit processing, which is reported to involve lower cognitive load [20], while laughter has been observed to be more frequent in social than in task-based dialogue [21].
Sacred and Profane American History: Does It Exist in Textbooks?

Tony WATErS, a sociologist at California State University, Chico, has raised an interesting issue about the intellectual conflict some of his students experienced when they arrived on campus and enrolled in American history classes. He reported students were perplexed to find there were two kinds of American history—the version they learned in middle/high school and a differing collegiate point of view.1 Freshmen believed that their college instruction clashed with the history they were taught in the earlier grades. Waters attempted to analyze this dilemma by employing a paradigm from sociology and divided history teaching into the sacred and the profane.2 Specifically, he borrowed from the work of Emile Durkheim, who used this division to explain the tension in many aspects of society as individuals grappled with the ideal of what they believed should be, and contrasted it against the reality of what actually occurred in daily life. Durkheim proposed there was a dualistic nature in human endeavors and Waters adapted this interpretation to explain the two views of history.3 Students said their pre-college history courses provided an approach to America’s past that emphasized “a triumphal, grand-sweep perspective. ”4 This view represented a “glass half-full” view of American history. Many freshmen, however, began to realize that this treatment was incomplete and that they did not learn “real” history until they got to college. The result of
Association Between Toll‐like Receptor 4 and Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background: The human Toll‐like receptor 4 (TLR4) participates in the innate response. Recently, the TLR4 variant Asp299Gly has been described to affect the response of this receptor to lipopolysaccharide. As such, there is a potentially important role of TLR4 in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We studied the involvement of TLR4 in IBD in a large population of Dutch patients with IBD and in family‐based controls. Methods: In 781 IBD cases and 315 controls, genotyping was performed for Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile variants and for 4 microsatellite markers flanking TLR4. Association analysis and the were applied. In addition, interaction of TLR4 with the caspase recruitment domain containing protein 15 gene (CARD15) was studied in patients with Crohn's disease (CD). Results: The haplotype sharing statistic showed association at microsatellite marker D9S1864 with IBD (P = 0.0019), and in particular with CD (P = 0.0025) and at TLR406 with ulcerative colitis (UC; P = 0.027). No association was found for Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile. However, the frequencies of both variant allele carriers were higher among CD cases with a disease onset ≥40 years than among controls. No evidence for interaction between TLR4 and CARD15 was found. Conclusions: Haplotype analysis shows that TLR4 is associated with both CD and UC. The Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile variants do not show an association with CD, UC, or IBD as a group, indicating that these polymorphisms are likely not the causal ones. We propose that the 2 polymorphisms are in linkage with (the) disease susceptibility variant(s) located elsewhere on TLR4.
Reducing latency in an SRAM/DRAM cache hierarchy via a novel Tag-Cache architecture

Memory speed has become a major performance bottleneck as more and more cores are integrated on a multi-core chip. The widening latency gap between high speed cores and memory has led to the evolution of multi-level SRAM/DRAM cache hierarchies that exploit the latency benefits of smaller caches (e.g. private L1 and L2 SRAM caches) and the capacity benefits of larger caches (e.g. shared L3 SRAM and shared L4 DRAM cache). The main problem of employing large L3/L4 caches is their high tag lookup latency. To solve this problem, we introduce the novel concept of small and low latency SRAM/DRAM Tag-Cache structures that can quickly determine whether an access to the large L3/L4 caches will be a hit or a miss. The performance of the proposed Tag-Cache architecture depends upon the Tag-Cache hit rate and to improve it we propose a novel Tag-Cache insertion policy and a DRAM row buffer mapping policy that reduce the latency of memory requests. For a 16-core system, this improves the average harmonic mean instruction per cycle throughput of latency sensitive applications by 13.3% compared to state-of-the-art.
The neuronal response at extended timescales: a linearized spiking input–output relation

Many biological systems are modulated by unknown slow processes. This can severely hinder analysis – especially in excitable neurons, which are highly non-linear and stochastic systems. We show the analysis simplifies considerably if the input matches the sparse “spiky” nature of the output. In this case, a linearized spiking Input–Output (I/O) relation can be derived semi-analytically, relating input spike trains to output spikes based on known biophysical properties. Using this I/O relation we obtain closed-form expressions for all second order statistics (input – internal state – output correlations and spectra), construct optimal linear estimators for the neuronal response and internal state and perform parameter identification. These results are guaranteed to hold, for a general stochastic biophysical neuron model, with only a few assumptions (mainly, timescale separation). We numerically test the resulting expressions for various models, and show that they hold well, even in cases where our assumptions fail to hold. In a companion paper we demonstrate how this approach enables us to fit a biophysical neuron model so it reproduces experimentally observed temporal firing statistics on days-long experiments.
Simultaneous Manipulation of Parameters of Auditory Icons to Convey Direction, Size, and Distance: Effects on Recognition and Interpretation

Auditory icons – or environmental sounds – have the potential to convey information by non-verbal means quickly and accurately. In addition, human listeners are quick to determine many qualities of an auditory object, such as location, distance, size, and motion, from acoustics of the signal. An experiment tests these two coupled assumptions in a controlled laboratory context. Stimuli consisted of auditory icons “loaded” with information achieved through systematic manipulation of the acoustic parameters pitch, volume ramping, and reverberation. Sixty adult listeners were asked to recognize and describe four auditory icons wherein object size, distance and direction of motion were captured in the parameters of each 1-second sound. Participants were accurate at recognizing and interpreting the icons 70-80% of the time. Recognition rate was consistently high when participants responded to one, two or three parameters. However, recognition was significantly poorer when in response to all four parameters. There was a significant effect of icon type and parameter manipulation: dog bark was the most easily recognized icon, and the direction parameter interpreted most accurately. Implications of the findings for applied contexts are discussed.
Metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor memory FET with long retention and high endurance

A ferroelectric memory field-effect transistor (FET) with a Pt-SrBi/sub 2/Ta/sub 2/O/sub 9/-Hf-Al-O-Si gate stack was fabricated and its electrical properties were characterized. The insulating and ferroelectric layers were successively deposited by a laser ablation technique. Excellent data retention characteristics were obtained. The drain currents of on- and off-states were measured as a function of time, after /spl plusmn/6 V poling voltage applied to the gate electrode. The current ratio of the on- and off-states was more than 10/sup 6/ even after 12 days. Moreover, after 10/sup 12/ cycles of /spl plusmn/8 V pulses, this ratio was also more than 10/sup 6/.
Genetic Regulation of Bone Metabolism in the Chicken: Similarities and Differences to Mammalian Systems

Birds have a unique bone physiology, due to the demands placed on them through egg production. In particular their medullary bone serves as a source of calcium for eggshell production during lay and undergoes continuous and rapid remodelling. We take advantage of the fact that bone traits have diverged massively during chicken domestication to map the genetic basis of bone metabolism in the chicken. We performed a quantitative trait locus (QTL) and expression QTL (eQTL) mapping study in an advanced intercross based on Red Junglefowl (the wild progenitor of the modern domestic chicken) and White Leghorn chickens. We measured femoral bone traits in 456 chickens by peripheral computerised tomography and femoral gene expression in a subset of 125 females from the cross with microarrays. This resulted in 25 loci for female bone traits, 26 loci for male bone traits and 6318 local eQTL loci. We then overlapped bone and gene expression loci, before checking for an association between gene expression and trait values to identify candidate quantitative trait genes for bone traits. A handful of our candidates have been previously associated with bone traits in mice, but our results also implicate unexpected and largely unknown genes in bone metabolism. In summary, by utilising the unique bone metabolism of an avian species, we have identified a number of candidate genes affecting bone allocation and metabolism. These findings can have ramifications not only for the understanding of bone metabolism genetics in general, but could also be used as a potential model for osteoporosis as well as revealing new aspects of vertebrate bone regulation or features that distinguish avian and mammalian bone.
Asian Economic and Social Society The Effects of Cost Leadership Strategy and Product Differentiation Strategy on the Performance of Firms

This study empirically investigates the effects of business strategies on the relationship between financial leverage and the performance of firms. The research data is collected from 45 firms in the Tehran Security Exchange (TSE) during 2003-2010.The statistical technique is used to examine the assumption of multiple regressions. To test the assumptions, firms were divided into 2 groups: firms with cost leadership strategy and firms with product differentiation strategy. The results indicated that in the firms with cost leadership strategy, there were positive relationships between leverage; cost leadership strategy and dividend payout with performance. The results also suggested that there were positive relationships between leverage and firm's size with performance in the firms with product differentiation strategy, but the relation between product differentiation strategy and dividend payout with performance was negative.
Uncertainty on Travel Time in Kinematic Wave Channel Routing

Channel flow routing provides information on the movement of flood wave as it travels downstream. From the flood forecast viewpoint, it is desirable to have some knowledge about the expected arrival time of peak flow. However, many parameters involved in the flow routing model, in reality, can not be quantified with certainty. In this paper, a probabilistic analysis using the Mellin transform is performed to assess the uncertainty in computing the travel time of flood wave based on the kinematic wave model. Information about the uncertainty of the arrival time of flood peak may have a potential impact on decision making relating to various contingency plans in attempting to alleviate the potential flood damage. INTRODUCTION Channel flood routing is an important hydraulic engineering practice because it deals with the modeling of movement of flow along the channel over time. Results of channel flow routing provide information regarding to the temporal and spatial distributions of flood wave which is essential f o r flood warning and protection. Mathematical models used in channel flood routing range from very sophisticated 3D distributed-parameter models such as the St. Venant full dynamic wave equation to the simple lumpparameter Muskingum model (Chow et al., 1988). Intuitively, a sophisticated model not only is expansive and difficult to use, but a l s o it requires a large amount of data with reasonable accuracy in order to produce reliable results. The selection of an appropriate model to use would generally be dictated by a number of factors such as objectives of the study, accuracy requirements, data availability, budget and time constraints, and others. The solution to a channel flood routing model is a function of hydrologic characteristics of the channel such as roughness, slope, channel geometry and boundary conditions. Deterministic analysis of channel flood routing would assume that a l l model parameters, boundary conditions and initial conditions are known with certainty. Such idealizations, in