Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Knowledge-Augmented Neural Network Model for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Identifying discourse relations that are not overtly marked with discourse connectives remains a challenging problem. The absence of explicit clues indicates a need for the combination of world knowledge and weak contextual clues, which can hardly be learned from a small amount of manually annotated data. In this paper, we address this problem by augmenting the input text with external knowledge and context and by adopting a neural network model that can effectively handle the augmented text. Experiments show that external knowledge did improve the classification accuracy. Contextual information provided no significant gain for implicit discourse relations, but it did for explicit ones.
Exploratory Neural Relation Classification for Domain Knowledge Acquisition

The state-of-the-art methods for relation classification are primarily based on deep neural net- works. This kind of supervised learning method suffers from not only limited training data, but also the large number of low-frequency relations in specific domains. In this paper, we propose the task of exploratory relation classification for domain knowledge harvesting. The goal is to learn a classifier on pre-defined relations and discover new relations expressed in texts. A dynamically structured neural network is introduced to classify entity pairs to a continuously expanded relation set. We further propose the similarity sensitive Chinese restaurant process to discover new relations. Experiments conducted on a large corpus show the effectiveness of our neural network, while new relations are discovered with high precision and recall.
Utilisation of Library Information Resources among Generation Z Students: Facts and Fiction

Generation Z was the foremost generation to have prevalent access to the Internet from an early age. Technology has strongly influenced this generation in terms of communication, education and consequently their academic information behaviour. With the next generation of scholars already being trained, in a decade, most of the researchers will be mainly digital natives. This study sought to establish the library information resources use pattern in relation to users’ preferred information media in order to render better academic information services to library users. A total of 390 respondents were surveyed at the Nelson Mandela University and the University of Fort Hare using quantitative and qualitative methods. Most of the respondents, 82.3%, were aged between 18 and 23 years; while the average library use time was two hours daily. The most utilised library resource is the Wi-Fi with e-books and e-journals found to be lowly utilised. Records from the E-librarians revealed that undergraduate students account for no more than 6% of total users of electronic databases with 62.3% of the respondents preferring print information resources. Better understanding of library users’ demographics and information media preference is essential in proving the right kind of information services to Generation Z library users.
Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation systems require a number of stacked layers for deep models. But the prediction depends on the sentence representation of the top-most layer with no access to low-level representations. This makes it more difficult to train the model and poses a risk of information loss to prediction. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer representation fusion (MLRF) approach to fusing stacked layers. In particular, we design three fusion functions to learn a better representation from the stack. Experimental results show that our approach yields improvements of 0.92 and 0.56 BLEU points over the strong Transformer baseline on IWSLT German-English and NIST Chinese-English MT tasks respectively. The result is new state-of-the-art in German-English translation.
Transpalpebral Electrical Stimulation as a Novel Therapeutic Approach to Decrease Intraocular Pressure for Open-Angle Glaucoma: A Pilot Study

Purpose To determine the effect on intraocular pressure of transpalpebral specific exogenous voltages in a cohort of open-angle glaucoma patients. Methods This is a prospective, comparative, and experimental pilot study. The electrical stimuli applied consisted of 10 Hz, biphasic, nonrectangular current pulses (100 μA) delivered from an isolated constant current stimulator. At intake, baseline IOP measurements were obtained from each eye. The measurement was repeated before and after microstimulation until the end of the treatment. Results Seventy-eight eyes of 46 patients diagnosed with POAG were studied: 58 eyes with maximum tolerated medical treatment and 20 eyes without treatment (naïve). The mean baseline IOP on the treated POAG group was 19.25 mmHg ± 4.71. Baseline IOP on the naïve group was 20.38 mmHg ± 3.28. At the four-month follow-up visit, the mean IOP value on the treatment group was 14.41 mmHg ± 2.06 (P < 0.0001). The obtained mean IOP measurement on the treatment-naïve group was 15.29 mmHg ± 2.28 (P < 0.0001). Conclusions The hypotensive response obtained using transpalpebral electrical stimulation on POAG patients, both on treatment-naïve patients and on patients receiving maximum tolerable treatment, was statistically significant when comparing basal IOP measurements to those obtained at the four-month follow-up visit.
A Position-aware Bidirectional Attention Network for Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-level sentiment analysis aims to distinguish the sentiment polarity of each specific aspect term in a given sentence. Both industry and academia have realized the importance of the relationship between aspect term and sentence, and made attempts to model the relationship by designing a series of attention models. However, most existing methods usually neglect the fact that the position information is also crucial for identifying the sentiment polarity of the aspect term. When an aspect term occurs in a sentence, its neighboring words should be given more attention than other words with long distance. Therefore, we propose a position-aware bidirectional attention network (PBAN) based on bidirectional GRU. PBAN not only concentrates on the position information of aspect terms, but also mutually models the relation between aspect term and sentence by employing bidirectional attention mechanism. The experimental results on SemEval 2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PBAN model.
Mesenchymal stem cells and CXC chemokine receptor 4 overexpression improved the therapeutic effect on colitis via mucosa repair

The present study intended to observe the homing capability and therapeutic effect of CXC chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR-4) gene overexpressed bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) on colitis, and to study the possible mechanisms involved. BMSCs were derived from male BALB/c mice and CXCR-4 gene was transfected into BMSCs by the utilization of the lentiviral vector. The expression of CXCR-4 gene was analyzed and the biological characteristics, and vitality of BMSCs and CXCR-4 gene overexpressed BMSCs (CXCR-BMSCs) were detected. The chemotaxis assay was performed to investigate migration in vitro. Colitis was induced by TNBS in female BALB/c mice. BMSCs and CXCR-BMSCs were injected into experimental models intravenously. The homing of cells was confirmed by fluorescence observation and Sry gene detection. Clinical manifestation and histological changes were also evaluated. The expression levels of occludin and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) were detected to measure mucosal repair. Furthermore, CXCR-4 gene was successfully transfected into BMSCs by the utilization of lentiviral vector. Results indicated that overexpression of CXCR-4 gene did not influence the biological characteristics and vitality of BMSCs, but enhanced the capability of migration and homing of BMSCs in vitro and in vivo. Notably, CXCR-BMSCs had an improved effect on treating colitis, and the expression levels of Occludin and VEGF were higher. The results suggested that overexpression of CXCR-4 gene may enhance BMSC homing to damaged intestinal mucosa and their curative effect on colitis. The present findings indicated that using lentiviral vector to transfect CXCR-4 gene into BMSCs may be a potential method to improve the outcomes of BMSCs treatment on inflammatory bowel disease.
An analysis on treatment effect of blue light phototherapy combined with Bifico in treating neonatal hemolytic jaundice

This study aimed to discuss and evaluate the clinical effect of blue light phototherapy combined with bifico in treating neonatal hemolytic jaundice. One hundred and twenty cases with neonatal hemolytic jaundice were randomly divided into treatment group and control group, 60 cases in each group. Neonatal patients in the control group were treated with traditional treatment, including administration of enzyme inducer phenobarbital and blue light phototherapy for 8 consecutive hours every day. Neonatal patients in the treatment group received bifico orally based on traditional treatment. Clinical effects of the two groups were observed after one course of treatment (7 days as one course). During the first course, serum bilirubin level in the treatment group treated with blue light phototherapy combined with bifico declined more rapidly (P<0.01) and more significantly (P<0.01) than that in the control group, and the mean time for eliminating jaundice was significantly reduced (P<0.05). The total effective rate was 91.67% in the treatment group, while that was 85.00% in the control group, which suggested that the treatment effect of the treatment group was better than that of the control group and the difference between the two groups was statistically significant (P<0.05). Compared with traditional treatment, the treatment effect of blue light phototherapy combined with bifico in treating neonatal hemolytic jaundice is significantly improved and the speed of eliminating jaundice is also higher. Thus, it is worthy to be applied in clinical practice.
Dengue infection in international travellers visiting Bali, Indonesia

Abstract Background Dengue, an acute febrile illness caused by infection with dengue virus (DENV), is endemic in Bali, Indonesia. As one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, Bali is regularly visited by domestic and international travellers, who are prone to infection by endemic pathogens, including DENV. Currently, limited data are available on the characteristics of dengue in travellers visiting Bali. Information on the epidemiology and virological aspects of dengue in these tourists is important to gain a better understanding of the dengue disease in international travellers. Methods We performed a prospective cross-sectional dengue study involving foreign travellers visiting Bali, Indonesia in the period of 2015–17. Patients presenting at Kasih Ibu Hospital with fever and clinical symptoms of dengue were asked to participate in the study. Clinical and laboratory assessments were performed and sera were collected for molecular analysis, which included DENV serotyping, genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. Results Among the 201 patients recruited, dengue was confirmed in 133 (66.2%) of them, based on detection of NS1 antigen and/or viral RNA. Of these, 115 (86.5%) manifested dengue fever (DF) and 18 (13.5%) dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). The temporal predominance of infecting DENV serotype was DENV-2 (48.7%), followed by DENV-3 (36.1%), DENV-1 (9.2%) and DENV-4 (3.4%). Phylogenetic analysis of DENV based on envelope gene sequences revealed that the source of DENVs was local endemic viruses. Conclusion Our study confirms that dengue is one of the causes of fever in travellers visiting Bali. Although it is a cause of significant morbidity, the majority of patients only experienced mild DF, with only a small proportion developing DHF. We revealed that DENVs isolated were autochthonous. Accurate diagnosis, preventive measures and continuous disease surveillance will be useful for better management of dengue infection in travellers.
Assessment of Ocular Surface Damage during the Course of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Purpose To investigate the impact of disease duration on the ocular surface during the course of type 2 diabetes mellitus compared with nondiabetic controls. Methods One hundred twenty diabetic patients were divided into three groups according to disease duration: less than 5 years, 5–10 years, and over 10 years. All eyes were imaged using a corneal topographer (Oculus Keratograph 5M). Tear film measurements and meibography were also recorded. Meibomian gland changes were scored from 0 to 6 (meiboscore). Results The noninvasive breakup time first (NIKBUT-1st) and noninvasive breakup time average (NIKBUT-avg) were significantly shorter in the over 10 years diabetic group compared with the control group (P=0.0056 and P=0.010, resp.). Tear meniscus height (TMH) was significantly lower in the over 10 years diabetic group compared with the control group (P=0.0016) and the 5 years group (P=0.0061). We also found that more patients in the over 10 years diabetic group showed bulbar and limbal hyperemia compared with the control group (bulbar hyperemia: P=0.049; limbal hyperemia: P=0.026). The meiboscore in the over 10 years diabetic group was significantly higher compared with the other three groups (P < 0.05). Bulbar hyperemia showed a significant negative correlation with NIKBUT-1st in the over 10 years diabetic group (r=−0.35 and P < 0.05). Conclusion Ocular surface damage in long-term type 2 diabetes is more severe than that in patients with shorter disease duration.
Topic or Style? Exploring the Most Useful Features for Authorship Attribution

Approaches to authorship attribution, the task of identifying the author of a document, are based on analysis of individuals’ writing style and/or preferred topics. Although the problem has been widely explored, no previous studies have analysed the relationship between dataset characteristics and effectiveness of different types of features. This study carries out an analysis of four widely used datasets to explore how different types of features affect authorship attribution accuracy under varying conditions. The results of the analysis are applied to authorship attribution models based on both discrete and continuous representations. We apply the conclusions from our analysis to an extension of an existing approach to authorship attribution and outperform the prior state-of-the-art on two out of the four datasets used.
Corrigendum to “Polyethylene glycol solutions rapidly restore and maintain axonal continuity, neuromuscular structures, and behaviors lost after sciatic nerve transections in female rats.”

In the article titled “Polyethylene glycol solutions rapidly restore and maintain axonal continuity, neuromuscular structures, and behaviors lost after sciatic nerve transections in female rats,” the authors did not disclose the following conflict of interest: Dr. Jackson is CEO of Neuraptive Therapeutics. Neuraptive has exclusively licensed the PEG-fusion patent estate from the University of Texas at Austin invented by, and based on, research performed by Dr. Bittner. Dr. Bittner has assigned all of his economic interests in the licensed PEG-fusion patent estate to a third party. Neither potential conflict has affected in any way any data analyses or text in this manuscript.
Point Precisely: Towards Ensuring the Precision of Data in Generated Texts Using Delayed Copy Mechanism

The task of data-to-text generation aims to generate descriptive texts conditioned on a number of database records, and recent neural models have shown significant progress on this task. The attention based encoder-decoder models with copy mechanism have achieved state-of-the-art results on a few data-to-text datasets. However, such models still face the problem of putting incorrect data records in the generated texts, especially on some more challenging datasets like RotoWire. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach with a delayed copy mechanism to improve the precision of data records in the generated texts. Our approach first adopts an encoder-decoder model to generate a template text with data slots to be filled and then leverages a proposed delayed copy mechanism to fill in the slots with proper data records. Our delayed copy mechanism can take into account all the information of the input data records and the full generated template text by using double attention, position-aware attention and a pairwise ranking loss. The two models in the two stages are trained separately. Evaluation results on the RotoWire dataset verify the efficacy of our proposed approach to generate better templates and copy data records more precisely.
Modulation of network‐to‐network connectivity via spike‐timing‐dependent noninvasive brain stimulation

Human cognitive abilities and behavior are linked to functional coupling of many brain regions organized in distinct networks. Gaining insights on the role those networks’ dynamics play in cognition and pathology requires their selective, reliable, and reversible manipulation. Here we document the possibility to manipulate the interplay between two brain networks in a controlled manner, by means of a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) protocol inducing spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). Pairs of TMS pulses at specific inter‐stimulus intervals, repeatedly delivered over two negatively correlated nodes of the default mode network (DMN) and the task‐positive network (TPN) defined on the basis of individual functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, induced a modulation of network‐to‐network connectivity, even reversing correlation from negative to slightly positive in 30% of cases. Results also suggest a baseline‐dependent effect, with a greater connectivity modulation observed in participants with weaker between‐networks connectivity strength right before TMS. Finally, modulation of task‐evoked fMRI activity patterns during a sustained attention task was also observed after stimulation, with a faster or slower switch between rest and task blocks according to the timing of TMS pulses. The present findings promote paired associative TMS as a promising technique for controlled manipulation of fMRI connectivity dynamics in humans, as well as the causal investigation of brain‐behavior relations.
Altered hepatic glucose homeostasis in AnxA6-KO mice fed a high-fat diet

Annexin A6 (AnxA6) controls cholesterol and membrane transport in endo- and exocytosis, and modulates triglyceride accumulation and storage. In addition, AnxA6 acts as a scaffolding protein for negative regulators of growth factor receptors and their effector pathways in many different cell types. Here we investigated the role of AnxA6 in the regulation of whole body lipid metabolism and insulin-regulated glucose homeostasis. Therefore, wildtype (WT) and AnxA6-knockout (KO) mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD) for 17 weeks. During the course of HFD feeding, AnxA6-KO mice gained less weight compared to controls, which correlated with reduced adiposity. Systemic triglyceride and cholesterol levels of HFD-fed control and AnxA6-KO mice were comparable, with slightly elevated high density lipoprotein (HDL) and reduced triglyceride-rich lipoprotein (TRL) levels in AnxA6-KO mice. AnxA6-KO mice displayed a trend towards improved insulin sensitivity in oral glucose and insulin tolerance tests (OGTT, ITT), which correlated with increased insulin-inducible phosphorylation of protein kinase B (Akt) and ribosomal protein S6 kinase (S6) in liver extracts. However, HFD-fed AnxA6-KO mice failed to downregulate hepatic gluconeogenesis, despite similar insulin levels and insulin signaling activity, as well as expression profiles of insulin-sensitive transcription factors to controls. In addition, increased glycogen storage in livers of HFD- and chow-fed AnxA6-KO animals was observed. Together with an inability to reduce glucose production upon insulin exposure in AnxA6-depleted HuH7 hepatocytes, this implicates AnxA6 contributing to the fine-tuning of hepatic glucose metabolism with potential consequences for the systemic control of glucose in health and disease.
The clinical significance of Mda-7/IL-24 and C-myb expression in tumor tissues of patients with diffuse large B cell lymphoma

Diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in adults. Mda-7/IL-24 had been identified as a differentiation inducer of B phenotype lymphoma cells. Previous studies have revealed that knockdown of C-myb also leads to the terminal differentiation of B cell lymphoma. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between the expression of Mda-7/IL-24 and C-myb, and their prognostic significance for DLBCL patients. The tumor tissues were collected from 72 cases of DLBCL patients and detected with reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction, western blotting and immunohistochemistry assays. The results showed that, the expression of Mda-7/IL-24 mRNA and protein was lower while the expression of C-myb was higher in DLBCL tissues, compared with the specimens of normal lymph node tissues. Furthermore, C-myb expression was negatively correlated with Mda-7/IL-24 expression at mRNA and protein levels in DLBCL tissues. The expression of Mda-7/IL-24 and C-myb in DLBCL tissues was associated with some clinicopathological parameters such as clinical stage, infiltration in bone marrow, Ki67 expression level in the tumor tissues and overall survival rates. These results indicated that low expression of Mda-7/IL-24, along with high expression of C-myb, are predictor for poor prognosis of DLBCL patients, suggesting that Mda-7/IL-24 and C-myb may be potential targets for clinical treatment of DLBCL.
Regional differences of hypothermia on oxidative stress following hypoxia-ischemia: a study of DHA and hypothermia on brain lipid peroxidation in newborn piglets

Abstract Background Oxidative stress plays an important part in the pathophysiology of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) and is reliably measured through prostanoids following lipid peroxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). The aim of the study is to measure oxidative stress in the prefrontal cortex, white matter and hippocampus in the brains of hypoxic-ischemic piglets treated with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and therapeutic hypothermia (TH) and investigate the additive effects of DHA on hypothermia by factorial design. Methods Fifty-five piglets were randomized as having severe global hypoxia (n=48) or not (sham, n=7). Hypoxic piglets were further randomized: vehicle (VEH), DHA, VEH+hypothermia (HT) or HT+DHA. A total of 5 mg/kg DHA was given intravenously 210 min after the end of hypoxia. Brain tissues were analyzed using liquid chromatography triple quadrupole mass spectrometry technique (LC-MS). A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with DHA and HT as main effects. Results In the white matter, we found main effects of DHA on DH-isoprostanes (P=0.030) and a main effect of HT on F4-neuroprostanes (F4-NeuroPs) (P=0.007), F2-isoprostanes (F2-IsoPs) (P=0.043) and DH-isoprostanes (P=0.023). In the cortex, the ANOVA analysis showed the interactions of main effects between DHA and HT for neurofuranes (NeuroFs) (P=0.092) and DH-isoprostanes (P=0.015) as DHA significantly reduced lipid peroxidation in the absence of HT. DHA compared to VEH significantly reduced NeuroFs (P=0.019) and DH-isoprostanes (P=0.010). No differences were found in the hippocampus. Conclusion After severe hypoxia, HT reduced lipid peroxidation in the white matter but not in the cortical gray matter. HT attenuated the reducing effect of DHA on lipid peroxidation in the cortex. Further studies are needed to determine whether DHA can be an effective add-on therapy for TH.