Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contextual Characters with Segmentation Representation for Named Entity Recognition in Chinese

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a typical sequence labeling task. It remains challenging for Chinese, partly because of the lack of clear typographic word boundaries. Decisions have to be made regarding the choice of basic units which constitute the sequence to be labeled, and their vectorized representation. Recent approaches have shown that character-based models lack the information about larger units (words) which is useful for NER, while word-based models may suffer from the propagation of word segmentation errors and a higher rate of Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) tokens. In this paper, we propose a new representation of sinograms (Chinese characters) enriched with word boundary information, for which different types of embeddings can be built. Experiments show that our solution outperforms other state-of-the-art models. We also took great care to propose a fully retrainable pipeline, which is available at https://github.com/enp-china/CCSR-NER . It does not rely on pretrained models and can be trained in few days on common hardware.
A corpus-based comparative study of light verbs in three Chinese speech communities

The universal category of light verbs has drawn considerable interest among researchers on Asian languages in recent years. For Chinese, recent research focused on several light verbs have included multiword expressions, some with parallels in English. This study begins with a common but little studied light verb DA 打 (“hit”) in Chinese, based on 22 years of data curated in the LIVAC Pan-Chinese corpus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIVAC_Synchronous_Corpus). The verb DA has differentially evolved from a regular transitive verb involving physical strike action to take on increasingly metaphorical extension and is well on the way to become a light verb. From 2175 lexical entries in LIVAC from 1995-2016, we are able to trace some longitudinal developments of this light verb across three Chinese speech communities (Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan) by comparing their differences in metaphorical extension. We also provide in detail how the three communities differ in the usage of this popular light verb, and the broader significance beyond linguistics, with Beijing and Hong Kong showing a higher degree of metaphorical shift in different ways. We also explore some means by which metaphorization may be compared with grammatical change. Moreover, we demonstrate how fruitful and new findings may be obtained with a rigorously curated corpus.
Pay Attention to Categories: Syntax-Based Sentence Modeling with Metadata Projection Matrix

Sentence modeling is a vital feature engineering for document classiﬁcation. Various feature extraction and summarization algorithms have been adopted for efﬁcient classiﬁcation of a sentence, e.g., dense word vectors and neural network classiﬁers. Recently, the concept of attention for machine translation has been applied to various natural language processing (NLP) tasks and has shown signiﬁ-cant performance. In this paper, we take a look at the syntactic categories of the words, to make up a metadata projection matrix that assigns strong restrictions on determining the attention weight. Unlike conventional attention models, which are considered as a division of location-based approaches, our model adds a selection layer to highlight categorical metadata that may appear more than once. The proposed algorithm shows improved performance compared to the baselines with the tasks in syntax-semantics, suggesting a possibility of extension to other ﬁelds such as symbolic music or bitstream analysis.
Neural Machine Translation from Historical Japanese to Contemporary Japanese Using Diachronically Domain-Adapted Word Embeddings

This paper describes the ﬁrst trial of neural machine translation (NMT) from historical Japanese to contemporary Japanese. To compensate for the lack of parallel data, we used pre-trained word embeddings for the input of the system and performed diachronic domain adaptation in the order of time. We investigated and compared an NMT system without pre-trained word embeddings, an NMT sys-tem with pre-trained word embeddings trained with contemporary Japanese, an NMT sys-tem with word embeddings diachronically domain-adapted at one time, and NMT systems with word embeddings that were gradually domain-adapted in the order of time. Although our system did not outperform statistical machine translation, experiments revealed that diachronic domain adaptation is effective, especially if it is performed in the order of time.
Utilizing Bert for Question Retrieval on Vietnameses E-commerce Sites

Question retrieval is an important task in question answering. This task is considered to be challenging due to the lexical gap issue, i.e., similar questions could be expressed in different words or phrases. Although there are numerous researches conducted on question retrieval task in English, the corresponding problem in Vietnamese hasn’t been studied much. In this investigation, we highlight our efforts on question retrieval in Vietnamese e-commerce sites majorly in two directions: (1) Building a Vietnamese dataset for question retrieval in e-commerce domain. (2) Conducting experiments using recent deep learning techniques including BERT-based classifiers. Our results provide practical examples of effectively employing these models on Vietnamese e-commerce data. Particularly, we demonstrate that a BERT model trained on e-commerce texts yields significant improvement on question retrieval over BERT trained on general-domain texts.
Language change in Report on the Work of the Government by Premiers of the People’s Republic of China

The present paper explored the focusing topics change and language change in Report on the Work of the Government by Premiers of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter Report texts). The text clustering and correspondence analysis showed the focusing topics change in selected three periods Report texts. The Report texts were represented by the clause length distribution and clustered. The clustering result showed the differences of clause length usages in the Report texts. The relationship between clause length and word length was studied. The average word length decreases with clause length and were fitted using the function, y = ax based on the Menzerath-Altmann Law. The relationship between the three periods Report texts represented by the fitted parameters, a and b, were explored.
Dynamic Changes of Post-Radiotherapy Plasma Epstein–Barr Virus DNA in a Randomized Trial of Adjuvant Chemotherapy Versus Observation in Nasopharyngeal Cancer

Purpose: To study the dynamic changes in plasma Epstein–Barr virus (pEBV) DNA after radiotherapy in nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC). Experimental Design: We conducted a randomized controlled trial of adjuvant chemotherapy versus observation in patients with NPC who had detectable pEBV DNA at 6 weeks post-radiotherapy. Randomized patients had a second pEBV DNA checked at 6 months post-randomization. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS). Results: We prospectively enrolled 789 patients. Baseline post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA was undetectable in 573 (72.6%) patients, and detectable in 216 (27.4%) patients, of whom 104 (13.2%) patients were eligible for randomization to adjuvant chemotherapy (n = 52) versus observation (n = 52). The first post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA had a sensitivity of 0.48, specificity of 0.81, area under receiver-operator characteristics curve (AUC) of 0.65, false positive (FP) rate of 13.8%, and false negative (FN) rate of 14.4% for disease progression. The second post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA had improved sensitivity of 0.81, specificity of 0.75, AUC of 0.78, FP rate of 14.3%, and FN rate of 8.1%. Patients with complete clearance of post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA (51%) had survival superior to that of patients without post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA clearance (5-year PFS, 85.5% vs. 23.3%; HR, 9.6; P < 0.0001), comparable with patients with initially undetectable post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA (5-year PFS, 77.1%), irrespective of adjuvant chemotherapy or observation. Conclusions: Patients with NPC with detectable post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA who experienced subsequent pEBV DNA clearance had superior survival comparable with patients with initially undetectable post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA. Post-radiotherapy pEBV DNA clearance may serve as an early surrogate endpoint for long-term survival in NPC.
Why Do Business Organizations Participate in Projects? Toward a Typology of Project Value Domains

Project scholarship suggests that an increasing volume of activities in organizations, economies, and societies occurs in the form of temporary projects. Drawing on research on project value, we aim to build a contextual understanding of why business organizations choose to participate in projects. Discussing value creation, capture, and destruction patterns for the owner, project-based firm, and the temporary project domains of project organizing, we develop a typology of project value domains for business organizations. We contribute to the theory and debate in project studies, integrating the conversations on the projectification of economies and societies with the stream of work on project value.
Associated factors with dietary patterns among children under 2 years of age: a study in childcare centres and homes of South Brazil

Abstract Identifying dietary patterns in different environments attended by children is relevant to guide public politics. The aim of this study was to analyse the factors associated with dietary patterns of children under 2 years of age in childcare centres and at homes. This transversal study was enrolled in municipal childcare centres of Guaratuba, Paraná, Brazil. Food consumption data from 256 children were obtained by the food record method. From the consumption data, four dietary patterns were identified by factor analysis using the principal component method in each environment. ‘Traditional’ patterns were observed in both environments; the ‘less healthy’ pattern was found only at homes. Other patterns identified in childcare centres include ‘snacks’, ‘nutritive’ and ‘pasta and meats’; at homes, it was possible to identify patterns such as ‘milk and cereals’ and ‘mixed’. Children over 12 months presented higher scores for all the patterns in both environments. Obese children had lower scores for all the patterns in childcare centres. There was an association between maternal age below 21 years and higher adherence to a ‘less healthy’ pattern, maternal level of education less than 8 years and lower adherence to the ‘mixed’ pattern and lower familiar income per capita and higher adherence to the ‘snacks’ and ‘traditional’ patterns in childcare centres. In conclusion, adherence to dietary patterns was associated with socio-economic, demographic variables and nutritional status and further studies are needed, especially those with a longitudinal design, enabling the monitoring of dietary patterns.
A Routine Dynamics Lens on the Stability-Change Dilemma in Project-Based Organizations

A central issue in project-based organizations (PBOs) is how to balance the need for flexibly responding to changing customer demands and creating consistent performance in the organization at large. This article discusses the relevance of a routine dynamics lens for understanding this dilemma. We show how routine dynamics might help to understand how and under what conditions routines—with their dual capacity for stability and change—produce a variety of performances, some stable and some varying, in the PBO. As such, we contribute to the stream of research that seeks to explain how PBOs build capabilities and how they work.
Role of ACE2 polymorphism in COVID-19: impact of age

Abstract More than 2 million people have died as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is a counter-regulatory enzyme that converts angiotensin-2 to Ang-(1–7) form in the renin-angiotensin system. Several studies have been analyzed the correlation between ACE2 and COVID-19. Indeed, ACE2/Ang (1–7) system protects the lung against acute respiratory distress syndrome by its anti-inflammatory/anti-oxidant function. However, SARS-Cov-2 can use ACE2 for host cell entry. Expression of ACE2 can be altered by several factors, including hypertension, diabetes and obesity, which also could increase the severity of COVID-19 infection. Besides, since androgens increase the expression of ACE-2, males are at higher risks of COVID-19 infection. Although reported statistics showed a significantly different infection risks of COVID-19 between adults and children, the reason behind the different responses is still unclear. This review proposes the effect of ACE polymorphism on the severity of SARS-COV-2 induced pneumonia. The previous meta-analysis regarding the effect of ACE polymorphism on the severity of pneumonia showed that polymorphism only affects the adult’s illness severity and not the children. Two recent meta-analyses examined the effect of ACE polymorphism on the prevalence and mortality rate of COVID-19 and reported contradicting results. Our opinion paper suggests that the effect of ACE polymorphism on the severity of COVID-19 depends on the patients age, same as of the pneumonia.
Monetary Policies and the Achievement of Bank Profit Objective

Abstract This study examined the nexus between monetary policy and the achievement of a bank’s profit objective. There have been lots of arguments about the benefits of monetary policy implementation on deposit money bank’s operations, since the policies have been seen to impact on their performance. This study was carried out to establish the influence of variables like Liquidity Ratio, Interest and Money supply (M2), which are used as monetary policy instruments, on deposit money bank profitability objective. The study covers the period from 2002-2019. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag and Error correction model were adopted in the analysis of the data. The study revealed that there was a positive long run relationship between Liquidity Ratio and deposit money bank’s profitability; there also existed a negative long run relationship between interest rate and deposit money bank profitability; lastly, there existed a positive long run relationship between Money Supply (M2) and deposit money bank’s profitability. Based on the findings, monetary authorities should put in place measures for Liquidity ratio, interest rates and M2 implementation to aid deposit money banks operations in the achievement of their profit objective.
‘Double activation’: Workfare meets marketisation

Abstract Since the financial crisis, Ireland’s welfare state has been reorientated around a regulatory, ‘work-first’ activation model. Claimants now face penalty rates for non-compliance with activation requirements that have been significantly extended since 2009. Alongside these formal policy reforms, the organisations delivering Public Employment Services, and the modes by which they are commissioned, have also been reconfigured through a series of New Public Management style governance reforms, including, most notably, the creation of a quasi-market for employment services (JobPath) in 2015. This article addresses the intersection between activation and quasi-marketisation, positioning the latter as a form of ‘double activation’ that reshapes not only how but also what policies are enacted at the street level. It unpacks their shared logics and mutual commitment to governing agents at a distance through a behavioural public policy orientation, and reflects on the extent to which marketisation is capable of producing lower-cost but more responsive employment services.
Intravital Imaging of Candida albicans Identifies Differential In Vitro and In Vivo Filamentation Phenotypes for Transcription Factor Deletion Mutants

Candida albicans is one of the most common causes of fungal infections in humans. C. albicans undergoes a transition from a round yeast form to a filamentous form during infection, which is critical for its ability to cause disease. Although this transition has been studied in the laboratory for years, methods to do so in an animal model of infection have been limited. ABSTRACT Candida albicans is an important cause of human fungal infections. A widely studied virulence trait of C. albicans is its ability to undergo filamentation to hyphae and pseudohyphae. Although yeast, pseudohyphae, and hyphae are present in pathological samples of infected mammalian tissue, it has been challenging to characterize the role of regulatory networks and specific genes during in vivo filamentation. In addition, the phenotypic heterogeneity of C. albicans clinical isolates is becoming increasingly recognized, while correlating this heterogeneity with pathogenesis remains an important goal. Here, we describe the use of an intravital imaging approach to characterize C. albicans filamentation in a mammalian model of infection by taking advantage of the translucence of mouse pinna (ears). Using this model, we have found that the in vitro and in vivo filamentation phenotypes of different C. albicans isolates can vary significantly, particularly when in vivo filamentation is compared to solid agar-based assays. We also show that the well-characterized transcriptional regulators Efg1 and Brg1 appear to play important roles both in vivo and in vitro. In contrast, Ume6 is much more important in vitro than in vivo. Finally, strains that are dependent on Bcr1 for in vitro filamentation are able to form filaments in vivo in its absence. This intravital imaging approach provides a new approach to the systematic characterization of this important virulence trait during mammalian infection. Our initial studies provide support for the notion that the regulation and initiation of C. albicans filamentation in vivo is distinct from in vitro induction. IMPORTANCE Candida albicans is one of the most common causes of fungal infections in humans. C. albicans undergoes a transition from a round yeast form to a filamentous form during infection, which is critical for its ability to cause disease. Although this transition has been studied in the laboratory for years, methods to do so in an animal model of infection have been limited. We have developed a microscopy method to visualize fluorescently labeled C. albicans undergoing this transition in the subcutaneous tissue of mice. Our studies indicate that the regulation of C. albicans filamentation during infection is distinct from that observed in laboratory conditions.
The Macrophage Reprogramming Ability of Antifolates Reveals Soluble CD14 as a Potential Biomarker for Methotrexate Response in Rheumatoid Arthritis

The physio-pathological relevance of the one-carbon metabolism (OCM) is illustrated by the chemotherapeutic and anti-inflammatory effects of the antifolates Pemetrexed (PMX) and Methotrexate (MTX) in cancer and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We report that OCM determines the functional and gene expression profile of human macrophages. PMX induces the acquisition of a p53-dependent proinflammatory gene signature in human monocyte-derived macrophages (GM-MØ). Indeed, OCM blockade reprograms GM-MØ towards a state of LPS-tolerance at the signaling and functional levels, an effect abolished by folinic acid. Importantly, OCM blockade led to reduced expression of membrane-bound and soluble CD14 (sCD14), whose exogenous addition restores LPS sensitivity. The therapeutic relevance of these results was confirmed in early RA patients, as MTX-responder RA patients exhibit lower sCD14 serum levels, with baseline sCD14 levels predicting MTX response. Our results indicate that OCM is a metabolic circuit that critically mediates the acquisition of innate immune tolerance, and positions sCD14 as a valuable tool to predict MTX-response in RA patients.
Tracking long-term functional connectivity maps in human stem-cell-derived neuronal networks by holographic-optogenetic stimulation

Neuronal networks derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have been exploited widely for modelling neuronal circuits, neurological diseases and drug screening. As these networks require extended culturing periods to functionally mature in vitro, most studies are based on immature networks. To obtain insights on long-term functional features of human networks, we improved a long-term glia-co-culture culturing protocol directly on multi-electrode arrays (MEA), facilitating long-term assessment of electrical features at weekly intervals. We applied optogenetic stimulation to induce neuronal activity, which resulted in accelerated neuronal responses during network development. Using holographic stimulation with single-cell-resolution, propagating evoked activities of 400 individually stimulated neurons per MEA were traceable, and precise network functional connectivity motifs were revealed. Our integrated holographic optogenetic stimulation platform on MEAs facilitates studying long-term functional dynamics of human neuronal networks in vitro. This is an important step towards establishing hiPSC-derived neurons as profound functional testbeds for basic and biomedical research. Highlights Integrated platform allowed long-term optogenetic experiments on hiPSC-derived networks. Full-field optogenetic stimulation boosted hiPSC-derived neuronal network activity. Single-neuron resolution holographic stimulation evoked local responses in the network. Holographic stimulation of each neuron revealed its functional connectivity patterns. Subsequent holographic stimulation of more than 400 neurons revealed the whole network connectivity map.
Marine biofilms on different fouling control coating types reveal differences in microbial community composition and abundance

Marine biofouling imposes serious environmental and economic impacts on marine applications, especially in the shipping industry. To combat biofouling, protective coatings are applied on vessel hulls which are divided into two major groups: biocidal and non-toxic fouling-release. The aim of the current study was to explore the effect of coating type on microbial biofilm community profiles to better understand the differences between the communities developed on fouling control biocidal antifouling and biocidal-free coatings. Biocidal (Intersmooth® 7460HS SPC), fouling-release (Intersleek® 900), and inert surfaces were deployed in the marine environment for 4 months and the biofilms that developed on these surfaces were investigated using Illumina NGS sequencing, targeting the prokaryotic 16S rRNA gene. The results confirmed differences in the community profiles between coating types. The biocidal coating supported communities dominated by Alphaproteobacteria (Loktanella, Sphingorhabdus, Erythrobacter) and Bacteroidetes (Gilvibacter), whilst other taxa such as Portibacter and Sva0996 marine group, proliferated on the fouling-release surface. Knowledge of these marine biofilm components on fouling control coatings will serve as a guide for future investigations of marine microfouling as well as informing the coatings industry of potential microbial targets for robust coating formulations.