Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automatic Abstracting in a Limited Domain

The present paper discusses a new knowledge-based approach proposed for automatic abstracting (AA) in a limited domain. Unlike most of the automatic abstracting models which do not make use of domain knowledge (an therefore are hardly capable of differentiating the "important" from the other concepts in the area) and linguistic knowledge (the summaries obtained usually do not undergo any additional modifications and the uncontrolled linkage of the text picked up for summary may sometimes be unacceptable), our approach is based on empirical, domain and linguistic knowledge, the latter enabling an additional treatment of the extracted text in order to obtain more coherent and natural text. The principal ideas presented in the paper are incorporated in the development of an automatic abstracting program.
Automatic Identification of Document Translations in Large Multilingual Document Collections

Abstract Texts and their translations are a rich lin-guistic resource that can be used to train and test statistics-based Machine Translation systems and many other applications. In this paper, we present a working system that can identify translations and other very similar documents among a large number of candi-dates, by representing the document con-tents with a vector of thesaurus terms from a multilingual thesaurus, and by then measur-ing the semantic similarity between the vec-tors. Tests on different text types have shown that the system can detect transla-tions with over 96% precision in a large search space of 820 documents or more. The system was tuned to ignore language-specific similarities and to give similar documents in a second language the same similarity score as equivalent documents in the same language. The application can also be used to detect cross-lingual document plagiarism. 1 Introduction The task of mining for translational equivalences at document level presented in this paper is based on the automatic mapping of documents onto an existing multilingual knowledge structure, the
Transducer composition for "on-the-fly" lexicon and language model integration

We present the use of a specialized composition algorithm that allows the generation of a determinized search network for ASR in a single step. The algorithm is exact in the sense that the result is determinized when the lexicon and the language model are represented as determinized transducers. The composition and determinization are performed simultaneously, which is of great importance for "on-the-fly" operation. The algorithm pushes the language model weights towards the initial state of the network. Our results show that it is advantageous to use the maximum amount of information as early as possible in the decoding procedure.
Employment Protection: Tough to Scrap or Tough to Get?

Differences in employment protection across countries appear to be quite persistent over time. One mechanism that could explain this persistence is the so called constituency effect: high employment protection creates a mass of workers in favor of maintaining high protection because deregulation would mean that they would lose their jobs. To the extent that this mechanism is at work, employment protection would appear to be a policy that is difficult to deregulate once it has been introduced. In this paper I consider an alternative mechanism generating persistence that makes employment protection a policy that is difficult to introduce. If a legislative process is initiated to introduce employment protection, it is reasonable to assume that firms have an opportunity to lay off workers before employment protection becomes effective. Firms would have an incentive to do so in order to avoid the cost associated with stringent employment protection in the future. Anticipating this, workers whose situation is already precarious may not find it in their best interest to support the legislative process to introduce employment protection in the first place. The main result of the paper is that the ability of firms to adjust employment before an increase in employment protection becomes effective may give rise to situations in which both low and high employment protection are stationary political outcomes.
Estimating Single-Tree Crown Biomass of Norway Spruce by Airborne Laser Scanning: A Comparison of Methods with and without the Use of Terrestrial Laser Scanning to Obtain the Ground Reference Data

Several methods to conduct single-tree inventories using airborne laser scanning (ALS) have been proposed, and even terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has recently emerged as a possible tool for the collection of forest inventory data. In the present study, a novel methodological framework for a combined use of ALS and TLS in an inventory was tested and compared to a method without the use of TLS. Single-tree Norway spruce crown biomass was predicted using an ALS-model with training data obtained by TLS. ALS and TLS data were collected for sets of sample trees, including 68 trees with both ALS and TLS data. In total, 29 destructively sampled trees were used to fit a TLS crown biomass model, which then was used to predict crown biomass in a separate set of 68 trees. This dataset was subsequently used to fit an ALS crown biomass model. When validating the model, using a separate dataset with accurately measured crown biomass obtained through destructive sampling, the mean error was 32% of the observed mean biomass. Corresponding crown biomass predictions derived with ALS-predicted diameters and the use of conventional and existing allometric models resulted in a mean error of 35%. Thus, in the present study, a slight improvement, in terms of prediction accuracy, was found when using training data with ground reference values obtained by TLS.
Multimodal medical image fusion using modified fusion rules and guided filter

Multimodal medical image fusion plays a crucial role in medical diagnostics and treatment. Widely used transform domain based image fusion methods like DWT, CVT, CT, NCST suffer from spatial inconsistency and high complexity. Recently proposed guided filter based spatial domain image fusion techniques are also limited by contrast reduction and halo artifacts. In this paper, the existing guided filter based image fusion scheme is modified by using Gaussian decomposition with local average energy and average gradient based saliency maps for base layer and detail layer respectively. Simulation results show that the modified fusion technique is more effective in preserving contrast and fine details than the existing guided filter based and DWT based fusion scheme.
A Statistical Approach for Similarity Measurement Between Sentences for EBMT

Success of Example-Based Machine Translation depends heavily on how efficient the retrieval scheme is. The more similar is the retrieved sentence to the input one, the easier will be the adaptation of the retrieved translation to the current requirement. However, there is no suitable scheme for measuring similarity between sentences. This paper reports preliminary results of a similarity measurement scheme that is based on a linear model , whose coefficients are determined by multiple regression technique. The data for the analysis has been collected from a survey of a number of respondents. Three major aspects of similarity, namely pragmatic, syntactic and semantic have been considered. Each respondent has been asked to evaluate the similarity between different pairs of sentences that are carefully designed to reflect one of the above types of similarity. A statistical analysis of these evaluations reveals general human perception about sentential similarity, which will help in designing a suitable retrieval scheme.
Predicted correspondence between species abundances and dendrograms of niche similarities

We examine a hypothesized relationship between two descriptions of community structure: the niche-overlap dendrogram that describes the ecological similarities of species and the pattern of relative abundances. Specifically, we examine the way in which this relationship follows from the niche hierarchy model, whose fundamental assumption is a direct connection between abundances and underlying hierarchical community organization. We test three important, although correlated, predictions of the niche hierarchy model and show that they are upheld in a set of 11 communities (encompassing fishes, amphibians, lizards, and birds) where both abundances and dendrograms were reported. First, species that are highly nested in the dendrogram are on average less abundant than species from branches less subdivided. Second, and more significantly, more equitable community abundances are associated with more evenly branched dendrogram structures, whereas less equitable abundances are associated with less even dendrograms. This relationship shows that abundance patterns can give insight into less visible aspects of community organization. Third, one can recover the distribution of proportional abundances seen in assemblages containing two species by treating each branch point in the dendrogram as a two-species case. This reconstruction cannot be achieved if abundances and the dendrogram are unrelated and suggests a method for hierarchically decomposing systems. To our knowledge, this is the first test of a species abundance model based on nontrivial predictions as to the origins and causes of abundance patterns, and not simply on the goodness-of-fit of distributions.
Car Dynamics using Quarter Model and Passive Suspension, Part I: Effect of Suspension Damping and Car Speed

Quarter-car model is in use for years to study the car dynamics. The objection of this paper is to examine the dynamics of a car passing a circular hump for sake maintaining ride comfort for the passengers. Passive suspension elements are considered with suspension damping coefficient in the range 1 to 15 kNs/m. Car speed in the range 5 to 25 km/h is considered when passing the hump. Important phenomenon evolved from the analysis of the car dynamics which is performed using MATLAB. The mathematical model of the quarter-car model is derived in the state form and the dynamics are evaluated in terms of the sprung mass displacement and acceleration. The effect of suspension damping and car speed on the sprung-mass displacement and acceleration is examined. The study shows that for ride comfort the car speed has not to exceed 6.75 km/h when passing a circular hump depending on the suspension damping.
CPG-based straight path control of a snake-like robot for moving in various space width

Maintaining a straight path for locomotion of a snake-like robot can be easily controlled using any control architecture such as sine-based, model-based or others. However, a problem occurs when one or more of the control parameters are modified online, where the trajectory of the snake-like robot will deviate from its original path. In this paper, a biomimetic approach based on central pattern generator (CPG) is utilized to control the straight path motion of a snake-like robot. The CPG model is based on the phase oscillator, in which only one control parameter is used to control the locomotion. The novelty of the approach is the online body shape transition of the snake-like robot which is useful in adapting to various space width especially for rescuing and searching tasks. The major parts of this paper include: 1) a brief introduction of the phase oscillator model and the proposed CPG network, 2) a proposed activation function to control the body shape transition of the snake-like robot, and 3) a straight path control strategy. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed straight path motion control method.
SyntaxNet Models for the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task

We describe a baseline dependency parsing system for the CoNLL2017 Shared Task. This system, which we call "ParseySaurus," uses the DRAGNN framework [Kong et al, 2017] to combine transition-based recurrent parsing and tagging with character-based word representations. On the v1.3 Universal Dependencies Treebanks, the new system outpeforms the publicly available, state-of-the-art "Parsey's Cousins" models by 3.47% absolute Labeled Accuracy Score (LAS) across 52 treebanks.
Quality of Information and Efficient Delivery in Military Sensor Networks

Sensor networks represent a powerful new data paradigm facilitating the development of new intelligent applications. A sensor networks utility can be measured by the quality of information (QoI) that it provides for these applications. This paper focuses on the concept of QoI and a technique enabling efficient delivery of information to other parts of the sensor network, to facilitate decision making.
A Low Power Digital Accumulation Technique for Digital-Domain CMOS TDI Image Sensor

In this paper, an accumulation technique suitable for digital domain CMOS time delay integration (TDI) image sensors is proposed to reduce power consumption without degrading the rate of imaging. In terms of the slight variations of quantization codes among different pixel exposures towards the same object, the pixel array is divided into two groups: one is for coarse quantization of high bits only, and the other one is for fine quantization of low bits. Then, the complete quantization codes are composed of both results from the coarse-and-fine quantization. The equivalent operation comparably reduces the total required bit numbers of the quantization. In the 0.18 µm CMOS process, two versions of 16-stage digital domain CMOS TDI image sensor chains based on a 10-bit successive approximate register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC), with and without the proposed technique, are designed. The simulation results show that the average power consumption of slices of the two versions are 6.47×10-8 J/line and 7.4×10-8 J/line, respectively. Meanwhile, the linearity of the two versions are 99.74% and 99.99%, respectively.
ECO-BIOLOGICAL SOIL ASSESSMENT : ANALYTICAL APPROACHES THROUGH MOLECULAR METHODS

Introduction Soil organisms facilitate key ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition, and also influence soil porosity and water infiltration through the production of bacterial polymers and fungal hyphae that hold soil particles together to form aggregates [1, 2]. Rhizosphere microorganisms can greatly influence the ability of a plant to acquire macroand micronutrients. This may occur as a direct consequence of symbiotic associations between plant roots and microorganisms such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, through symbiotic and associative interactions such as the fixation of N2 by the root-associated bacteria Rhizobium spp. , Azospirillum, Azotobacter, or Beijerinckia spp. [3], or through trophic interactions, such as the excretion of nutrients by the microbial feeders protozoa and nematodes [4]. Through these interactions, soil organisms powerfully affect crop growth and yield. Soil management strategies should aim to support and enable soil biota to carry out these key ecosystem functions to assure long-term soil fertility and sustained crop production. In order to understand better how soil management practices influence soil biota and their interactions with plant roots, appropriate methods are urgently needed to detect, enumerate and characterize them.
Fair Game-Theoretic Resource Management in Dedicated Grids

We study two problems directly resulting from organizational decentralization of the grid. Firstly, the problem of fair scheduling in systems in which the grid scheduler has complete control of processors' schedules. Secondly, the problem of fair and feasible scheduling in decentralized case, in which the grid scheduler can only suggest a schedule, which can be later modified by a processor's owner. Using game theory, we show that scheduling in decentralized case is analogous to the prisoner's dilemma game. Moreover, the Nash equilibrium results in significant performance drop. Therefore, a strong community control is required to achieve acceptable performance.
An Energy Efficient Sleep Scheduling Considering QoS Diversity for IEEE 802.16e Wireless Networks

Power management is one of the most important issues in IEEE 802.16e wireless networks. In the standard, it defines three types of power saving classes (PSCs) for flows with different QoS characteristics. It allows a mobile device to turn off its wireless radio when all its PSCs are in sleep states. In this paper, we consider the scheduling of power saving classes of type II in an IEEE 802.16e network with a BS and multiple MSSs (mobile subscriber stations). Previous work proposes to enforce all MSSs to have the same sleep cycle, thus leading to higher energy cost for those MSSs with less strict delay bounds. We observe that if the sleep cycles of MSSs can be assigned according to their delay bounds, MSSs can significantly reduce their duty cycles. We propose an efficient tank-filling algorithm, which is standard-compliant and can allocate resources to MSSs according to their QoS characteristics with the least number of active frames. Simulation results verify that our algorithm incurs less power consumption and leads to higher bandwidth utilization than the previous schemes.
HLS Distorted colour model for enhanced colour image segmentation

In this work a new colour model HLS Distorted is presented which greatly improves the HLS colour model for use in robust colour image segmentation. When working with various colour models we often find that each has strengths and weaknesses for image analysis making most colour models useful only some of the time. The HLS colour model is one such model. While it is excellent at separating colour into components useful in many areas of computer vision it has the problem of being difficult to use when colours are weak. This weakness is caused by the colour modelpsilas axes converging at low saturation and low/high luminance causing calculated distances between perceptively similar colours to be larger than expected. For this reason the colour model is primarily used in applications working with brightly coloured objects. A technique is presented for distorting the HLS colour model in a unique way to keep the models strengths whilst removing its fundamental weakness.
Integrating organizational control into multi-agent learning

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms suffer from slow convergence and even divergence, especially in large-scale systems. In this work, we develop an organization-based control framework to speed up the convergence of MARL algorithms in a network of agents. Our framework defines a multi-level organizational structure for automated supervision and a communication protocol for exchanging information between lower-level agents and higher-level supervising agents. The abstracted states of lower-level agents travel upwards so that higher-level supervising agents generate a broader view of the state of the network. This broader view is used in creating supervisory information which is passed down the hierarchy. The supervisory policy adaptation then integrates supervisory information into existing MARL algorithms, guiding agents' exploration of their state-action space. The generality of our framework is verified by its applications on different domains (distributed task allocation and network routing) with different MARL algorithms. Experimental results show that our framework improves both the speed and likelihood of MARL convergence.
Is the Black Box Grey or does it have Black Spots

summary Title: Is the Black Box Grey or does it have Black Spots? – a study of consultants doing practical change work Seminar date: 2008-06-02 Course: Master thesis in Business Administration, Program for Managing People, Knowledge and Change, 15 University Credit Points (15 ECTS). Authors: Marie Thorstensson and Oskar Christensson Advisor: Martin Blom Five key words: organizational change, consultants, practical work, power, politics Purpose: To make an empirically grounded description of the interaction between consultants in Consult and the clients in implementing change initiatives and how this interaction affects the change Methodology: An interpretative constructionist perspective is adopted using a single case study. Theory: Combining knowledge work theory, Alvesson (2004) and Lowendahl (2005), with that of organizational development, by Beer et al. (1990). This is nuanced with Hardy and Redivo’s (1994) power notions. Empirical foundation: A medium size consultancy firm is studied through one observation and semi-structured interviews with current and previous clients. Conclusions: The firm of Consult works with structure, skills, support and social ability in order to implement an intended change within their client’s organization. By making the client owner of the project, the client continues to build on the implemented changes. The owning of the project also creates problems in information flows that seem to be neglected.
An SNX10 mutation causes malignant osteopetrosis of infancy

Background Osteopetrosis is a life-threatening, rare disorder typically resulting from osteoclast dysfunction and infrequently from failure to commitment to osteoclast lineage. Patients commonly present in infancy with macrocephaly, feeding difficulties, evolving blindness and deafness, and bone marrow failure. In ∼70% of the patients there is a molecularly defined failure to maintain an acid pH at the osteoclast-bone interface (the ruffled border) which is necessary for the bone resorptive activity. Methods and results In eight patients with infantile osteopetrosis which could be cured by bone marrow transplantation, the study identified by homozygosity mapping in distantly related consanguineous pedigrees a missense mutation in a highly conserved residue in the SNX10 gene. The mutation segregated with the disease in the families and was carried by one of 211 anonymous individuals of the same ethnicity. In the patients' osteoclasts, the mutant SNX10 protein was abnormally abundant and its distribution altered. The patients' osteoclasts were fewer and smaller than control cells, their resorptive capacity was markedly deranged, and the endosomal pathway was perturbed as evidenced by the distribution of internalised dextran. Conclusions SNX10 was recently shown to interact with vacuolar type H+-ATPase (V-ATPase) which pumps protons at the osteoclast-bone interface. Mutations in TCIRG1, the gene encoding a subunit of the V-ATPase complex, account for the majority of cases of osteopetrosis. It is speculated that SNX10 is responsible for the vesicular sorting of V-ATPase from Golgi or for its targeting to the ruffled border. A mutation in SNX10 may therefore result in ‘secondary V-ATPase deficiency’ with a failure to acidify the resorption lacuna. Determination of the sequence of the SNX10 gene is warranted in molecularly undefined patients with recessive ‘pure’ osteopetrosis of infancy.
Special Education in the United Arab Emirates: Anxieties, Attitudes and Aspirations.

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief background about the educational system in the United Arab Emirates and particularly describe the present types of programs and services offered within the country with respect to individuals with special needs. In addition, findings of an ongoing study about the attitudes of teachers and preservice teachers towards the integration of children with special needs into regular schools across the United Arab Emirates have been discussed. As the country continues its dramatic period of change as a nation, changes in the education of children with special needs will occur at a rapid rate. For success in the change process information on the attitudes and anxieties of the major stakeholders needs to be investigated and addressed. The findings of study would contribute to the literature base. Finally, the educational implications and recommendations will be explored within the social, religious and cultural contexts of the country.