Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scaling Information Extraction to Large Document Collections

Information extraction and text mining applications are just beginning to tap the immense amounts of valuable textual information available online. In order to extract information from millions, and in some cases, billions of documents, different solutions to scalability emerged. We review key approaches for scaling up information extraction, including using general-purpose search engines as well as indexing techniques specialized for information extraction applications. Scalable information extraction is an active area of research, and we highlight some of the opportunities and challenges in this area that are relevant to the database community.
Macedonian Čalgija: A Musical Refashioning of National Identity

What is the role of music in fashioning a national identity out of a cosmopolitan past? The Macedonian čalgija genre is an instructive case study of the process by which state agencies and historical communities engage in, and contest, identity construction. This article traces the effects of state cultural policies that shaped čalgija—an Ottoman urban genre—during the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–91) and the processes by which čalgija was gradually recast as a distinctly Macedonian Christian and modern form of expression. This study contributes ethnomusicological rigour to an anthropology of nationalism per Turino in order to explicitly analyse the musical ground of national identity construction as proposed by Herzfeld and Danforth. This article uses an approach that I term critical semantics to analyse the ways in which boundaries of musical style become contested frames through which musicians, audiences and state representatives experience varied attachments to national ideology and historical communal identity. I focus on the discourses of folklore agencies, research institutions and musicians alongside musical practice in two formative periods: 1944–60, during which čalgija was highlighted as a symbol of Macedonia's cosmopolitan urban past; and 1960s–80s, when čalgija was subjected to increasingly homogenising stylistic features and loss of regional specificities in response to growing ethnic tensions in the region. I trace the impact of these political and social changes through a musical analysis of four versions of a heroic ballad (‘The song of Gorgi Sugarev/Mariovo began to weep’) that span 1928–79. I argue that studies of musical nationalism need to address musical silences, erasure and transformations as well as the incorporation of new elements.
Assessing Sustainability and Guiding Development towards More Sustainable Products

Companies need to develop more sustainable products that fit into future more sustainable markets. For this reason, the integration of sustainability considerations is needed in the early stages of product development, where a major part of the sustainability performance of a final product is determined. The aim of the research presented in this doctoral thesis is to better understand both enablers and obstacles in developing sustainable products. This research is based on three empirical studies. In the first study participatory action research was applied in a material research project aiming at developing wood-based materials to replace petroleum-based materials, while ensuring a more sustainable product. A specific focus was on how to facilitate action towards more sustainable products by visualising what affects a product’s sustainability. The insights from the first study were applied to the second study, an investigation of the connection between ecolabels and clothing design at three Swedish clothing companies. The research revealed a weak connection, because present ecolabel criteria mainly focus on considerations at the production stage. During the above-mentioned studies it became increasingly apparent that the business organisation has an important influence on companies’ ability to develop more sustainable products. A third study examined two companies to attain a better understanding of how company management systems affect work practices regarding sustainability in product development. The research revealed that technical knowledge on products, production and sustainability is a necessary condition, but by itself not sufficient to drive development of more sustainable products; action competence in a broader sense is needed. For a company or organisation to achieve action competence, collaboration and team learning are necessary, since many different skills must be utilised.
Building Memory with Concept Learning Capabilities from Large-Scale Knowledge Bases

We present a new perspective on neural knowledge base (KB) embeddings, from which we build a framework that can model symbolic knowledge in the KB together with its learning process. We show that this framework well regularizes previous neural KB embedding model for superior performance in reasoning tasks, while having the capabilities of dealing with unseen entities, that is, to learn their embeddings from natural language descriptions, which is very like human's behavior of learning semantic concepts.
Developmental Changes within the Structure of the Mammal Domain.

Development changes in the organization of information within the mammal domain were examined and considered within the context of cultural knowledge acquisition. Judgments of similarity among mammals were elicited from 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults by means of a triad task. Analyses addressed both quantitative and qualitative models of development consistent with Romney, Weller, and Batchelder's (1986) cultural consensus model. Results provided partial support for both models. Ss' responses generally fit the cultural consensus model, whereas systematic patterns of deviation from the model emerged between children and adults because of the emergence of a primate category after age 10. The relationship between these results and Carey's (1985) research on the development of biological knowledge is discussed, and implications for the study of expertise acquisition are considered
An algorithm for constraint-based structural template matching: application to 3D templates with statistical analysis

MOTIVATION Structural templates consisting of a few atoms in a specific geometric conformation provide a powerful tool for studying the relationship between protein structure and function. Current methods for template searching constrain template syntax and semantics by their design. Hence there is a need for a more flexible core algorithm upon which to build more sophisticated tools. Statistical analysis of structural similarity is still in its infancy when compared with its analogue in sequence alignment. In the context of template matching, there is an urgent need for normalization of scores so that results from templates with differing sensitivity may be compared directly. RESULTS We introduce Jess, a fast and flexible algorithm for searching protein structures for small groups of atoms under arbitrary constraints on geometry and chemistry. We apply the algorithm to a set of manually derived enzyme active site templates, and derive an empirical measure for estimating the relative significance of hits encountered using differing templates.
Delayed Auditory Feedback with Dyslexics

AbstractDyslexic college students were hypothesized to differ from normal college students in their response to delayed auditory feedback. Based on previous research, there was an apparent likelihood that dyslexics would not be as adversely affected by delayed auditory feedback as normals. However, this hypothesis was not supported. The mean difference in performance between direct and delayed auditory teed back was 9.0 errors for dyslexics and only 2.2 errors for normals (t = 6.36, df = 13, p .0001).
Zebrafish neurolin‐a and ‐b, orthologs of ALCAM, are involved in retinal ganglion cell differentiation and retinal axon pathfinding

Neurolin‐a and Neurolin‐b (also called alcam and nlcam, respectively) are zebrafish orthologs of human ALCAM, an adhesion protein of the immunoglobulin superfamily with functions in axon growth and guidance. Within the developing zebrafish retina, onset and progression of Neurolin‐a expression parallels the pattern of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) differentiation. By using a morpholino‐based knockdown approach, we show that Neurolin‐a (but not Neurolin‐b) is necessary for a crucial step in RGC differentiation. Without Neurolin‐a, a large proportion of RGCs fail to develop, and RGC axons are absent or reduced in number. Subsequently, Neurolin‐a is required for RGC survival and for the differentiation of all other retinal neurons. Neurolin‐b is expressed later in well‐differentiated RGCs and is required for RGC axon pathfinding. Without Neurolin‐b, RGC axons grow in highly aberrant routes along the optic tract and/or fail to reach the optic tectum. Thus, the zebrafish Neurolin paralogs are involved in distinct steps of retinotectal development. J. Comp. Neurol. 513:38–50, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Exposure of Low-Income Families and Their Children to Neighborhood Violence and Paternal Antisocial Behavior

Objective. We examined the relation between neighborhood violence and father antisocial behavior with a national sample of fathers from low-income families with 3-year-old children Design. Children were classified into 4 groups based on their exposure to father antisocial behavior and neighborhood violence. Results. Children who experience high levels of each performed more poorly on indicators of emotion regulation. Children in risk groups were exposed to higher levels of family conflict, father depression, and poorer internal and external physical environments than children who were in the low-risk group. Children with fathers who were not antisocial were 3 times more likely to be spanked when the father resided in a high-risk neighborhood. Conclusions. Fathers should be included in early prevention programs targeting families with very young children, and such programs simultaneously challenged to broaden into community networks.
A Novel Strategy for Development of Recombinant Antitoxin Therapeutics Tested in a Mouse Botulism Model

Antitoxins are needed that can be produced economically with improved safety and shelf life compared to conventional antisera-based therapeutics. Here we report a practical strategy for development of simple antitoxin therapeutics with substantial advantages over currently available treatments. The therapeutic strategy employs a single recombinant ‘targeting agent’ that binds a toxin at two unique sites and a ‘clearing Ab’ that binds two epitopes present on each targeting agent. Co-administration of the targeting agent and the clearing Ab results in decoration of the toxin with up to four Abs to promote accelerated clearance. The therapeutic strategy was applied to two Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) serotypes and protected mice from lethality in two different intoxication models with an efficacy equivalent to conventional antitoxin serum. Targeting agents were a single recombinant protein consisting of a heterodimer of two camelid anti-BoNT heavy-chain-only Ab VH (VHH) binding domains and two E-tag epitopes. The clearing mAb was an anti-E-tag mAb. By comparing the in vivo efficacy of treatments that employed neutralizing vs. non-neutralizing agents or the presence vs. absence of clearing Ab permitted unprecedented insight into the roles of toxin neutralization and clearance in antitoxin efficacy. Surprisingly, when a post-intoxication treatment model was used, a toxin-neutralizing heterodimer agent fully protected mice from intoxication even in the absence of clearing Ab. Thus a single, easy-to-produce recombinant protein was as efficacious as polyclonal antiserum in a clinically-relevant mouse model of botulism. This strategy should have widespread application in antitoxin development and other therapies in which neutralization and/or accelerated clearance of a serum biomolecule can offer therapeutic benefit.
Qyz : A Platform for Visual Analysis of Error , Abuse , and Fraud in Medical Bills

Qyz is a novel domain-specific visualization tool that provides a comprehensive overview of error, fraud, and abuse in large sets of medical bills. The system supports users from a wide range of technical backgrounds and access levels. A typical analysis covers medical codes, line-level pricing, and gives broad geographic and regulatory context for a set of bills. Qyz graphically presents descriptive statistics regarding bill overpayment, medical coding error frequencies, procedure co-occurrences, and other variables of interest. The system provides interfaces for both interactive analysis and automated generation of easily-customizable, distributionquality reports.
RAPPORT TECHNIQUE PROUVÉ Retour d’Expérience sur la Validation du Vote Électronique

Electronic voting promises the possibility of a convenient, efficient and secure facility for recording and tallying votes in an election. Recently highlighted inadequacies of implemented systems have demonstrated the importance of formally verifying the underlying voting protocols. The applied pi calculus is a formalism for modelling such protocols, and allows us to verify properties by using automatic tools, and to rely on manual proof techniques for cases that automatic tools are unable to handle. We model a known protocol for elections known as FOO 92 in the applied pi calculus, and we formalise three of its expected properties, namely fairness, eligibility, and privacy. We use the ProVerif tool to prove that the first two properties are satisfied. In the case of the third property, ProVerif is unable to prove it directly, because its ability to prove observational equivalence between processes is not complete. We provide a manual proof of the required equivalence.
Generating Better Radial Basis Function Network for Large Data Set of Census

Radial basis function networks are known to have good performance compared to other artificial neural networks like multilayer perceptrons. Because the size of target data sets in data mining is very large and artificial neural networks including radial basis function networks require intensive computing, sampling is needed. So, because the sample size should be relatively small due to computational load to train radial basis function networks, simple random sampling for small size might not generate perfect and balanced samples. This paper suggests a better sampling technique based on branching information of decision tree for radial basis function networks when target data set is very large like census data. Experiments with census income data in UCI machine learning repository shows a promising result.
Self-Monitoring as a Personality Correlate of Materialism: An Investigation of Related Cognitive Orientation

For a sample of 170 undergraduate students, scores on Snyder's Self-monitoring scale were correlated . 85 with scores on Richins and Dawson's Materialism scale. This suggests that the constructs reflect a similar externally focused cognitive orientation. In addition, stepwise regression indicated that variance in Self-monitoring scores is explained largely by the success and centrality components of Materialism. Since these components entail a characteristic use of external contextual cues, their predictive efficacy lends further support to an explanation of construct relationship grounded in individuals' cognitive orientation.
Lossless scalar functions: Boundary interpolation, Schur algorithm and Ober’s canonical form.

In [1] a balanced canonical form for continuous-time lossless systems was presented. This form has a tridiagonal dynamical matrix A and the useful property that the corresponding controllability matrix K is upper triangular. In [2], this structure is also derived from a LC ladder. In this paper, a connection is established between Ober¿s canonical form and a Schur algorithm built from angular derivative interpolation conditions. It provides a new interpretation of the parameters in Ober¿s form as interpolation values at infinity and a recursive construction of the balanced realization.
Language and Brand Attitudes: Impact of Script and Sound Matching in Chinese and English

Chinese names consist of logographs that represent the meanings of a word, whereas English names consist of alphabetic letters that represent the sound of the word. Therefore, we propose that Chinese brand attitudes are primarily affected by the match between script associations and brand associations, but brand attitudes of English names are primarily affected by the match between sound associations and brand associations. A cross-cultural study conducted in China and the United States confirms these predictions. These findings add further evidence to the stream of research that shows how structural features of languages and writing systems affect consumer behavior.
The IFN-Independent Response to Virus Particle Entry Provides a First Line of Antiviral Defense That Is Independent of TLRs and Retinoic Acid-Inducible Gene I1

The innate immune system responds to pathogen infection by eliciting a nonspecific immune response following the recognition of various pathogen-associated molecular patterns. TLRs and the RNA helicases retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) and melanoma differentiation-associated gene 5 recognize foreign nucleic acid within endosomal and cytoplasmic compartments, respectively, initiating a signaling cascade that involves the induction of type I IFN through the transcription factors IFN regulatory factor (IRF) 3 and NF-κB. However, a recent paradigm has emerged in which bacterial DNA and double-stranded B-form DNA trigger type I IFN production through an uncharacterized TLR- and RIG-I-independent pathway. We have previously described a response in primary fibroblasts wherein the entry of diverse RNA- and DNA-enveloped virus particles is sufficient to induce a subset of IFN-stimulated genes and a complete antiviral response in an IRF3-dependent, IFN-independent manner. In this study, we show that the innate immune response to virus particle entry is independent of both TLR and RIG-I pathways, confirming the existence of novel innate immune mechanisms that result in the activation of IRF3. Furthermore, we propose a model of innate antiviral immunity in which exposure to increasing numbers of virus particles elevates the complexity of the cellular response from an intracellular, IFN-independent response to one involving secretion of cytokines and activation of infiltrating immune cells.
A NICHING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZER

This paper describes a technique that extends the unimodal particle swarm optimizer to efficiently locate multiple optimal solutions in multimodal problems. Multiple subswarms are grown from an initial particle swarm by monitoring the fitness of individual particles. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can successfully locate all maxima on a small set of test functions during all simulation runs.
Document Image Classification with Intra-Domain Transfer Learning and Stacked Generalization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In this article, a region-based Deep Convolutional Neural Network framework is presented for document structure learning. The contribution of this work involves efficient training of region based classifiers and effective ensembling for document image classification. A primary level of ‘inter-domain’ transfer learning is used by exporting weights from a pre-trained VGG16 architecture on the ImageNet dataset to train a document classifier on whole document images. Exploiting the nature of region based influence modelling, a secondary level of ‘intra-domain’ transfer learning is used for rapid training of deep learning models for image segments. Finally, a stacked generalization based ensembling is utilized for combining the predictions of the base deep neural network models. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.21% on the popular RVL-CDIP document image dataset, exceeding the benchmarks set by the existing algorithms.
Verifiable secret sharing and multiparty protocols with honest majority

Under the assumption that each participant can broadcast a message to all other participants and that each pair of participants can communicate secretly, we present a verifiable secret sharing protocol, and show that any multiparty protocol, or game with incomplete information, can be achieved if a majority of the players are honest. The secrecy achieved is unconditional and does not rely on any assumption about computational intractability. Applications of these results to Byzantine Agreement are also presented. Underlying our results is a new tool of Information Checking which provides authentication without cryptographic assumptions and may have wide applications elsewhere.
Selecting Decision Rules for Crucial Choices

Thompson developed a framework to make strategic choices that indicates when to use optimizing, satisficing, instrumentality, and social tests as decision rules. These oft-cited prescriptions have not been empiricallyinvestigated. This studyprovides such a test by comparing the success realized when Thompson’s prescriptions were or were not followed in more than 300 strategic decisions. The findings indicate that managers followed the prescriptions in 4 of 10 decisions. Failing to follow the prescriptions led managers to applya decision rule that either developed misleading factual information or ignored available information as choices were made. Both misusing and ignoring evaluative information dramaticallylowered the prospect of success. Success improved when a decision rule was selected that adhered to the prescriptions. The implications of these findings for managers and management are discussed.
Characteristics of dentists participating in capitation and Preferred Provider Organization dental plans.

BACKGROUND In 1998, the American Dental Association Survey Center conducted a telephone and mail survey of U.S. dentists in private practice in an effort to determine the extent of dentists' participation in capitation and preferred provider organization, or PPO, dental plans and the characteristics of dentists who participate in those plans. METHODS An initial telephone screening survey of a random sample of 11,550 dentists in private practice was conducted to identify dentists who participated in PPO or capitation dental plans. Dentists who participated in either of these plan types then were asked to complete a mail survey on their plan participation. RESULTS The majority of dentists participating in either type of dental plan reported having never left a dental plan. Dentists who belonged to more than one PPO or capitation plan reported that a larger percentage of their patients were enrolled in these plans and that more of their practice's gross income came from the plans. Participation in PPO and capitation plans has had a positive impact on the practices of many of the responding dentists, particularly with regard to expanding their patient base. CONCLUSIONS The authors found that the majority of dentists participating in PPO dental plans found it to be a positive experience overall. Dentists participating in capitation plans were less satisfied; more than 50 percent of capitation plan participants reported some level of dissatisfaction with the plans. The majority of dentists participating in a PPO plan expected to renew participation when their current contract expired; a much smaller percentage (though still a majority) of responding capitation-plan participants indicated the same. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS Responding dentists' overall indication of satisfaction with their current PPO plan participation probably indicates further growth for these dental plans. On the other hand, capitation plan participants seem much less satisfied with their plans. PPO plans, therefore, seem much more likely to be the type of plan that dentists will choose in the future.