Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Citation Extraction from Patents

The Quaero project organized a set of evaluations of Named Entity recognition systems in 2009. One of the sub-tasks consists in extracting citations from patents, i.e. references to other documents, either other patents or general literature from English-language patents. We present in this paper the participation of LIMSI in this evaluation, with a complete system description and the evaluation results. The corpus shown that patent and non-patent citations have a very different nature. We then separated references to other patents and to general literature papers and we created a hybrid system. For patent citations, the system used rule-based expert knowledge on the form of regular expressions. The system for detecting non-patent citations, on the other hand, is purely stochastic (machine learning with CRF++). Then we mixed both approaches to provide a single output. 4 teams participated to this task and our system obtained the best results of this evaluation campaign, even if the difference between the first two systems is poorly significant.
Optimization of Gate Leakage and NBTI for Plasma-Nitrided Gate Oxides by Numerical and Analytical Models

Reduction in static-power dissipation (gate leakage) by using nitrided oxides comes at the expense of enhanced negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI). Therefore, determining the nitrogen content in gate oxides that can simultaneously optimize gate-leakage and NBTI degradation is a problem of significant technological relevance. In this paper, we experimentally and theoretically analyze wide range of gate-leakage and NBTI stress data from a variety of plasma-oxynitride gate dielectric devices to establish an optimization scheme for gate-leakage and NBTI degradation. Calculating electric fields and leakage current both numerically and using simple analytical expressions, we demonstrate a design diagram for arbitrary nitrogen concentration and effective oxide thickness that may be used for process and IC design.
Analysis of Overlay Network Impact on Dependability

Recently, peer-to-peer systems have become widely accepted and are probably the most recognizable examples of distributed applications. As they are maturing and their functionalities are becoming increasingly complex, the need for dependable solutions arises. In particular peer-to-peer systems' dependability is immensely influenced by their virtual overlay networks. The paper presents the results of analysis of diverse overlay networks with respect to their support for dependability.
Database partitioning in a cluster of processors

In a distributed database system the partitioning and allocation of the database over the processor nodes of the network can be a critical aspect of the database design effort. In this paper we develop and evaluate algorithms that perform this task in a computationally feasible manner. The network we consider is characterized by a relatively high communication bandwidth, considering the processing and input output capacities in its processors. Such a balance is typical if the processors are connected via busses or local networks. The common constraint that transactions have a specific root node no longer exists, so that there are more distribution choices. However, a poor distribution leads to less efficient computation, higher costs, and higher loads in the nodes or in the communication network so that the system may not be able to handle the required set of transactions. Our approach is to first split the database into fragments which constitute appropriate units for allocation. The fragments to be allocated are selected based on maximal benefit criteria using a greedy heuristic. The assignment to processor nodes uses a first-fit algorithm. The complete algorithm, called GFF, is stated in a procedural form. The complexity of the problem and of its candidate solutions are analyzed and several interesting relationships are proven. Alternate benefit metrics are considered, since the execution cost of the allocation procedure varies by orders of magnitude with the alternatives of benefit evaluation. A mixed benefit evaluation strategy is eventually proposed. A model for evaluation is presented. Two of the strategies are experimentally evaluated, and the reported results support the discussion. The approach should be suitable for other cases where resources have to be allocated subject to resource constraints.
Design and characterisation of a serial-kinematic nanopositioner for high-speed AFM

A flexure-guided serial-kinematic XYZ nanopositioner for high-speed Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is presented in this paper. Two aspects influencing the performance of serial-kinematic nanopositioners are studied in this work. First, mass reduction by use of tapered flexures is used to enhance the natural frequency of the nanopositioner. Second, a study of possible sensor positioning in a serial-kinematic nanopositioner is presented. An arrangement of sensors for exact estimation of cross-coupling is incorporated in the proposed design. Characterization in terms of range, hysteresis, cross-coupling and dynamic response of the nanopositioner is presented. Scanning results up to 640 Hz are also furnished. Outcomes and future work are discussed in conclusion.
Mismatch Analysis of Elementary School Furniture in Several Regions of Central Java, Indonesia, and Redesign Recommendations

The aim of this article was to determine the mismatch between the existing desks and chairs in elementary schools and the anthropometric measurements of students in several regions of Central Java, Indonesia. Based on the mismatch, recommendations are given to improve the fit of the desks and chairs with the students’ anthropometry. Five critical dimensions of desk and chair were included in the analysis: seat height (SH), seat depth (SD), seat width (SW), desk height (DH), and under-desk clearance (DC). The analysis provided three critical chair dimensions and two critical desk dimensions with a high degree of mismatch. ANOVA and Tukey tests were performed to determine the grouping of students’ anthropometric data. Four sizes of chair and three sizes of desk are proposed based on the results of the analysis. The proposed dimensions lower mismatch more than the existing dimensions.
Anchored Kernel Metric Learning

This paper proposes the Anchored Kernel Metric Learning (AKML) method, which learns metrics by sparsely combining locally discriminative rank-1 basis matrices in the anchored kernel induced space. First, we apply k-means clustering to generate anchored samples, thus forming an anchored sample matrix. Based on the assumption that the basis matrices can be formulated as linear combinations of anchored samples, we then learn the combining weights by regularized LDA in anchored samples' neighborhoods. Finally, a logistic loss with nonnegative constraints is utilized to select and weigh these basis matrices for a PSD metric matrix. Under this framework, we incorporate multiple kernels into AKM-L for further boosting the performance. Experiments on two benchmark person re-identification datasets demonstrate that our approach clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art metric learning methods.
VIRTUAL REALITY IN REHABILITATION OF SPINAL CORD INJURIES: A CASE REPORT

Advances in Information Technology offer new opportunities for rehabilitation. In particular, the immersion capability provided by a synthetic environment could be exploited to design novel assistive devices. In virtual reality (VR) users navigate and interact with 3-D, computer-generated environments that are highly flexible and programmable, enabling the therapist to present a variety of controlled stimuli and to measure and monitor responses. VR provides a powerful means of increasing levels of environmental interaction in a highly controlled and structured manner. In this paper an overview is given of the design issues of a VR-enhanced orthopaedic appliance used in rehabilitation of a person with spinal cord injury.
Contribution to Semantic Analysis of Arabic Language

We propose a new approach for determining the adequate sense of Arabic words. For that, we propose an algorithm based on information retrieval measures to identify the context of use that is the closest to the sentence containing the word to be disambiguated. The contexts of use represent a set of sentences that indicates a particular sense of the ambiguous word. These contexts are generated using the words that define the senses of the ambiguous words, the exact string-matching algorithm, and the corpus. We use the measures employed in the domain of information retrieval, Harman, Croft, and Okapi combined to the Lesk algorithm, to assign the correct sense of those proposed.
Just a Girl in the Army

This article considers the experiences of 12 U.S. Army women combat veterans. These women served in historically significant roles as some of the first women to officially serve in combat in the U.S. military. This article focuses on the role of gender in these women’s experiences in the context of the masculine culture of the military. We explore how they used performance of masculinity and metaphors of family to fit into their combat units. We also deliberate on how sexual harassment was used against these women in ways that communicated that they were not fully accepted. Finally, we consider the tension between empowerment and disempowerment in these women’s narratives of their military service.
Robust Constant Switching Frequency-Based Field-Weakening Algorithm for Direct Torque Controlled Reluctance Synchronous Motors

This paper presents an improved direct torque controlled reluctance synchronous motor drive for field-weakening applications. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a modified direct torque control (DTC) algorithm is proposed to enable a constant switching frequency, reducing the torque ripples significantly while simultaneously retaining the simplicity of the DTC. Conventional field weakening entails the knowledge of the machine parameters that inevitably degrades the robustness and stability of the overall drive system. To circumvent this problem, an improved field-weakening method robust to the machine parameter variations is also presented. These two methods are combined to achieve a robust field-weakening algorithm for direct torque controlled reluctance synchronous motor drives with constant switching frequency and reduced torque ripples. The validity of the proposed algorithm is verified by simulation and experimental results supplemented in this paper.
NASTIA: Negotiating Appointment Setting Interface

This paper describes a French Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) named NASTIA (Negotiating Appointment SeTting InterfAce). Appointment scheduling is a hybrid task halfway between slot-filling and negotiation. NASTIA implements three different negotiation strategies. These strategies were tested on 1734 dialogues with 385 users who interacted at most 5 times with the SDS and gave a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 for each dialogue. Previous appointment scheduling systems were evaluated with the same experimental protocol. NASTIA is different from these systems in that it can adapt its strategy during the dialogue. The highest system task completion rate with these systems was 81% whereas NASTIA had an 88% average and its best performing strategy even reached 92%. This strategy also significantly outperformed previous systems in terms of overall user rating with an average of 8.28 against 7.40. The experiment also enabled highlighting global recommendations for building spoken dialogue systems.
Categories and classifications in EuroWordNet

In EuroWordNet we develop wordnets in 8 European languages, which are structured along the same lines as the Princeton WordNet. The wordnets are inter-linked in a multilingual database, where they can be compared. This comparison reveals many different lexicalizations of classes across the languages that also lead to important differences in the hierarchical structure of the wordnets. It is not feasible to include all these classes (the superset) in each languagespecific wordnet and to reach consensus on the implicational effects across all the languages. Each wordnet is therefore limited to the lexicalized words and expressions of a language. The wordnets are thus autonomous languagespecific structures that capture valuable information about the lexicalization of each language, which is important for information retrieval, machine translation and language generation. By connecting the wordnets to a separate ontology, semantic inferencing can still be guaranteed. Still, different types of classification schemes can be distinguished among the lexicalized classes. In this paper we will further describe the properties of these different classes and discuss the advantages and effects of distinguishing them in wordnetlike structures.
A Framework for Intelligent Service Environments Based on Middleware and General Purpose Task Planner

Aiming at providing various services for daily living, a framework of Intelligent Service Environment of Ubiquitous Robotics (ISEUR) is presented. This framework mainly addresses two important issues. First, it builds standardized component models for heterogeneous sensing and acting devices based on the middleware technology. Second, it implements a general purpose task planner, which coordinates associated components to achieve various tasks. The video demonstrates how these two functionalities are combined together in order to provide services in intelligent environments. Two different tasks, a localization task and a robopub task, are implemented to show the feasibility, efficiency and expandability of the system.
Housing Markets, Wealth and the Business Cycle

The paper examines the linkages between housing markets and the business cycle in OECD countries, focusing on how differences in the degree of resilience to economic shocks can be affected by the structural characteristics of housing and mortgage markets. The paper focuses specifically on: the transmission channel from housing wealth to consumption and on the factors behind house price variability, which help to determine whether the housing sector plays a stabilising role or not. Estimates of the marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth are presented for ten OECD countries, where it is found that the strongest impact on consumption is in countries that have large, efficient and responsive mortgage markets. Particularly important in this regard is the degree of mortgage market “completeness” -- i.e. the extent to which the market is able to offer a variety of products and to serve a broad range of potential borrowers -- in particular, the extent to which they provide . Cette etude examine les liens entre les marches immobiliers et le cycle economique dans les pays de l’OCDE, se concentrant sur le role des specificites nationales des marches immobiliers et hypothecaires sur l’inegale resilience face aux chocs economiques. Cette etude s’interesse particulierement au canal de transmission de la richesse immobiliere a la consommation et aux facteurs expliquant la variabilite des prix des logements ; ces deux aspects contribuent a determiner si le secteur immobilier joue un role stabilisateur ou non. Des estimations de la propension marginale a consommer la richesse immobiliere sont presentees pour dix pays de l’OCDE. Ces estimations indiquent que les effets les plus important sur la consummation apparaissent dans les pays ayant des marches hypothecaires de grande taille, efficients et reactifs. Le niveau de « completude » du marche hypothecaire -- la mesure dans laquelle le marche peut offrir une variete de produits et repondre a un large eventail .
The Comparability of Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Fatigue Scores between Cancer and Systemic Sclerosis

Purpose The functional assessment of chronic illness therapy-fatigue (FACIT-F) is commonly used to assess fatigue across diseases. The degree to which the FACIT-F demonstrates measurement equivalence across disease groups, however, is not known. The purpose of this study was to assess differential item functioning (DIF) of FACIT-F items between patients with cancer and systemic sclerosis (SSc or scleroderma). Methods Secondary analysis of FACIT-F data from cancer and SSc patients. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the factor structure of the FACIT-F in cancer and SSc patients. The multiple-indicator, multiple-cause model was utilized to assess DIF, comparing responses from cancer and SSc patients. Results A unidimensional factor structure for the FACIT-F was demonstrated with the cancer (n = 1141), SSc (n = 1186), and combined samples. Statistically significant, but small-magnitude, DIF was found for four items. Compared to cancer patients with the same level of fatigue, SSc patients had lower scores (more fatigue) for item 2 (bodily weakness), 7 (energy), and 8 (ability to perform daily activities); and higher scores (less fatigue) for item 9 (need to sleep throughout the day). For the entire scale, SSc patients had 0.47 SD lower FACIT-F latent factor scores (more fatigue) than cancer patients. After correcting for DIF, there was a change of only 0.03 SD in this difference (0.44 SD lower). Conclusions Although statistically significant DIF was detected for four FACIT-F items, the magnitude was small and the effect on fatigue latent scores was minimal. Thus, FACIT-F scores can be used equivalently in cancer and SSc.
View De nition and DTD Inference for XML

We present a query language and mediator architecture for XML data [XML98b]. The query language, calledXmas (XMLMatching And Structuring Language) uses vertical and horizontal navigation. The horizontal navigation provides a powerful novel mechanism for using the order in the semistructured model underlying XML. This couples nicely with the well-known regular path expressions for vertical navigation [Suc, Abi97, Bun97, AQM97, FFLS98, AM98, CDSS98, XML98a, KS95]. Xmas also provides versatile mechanisms for constructing XML documents as answers to queries, including powerful group-by and order-by constructs. We brie y describe a prototype for an XML-based information mediation system, built around Xmas. DTDs can have multiple uses in creating integrated views and querying XML data. Our prototype uses a QBE-style query interfaces driven by the view DTD. The mediator will use DTDs to optimize the queries it sends to the sources. Finally DTDs may guide the production of style sheets, such as XSL scripts [XSL98], that display XML documents as browser-friendly HTML documents. DTDs may also help in the design of the storage structures. Thus, it is clear that DTDs of integrated views will be particularly useful. However, creating a view DTD \manually" by delving into the details of the source DTDs is error-prone and may become the bottleneck of the integration software development, compromising much of the advantage of semi-automatic data integration. A central component of our mediator is a DTD inference module. After outlining the architecture of the mediator and illustrating Xmas, we present work in progress and results (submitted for publication [PV98]) on DTD inference in views de ned by Xmas queries. We point out several strong limitations of DTDs and the need for extending them with (i) a subtyping mechanism and (ii) a more powerful speci cation mechanism than regular languages, such as contextfree languages. With these extensions, we show that one can always infer tight DTDs for views de ned by selection queries, which extract a list of elements from the input. The tight DTD precisely characterizes the documents in the view on sources satisfying given DTDs. We also show interesting special cases where we can derive a tight DTD without requiring the extension with subtyping. Finally we consider related problems such as checking conformance of a view de nition to a prede ned DTD.
"Secure" Logistic Regression of Horizontally and Vertically Partitioned Distributed Databases

Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) techniques aim to construct efficient data mining algorithms while main- taining privacy. Statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) tech- niques aim to preserve confidentiality but in contrast to PPDM techniques also aim to provide access to statistical data needed for "full" statistical analysis. We draw from both PPDM and SDL paradigms, and address the prob- lem of performing a "secure" logistic regression on pooled data collected separately by several parties without directly combining their databases. We describe "secure" Newton- Raphson protocol for binary logistic regression in the case of horizontally and vertically partitioned databases using secure-mulity party computation.
Stepping through the door – exploring low‐threshold services in Norwegian family centres

Public policies encourage the service system to work in new ways to promote health and increase social equality. This paper presents four categories that show the character of the low-threshold services in Norwegian family centres from the professionals' and parents' perspectives, focusing on accessibility and participation: easy access, low level of bureaucracy, collaborative competences and inclusive arena. This paper is based on an inductive study in three municipalities that have chosen to establish family centres as interdisciplinary co-located services that aim to offer low-threshold services for children and their families. Data were generated through a fieldwork, and participatory observation and interviews were the main source of data. The methodological framework for the analysis was grounded theory, in which the data generation and analysis interchanged throughout the study, and theoretical sampling set the focus for the fieldwork. Exploring the actor's perspective highlighted both strengths and challenges with the low-threshold services in the family centres. The four elements presented emphasize that the value of these low-threshold services are not found in one single hallmark; rather, the value depends on an interaction between different elements that must be addressed when establishing, evaluating and developing low-threshold services in family centres.
Protein Synthesis in Distal Axons Is Not Required for Growth Cone Responses to Guidance Cues

Recent evidence suggests that growth cone responses to guidance cues require local protein synthesis. Using chick neurons, we investigated whether protein synthesis is required for growth cones of several types to respond to guidance cues. First, we found that global inhibition of protein synthesis stops axonal elongation after 2 h. When protein synthesis inhibitors were added 15 min before adding guidance cues, we found no changes in the typical responses of retinal, sensory, and sympathetic growth cones. In the presence of cycloheximide or anisomycin, ephrin-A2, slit-3, and semaphorin3A still induced growth cone collapse and loss of actin filaments, nerve growth factor (NGF) and neurotrophin-3 still induced growth cone protrusion and increased filamentous actin, and sensory growth cones turned toward an NGF source. In compartmented chambers that separated perikarya from axons, axons grew for 24–48 h in the presence of cycloheximide and responded to negative and positive cues. Our results indicate that protein synthesis is not strictly required in the mechanisms for growth cone responses to many guidance cues. Differences between our results and other studies may exist because of different cellular metabolic levels in in vitro conditions and a difference in when axonal functions become dependent on local protein synthesis.