Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
At the Lower End of Language—Exploring the Vulgar and Obscene Side of German

In this paper, we describe a workflow for the data-driven acquisition and semantic scaling of a lexicon that covers lexical items from the lower end of the German language register—terms typically considered as rough, vulgar or obscene. Since the fine semantic representation of grades of obscenity can only inadequately be captured at the categorical level (e.g., obscene vs. non-obscene, or rough vs. vulgar), our main contribution lies in applying best-worst scaling, a rating methodology that has already been shown to be useful for emotional language, to capture the relative strength of obscenity of lexical items. We describe the empirical foundations for bootstrapping such a low-end lexicon for German by starting from manually supplied lexicographic categorizations of a small seed set of rough and vulgar lexical items and automatically enlarging this set by means of distributional semantics. We then determine the degrees of obscenity for the full set of all acquired lexical items by letting crowdworkers comparatively assess their pejorative grade using best-worst scaling. This semi-automatically enriched lexicon already comprises 3,300 lexical items and incorporates 33,000 vulgarity ratings. Using it as a seed lexicon for fully automatic lexical acquisition, we were able to raise its coverage up to slightly more than 11,000 entries.
The AIP-Tohoku System at the BEA-2019 Shared Task

We introduce the AIP-Tohoku grammatical error correction (GEC) system for the BEA-2019 shared task in Track 1 (Restricted Track) and Track 2 (Unrestricted Track) using the same system architecture. Our system comprises two key components: error generation and sentence-level error detection. In particular, GEC with sentence-level grammatical error detection is a novel and versatile approach, and we experimentally demonstrate that it significantly improves the precision of the base model. Our system is ranked 9th in Track 1 and 2nd in Track 2.
Survey on Ocular Blood Vessel Segmentation

The eye is sometimes said to provide a window into the health of a person for it is only with the eye that one can actually see the exposed flesh of the subject without using invasive procedures. There are a number of diseases, particularly vascular disease that leave telltale markers in the retina. The retina can be photographed relatively straightforwardly with a funds camera and now with retinal image processing there is much interest in computer analysis of retinal images for identifying and quantifying the effects of diseases such as cardio vascular diseases. A retinal image provides a snapshot of what is happening inside the human body. In particular, the ceremonial of the retinal blood vessels has been shown to imitate the cardiovascular condition of the body. Retinal images provide considerable information on pathological changes caused by local ocular disease which reveals diabetes, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, cardiovascular disease and stroke. Computer-aided study of retinal image plays a central role in diagnostic procedures. However, automatic retinal segmentation is complicated by the fact that retinal images are often noisy, poorly contrasted, and the vessel widths can vary from very small to very large. So in this survey we can review various segmentation techniques to improve the accuracy in blood vessel extraction.
Wait for Face Guide TourCheck Battery O ff er Trivia Questions O ff er Tour Do Trivia Qustions and Remember Face Say GoodbyeGreet Humanwith Name Ask Visitor ’ s Name Check and Respond to Control Command Acquaintance StrangerNo face

Service robots perform flawless demos while their developers are keeping a close eye, but they often fail when working autonomously, especially in a long-term deployment. To study failure modes and human-robot interaction patterns in long-term deployments, we built TritonBot, a long-term autonomy robot working as a building receptionist and a tour guide. It recognizes people’s face, talks to them, and guides people to the labs and facilities in an office building. This paper presents the design of TritonBot and the lessons we learned from the first-month deployment with respect to technical and human-robot interaction aspects. TritonBot and its variant BoxBot have worked for 108.7 hours, actively interacted with people for 22.1 hours, greeted people 2950 times, guided 150 tours, and traveled 9.9 kilometers. We share the components of TritonBot using an open licence to help the community to replicate the TritonBot platform and inspire long-term autonomy and human-robot interaction research.
A comparative study of factors affecting service quality and level of customer satisfaction in Local and Foreign banks in Oman

Quality service and customer satisfaction are major challenges faced by the banking sector in Oman. This paper aims to comparative study of the factors affecting service quality in local and foreign banks in Oman. The quality of service provided in the service sector is of utmost importance in order to sustain in a competitive market. As far banking sector in Oman is concerned, the various policies are adopted by the banks to improve the service quality that includes ebanking, Phone banking, making available CDM (Cash deposits Machines) and ATM (Automated Teller Machines), easy loans, customer care service etc. This research paper is an attitudinal study of customers of two local and foreign banks in Oman. The customer feedback is collected through structured questionnaire, based on the five points Likert scale. The parameters of servqual model have been followed to test the service quality in the banks. An attempt has been made to explore and analyze the significant factors affecting the service quality of banks in Oman by using descriptive and inferential statistics. The key findings of the study are the level of customer satisfaction of local banks is better than the foreign banks in Oman. This is because of the quality of service provided by the local bank is better than foreign banks.
The Impact of Government Size on Output Volatility: Evidence from World Economies

One of the most important goals of policy-makers is to achieve macroeconomic stability, which could significantly be affected by output volatility. In an effort to provide insights with regard to macroeconomic stability, this study aims to model the volatility of output by using univariate GARCH models and to examine the impact of government size on output volatility by using extensive data set from eight different classifications of world economies for the period between 1960 and 2017. The study also employs the Granger Causality Analysis to determine the direction of this relationship. The results provide strong evidence for a negative relation between government size and output volatility. Output volatility is largely dependent on its own shocks and negatively influenced by outside shock as government size. Moreover, confirming Keynesian Hypothesis, the results show that there is mostly one-way causality from government size to output volatility. The results are robust in terms of different classifications of world economies, different measurements of output volatility, different methodologies and controlling for the effect of different sets of exogenous variables.
Comprehensive endovascular treatments of traumatic pseudoaneurysm of the posterior communicating artery combined with cavernous sinus fistula : a case report and literature review

A 23-year-old woman experienced a serious accident, resulting in multiple fractures of the skull base. Forty-five days after the injury, the patient presented with symptoms such as conjunctival congestion, ptosis of the eyelids, and blurred vision. Head CTA (CT angiography); revealed an arterial aneurysm in the cavernous sinus region. Angiography revealed a giant posterior communicating artery aneurysm combined with a cavernous sinus fistula. Subsequently, the patient was treated using a covered stent, coils, and Onyx18. After treatment, both the aneurysm and cavernous sinus fistula were embolized, and the clinical symptoms improved significantly. The combination of a covered stent, coils, and Onyx18 is a safe and effective treatment method for post-traumatic pseudoaneurysm of the posterior communicating artery combined with cavernous sinus fistula.
Exploring Diachronic Changes of Biomedical Knowledge using Distributed Concept Representations

In research best practices can change over time as new discoveries are made and novel methods are implemented. Scientific publications reporting about the latest facts and current state-of-the-art can be possibly outdated after some years or even proved to be false. A publication usually sheds light only on the knowledge of the period it has been published. Thus, the aspect of time can play an essential role in the reliability of the presented information. In Natural Language Processing many methods focus on information extraction from text, such as detecting entities and their relationship to each other. Those methods mostly focus on the facts presented in the text itself and not on the aspects of knowledge which changes over time. This work instead examines the evolution in biomedical knowledge over time using scientific literature in terms of diachronic change. Mainly the usage of temporal and distributional concept representations are explored and evaluated by a proof-of-concept.
Supplementary Material for: Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering

All models were trained using the Adam optimizer (Kingma and Ba, 2014) with a learning rate of 0.0005 and with a batch size of 64. We stopped the training of the models whenever their accuracy on the validation set did not increase for 3 times in a row. Word embeddings had a size of 300. RNNs had two hidden layers and LSTM cells had a size of 1024. MLPs had one hidden layer of size 1024. We used the implementation released by (Johnson et al., 2017) for the LSTM+CNN+SA architecture.
Sample Distribution and Research Design Are Methodological Dilemmas When Identifying Selection and Using Relative Age as an Explanation of Results

The use of a statistical test, such as the chi-squared test, to determine if selection has occurred within a sport has been used frequently in research. The assumed distribution of a sample could influence the occurrence of significant outcomes. The occurrence of significance is generally interpreted as RAE and explained as a result of selection within the sport. Most studies in this field have been done using a cross-sectional design. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the influence of using different types of distribution when testing for significance, in swimming as an example, over a nine-year period of six cohorts in age by gender groups.
Predicting Gender Assignment in Icelandic : A Longitudinal Corpus Case Study

Grammatical gender has descriptively been defined as the sorting of nouns into classes, which is reflected in agreement patterns outside of the noun itself (Corbett 1991). Knowledge of a language that encodes gender involves being able to predict which nouns fall into which group, or, gender classes. Grammatical gender is a language-specific property that is subject to a great deal of crosslinguistic variation. This raises the question of how children are able to discover which patterns are predictive to gender assignment in the language they are acquiring. The age of acquisition and the learning trajectory of grammatical gender has been shown to be subject to cross-linguistic variation. But, hitherto there has been no account of gender acquisition that can explain children’s differing behaviors in the process of acquiring different gender systems. In this paper, we show how the learning trajectory of a gender system can be predicted by modelling the productivity of mappings between noun endings and gender assignment, using Icelandic as a test case. Icelandic has a 3-gender system that distinguishes between masculine, feminine and neuter in both the singular and the plural. The three genders have been claimed to be represented at roughly equal frequency in Icelandic speech (Rögnvaldsson 1990). In addition, Icelandic has a 4-gender case system that distinguishes between nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Neuter has been argued to be the gender default in Icelandic, on the basis of traditional syntactic criteria for the appearance of default morphological forms (see e.g. Thráinsson 2007, Rögnvaldsson 2013). Following Björnsdóttir (in progress), we argue that the domain of generalization to the child learner acquiring Icelandic gender is the case ending in the nominative singular. The current study found this form to be the most frequently attested nominal case form (47%) in a corpus of Icelandic child-directed speech (Sigurjónsdóttir 2007). The learning trajectory of the Icelandic gender system was modeled using the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016). The Tolerance Principle (TP) is an independently motivated quantitative measure that can predict with numerical precision, how many exceptions a linguistic pattern can tolerate in order to be
GIS-based River Inundation and Flood Hazard Mapping

In recent times there have been extreme climatic conditions due to climate change. As a result of this, the intensity of rainfall has increased tremendously causing floods in many areas and countries worldwide. It is therefore prudent that such a natural hazard is addressed in a way to reduce the impact it causes on people and the environment. To achieve the aim of river modeling and hazard mapping, Geographic Information System, spatial technology and the HEC-RAS hydraulic model were used as tools. In this research, a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) which is basic input for any effective flood modeling was created from contour data. The geometric data needed for the modeling process were extracted from the DEM, topographic map and field measurements. A remotely sensed image was classified into various land cover types which was used for estimating the roughness coefficient of the various cover types during the modeling process. The model results were displayed and analyzed in ESRI ArcGIS environment. The flooded area was geometrically overlaid on the topographic map to delineate the affected buildings. The hazard map produced clearly shows the spatial distribution of the flooded area which is located at areas with relatively low relief. The total flooded area covers an approximately 2.93km. Also a flood depth of 4.01637 © 2014 GSS Journals. All rights reserved.
Loughborough University Institutional Repository Interactive constraint-based space layout planning

Layout planning is the primordial design activity that determines the characteristics and performance of a building throughout its lifecycle. Due to its iterative nature, there is a growing interest in the automation of space layout planning to enhance the search for optimum design solutions. The approaches for automation range from constraint/heuristics-based to the application of numerical optimisation algorithms. Among these, the use of design constraints to guide the search of the solution space is well regarded due to its ability to model design problems of an applied nature with multiple objectives. Constraint-based approaches also allow interactivity between the designer and layout planning process, which simulates the iterative nature of creative design and can be integrated well with the existing design process. Interactivity also enhances the management of design knowledge through improved processing and visualisation of information. This paper presents a theoretical framework for interactive constraint-based layout optimisation with an implemented prototype for a hospital patient room interior layout. The theoretical framework was developed by analysing existing layout automation methods and interactive approaches through a review of relevant literature. Object-oriented computer programming was used to develop the prototype to demonstrate the proposed approach of interactive layout planning system. The framework augments the iterative design process by facilitating the active participation and sharing of the designer’s knowledge during the aggregation. With regard to the implementation of the framework in large problems, fast evaluation of design solution was found to be necessary to interact with the system in real time. Interactive constraint-based layout optimisation has, therefore, the ability to enhance the search process of optimum design solutions by augmenting the iterative nature of the creative design process.
TransFAT: Translating Fairness, Accountably and Transparency into Data Science Practice

Data science holds incredible promise for improving peoples lives, accelerating scientific discovery and innovation, and bringing about positive societal change. Yet, if not used responsibly — in accordance with legal and ethical norms — the same technology can reinforce economic and political inequities, destabilize global markets, and reaffirm systemic bias. In this paper I discuss an ongoing regulatory effort in New York City, where the goal is to develop a methodology for enabling responsible use of algorithms and data in city agencies. I then highlight some ongoing work that makes part of the Data, Responsibly project, aiming to operationalize fairness, diversity, accountability, transparency, and data protection at all stages of the data science lifecycle. Additional information about the project, including technical papers, teaching materials, and open-source tools, is available at dataresponsibly.github. io.
Predicting early dropout student is a matter of checking completed quizzes: the case of an online statistics module

Higher education students who either do not complete the subjects they enrolled in or interrupt indefinitely their studies without certification, the so-called college dropout problem, still continues to be a major concern for practitioners and researchers. Within the subjects, an early prediction of dropout students has aided teachers to focus their intervention in order to reduce dropout rates. Several machine-learning techniques have been used to classify/predict dropout students, including the tree-based methods which are not the best per-formers, but in their favour, are easily interpretable. This study presents a procedure to identify dropout-prone students at an early stage in an online statistics module, based on decision tree models. Although the attributes initially considered in the creation of the trees were mainly related to quiz completion, participation in the forum and access to the bulletin board, the final models show that the former is the only attribute with significant discriminatory power. We have evaluated the classification performance by means of a validation set. The performance measure of accuracy shows values above 90%, whereas that of recall and precision slightly under 90%.
Oocyte insemination with the Walking Egg simplified IVF culture system – an investigation into reduced sperm numbers, sperm DNA fragmentation and reactive oxygen species formation

Research question What is the lowest number of sperm that can be used for oocyte insemination during either conventional or the Walking Egg simplified IVF? Does the use of low numbers of sperm in high volume (1 ml) culture media have an effect on sperm DNA fragmentation and reactive oxygen species formation? Also, does the extended co-incubation of embryos with sperm and cumulus cells in the Walking Egg culture tubes induce higher levels of reactive oxygen species? Design Binding of sperm to the zona pellucida was compared using a modified hemi-zona assay. In the first part of the study, the binding capacity of decreasing concentrations of motile spermatozoa was evaluated, followed by a comparison of sperm binding after simulated insemination by conventional or the Walking Egg simplified culture protocol. Sperm DNA fragmentation was determined between test and control samples in the second part of the study and reactive oxygen species was measured in spent culture media. As a supplementary examination, reactive oxygen species formation, with the simulated co-incubation of cumulus and sperm cells, was compared between the conventional and Walking Egg IVF culture systems. Results Sperm-zona binding in 50 μl culture media, indicated mean sperm binding of more than 20 sperm per hemi-zona with as low as 1000 sperm used for insemination. Using a higher volume of culture media, as is done in the Walking Egg simplified IVF culture system, resulted in 42.8% reduced sperm-zona binding. No significant difference in DNA integrity was observed between the two test groups. The amount of ROS generated during conventional IVF in the first 18 hours of incubation was more than that produced in the simplified culture system over sixty-six hours. Only during extended culture for 114 hours in the simplified culture system, did the ROS generated slightly surpass that of conventional IVF at 18 hours. Conclusion Oocyte insemination with as little as 2 x 103 motile sperm showed sufficient sperm-zona binding capacity to be indicative of fertilization potential, supporting the Walking Egg simplified IVF insemination protocol. No difference in DNA fragmentation was observed between conventional and the simplified IVF culture systems, while reactive oxygen species formation was indicated to be at a slower rate during incubation with the Walking Egg simplified IVF culture system than with conventional IVF.
Cloning, purification, and characterization of GH3 β-glucosidase, MtBgl85, from Microbulbifer thermotolerans DAU221

Background β-Glucosidases have attracted considerable attention due to their important roles in various biotechnological processes such as cellulose degradation to make energy and hydrolysis of isoflavone. Microbulbifer thermotolerans (M. thermotolerans) is isolated from deep-sea sediment and has not been researched much yet. As a potential candidate for a variety of biotechnological industries, β-glucosidases from the novel bacterial species should be researched extensively. Methods β-Glucosidase, MtBgl85, from M. thermotolerans DAU221 was purified by His-tag affinity chromatography and confirmed by SDS-PAGE and zymogram. Its biochemical and physiological properties, such as effects of temperature, pH, metal ions, and organic solvents, substrate specificity, and isoflavone hydrolysis, were investigated. Results M. thermotolerans DAU221 showed β-glucosidase activity in a marine broth plate containing 0.1% esculin and 0.25% ammonium iron (III) citrate. The β-glucosidase gene, mtbgl85, was isolated from the whole genome sequence of M. thermotolerans DAU221. The β-glucosidase gene was 2,319 bp and encoded 772 amino acids. The deduced amino acid sequence had a 43% identity with OaBGL84 from Olleya aquimaris and 35% and 32% identity with to CfBgl3A and CfBgl3C from Cellulomonas fimi among bacterial glycosyl hydrolase family 3, respectively. The optimal temperature of MtBgl85 was 50 °C and the optimum pH was 7.0. MtBgl85 activity was strongly reduced in the presence of Hg2+ and Cu2+ ions. As a result of measuring the activity at various concentrations of NaCl, it was confirmed that the activity was maintained up to the concentration of 1 M, but gradually decreased with increasing concentration. MtBgl85 showed higher enzyme stability at non-polar solvents (high Log Pow) than polar solvents (low Log Pow). The hydrolyzed products of isoflavone glycosides and arbutin were analyzed by HPLC.
DEVELOPING, VALIDATING, AND MEASURING CONTENT KNOWLEDGE FOR TEACHING: AN EXAMPLE FROM PHYSICS

In this talk, a multi-institutional, ongoing effort (supported in part by National Science Foundation grant 1222732) to pursue these questions will be described, the project framework will be shared, sample assessments items will be illustrated, and preliminary results from a pilot study involving 222 high school physics teachers will be discussed. Implications for teacher education programs will be highlighted.