Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning to Detect Relevant Contexts and Knowledge for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems

Recently, knowledge-grounded conversations in the open domain gain great attention from researchers. Existing works on retrieval-based dialogue systems have paid tremendous efforts to utilize neural networks to build a matching model, where all of the context and knowledge contents are used to match the response candidate with various representation methods. Actually, different parts of the context and knowledge are differentially important for recognizing the proper response candidate, as many utterances are useless due to the topic shift. Those excessive useless information in the context and knowledge can influence the matching process and leads to inferior performance. To address this problem, we propose a multi-turn Response Selection Model that can Detect the relevant parts of the Context and Knowledge collection (RSM-DCK). Our model first uses the recent context as a query to pre-select relevant parts of the context and knowledge collection at the word-level and utterance-level semantics. Further, the response candidate interacts with the selected context and knowledge collection respectively. In the end, the fused representation of the context and response candidate is utilized to post-select the relevant parts of the knowledge collection for matching with more confidence. We test our proposed model on two benchmark datasets. Evaluation results indicate that our model achieves better performance than the existing methods, and can effectively detect the relevant context and knowledge for response selection.
Genetic Analysis of Larval Dispersal, Gene Flow, and Connectivity

One of the major hallmarks of marine species is that many produce large numbers of 9 small pelagic larvae that drift in the ocean for varying periods of time. For these species, 10 establishing the degree to which different populations are connected by larval dispersal is a 11 fundamental goal for larval ecologists interested in understanding the influence of planktonic 12 processes and larval supply on ecological and evolutionary processes within populations. 13 Assessing and predicting local population and community dynamics, spread of invasive species, 14 patterns of local adaptation, spread of advantageous alleles, maintenance of local biodiversity, 15 sustainability of fisheries, and effective marine reserve design, all require some knowledge of 16 rates and patterns of larval exchange among populations. 17
Embedding Node Structural Role Identity into Hyperbolic Space

Recently, there has been an interest in embedding networks in hyperbolic space, since hyperbolic space has been shown to work well in capturing graph/network structure as it can naturally reflect some properties of complex networks. However, the work on network embedding in hyperbolic space has been focused on microscopic node embedding. In this work, we are the first to present a framework to embed the structural roles of nodes into hyperbolic space. Our framework extends struct2vec, a well-known structural role preserving embedding method, by moving it to a hyperboloid model. We evaluated our method on four real-world and one synthetic network. Our results show that hyperbolic space is more effective than euclidean space in learning latent representations for the structural role of nodes.
Live Multi-Streaming and Donation Recommendations via Coupled Donation-Response Tensor Factorization

In contrast to traditional online videos, live multi-streaming supports real-time social interactions between multiple streamers and viewers, such as donations. However, donation and multi-streaming channel recommendations are challenging due to complicated streamer and viewer relations, asymmetric communications, and the tradeoff between personal interests and group interactions. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Stream Party (MSP) and formulate a new multi-streaming recommendation problem, called Donation and MSP Recommendation (DAMRec). We propose Multi-stream Party Recommender System (MARS) to extract latent features via socio-temporal coupled donation-response tensor factorization for donation and MSP recommendations. Experimental results on Twitch and Douyu manifest that MARS significantly outperforms existing recommenders by at least 38.8% in terms of hit ratio and mean average precision.
Recommending Inferior Results: A General and Feature-Free Model for Spam Detection

Spam activities on multifarious online platforms, such as the opinion spam and fake following relationships have been extensively studied for years. Existing works separately employ hand-crafted features --- mainly extracted from user behavior, text information, and relational network, to detect the specific spamming phenomenon on a certain kind of online platform. Although these attempts have made some headway, rapidly emerging spamming categories and frequently changing cheating strategies lead detection models to be subject to circumscribed usability and fragile effectiveness. This paper is the first attempt to develop a general and feature-free fraud detection model, tackling the longstanding and thorny challenges in spam detection area. To achieve this, we first transform diverse relational networks that are contaminated by fraudsters into the unified matrix form. We then deal with the spam problem from a fresh perspective inspired by the pairwise learning thought in the area of recommender system. By comparing pairwise ranking relations of all the entities in the unified matrix, a new pairwise loss objective function is formulated to identify instances that occupy higher rankings as inferior (spamming) results. To further boost detection performance, we incorporate the pairwise ranking detection method and the widely used structure-based algorithm into an integrated framework. Experiments on real-word datasets of different Web applications show significant improvements of our proposed framework over competitive methods.
Fairness in Unsupervised Learning

Data in digital form is expanding at an exponential rate, far outpacing any chance of getting any significant fraction labelled manually. This has resulted in heightened research emphasis on unsupervised learning, learning in the absence of labels. In fact, unsupervised learning has been often dubbed as the next frontier of AI. Unsupervised learning is the most plausible model to analyze the bulk of passively collected data that spans across various domains; e.g., social media footprints, safety/surveilance cameras, IoT devices, sensors, smartphone apps, medical wearables, traffic sensing devices and public wi-fi access. While fairness in supervised learning, such as classification tasks, has inspired a large amount of research in the past few years, work on fair unsupervised learning has been relatively slow in picking up. This tutorial targets to provide an overview of: (i) fairness issues in unsupervised learning drawing abundantly from political philosophy, (ii) current research in fair unsupervised learning, and (iii) new directions to extend the state-of-the-art in fair unsupervised learning. While we intend to broadly cover all tasks in unsupervised learning, our focus will be on clustering, retrieval and representation learning. In a unique departure from conventional data science tutorials, we will place significant emphasis on presenting and debating pertinent literature from ethics and philosophy. Overall, this half-day tutorial brings a strong emphasis on ensuring strong interdisciplinarity.
A Large Test Collection for Entity Aspect Linking

Given a text with entity links, the task of entity aspect linking is to identify which aspect of an entity is referred to in the context. For example, if a text passage mentions the entity "USA'', is USA mentioned in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, American cuisine, or else? Complementing efforts of Nanni et al (2018), we provide a large-scale test collection which is derived from Wikipedia hyperlinks in a dump from 01/01/2020. Furthermore, we offer strong baselines with results and broken-out feature sets to stimulate more research in this area. Data, code, feature sets, runfiles and results are released under a CC-SA license and offered on our aspect linking resource web page http://www.cs. unh.edu/~dietz/eal-dataset-2020/
Query-aware Tip Generation for Vertical Search

As a concise form of user reviews, tips have unique advantages to explain the search results, assist users' decision making, and further improve user experience in vertical search scenarios. Existing work on tip generation does not take query into consideration, which limits the impact of tips in search scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes a query-aware tip generation framework, integrating query information into encoding and subsequent decoding processes. Two specific adaptations of Transformer and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are proposed. For Transformer, the query impact is incorporated into the self-attention computation of both the encoder and the decoder. As for RNN, the query-aware encoder adopts a selective network to distill query-relevant information from the review, while the query-aware decoder integrates the query information into the attention computation during decoding. The framework consistently outperforms the competing methods on both public and real-world industrial datasets. Last but not least, online deployment experiments on Dianping demonstrate the advantage of the proposed framework for tip generation as well as its online business values.
Non-local Self-attentive Autoencoder for Genetic Functionality Prediction

A big challenge existing in genetic functionality prediction is that genetic datasets comprise few samples but massive unclear structured features, i.e., 'large p, small N' problem. To tackle this problem, we propose Non-local Self-attentive Autoencoder (NSAE) which applies attention-driven genetic variant modelling. The backbone attention layer captures long-range dependency relationship among cells (i.e., features) and thus allocates weights to construct attention maps based on cell significance. Utilizing attention maps, NSAE can effectively seize and leverage significant features in a non-local way from numerous cells. Our proposed NSAE outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on two genomics datasets from Roadmap projects. The visualization of the attention layer also validates NSAE's ability to highlight important features.
The complete mitochondrial genome of freshwater snail, Semisulcospira coreana (Pleuroceridae: Semisulcospiridae)

Abstract We have determined the mitochondrial DNA of Semisulcospira coreana. The complete mitogenome was 15,398 bp in length, encoding 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, and 2 ribosomal RNA genes. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the mitochondrial DNA of S. coreana was much closely related to other Semisulcospira species. This mitogenome could be helpful information for a variety of biodiversity researches in Korean freshwater snail.
The cover uncovered: Bark control over wood decomposition

Woody debris (WD) represents a globally significant carbon stock and its decomposition returns nutrients to the soil while providing habitat to microbes, plants and animals. Understanding what drives WD decomposition is therefore important. WD decomposition rates differ greatly among species. However, the role of bark in the process remains poorly known. We ask how, and how much, interspecific variation in bark functional traits related to growth and protection have afterlife effects on the decomposition of wood, partly mediated by animals. We examine the roles of bark cover and bark traits throughout the wood decomposition process. Synthesis. We find that: (1) bark effects on WD decomposition are species‐ and wood size‐specific, (2) bark can enhance coarser WD decomposition but slows twig decomposition in some species, and (3) bark acts as an environmental filter to faunal assemblages in the early stage of wood decomposition.
Change in Esterase Activity and Content During the Selection of Resistance to Alphamethrin in Myzus persicae

The resistance of alphamethrin in Myzus persicae (green peach aphid) was selected in laboratory. The resistance development was monitored through the bioassay and the 96-well microplate reader for measuring change of esterase (Est). The results showed that the resistance level gradually rose with the increase of selection time. After three generations, the resistance of green peach aphid was 13-fold. While ten generations later, the resistance amounted to 49.86-fold. It suggested that green peach aphid developed obvious resistance to alphamethrin. As resistance developed, enzyme protein content increased significantly from 35.8632 to 66.2990 μg/mL with Est activity varying from 33.6760 to 171.0052 μmol/(mL·min). Comparing the frequency distribution of enzyme protein content and activity, we found that more and more individuals possessed higher content and activity. And there is a significant correlation between LD 50 and enzyme protein content, Est activity respectively. The results showed that the Est played an important role in resistance development of green peach aphid to alphamethrin.
Multi-gene phylogeny of Jattaea bruguierae, a novel asexual morph from Bruguiera cylindrica

During our survey on marine-based ascomycetes of southern Thailand, fallen mangrove twigs were collected from the intertidal zones. Those specimens yielded a novel asexual morph of Jattaea (Calosphaeriaceae, Calosphaeriales), Jattaea bruguierae, which is confirmed as a new species by morphological characteristics such as nature and measurements of conidia and conidiophores, as well as a multigene analysis based on combined LSU, SSU, ITS and β-tubulin sequence data. Jattaea species are abundantly found from wood in terrestrial environments, while the asexual morphs are mostly reported from axenic cultures. Jattaea bruguierae is the first documentation of an asexual morph species from marinehabitats.
Polymorphism in the chelae of mature males of the land crabs Johngarthia lagostoma and Epigrapsus spp.

The growth of the chelae of mature males was examined in three gecarcinid land crabs — Johngarthia lagostoma on Ascension Island, Epigrapsus notatus on Taiwan, and E. politus on Moorea. Chelar dimorphism was found in each species, with a mixture of homochelous and heterochelous males. In J. lagostoma there was progressive polymorphism, with the heterochelous condition appearing only in a proportion of the larger mature males. The situation in Epigrapsus was less clear. The proportion of heterochelous males increased in the larger mature size classes, but progressive polymorphism is yet to be confirmed.
Phylogeny of the Stachys coccinea (Lamiaceae) Complex Based on Molecular and Morphological Data

Abstract One of the largest genera within the Lamiaceae, Stachys, is in extreme need of taxonomic revision due to its demonstrated phylogenetic polyphyly. Among the New World Stachys, a group of seven species belonging to the Stachys coccinea complex is widely distributed in Mexico, where four of the species in this complex are considered endemic. The members of this complex are characterized by having large and red, orange, or purple corollas. The observed morphological variation, however, may insufficiently circumscribe this number of species, and an assessment combining the use of morphological and molecular data is needed. Here, we evaluated the circumscription of the Stachys coccinea complex and relationships among its members using phylogenetic analyses of chloroplast (cp) DNA sequence data and numerical analysis applied to morphological data. We found that morphological variation in this complex insufficiently circumscribed members of the complex, possibly caused by plasticity of diagnostic morphological characters. In addition, the utilized cpDNA regions, which are commonly used in plant phylogenetic reconstruction (trnL intron, trnL-F spacer, and rps16 intron sequences), render relationships among most of the species in the complex unresolved.We propose that the Stachys coccinea complex be recircumscribed, reducing the number of members to three species: Stachys coccinea, S. lindenii, and S. albotomentosa, keeping the original circumscription of these species and including S. pacifica, S. manantlanensis, S. torresii, and S. jaimehintonii as varieties of S. coccinea.
PrPSc-induced conformational changes and strain-specific structures of PrPSc revealed by Disulfide-crosslink scanning

There exist many phenotypically-varied prion strains, like viruses, despite the absence of conventional genetic material which codes the phenotypic information. As prion is composed solely of the pathological isoform (PrPSc) of prion protein (PrP), the strain-specific traits are hypothesized to be enciphered in the structural details of PrPSc. Identification of the structures of PrPSc is therefore vital for the understanding of prion biology, though they remain unidentified due to the incompatibility of PrPSc with conventional high-resolution structural analyses. Based on our previous hypothesis that the region between the first and the second α-helix (H1∼H2) and the distal region of the third helix (Ctrm) of the cellular isoform of PrP (PrPC) have important roles for efficient interactions with PrPSc, we created series of mutant PrPs with two cysteine substitutions (C;C-PrP) which were systematically designed to form an intramolecular disulfide crosslink between H1∼H2 and Ctrm and assessed their conformational changes by prions: Specifically, a cysteine substitution in H1∼H2 from 165 to 169 was combined with cysteine-scanning along Ctrm from 220 to 229. C;C-PrPs with the crosslinks were expressed normally with the similar glycosylation patterns and subcellular localization as the wild-type PrP albeit with varied expression levels. Interestingly, some of the C;C-PrPs converted to the protease-resistant isoforms in the N2a cells persistently infected with 22L prion strain, whereas the same mutants did not convert in the cells infected with another prion strain Fukuoka1, indicating that local structures of PrPSc in these regions vary among prion strains and contribute to prion-strain diversity. Moreover, patterns of the crosslinks of the convertible C;C-PrPs implied drastic changes in positional relations of H1∼H2 and Ctrm in the PrPSc-induced conformational changes by 22L prion. Thus, disulfide-crosslink scanning is a useful approach for investigation of strain-specific structures of PrPSc, and would be applicable to other types of amyloids as well.
Use of remote sensing to identify areas at risk of degradation in the semi-arid region

One of the most effective procedures in the evaluation of degraded areas has been the use of remote sensing. The aim of this work was to evaluate the temporal dynamics of the NDVI and rainfall in detecting the degradation of natural resources in a semi-arid region of Brazil. The area under study is located to the west of the district of Taua, in the State of Ceara, with a predominance of shrub-like caatinga forest. Rainfall data was obtained from FUNCEME. Ten images (dry season) were acquired from a 27-year historical series (1985-2011) from the TM/LANDSAT5 sensor, later converted to surface reflectance using the FLAASH/ENVI extension; NDVI indices were obtained and divided into six classes corresponding to land usage and occupation. The mean values of the NDVI classes were submitted to statistical analysis and compared by T-test (p<0.05) and the Pearson correlation matrix. It was found that in the years with rainfall above the historical average (1985-1993 and 1996-2004) there was a significant increase in degraded areas, represented by low values for the NDVI (between 0 and 0.4), due to more land being used for subsistence farming. However, during periods of drought (1993-1996 and 2004-2011), the opposite behaviour was seen, characterised by the natural regeneration of the woody stratum due to agricultural areas being abandoned; behaviour that was evidenced by increases of up to 1,807% in the moderately high class of the NDVI (between 0.6 and 0.8). The spatial and temporal dynamics of the NDVI and the rainfall therefore played a part in detecting evidence of the process of degradation of the caatinga biome in an area of the district of Taua, in the State of Ceara.
Phylogeny contributes more than site characteristics and traits to the spatial distribution pattern of tropical tree populations

Dispersal mechanism, species height, sexual system, and wood density are potential drivers of the spatial distribution pattern of tropical tree populations. These traits are usually conserved among closely related species, thus populations of these species should have more similar spatial distribution patterns than populations of phylogenetically distant species. Additionally, variation in the abiotic and biotic environment might result in distinct spatial distribution patterns of local populations of the same species. We employed variation partitioning to determine the degree to which traits, shared evolutionary history, site characteristics, and their joint effects govern the degree of overdispersion or aggregation of tree populations at different spatial scales within fourteen 1‐ha plots of the Atlantic Rainforest in southeastern Brazil. We quantified the degree of overdispersion or aggregation with a new standardized index err(r) based on standardized effect sizes of the pair correlation function. Variation in err(r) was mostly explained by phylogenetic relationships among species (70–95%, depending on spatial scale), indicating that traits not included in our analysis are important drivers of the spatial distribution pattern. Site characteristics explained a smaller part of the variation, indicating context‐dependence. Finally, the traits studied here provided the smallest explanation of the variation, suggesting a minor role of seed dispersal. Residual variation in err(r) ranged from 5–29%, indicating that stochasticity and/or variables not included in the models (e.g. direct measures of post‐dispersal processes) also influence the spatial distribution pattern of the populations. Our results suggest that many ecological processes act in concert at the study site and that their importance changes with spatial scale. Additionally, the relative importance of these processes differs from that previously described for other tropical forests. Determining why a given ecological process is more important in some tropical tree communities than in others are promising venues for further research.
A central role for boom-bust cycles in maintaining genetic variation in fluctuating environments

The long-running debate about the role of selection in maintaining genetic variation has been given new impetus by the discovery of hundreds of seasonally oscillating polymorphisms in natural Drosophila populations. One possible explanation is that polymorphism is stabilized by an alternating summer-winter selection regime. The general principle that fluctuating environments can promote coexistence is widely accepted, often in the guise of the “storage effect”, yet little has been done to evaluate and compare coexistence mechanisms under seasonally alternating selection coupled with large seasonal variation in population size. Here we distinguish two general mechanisms, which we call “density-regulated growth”, and “protection from selection”. We contrast and compare these mechanisms, both in terms of the underlying biology, and in terms of their capacity to stabilize coexistence. We clarify their connection to the storage effect, which is still sometimes confusingly identified with protection from selection. We also clarify the role of overlapping generations as a form of protection. We find that density-regulated growth is a powerful stabilizer under conditions in which protection from selection might be weak.