Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generation from Abstract Meaning Representation

Given the minimal nature of semantic structures, generating text from them is a fairly unconstrained task. The crux lies in the need for linguistically fluent output that is drawn from a sparse, high-dimensional vocabulary. Learning to flexibly map from semantic structures to these output strings can involve ambiguity. This paper surveys a continuum of statistical and neural approaches for such natural language generation (NLG). It further introduces a neural decoder for NLG from AMR that is constrained by a transition-based parser. The model jointly predicts transition system actions and English tokens to more directly learn wordorder traversals of AMR graphs.
Bargaining and Time Preferences: An Experimental Study

We generalize the Rubinstein (1982) bargaining model by disentangling payoff delay from bargaining delay. We show that our extension is isomorphic to generalized discounting with dynamic consistency and characterize the unique equilibrium. Using a novel experimental design to control for various confounds, we then test comparative statics predictions with respect to time discounting. All bargaining takes place within a single experimental session, so bargaining delay is negligible and dynamic consistency holds by design, while payoff delay per disagreement round is significant and randomized transparently at the individual level (week/month, with/without front-end delay). In contrast to prior experiments, we obtain strong behavioral support for the basic predictions that hold regardless of the details of discounting. Testing differential predictions of different forms of discounting, we strongly reject exponential discounting in favor of present-biased discounting.
Pavol Baboš TRUST IN POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS : THE EFFECT OF CORRUPTION , ELECTORAL WINNERS , AND THE POST-COMMUNIST LEGACY

Trust in political institutions is an important issue in contemporary democracies, as it contributes to democratic regimes’ legitimacy and sustainability. This paper investigates what effects corruption, political allegiance, and the post-communist history of a country have on political trust. Political trust is measured as trust towards parliament, political parties, and politicians. Both individualand country-level factors are included in the analytical model in order to account for the personal and contextual characteristics that might shape political trust. This research employs the multilevel modelling for empirical analysis. The results show that the winner effect and corruption perception impact are relatively strongly affecting political trust. Surprisingly, the post-communist history of a country seems to play no significant role in driving political trust. The concluding part links the findings of this study back to the theory and draws several implications not only for the future research but also the real world of policies and politics.
1 Efficient Algorithms for Approximate Single-Source Personalized

Given a graph G , a source node s and a target node t , the personalized PageRank (PPR) of t with respect to s is the probability that a random walk starting from s terminates at t . An important variant of the PPR query is single-source PPR (SSPPR), which enumerates all nodes in G , and returns the top-k nodes with the highest PPR values with respect to a given source s . PPR in general and SSPPR in particular have important applications in web search and social networks, e.g., in Twitter’s Who-To-Follow recommendation service. However, PPR computation is known to be expensive on large graphs, and resistant to indexing. Consequently, previous solutions either use heuristics, which do not guarantee result quality, or rely on the strong computing power of modern data centers, which is costly. Motivated by this, we propose effective index-free and index-based algorithms for approximate PPR processing, with rigorous guarantees on result quality. We first present FORA, an approximate SSPPR solution that combines two existing methods Forward Push (which is fast but does not guarantee quality) and Monte Carlo Random Walk (accurate but slow) in a simple and yet non-trivial way, leading to both high accuracy and efficiency. Further, FORA includes a simple and effective indexing scheme, as well as a module for top-k selection with high pruning power. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed solutions are orders of magnitude more efficient than their respective competitors. Notably, on a billion-edge Twitter dataset, FORA answers a top-500 approximate SSPPR query within 1 second, using a single commodity server.
Deterministic concurrency control for transaction processing systems on FPGAs

Transactions are the unit of change for a database system. With the rise of ecommerce and other internet scale services, the role of online transaction processing (OLTP) systems has become increasingly important. In parallel to this, the slowdown of single core performance improvements has lead to many data-centres utilising increasingly heterogeneous hardware, including the use of FPGAs. However whilst there has been research into the applications of FPGAs in acceleration various aspect of database systems such as query processing [36] or caching [3], there has not been any investigation into transaction processing; the heart of a database management system (DBMS). To remedy this, this project will investigate transaction processing of OLTP workloads using an FPGA. This project implements both deterministic concurrency control as well as more traditional two phase locking (TPL) both on the CPU and FPGA as a basis of comparison. While deterministic concurrency control is a promising new technology for multinode databases [30], the nding of the project show that it's single node performance does not scale well to utilise the resources of a single server e ectively. However when transaction processing is moved to an FPGA and the cost of synchronisation is large as in a multi-node system, we see that this method of concurrency control far outperforms TPL. This project also introduces a novel deterministic lock manager, suited to batch transaction processing on FPGAs. These improvements combined with the speed and parallelism possible on an FPGA produced better performance than seen from that of the purely CPU based implementations. From our ndings, the use of FPGAs for single node in memory transaction processing shows much promise. This project has the potential to form the basis of future investigations into the application of FPGAs in transaction processing.
Principled Unearthing of TCP Side Channel Vulnerabilities

Recent work has showcased the presence of subtle TCP side channels in modern operating systems, that can be exploited by off-path adversaries to launch pernicious attacks such as hijacking a connection. Unfortunately, most work to date is on the manual discovery of such side-channels, and patching them subsequently. In this work we ask "Can we develop a principled approach that can lead to the automated discovery of such hard-to-find TCP side-channels? " We identify that the crux of why such side-channels exist is the violation of the non-interference property between simultaneous TCP connections i.e., there exist cases wherein a change in state of one connection implicitly leaks some information to a different connection (controlled possibly by an attacker). To find such non-interference property violations, we argue that model-checking is a natural fit. However, because of limitations with regards to its scalability, there exist many challenges in using model checking. Specifically, these challenges relate to (a) making the TCP code base self-contained and amenable to model checking and (b) limiting the search space of model checking and yet achieving reasonable levels of code coverage. We develop a tool that we call SCENT (for Side Channel Excavation Tool) that addresses these challenges in a mostly automated way. At the heart of SCENT is an automated downscaling component that transforms the TCP code base in a consistent way to achieve both a reduction in the state space complexity encountered by the model checker and the number and types of inputs needed for verification. Our extensive evaluations show that SCENT leads to the discovery of 12 new side channel vulnerabilities in the Linux and FreeBSD kernels. In particular, a real world validation with one class of vulnerabilities shows that an off-path attacker is able to infer whether two arbitrary hosts are communicating with each other, within slightly more than 1 minute, on average.
Early retirement disincentives: Effectiveness and implications for distribution and welfare∗

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of early retirement disincentives introduced in Germany and investigates the distributional, individual welfare, and fiscal implications. Therefore, we set up a detailed model of the German social security and tax system with a focus on the PAYG-pension system. Building on the fact that the institutional changes were phased in impacting birth cohorts to a different degree we are able to estimate the parameters of a structural dynamic retirement model. This enables us to analyze whether and to what extend disincentives are able to steer retirement behavior. The estimates are based on high quality administrative data. We also compute changes in Gini coefficients of expected remaining lifetime consumption as well as equivalent and compensating variations to assess individual welfare effects. We show that the associated welfare losses are largest for medium income individuals and are only partially compensated by recently introduced subsidies for private old age provisions. At last, we consider the fiscal implications and compute the net public returns of the introduction of retirement disincentives. The simulated public returns per capita translates into overall public gains for the cohorts 1939-1945 of about 10 billion Euros.
Incorporating Source Syntax into Transformer-Based Neural Machine Translation

Transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT) has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on many machine translation tasks. However, recent work (Raganato and Tiedemann, 2018; Tang et al., 2018; Tran et al., 2018) has indicated that Transformer models may not learn syntactic structures as well as their recurrent neural network-based counterparts, particularly in low-resource cases. In this paper, we incorporate constituency parse information into a Transformer NMT model. We leverage linearized parses of the source training sentences in order to inject syntax into the Transformer architecture without modifying it. We introduce two methods: a multi-task machine translation and parsing model with a single encoder and decoder, and a mixed encoder model that learns to translate directly from parsed and unparsed source sentences. We evaluate our methods on low-resource translation from English into twenty target languages, showing consistent improvements of 1.3 BLEU on average across diverse target languages for the multi-task technique. We further evaluate the models on full-scale WMT tasks, finding that the multi-task model aids low- and medium-resource NMT but degenerates high-resource English-German translation.
Low temperature thermal ALD TaNx and TiNx fi lms from anhydrous N 2 H 4

Thermal ALD of TaNx and TiNx films was performed using hydrazine (N2H4) as a reactive N-containing source. Ultralow temperature (100 °C and 300 °C) growth of TaNx was observed using N2H4 and tris(diethylamido)(tertbutylimido) tantalum (TBTDET); XPS showed nearly stoichiometric Ta3N5 films were deposited with below 10% O and 5% C incorporation. Stoichiometric TiNx films grown at 300 °C with tetrakis(dimethylamido) titanium (TDMAT) showed an RMS roughness below 2 nm consistent with good nucleation density. High conductivity nitride films were grown by a thermal low-temperature TiNx ALD process using anhydrous N2H4 and titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4) from 300 to 400 °C; uniform, nearly stoichiometric films of 0.44 nm RMS roughness were deposited. Compared to NH3 grown films, XPS confirmed N2H4 grown films contained fewer O, C, and Cl impurities consistent with lower resistivities being observed with N2H4. The data is consistent with N2H4 serving as a reducing agent and a good proton donor to Ta and Ti ligands.
Optimization of CT images for breast cancer screening using spectral imaging.

About 1.7 million new cases of breast cancer were estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2012, accounting for 23 percent of all female cancers. In the UK 33 percent of women aged 50 and above were diagnosed in the same year, thus positioning the UK as the 6th highest in breast cancer amongst the European countries. The national Screening programme in the UK has been focused on the procedure of early detection and to improve prognosis by timely intervention to extend the life span of patients. To this end, the National Health Service Breast Screening Programme (NHSBSP) employs 2-D planar mammography because it is considered to be the gold standard technique for early breast cancer detection worldwide. Breast tomosynthesis has shown great promise as an alternative method for removing the intrinsic overlying clutter seen in conventional 2D imaging. However, preliminary work in breast CT has provided a number of compelling aspects that motivates the work featured in this thesis. These advantages include removal of the need to mechanically compress the breast which is a source of screening non-attendances, and that it provides unique cross sectional images that removes almost all the overlying clutter seen in 2D. This renders lesions more visible and hence aids in early detection of malignancy. However work in Breast CT to date has been focused on using scaled down versions of standard clinical CT systems. By contrast, this thesis proposes using a photon counting approach. The work of this thesis focuses on investigating photoncounting detector technology and comparing it to conventional CT in terms of contrast visualization. Results presented from simulation work developed in this thesis has demonstrated the ability of photoncounting detector technology to utilize data in polychromatic beam where contrast are seen to decrease with increasing photon energy and compared to the conventional CT approach which is the standard clinical CT system.
Fracture analysis of phosphate and silicate glasses by microscopy and nanoindentation : comparison of different glasses utilized for building engineering

INTRODUCTION Traditional testing methods for fracture toughness determination are generally based on macroscopic crack extension experiments. However, evaluating the fracture toughness of glasses and ceramics is still a problematic task. As a consequence, a mechanism for measuring fracture toughness of these materials has not been well determined. Nanoindentation test is an option that has been used in order to assess the fracture toughness of brittle materials, such as glasses, ceramics, films and coatings. As long as the materials exhibit brittle fracture with minimal crack tip plasticity, this crack pattern can be used to establish fracture toughness values [1]. This property can be estimated by either crack-length-based method or crack-energy-based method, providing useful partially quantitative information. In this work, nanoindentation was used to assess the fracture toughness of different glass compositions. These innovative compositions are composed by potassium metaphosphate (KPO3), aluminium oxide (Al2O3) and by-products (fly ash or slag). Their preparation was previously reported [2]. Different loads were tested in order to produce controlled cracks. The elastic modulus and the hardness of the samples were also determined. The crack lengths were evaluated by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK o f ATLANTA WORKING PAPER SERIES Fiscal Austerity in Ambiguous Times

How should public debt be managed when uncertainty about the business cycle is widespread and debt levels are high, as in the aftermath of the last financial crisis? This paper analyzes optimal fiscal policy with ambiguity aversion and endogenous government spending. We show that, without ambiguity, optimal surplus-to-output ratios are acyclical and that there is no rationale for either reduction or further accumulation of public debt. In contrast, ambiguity about the cycle can generate optimal policies that resemble “austerity” measures. Optimal policy prescribes front-loaded fiscal consolidations and convergence to a balanced primary budget in the long run. This is the case when interest rates are sufficiently responsive to cyclical shocks; that is, when the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is sufficiently low. JEL classification: D80; E62; H21; H63
Rheum emodi ( Rhubarb ) root powder accelerates dermal wound healing by up regulating the expression of Ccr 1 , EGF , K 6 and EGR-1

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of Rheum emodi (Rhubarb) root powder on the expression of wound healing genes Ccr1, EGF, Keratin 6 and EGR-1 in rabbits of different age groups. The wounds treated with Rhubarb powder showed enhanced expression of Ccr1, EGF, K6 and EGR-1 by using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction against normal saline treated wounds in all the groups. The expression was more pronounced in group A and B treated wounds as against group C treated wounds. The Rheum emodi (Rhubarb) root powder demonstrated wound healing activity by enhancing the expression of Ccr1, EGF, K6 and EGR-1thereby confirming the therapeutic potential of Rheum emodi.
Altered white matter and cortical structure in neonates with antenatally diagnosed isolated ventriculomegaly

Ventriculomegaly (VM) is the most common central nervous system abnormality diagnosed antenatally, and is associated with developmentaldelay inchildhood. We testedthehypothesisthat antenatally diagnosed isolated VMrepresentsabiologicalmarkerforalteredwhitematter(WM)andcorticalgreymatter(GM)developmentin neonates. 25 controls and 21 neonates with antenatally diagnosed isolated VM had magnetic resonance imaging at 41.97 (±2.94) and 45.34(±2.14) weeks respectively. T 2 -weighted scans were segmented for volumetric analyses of the lateral ventricles, WM and cortical GM. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) measures were assessed using voxel-wise methods in WM and cortical GM; comparisons were made between cohorts. gionaldecreases infractionalanisotropy (FA) and increasesinmeandiffusivity (MD)weredemonstratedinWM of the VM group compared to controls. No differences in cortical DTI metrics were observed. At 2 years, neurodevelopmental delays, especially in language, were observed in 6/12 cases in the VM cohort. WM alterations in isolated VM cases may be consistent with abnormal development of WM tracts involved in language and cognition. Alterations in WM FA and MD may represent neural correlates for later neurodevelopmental de ﬁ cits. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Performance-Maximizing Contests

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants’ performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their abilities and prize valuations, and there may be complete or incomplete information about these parameters. The contestants may be risk neutral, risk averse, or risk seeking, and their performance cost may be linear, concave, or convex. A main takeaway is that awarding numerous prizes whose values gradually decline with contestants’ ranking is optimal in the typical case of risk averse contestants that have a convex cost of performance. ∗Department of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 (e-mail: wo@northwestern.edu) and The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, IL 16802 (e-mail: rus41@psu.edu). We thank Bruno Strulovici and the audiences at Bocconi University, Boston College, the University of British Columbia, Cambridge University, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Kyoto University, Leicester University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Montreal, the University of New South Wales, Oxford University, the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, the university of Rochester, the University of Queensland, the University of Southampton, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), the Conference in Honor of Sergiu Hart at Hebrew University, the Econometric Society World Congress in Montreal, the Midwest Economic Theory Conference at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Hong Kong, the Conference on Economic Design in Istanbul, the Canadian Economic Theory Conference in London, Ontario, the Summer North American Econometric Society Meeting in Philadelphia, the Current Frontiers in the Theory of Contests Workshop in Münich, the 8th Shanghai Microeconomics Workshop, and the Cowles Summer Economic Theory Conference for very helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the NSF (grant SES-1325968) is gratefully acknowledged.
Special tests of phase centre variations of various GPS antennas , and some results

The error budget of GPS measurements has long been generally understood. However the accuracies required and achieved by GPS become ever greater. For certain fields of application the largest sources of error at a given time are an important topic of research, in order to achieve further improvements in accuracy and reliability. Consequently, effects which have been regarded as satisfactorily contained gain in importance and are subjected to further intensive investigation. Until now, the phase centre variations (PCVs) of receiver antennas represented one such error component, but today absolute values of PCVs can be determined with increased accuracy using field procedures. This leads to reliable recording of azimuthal variations by means of homogeneous scanning of the antenna, a higher resolution and the elimination of multipath effects. The general advantages of absolute PCV values (as functions of elevation and azimuth), for differently oriented antennas and thus for real−time applications, have now been demonstrated by experiment (Wübbena et al., 2000a, 2000b).
Emotions and Deliberation in the Citizens’ Initiative Review

Objective Emotions in deliberative democratic practices have been of interest to researchers and practitioners of democracy for years. Yet, scholars have not fully analyzed emotions in this context. We advance this discussion in terms of both data collection and analysis with respect to Citizens' Initiative Reviews (CIRs) in Arizona, Oregon, and Massachusetts in 2016. We respond to four central research questions: (1) What discrete emotions do participants report experiencing during mini‐public deliberation? (2) How do the reported emotions vary across the period of deliberation? (3) How do the expressed emotions affect the deliberation? and (4) What work do expressed emotions do in mini‐publics in terms of helping or hindering deliberation? Methods To ensure a comprehensive analysis of the data we were able to collect, we employ a mixed‐methods design and use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Results and Conclusion Ultimately, we contend that the activities and tasks of the group, as well as the behaviors of participants and relationships among them, are all important factors that shape how people experience emotion, but that the CIR procedures have the greatest influence in mediating emotions to serve the ends of deliberation in these mini‐publics.