Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards Automatic Question Answering over Social Media by Learning Question Equivalence Patterns

Many questions submitted to Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) sites have been answered before. We propose an approach to automatically generating an answer to such questions based on automatically learning to identify "equivalent" questions. Our main contribution is an unsupervised method for automatically learning question equivalence patterns from CQA archive data. These patterns can be used to match new questions to their equivalents that have been answered before, and thereby help suggest answers automatically. We experimented with our method approach over a large collection of more than 200,000 real questions drawn from the Yahoo! Answers archive, automatically acquiring over 300 groups of question equivalence patterns. These patterns allow our method to obtain over 66% precision on automatically suggesting answers to new questions, significantly outperforming conventional baseline approaches to question matching.
A survey of proposals for an alternative group communication service

As expectations for the Internet to support multimedia applications grow, new services need to be deployed. One of them is the group communication service for one-to-many or many-to-many data delivery. After more than a decade of important research and development efforts, the deployment of multicast routing in the Internet is far behind expectations. Therefore, a first motivation for an alternative group communication service is to bypass the lack of native IP multicast routing. Although less efficient and scalable than native multicast routing, such alternative services are generally suitable for the purpose. A second possible motivation is to go beyond the limitations of classic multicast routing for very specific working environments. We identify, classify, and discuss some of these alternative approaches.
Durability of HBeAg seroconversion following antiviral therapy for chronic hepatitis B: relation to type of therapy and pretreatment serum hepatitis B virus DNA and alanine aminotransferase

Background and aims: Interferon (IFN) induced hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) seroconversion is durable in 80–90% of chronic hepatitis B patients. Preliminary reports on the durability of HBeAg seroconversion following lamivudine are contradictory. We investigated the durability of response following IFN, lamivudine, or IFN-lamivudine combination therapy in a meta-analysis of individual patient data. Patients and methods: Twenty four centres included 130 patients in total with an HBeAg seroconversion (HBeAg negative, antibodies to hepatitis B e antigen positive) at the end of antiviral therapy: 59 with lamivudine, 49 with interferon, and 22 with combination therapy. Relapse was defined as confirmed reappearance of HBeAg. Results: The three year cumulative HBeAg relapse rate by the Kaplan-Meier method was 54% for lamivudine, 32% for IFN, and 23% for combination therapy (p=0.01). Cox regression analysis identified pretreatment hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA, alanine aminotransferase (ALT), sex, and therapy as independent predictive factors of post-treatment relapse; Asian race, previous therapy, centre, and type of study were not predictive of relapse. The relative HBeAg relapse risk of lamivudine compared with IFN therapy was 4.6 and that of combination therapy to IFN therapy 0.7 (poverall=0.01). Conclusions: The durability of HBeAg seroconversion following lamivudine treatment was significantly lower than that following IFN or IFN-lamivudine combination therapy. The risk of relapse after HBeAg seroconversion was also related to pretreatment levels of serum ALT and HBV DNA, but independent of Asian race.
Mesh-centered finite differences from nodal finite elements for ellitic problems

After it is shown that the classical ve points mesh-centered nite diierence scheme can be derived from a low order nodal nite element scheme by using nonstandard quadrature formulae, higher order block mesh-centered nite diierence schemes for second-order elliptic problems are derived from higher order nodal nite elements with nonstandard quadrature formulae as before, combined to a procedure known as \transverse integration". Numerical experiments with uniform and nonuniform meshes and diierent types of boundary conditions connrm the theoretical predictions, in discrete as well as continuous norms. Dii erences Finies Centr ees a partir d'El ements Finis Nodaux R esum e : Apr es avoir montr e que le sch ema en dii erences nies centr e clas-sique a cinq points peut ^ etre obtenu a partir d'un el ement ni nodal de bas ordre en utilisant des formules de quadrature num eriques non standard, on d eveloppe des sch emas a cinq blocs d'ordre plus elev e avec des quadratures num eriques non standard comme plus haut, combin ees avec une proc edure connue sous le nom d'int egration transversale. Des exp eriences num eriques avec des mailles uniformes ou pas et dii erents types de conditions a la fron-ti ere, connrment les pr edictions th eoriques en normes continues et discr etes.
MORSE POSITION OF KNOTS AND CLOSED INCOMPRESSIBLE SURFACES

In this paper, we study on knots and closed incompressible surfaces in the 3-sphere via Morse functions. We show that both knots and closed incompressible surfaces can be isotoped into a "related Morse position" simultaneously. As an application, we have the following results. • Smallness of Montesinos tangles with length two and Kinoshita's theta curve. • Classification of closed incompressible and meridionally incompressible surfaces in 2-bridge theta-curve and handcuff graph complements and the complements of links which admit Hopf tangle decompositions.
Intracerebral hodgkin's disease in a human immunodeficiency virus‐seropositive patient

Intracerebral involvement of Hodgkin's disease (HD) is rarely described, with only 42 cases in the literature. Since the outbreak of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic, there has been an increasing number of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)‐infected (HIV+) persons who have diffuse non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma and, more recently, atypical aggressive HD. The authors report the case of a patient with a history of intravenous drug abuse (IVDA) and Stage IVB HD who, after a drug‐induced clinical remission, had intracerebral mixed‐cellularity HD. This appears to be the first report of intracerebral HD in a person who is HIV+.
A passivity approach to controller-observer design for robots

Passivity-based control methods for robots, which achieve the control objective by reshaping the robot system's natural energy via state feedback, have, from a practical point of view, some very attractive properties. However, the poor quality of velocity measurements may significantly deteriorate the control performance of these methods. In this paper the authors propose a design strategy that utilizes the passivity concept in order to develop combined controller-observer systems for robot motion control using position measurements only. To this end, first a desired energy function for the closed-loop system is introduced, and next the controller-observer combination is constructed such that the closed-loop system matches this energy function, whereas damping is included in the controller- observer system to assure asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. A key point in this design strategy is a fine tuning of the controller and observer structure to each other, which provides solutions to the output-feedback robot control problem that are conceptually simple and easily implementable in industrial robot applications. Experimental tests on a two-DOF manipulator system illustrate that the proposed controller-observer systems enable the achievement of higher performance levels compared to the frequently used practice of numerical position differentiation for obtaining a velocity estimate. >
Structure, dynamics and RNA binding of the multi-domain splicing factor TIA-1

Alternative pre-messenger ribonucleic acid (pre-mRNA) splicing is an essential process in eukaryotic gene regulation. The T-cell intracellular antigen-1 (TIA-1) is an apoptosis-promoting factor that modulates alternative splicing of transcripts, including the pre-mRNA encoding the membrane receptor Fas. TIA-1 is a multi-domain ribonucleic acid (RNA) binding protein that recognizes poly-uridine tract RNA sequences to facilitate 5′ splice site recognition by the U1 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (snRNP). Here, we characterize the RNA interaction and conformational dynamics of TIA-1 by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). Our NMR-derived solution structure of TIA-1 RRM2–RRM3 (RRM2,3) reveals that RRM2 adopts a canonical RNA recognition motif (RRM) fold, while RRM3 is preceded by an non-canonical helix α0. NMR and SAXS data show that all three RRMs are largely independent structural modules in the absence of RNA, while RNA binding induces a compact arrangement. RRM2,3 binds to pyrimidine-rich FAS pre-mRNA or poly-uridine (U9) RNA with nanomolar affinities. RRM1 has little intrinsic RNA binding affinity and does not strongly contribute to RNA binding in the context of RRM1,2,3. Our data unravel the role of binding avidity and the contributions of the TIA-1 RRMs for recognition of pyrimidine-rich RNAs.
Concept Mapping: Connecting Educators Proc. of the Third Int. Conference on Concept Mapping Development of a Conceptual Structure for a Domain-specific Corpus

The corpus reported in this paper was developed for the evaluation of a domain-specific Text to Knowledge Mapping (TKM) prototype. The TKM prototype operates on the basis of both a combinatory categorical grammar (CCG) linguistic model and a knowledge model that consists of three layers: ontology, qualitative and quantitative layers. In the course of this evaluation it was necessary to populate these initial models with lexical items and semantic relations. Both elements, the lexicon and semantic relations, are meant to reflect the domain of the prototype; hence both had to be extracted from the corpus. While dealing with the lexicon was straight forward, the identification and extraction of appropriate semantic relations was much more involved. It was necessary, therefore, to manually develop a conceptual structure for the domain which was then used to formulate a domain-specific framework of semantic relations. The conceptual structure was developed using the Cmap tool of IHMC. The framework of semantic relations-that has resulted from this study consisted of 55 relations, out of which 42 have inverse relations.
Analyzing and accessing Wikipedia as a lexical semantic resource

We analyze Wikipedia as a lexical semantic resource and compare it with conventional resources, such as dictionaries, thesauri, semantic wordnets, etc. Di erent parts of Wikipedia re ect di erent aspects of these resources. We show that Wikipedia contains a vast amount of knowledge about, e.g., named entities, domain speci c terms, and rare word senses. If Wikipedia is to be used as a lexical semantic resource in large-scale NLP tasks, e cient programmatic access to the knowledge therein is required. We review existing access mechanisms and show that they are limited with respect to performance and the provided access functions. Therefore, we introduce a general purpose, high performance Java-based Wikipedia API that overcomes these limitations. It is available for research purposes at http://www.ukp. tu-darmstadt. de/software/WikipediaAPI.
Infant pain medical aid with SUN Saliency Map and SVM classifier approach

This paper discussed the crucial demand regarding the scheme to translate the silence voice from the newborn. The infant can't afford to express their feeling of pain by voice. Hence, we proudly present an infant pain recognition system to overcome this matter. We employed Saliency Using Natural statistics (SUN) Saliency Map as the feature extraction. We determine the condition of the infants (pain/no pain) with Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifier. Several examples were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.
Knowledge of iodine nutrition in the South African adult population

Abstract Objectives To determine the level of knowledge regarding iodine nutrition and its relationship with socio-economic status in the South African population. Design A cross-sectional population survey collecting questionnaire information on knowledge of iodine nutrition and sociodemographic variables in a multistage, stratified, cluster study sample, representative of the adult South African population. Setting Home visits and personal interviews in the language of the respondent. Subjects Data were collected from one adult in each of the selected 2164 households, and the participation rate was 98%. Results Only 15.4% of respondents correctly identified iodised salt as the primary dietary source of iodine, 16.2% knew the thyroid gland needs iodine for its functioning, and a mere 3.9% considered brain damage, and 0.8% considered cretinism, as the most important health consequence of iodine deficiency. Compared with respondents from high socio-economic households, respondents from low socio-economic households were considerably less informed about aspects of iodine nutrition covered in this study. Conclusions The knowledge level of iodine nutrition is low among South Africans, particularly among the low socio-economic groups. These data suggest that the international emphasis on brain damage resulting from iodine deficiency has not been conveyed successfully to the consumer level in this country.
Framework for testing biological-utility hypotheses

Various aspects of the visual system have been hypothesized to have a certain biological role. The usual argument is that a given neural mechanism would help an animal to perform better a certain task. Such hypotheses are typically not verified by quantitative measurements and statistical studies and remain speculative. For instance, nonclassical receptive field (non-CRF) inhibition (Fig. 1) has been hypothesized to have as probable biological utility the detection of texture boundaries [2] and object contours [3].
The Squatting Test: A Useful Tool to Assess Both Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Involvement of the Cardiovascular Autonomic Neuropathy in Diabetes

The heart rate responses observed after both squatting and standing are thought to be of reflex nature and may be useful to assess the functional integrity of parasympathetic and sympathetic nerves in diabetes. In the standard maneuver, each subject stood still for 3 min, then squatted down for 1 min, and at last stood up during an inspiratory phase. In 10 healthy subjects (25–31 years of age), lengthening of the R-R interval during squatting was abolished by atropine, whereas propranolol markedly attenuated shortening of the R-R interval at standing from squatting. Squatting test (SqT) ratios (SqT vagal [SqTv] = ratio between the R-R interval mean before squatting and the longest R-R interval after squatting; SqT sympathetic [SqTs] = ratio between the basal R-R interval and the shortest R-R interval at standing) were calculated in 558 healthy subjects and 346 diabetic patients (insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus/non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus: 103/243). Normal ranges (95 and 99% confidence intervals [CIs]) for subjects 20–74 years of age showed a statistically significant negative correlation with age. SqTv was outside the 99% CI in 145 (42%) diabetic patients and in 7 (1.3%) of the control subjects. The corresponding figures for SqTs were 40 and 0.8%, respectively. Age and duration of diabetes had a negative influence on SqT ratios. SqT ratios were compared with other reflex tests currently used for diagnosis of autonomic neuropathy: deep breathing (DB), lying-to-standing (LS), Valsalva manuever, and blood pressure change after standing (orthostatic hypotension [OH]). Autonomic involvement was arbitrarily defind as mild (one test pathologica), definite (two tests pathological), or severe (three or more tests pathological), definite (two tests pathological), or severe (three or more tests pathological). In patients with definite or severe involvement, Sqt ratios and DB anf LS tests showed the least overlap between healthy subjects and diabetic patients; however, for patients with mild or no autonomic involvement, SqT rations were significantly better than DB, LS, or OH tests. In conclusion, 1) SqT ratios can discriminate between healthy subjects and diabetic patients to an equal or greater extent than the other tests; 2) SqT ratios give information on both parasympathetic and sympathetic activity; and 3) SqT ratios are better than other single tests in identifying mild autonomic involvement. These results may be important for early intervention trials.
Play as a Vehicle for Enhancing Reading Skills in Children with Poor Reading Ability

Objective. Colombian scientific literature on reading acquisition and rehabilitation of reading difficulties is limited. For this reason, this study aims to prove the impact of an intervention program for reading, based on play and implicit learning, in children with non-specific reading disabilities, after finishing the program and 6 months later. Method. Using a cross sectional and comparative design, 20 children, between 7 to 9 years old, with typical psychological development with regular attendance at a school in Cali (Colombia), participated voluntary in this study. Pre and post assessment included the evaluation of phonological awareness, reading skills and general cognitive functioning, that were used to establish if there were differences between the three times of assessment. Results. Children showed significant improvement in their reading skills after their participation in the intervention program, maintaining the effect in the long term. Conclusion. Non specific reading difficulties can be improved with an intervention program of reading, based on play and implicit learning.
La evaluación de la memoria implícita mediante la tarea de identificación perceptiva de dibujos fragmentados

Implicit memory assessment by perceptual identification of fragmented pictures. Two experiments were carried out to check whether the four forms of Snodgrass and Corwin's (1988) fragmented pictures were equivalent for a Spanish population. It was also examined if the picture attributes of the drawings proposed by the same authors could predict the performance in an Identification task (Experiment 1), and in a Free Recall task (Experiment 2). For this purpose it was used the standarised norms of Sanfeliu and Fernandez (1996). The results of Experiment 1 showed that neither perceptual learning nor skill learning were homogeneous in all the Snodgrass and Corwin's subforms. Pictures' atributes as Name agreement, Image variability and Familiarity did have an influence on the Identification task. But none of them showed any positive effect in the Free Recall task (Experiment 2). When there was an effect, as in the case of the Name agreement, it was in the opposite direction.
A Quantitative Description of the Interaction of Enhancement and Depression of Transmitt er Release at the Neuromuscular Junction

A quantitative description of the interaction (December 2007) of enhancement and depression of transmitter release at the neuromuscular junction Abstract of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Synaptic transmission alters the strength of the postsynaptic potential, through a process called short-term synaptic plasticity (STP). In this study, endplate potentials (EPPs) from the frog neuromuscular junction were used to resolve and quantify the presynaptic components involved in enhancement and depression of transmitter release during repetitive stimulation under normal quantal release conditions (2 mM Ca 2+ , 1mM Mg 2+). During trains of stimulation given between 10-200 Hz, the amplitude of the EPPs first increased then decreased; a maximum increase of 77% was produced after 2-4 stimuli. EPP amplitudes began to increase at ~ 20 Hz, were maximal at ~ 55 Hz, and thereafter, decreased as the rate of stimulation increased. The integrated total release after 25 stimuli was little changed across frequencies between 10 – 100 Hz. EPPs ran down in two phases: a fast phase, attributed to the depletion of a readily releasable pool (RRP) of synaptic vesicles, followed by a slow phase, attributed to the depletion of vesicles from a depot pool (DP). Depletion of the readily releasable pool of synaptic vesicles (RRP) was determined by quantifying release under the fast and slow time rundowns and subtracting the number of vesicles associated with mobilization to the RRP from the total number of vesicles released during stimulation trains of 50 impulses. Impulses were delivered at 12 different rates ranging from 50 to 200 /s. Estimates of the number of vesicles released from the RRP increased with frequency of stimulation until maximal depletion levels of 5500-6000 vesicles were reached at stimulation rates between 90-130/s, assuming a control quantal content of 200 vesicles released per impulse. Depletion was less at lower frequencies when the number of stimuli delivered was identical. When the RRP maximally depleted, release was inversely related to stimulation rate, as would be expected if mobilization from the depot pool was the sole determinate of release during the slow phase. An equation constructed from four known components of enhancement and two components of depression-the depletion of vesicles from a readily releasable pool (RRP) and from the depot pool (DP) that refills the RRP, was used to fit and then simulate EPPs obtained during trains using different patterns of stimulation and varying amounts of extracellular Ca 2+ ; the decay …
Immunomodulatory Function of the Tumor Suppressor p53 in Host Immune Response and the Tumor Microenvironment

The tumor suppressor p53 is the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers. Most of the mutations are missense leading to loss of p53 function in inducing apoptosis and senescence. In addition to these autonomous effects of p53 inactivation/dysfunction on tumorigenesis, compelling evidence suggests that p53 mutation/inactivation also leads to gain-of-function or activation of non-autonomous pathways, which either directly or indirectly promote tumorigenesis. Experimental and clinical results suggest that p53 dysfunction fuels pro-tumor inflammation and serves as an immunological gain-of-function driver of tumorigenesis via skewing immune landscape of the tumor microenvironment (TME). It is now increasingly appreciated that p53 dysfunction in various cellular compartments of the TME leads to immunosuppression and immune evasion. Although our understanding of the cellular and molecular processes that link p53 activity to host immune regulation is still incomplete, it is clear that activating/reactivating the p53 pathway in the TME also represents a compelling immunological strategy to reverse immunosuppression and enhance antitumor immunity. Here, we review our current understanding of the potential cellular and molecular mechanisms by which p53 participates in immune regulation and discuss how targeting the p53 pathway can be exploited to alter the immunological landscape of tumors for maximizing therapeutic outcome.