Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Machine-Learning-Based Functional Microcirculation Analysis

Analysis of microcirculation is an important clinical and research task. Functional analysis of the microcirculation allows researchers to understand how blood flowing in a tissues’ smallest vessels affects disease progression, organ function, and overall health. Current methods of manual analysis of microcirculation are tedious and time-consuming, limiting the quick turnover of results. There has been limited research on automating functional analysis of microcirculation. As such, in this paper, we propose a two-step machine-learning-based algorithm to functionally assess microcirculation videos. The first step uses a modified vessel segmentation algorithm to extract the location of vessel-like structures. While the second step uses a 3D-CNN to assess whether the vessel-like structures contained flowing blood. To our knowledge, this is the first application of machine learning for functional analysis of microcirculation. We use real-world labelled microcirculation videos to train and test our algorithm and assess its performance. More precisely, we demonstrate that our two-step algorithm can efficiently analyze real data with high accuracy (90%).
Red crabs in rain forest, Christmas Island : Biotic resistance to invasion by an exotic snail

A widely held view is that biotic resistance to invasion on oceanic islands is weak. On Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, the endemic red crab (Gecarcoidea natalis) and the introduced giant African snail (Achatina fulica) showed inverse patterns of abundance along gradients from disturbed habitat to intact rain forest: empty, but intact snail shells were abundant in disturbed habitat and rare in adjacent rain forest, while red crabs were abundant in rain forest and uncommon in disturbed habitat
Modeling human genetic history

Recent years have seen the development of new ways of handling genetic data and making inferences on specific types of demographic events such as population expansions, bottlenecks, or admixture events. Indeed, simulations have shown that ancient demographic events can leave specific signatures in genetic data extracted from present-day populations. How specific these signatures are is the focus of ongoing research. In this article, we present some of the principles underlying demographic inference based on genetic data. We discuss some results from the coalescent theory, which has been the backbone of population genetic modeling for the last 15–20 years. We also describe some of the recent methodological developments including the introduction of Bayesian and the so-called approximate Bayesian computational methods. Genetic data provide unique and very powerful means of inferring or understanding the patterns of sometimes very ancient demographic events. However, we also emphasize the huge uncertainty in our ability to reconstruct past events from genetic data in general, and from mtDNA or Y chromosome haplotypes in particular. We conclude by discussing a number of problems associated with the use of network-based methods, and briefly highlight some promising avenues of research for the future. Keywords: population genetics; human evolution; genetic modeling; inference; coalescent; likelihood; Bayesian; approximate Bayesian computation
Floral colors in the high arctic with reference to insect–flower relations and pollination

Some review, concepts, terminology, and methods are given towards the description of colors, here, of flowers of the high arctic flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, in the insect (including ultraviolet) and human visual spectra. Photographs and spectral reflection curves are given. The various flower colors found elsewhere do not occur in the same proportions in the high arctic where white and yellow predominate. Ultraviolet is reflected from several yellow (insect-red) flowers, making them insect-purple. Patterns and markings in the ultraviolet or other colors may be simple or complex, but cannot be described as honey-guides. To insects, the high arctic flowers of the different species have more distinctive colors and color patterns, and there are more different colors and color patterns, than there are to humans. Most flowers have greater luminance factors than do their backgrounds so stand out as different in color and brightness. Yellow flowers (with or without ultraviolet) are the most attracti.
Eficàcia i eficiència de la pollinització d'abellots i colibrís que visiten Delphinium nelsonii

Delphinium nelsonii Greene is a spring-flowering perennial of the Rocky Mountains of North America. Its blue flowers conform to a classical «bee pollination syndrome», but in western Colorado they are visited by hummingbirds (mostly in the first half of the flowering season) as well as bumble bee queens (mostly in the second half of the season). Experiments with potted plants showed that a bee deposits about 10 times as much pollen while visiting a flower as does a bird, and causes about la times as many seeds to be set. In contrast, bees and birds appear similar in the «quality» of pollen they deliver, e. g. , in its outcrossing distance. At the level of entire pollinator populations, hummingbird visitation rates may be over 10 times as great as those or bumble bees, in part because birds visit flowers more quickly. Thus the two visitor classes should deliver similar pollen quantities overall, which is confirmed by similar pollen loads of flowers early and late in the season, and should contribute about equally to seed set, which is confirmed by several experiments and observations. Exact relative contributions probably depend on pollinator population sizes, which in the case of hummingbirds appear to have varied 2.5 fold across 14 years. The similar contributions or birds and bees lo seed set shows that individual pollination efficiency must be distinguished from population-level effectiveness. and that the «pollination syndrome» of a flower may not indicate present-day effectiveness of its visitors.
From Creditworthiness to Trustworthiness with Alternative NLP/NLU Approaches

The word “Credit” comes from the Latin ‘credere’ which means “to give trust”. The way this trust is being given today by financial institutions is mainly based on statistical methods, using financial information - such as the revenues of an individual, the money he/she spends monthly, etc. - to quantify the chances of a successful loan repayment. By definition, this method of quantifying risk limits the access to financial services to individuals who have banking information history. In emerging markets, as described here, a huge part of the population doesn't meet these criteria and is accordingly left outside of the equation. This paper discusses alternative approaches to allow these unbanked people to access financial services in reviewing current and innovative Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding methods. The latter support excellent risk quantification results without affecting the privacy of the borrower and result in moving from biased creditworthiness to broader trustworthiness.
Limiting Resources and Territoriality in Microtine Rodents

Theories concerning microtine population dynamics have relied increasingly on assumptions about social structure, but there has been no underlying theory for social biology itself. Among microtine species, patterns of sex-specific territoriality, the best-studied aspect of their social organization, are diverse, setting the scene for the fragmented nature of the contemporary approaches to this issue. Here I propose a set of hypotheses to predict under what conditions females and males should defend territories. The argument has three main components. 1. Microtines have a low-quality diet and should tend to be food-limited. Females invest a large portion of their energy in reproductive physiology, and their reproductive success should be limited by their ability to acquire food and convert it into weaned offspring. Males invest much less energy in reproductive effort and do not participate in parental care; thus, their reproductive success should be limited by access to females. Therefore, territoriality in females should be food-based, and in males it should be female-based. 2. There are three main dietary categories for microtines: fruit-seed-fungus, forbs, and grasses. Although more work is needed to describe the spatial and temporal patterns of availability for these foods, a first approximation is possible. In general, fruits and seeds (in forest habitat) and forbs (in meadows) should be patchily distributed, relatively sparse, and poorly renewable. Since patchy distribution of a resource increases its defensibility, and since sparseness and poor renewability increase the costs of allowing exploitation by intruders, females relying on these two diets should be territorial. On the other hand, grass (in meadows) is evenly distributed (relative to forbs), abundant, and highly renewable. Thus, females of those species that rely largely on grasses should be nonterritorial. 3. When females are territorial they tend to be hyperdispersed, and when females are nonterritorial they should be clumped in distribution. Since evenly spaced females are difficult to defend, male territoriality should not occur in species showing female territoriality. Conversely, when females are nonterritorial, males should be territorial. I assess this argument by using published information. The relation between diet and female territoriality holds up well, with the caution that diet and behavior are seldom analyzed in the same population at the same time. Both factors are variable and their concurrent study necessary. The relation between female territoriality and male territoriality also holds up well, with the exception of Microtus ochrogaster, in which male-female pairs are territorial. Finally, several correlative and experimental approaches are suggested as tests of my predictions. A better understanding of the factors affecting microtine territoriality, and spacing behavior in general, should allow us to evaluate the suppositions of the many theories of how these populations are regulated.
Restrictions on Tree Adjoining Languages

Several methods are known for parsing languages generated by Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs) in O(n 6) worst case running time. In this paper we investigate which restrictions on TAGs and TAG derivations are needed in order to lower this O(n 6) time complexity, without introducing large runtime constants, and without losing any of the generative power needed to capture the syntactic constructions in natural language that can be handled by unrestricted TAGs. In particular, we describe an algorithm for parsing a strict subclass of TAG in O(ns), and attempt to show that this subclass retains enough generative power to make it useful in the general case. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Several methods are known that can parse languages generated by Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs) in worst case time O(n~), where n is the length of the input string (see (Schabes and Joshi, 1991) and references therein). Although asymptotically faster methods can be constructed, as discussed in (Rajasekaran and Yooseph, 1995), these methods are not of practical interest, due to large hidden constants. More generally, in (Satta, 1994) it has been argued that methods for TAG parsing running in time asymptotically faster than (9(n 6) are unlikely to have small hidden constants. A careful inspection of the proof provided in (Satta, 1994) reveals that the source of the claimed computational complexity of TAG parsing resides in the fact that auxiliary trees can get adjunctions at (at least) two distinct nodes in their spine (the path connecting the root and the foot nodes). The question then arises of whether the bound of two is tight. More generally, in this paper we investigate which restrictions on TAGs are needed in order to lower tile O(n 6) time complexity, still retaining the generative power that is needed to capture the syntactic constructions of natural language that unrestricted TAGs can handle. The contribution of this paper is twofold: • We define a strict subclass of TAG where adjunction of so-called wrapping trees at the spine is restricted to take place at no more than one distinct node. We show that in this case the parsing problem for TAG can be solved in worst case timc O(nS). • We provide evidence that the proposed subclass still captures the vast majority of TAG analyses that have been currently proposed for the syntax of English and of several other languages. Several restrictions on the adjunction operation for TAG have been proposed in the literature (Schabes and Waters, 1993; Schabes and Waters, 1995) (Rogers, 1994). Differently from here, in all those works the main goal was one of characterizing, through the adjunction operation, the set of trees that can be generated by a context-free grammar (CFG). For the sake of critical comparison, we discuss some common syntactic constructions found in current natural language TAG analyses, that can be captured by our proposal but fall outside of the restrictions mentioned above.
Parsing and Subcategorization Data

In this paper, we compare the performance of a state-of-the-art statistical parser (Bikel, 2004) in parsing written and spoken language and in generating sub-categorization cues from written and spoken language. Although Bikel’s parser achieves a higher accuracy for parsing written language, it achieves a higher accuracy when extracting subcategorization cues from spoken language. Additionally, we explore the utility of punctuation in helping parsing and extraction of subcat-egorization cues. Our experiments show that punctuation is of little help in parsing spoken language and extracting sub-categorization cues from spoken language. This indicates that there is no need to add punctuation in transcribing spoken corpora simply in order to help parsers.
Kinetic model of sugar diffusion from sugar beet tissue treated by pulsed electric field

Extraction of sugar from sugar beet slices was studied following various pulsed electric field (PEF) treatments (intensities from 300 to 800 V cm−1 and number of pulses varying between 50 and 1000). Slices treated by PEF were immersed in water at ambient temperature at a liquid/solid ratio of 3. A significant increase in extraction yield was observed. This enhancement was due to permeabilisation of the cellular membrane and to the additional quantity of juice appearing on the surface of slices after PEF treatment being extracted rapidly by convection. The optimal conditions of PEF treatment were an intensity of 670 V cm−1 and 250 pulses. The extraction kinetics was studied on the basis of two approaches: Fick's diffusion equation and a two-exponential kinetic model. The coefficient of diffusion was only slightly influenced by the conditions of PEF treatment. The two-exponential model successfully described both the rapid and prolonged stages of extraction. By heating the solution at mild temperatures of 30–50 °C, the coefficient of diffusion was increased and the kinetics of extraction was enhanced. The quality of cellular juice obtained after PEF treatment was higher than that of juice obtained after thermal pretreatment at 75 °C. Copyright © 2004 Society of Chemical Industry
Practical Neural Machine Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved new breakthroughs in machine translation in recent years. It has dominated recent shared translation tasks in machine translation research, and is also being quickly adopted in industry. The technical differences between NMT and the previously dominant phrase-based statistical approach require that practictioners learn new best practices for building MT systems, ranging from different hardware requirements, new techniques for handling rare words and monolingual data, to new opportunities in continued learning and domain adaptation.This tutorial is aimed at researchers and users of machine translation interested in working with NMT. The tutorial will cover a basic theoretical introduction to NMT, discuss the components of state-of-the-art systems, and provide practical advice for building NMT systems.
The impact of river regulation and climate change on the barred estuary of the Oued Massa, southern Morocco

The estuary of the Oued Massa, southern Morocco, has experienced alternating phases of tidal and lagoon conditions. Using field surveys, aerial photographs and rainfall–runoff records the dominant processes and recent evolution of the estuary are described. These data suggest that the character of the estuary has changed since the upstream impoundment of the river by the Youssef Ben Tachfine reservoir. The frequency of low-flows has been significantly increased by river regulation, as has the mean interval between flood events. Using reconstructed flow series it is speculated that lagoon conditions have become more common in the post-impoundment era than at any time since the 1920s. Although increases in winter precipitation projected by the global climate model HadCM2 for 2030–2049 imply a higher frequency of flood flows entering the reservoir in the future, the magnitude and frequency of such inflows are still within historic variability. Nonetheless, higher inflows may produce more frequent spills with concomitant bar breaching and termination of lagoon phases. Despite this, it is argued that the presence of the dam is ultimately of greater consequence to the functioning of the estuary–lagoon system than future precipitation changes over the region. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Herpetomonas mariadeanei sp. n. (Protozoa, Trypanosomatidae) from Muscina stabulans (Falléen, 1816) (Diptera, Muscidae)*

SYNOPSIS. A trypanosomatid flagellate was isolated from the musciod fly Muscina stabulans (Fallen). Cloned cultures of this organism contained promastigotes, opisthomastigotes, and froms containing a long flagellum doubled or coiled within the cell but not protruding outside. These latter forms we are designating endomastigotes. The presence of these hitherto underscribed endomastigotes along with other morphologic and growth characteristics suggest that this is a new species for which the name Herpetomonas mariadeanei is proposed.
SemEval-2017 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter

This paper describes the fifth year of the Sentiment Analysis in Twitter task. SemEval-2017 Task 4 continues with a rerun of the subtasks of SemEval-2016 Task 4, which include identifying the overall sentiment of the tweet, sentiment towards a topic with classification on a two-point and on a five-point ordinal scale, and quantification of the distribution of sentiment towards a topic across a number of tweets: again on a two-point and on a five-point ordinal scale. Compared to 2016, we made two changes: (i) we introduced a new language, Arabic, for all subtasks, and (ii) we made available information from the profiles of the Twitter users who posted the target tweets. The task continues to be very popular, with a total of 48 teams participating this year.
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Translation Systems for the WMT 2011

This paper describes the phrase-based SMT systems developed for our participation in the WMT11 Shared Translation Task. Translations for English↔German and English↔French were generated using a phrase-based translation system which is extended by additional models such as bilingual and fine-grained POS language models, POS-based reordering, lattice phrase extraction and discriminative word alignment. Furthermore, we present a special filtering method for the English-French Giga corpus and the phrase scoring step in the training is parallelized.
Structural Disambiguation Based on Reliable Estimation of Strength of Association

This paper proposes a new class-based method to estimate the strength of ,association in word co-occurrence for the purpose of structural disambiguation. To deal with sparseness of data, we use a conceptual dictionary ,'us the source for acquiring upper closes of the words related in the co-occurrence, and then use t-scores to determine a pair of classes to be employed for calculating the strength of association. We have applied our method to determining dependency relations in Japanese and prepositional phrase attachments in English. The experimental resuits show that the method is sound, effective and usefifl in resolving structural ambiguities. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The strength of association between words provides lexical preferences for ambiguity resolution. It is usuMly estimated fi'om statistics on word co-occurrences in large corpora (Hindle and Rooth, 1993). A problem with this approach is how to estimate the probability of word co-occurrences that are not observed in the training corpus. There are two main approaches to estimate the probability: smoothing methods (e.g., Church and Gale, 1991; Jelinek and Mercer, 1985; Katz, 1987) and clmss-b~ed methods (e.g., Brown et al., 1992; Pereira and Tishby, 1992; Resnik, 1992; Yarowsky, 1992). Smoothing methods estimate the probability of the unobserved co-occurrences by using frequencies of the individual words. For example, when eat and bread do not co-occur, tile probability of (eat, bread) would be estimated by using the frequency of (eat) and (bread). A problem with this approach is that it pays no attention to tile distributional characteristics of the individual words in question. Using this method, the probability of (eat, bread} and (eat, cars) would become the same when bread and cars have the same frequency. It is unacceptable fl'om the linguistic point of view. Cl,~ss-bmsed methods, oll the other hand, estimate tile probabilities by associating a class with each word and collecting statistics on word class co-occurrences. For instance, instead of calculating tile probability of (eat, bread) directly, these methods associate eat with the class [ingest] and bread with the class [food] and collect statistics on the classes [ingest] and [food]. The accuracy of the estimation depends on the choice of classes, however. Some classbased methods (e.g., Yarowsky, 1992) associate each word with a single class without considering the other words in the co-occurrence. However, a word may need to bc replaced by different class depending on the co-occurrence. Some classes may not have enough occurrences to allow a reliable estimation, while other classes may be too general and include too many words not relevant to the estimation. An alternative is to obtain various classes ~sociated in a taxonomy with the words in question and select the closes according to a certain criteria. There are a number of ways to select the classes used in the estimation. Weischedel et al. (1993) chose the lowest classes in a taxonomy
Challenges for Making Use of a Large Text Corpus such as the ‘AAC – Austrian Academy Corpus’ for Digital Literary Studies

The challenges for making use of a large text corpus such as the ‘AAC – Austrian Academy Corpus’ for the purposes of digital literary studies will be addressed in this presentation. The research question of how to use a digital text corpus of considerable size for such a specific research purpose is of interest for corpus research in general as it is of interest for digital literary text studies which rely to a large extent on large digital text corpora. The observations of the usage of lexical entities such as words, word forms, multi word units and many other linguistic units determine the way in which texts are being studied and explored. Larger entities have to be taken into account as well, which is why questions of semantic analysis and larger structures come into play. The texts of the AAC – Austrian Academy Corpus which was founded in 2001 are German language texts of historical and cultural significance from the time between 1848 and 1989. The aim of this study is to present possible research questions for corpus-based methodological approaches for the digital study of literary texts and to give examples of early experiments and experiences with making use of a large text corpus for these research purposes.