bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Qualitative study using interviews and focus groups to explore the current and potential for antimicrobial stewardship in community pharmacy informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework
Authors: Jones Leah Ffion , Owens Rebecca , Sallis Anna , Ashiru-Oredope Diane , Thornley Tracey , Francis Nick A , Butler Chris , McNulty Cliodna A M
Published: December 2018

Objectives

Community pharmacists and their staff have the potential to contribute to antimicrobial stewardship (AMS). However, their barriers and opportunities are not well understood. The aim was to investigate the experiences and perceptions of community pharmacists and their teams around AMS to inform intervention development.

Design

Interviews and focus groups were used to explore the views of pharmacists, pharmacy staff, general practitioners (GPs), members of pharmacy organisations and commissioners. The questioning schedule was developed using the Theoretical Domains Framework which helped inform recommendations to facilitate AMS in community pharmacy.

Results

8 GPs, 28 pharmacists, 13 pharmacy staff, 6 representatives from pharmacy organisations in England and Wales, and 2 local stakeholders participated.

Knowledge and skills both facilitated or hindered provision of self-care and compliance advice by different grades of pharmacy staff. Some staff were not aware of the impact of giving self-care and compliance advice to help control antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The pharmacy environment created barriers to AMS; this included lack of time of well-qualified staff leading to misinformation from underskilled staff to patients about the need for antibiotics or the need to visit the GP, this was exacerbated by lack of space. AMS activities were limited by absent diagnoses on antibiotic prescriptions.

Several pharmacy staff felt that undertaking patient examinations, questioning the rationale for antibiotic prescriptions and performing audits would allow them to provide more tailored AMS advice.

Conclusions

Interventions are required to overcome a lack of qualified staff, time and space to give patients AMS advice. Staff need to understand how self-care and antibiotic compliance advice can help control AMR. A multifaceted educational intervention including information for staff with feedback about the advice given may help. Indication for a prescription would enable pharmacists to provide more targeted antibiotic advice. Commissioners should consider the pharmacists’ role in examining patients, and giving advice about antibiotic prescriptions.
Concussion assessment in the emergency department: a preliminary study for a quality improvement project
Authors: Mistry Dylan A , Rainer Timothy H
Published: December 2018

Background

In sport, concussion is assessed using the Sports Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT) 5 and managed with return to play guidelines. Similar, user-friendly tools are rarely, if ever, used in the emergency department (ED).

Objectives

To evaluate a modified concussion assessment tool designed for the ED (ED-CAT) in patients presenting with a head injury and to identify variables that predict 30-day reattendance.

Methods

A preliminary, prospective, evaluation in a quality improvement project was conducted in one hospital in South Wales. Patients were recruited if they were over 13 years, and either did not have an ED-CT head scan or had a scan with no acute changes. The primary outcome was 30-day reattendance.

Results

40 patients were recruited, 18 of whom had a CT scan. 37 were discharged on the same day with advice, two discharged the next day and one was admitted. Three (7.5%) patients reattended the department. Predictors of reattendance were headache score (median 3.0 vs 5.0; p<0.05), pressure in head score (2.0 vs 5.0; p<0.05), nausea/vomiting score (1.0 vs 3.0; p<0.05), dizziness score (1.0 vs 4.0; p<0.05), blurred vision score (0 vs 4.0; p<0.01), balance problems score (0 vs 4.0; p<0.05), sensitivity to light and confusion score (0 vs 4.0; p<0.01), orientation score (1. 0 vs 0; p<0.05) and immediate memory score (5.0 vs 4.0; p<0.05).

Conclusions

Key symptoms and signs predicted 30-day reattendance. The ED-CAT requires validation and refinement in a larger population to produce a short, practical, user-friendly, relevant tool for ED head injury assessment.
Neoadjuvant chemoradiation and rectal cancer
Authors: Chetty Runjan , McCarthy Aoife J
Published: December 2018

Neoadjuvant chemoradiation (NACR) is now standard of care in stage II and III rectal cancer. The advent of this modality of treatment has impacted on the way the pathological evaluation of resection specimens that have been subjected to preoperative chemoradiation is conducted. The gross description, sectioning and microscopic examination have had to be adapted to accommodate the changes induced by NACR. Attempts at introducing a uniform approach to the gross triaging and reporting of these specimens have been met with muted response. There still exists much variation in approach. The purpose of this overview is to highlight some of the newer developments and issues around NACR-treated rectal cancers from a pathological point of view. The NACR-treated resection specimens should be handled in a consistent manner, at least within individual institutions, if not universally. There should be generous sampling with multiple sections taken as tumour is often sequestered deep in the bowel wall. Microscopic examination should be extra vigilant as residual cancer can be present as single cells or small clusters, often deep in the muscularis propria or serosa. Acellular pools of mucin or non-viable tumour cells in mucin within the bowel wall or lymph nodes are not regarded as positive and do not upstage the tumour. The issue of grading of regression has been the subject of much debate, and several approaches have been published. It is recommended that a system that has clinical meaning and use to oncologists be used. Lymph node counts will be reduced after NACR, but reasonable attempts to accrue 12 nodes should be made.
Long-term efficacy of rifaximin to manage the symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease of the colon
Authors: Di Mario Francesco , Miraglia Chiara , Cambiè Ginevra , Violi Alessandra , Nouvenne Antonio , Franceschi Marilisa , Brandimarte Giovanni , Elisei Walter , Picchio Marcello , Tursi Antonio
Published: December 2018

Although rifaximin is currently advised in managing symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease (SUDD) of the colon, no long-term data are available. This retrospective study assessed the outcome of a large cohort of patients with SUDD, treated with rifaximin, during an 8-year follow-up. The study group (group A) included 346 patients with SUDD (median age 64 years, IQR 58–69, 62.4% females), treated with rifaximin 800 mg/d for 7 days every month. The control group (group B) included 470 patients with SUDD (median age 65 years, IQR 59–74 years, 60.8% females), taking any other treatment on demand. Two symptoms (left lower abdominal pain and bloating) were assessed by a visual analog scale (VAS), graded from 0=no symptom to 10=the most severe symptom. Daily bowel movements were also reported. Median (IQR) VAS score for pain was 6 (5–7) in group A and 6 (6–7) in group B at baseline (p=0.109); at 8-year follow-up it was 3 (3–4) and 6 (5–7), respectively (p<0.000). Both bloating and daily bowel movements were significantly reduced in group A. Acute diverticulitis occurred in 9 (2.6%) patients in group A and in 21 (4.5%) patients in group B (p=0.155). Surgery occurred in 4 (1.2%) patients in group A and 9 (1.9%) in group B (p=0.432). Disease-related mortality occurred in no patient in group A and 2 (0.4%) patients in group B (p=0.239). No side effects were recorded during the entire study period. Rifaximin is effective to relieve symptoms and reduce the risk of disease-related complications in patients with SUDD.
Serum heart-type fatty acid-binding protein decreases and soluble isoform of suppression of tumorigenicity 2 increases significantly by long-term physical activity
Authors: Sponder Michael , Lichtenauer Michael , Wernly Bernhard , Paar Vera , Hoppe Uta , Emich Michael , Fritzer-Szekeres Monika , Litschauer Brigitte , Strametz-Juranek Jeanette
Published: December 2018

The aim of this prospective study was to investigate the influence of long-term physical activity on biomarkers for myocyte ischemia (heart-type fatty acid-binding protein, H-FABP), matrix remodelling/vascular stress (soluble isoform of suppression of tumorigenicity 2, sST2) and inflammation (soluble urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor, suPAR). In this prospective observational study 109 subjects were recruited, 98 completed the study. Subjects were asked to perform exercise within the calculated training pulse for 8 months. The performance gain was measured/quantified by bicycle stress tests at the beginning and end of the observation period. Twenty-seven subjects with a performance gain <2.9% were excluded. suPAR, H-FABP and sST2 were measured in serum at baseline and after 2, 4 and 8 months by ELISA. We found a significant decrease in H-FABP (1.86 (0.86) to 1.29 (0.98) ng/mL; p<0.01) and a significant increase in sST2 levels (6126 (2759) to 6919 (3720) pg/mL; p=0.045) during the observation period of 8 months while there was no remarkable change in suPAR levels. We interpret the activity-induced decrease in H-FABP as sign of lower subclinical myocardial ischemia and better perfusion, probably due to a more economic metabolization and electrolyte balance. The increase in sST2 might reflect physiological sports-induced vascular stress. As H-FABP and sST2 play an important role in the pathomechanism of ischemic cardiomyopathy (iCMP) further studies should investigate the influence of regular physical activity on these biomarkers in a population of patients with iCMP.

Trial registration number

NCT02097199.
Chiral effects in magnetized quantum spinor matter in particle and astroparticle physics
Authors: Sitenko Yu. A.
Published: December 2018

Quantum spinor matter in extremal conditions (high densities and temperatures, presence of strong magnetic fields) have drawn the attention of researchers in diverse areas of contemporary physics, ranging from cosmology, high-energy and astroparticle physics to condensed matter physics. We study an impact of the confining boundary conditions on the properties of physical systems with hot dense magnetized ultrarelativistic spinor matter and elucidate a significant role of boundaries for such systems.
Community Perceptions of and Vulnerability to Earthquake Disaster: Insights from the City of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Authors: Rahman Md. Mahbubur , Abdullah A. B. M. , Murad Md. Wahid
Published: December 2018

This study is an attempt to empirically determine and analyse the factors that significantly influence the perceptions of and vulnerability to an earthquake disaster that struck a community located in the Hazaribagh area of Dhaka South City, Bangladesh. The empirical results reveal a significant relationship between a number of sociodemographic factors and the community’s perceptions of and level of vulnerability to an earthquake disaster. The critical factors we have determined as significantly influencing these community perceptions and sense of vulnerability to earthquake disaster include: “level of education”, “preserve the drinking water, “uncovered drainage system”, “unplanned commercial and business apartments”, “unplanned tannery”, “first aid equipment”, and “family size”. We argue that while an earthquake disaster is a natural phenomenon, people’s vulnerabilities to it are in most cases caused by their societies and the governments” actions and inactions when facing such a situation.
Differentiating compensatory mechanisms associated with low tolerance to central hypovolemia in women
Authors: Schlotman Taylor Elyse , Akers Kevin S. , Nessen Shawn C. , Convertino Victor A.
Published: December 2018

Women generally display lower tolerance to acute central hypovolemia than men. The measurement of compensatory reserve (CRM) is a novel metric that provides information about the sum total of all mechanisms that together work to compensate for the relative blood volume deficit. Hemodynamic decompensation occurs with depletion of the CRM (i.e., 0% CRM). In the present study, we hypothesized that the lower tolerance to progressive central hypovolemia reported in women can be explained by a faster reduction rate in CRM compared with men rather than sex differences in absolute integrated compensatory responses. Continuous, noninvasive measures of CRM were collected from 208 healthy volunteers (107 men and 85 women) who underwent progressive stepwise central hypovolemia induced by lower body negative pressure to the point of presyncope. Comparisons revealed shorter ( P < 0.01) times in female participants compared with male participants to reach 30% and 0% CRM. Similarly, the lower body negative pressure level, represented by the cumulative stress index, was less at 30% and 0% CRM in women compared with men ( P < 0.01). Changes in hemodynamic responses and frequency-domain data (oscillations in cerebral blood flow velocity and mean arterial blood pressure) were similar between men and women at 0% CRM ( P > 0.05). We conclude that compensatory responses to central hypovolemia in women were similar to men but were depleted at a faster rate compared with men. The earlier depletion of the compensatory reserve in women appears to be influenced by failure to maintain adequate cerebral oxygen delivery.

NEW & NOTEWORTHY We compared hemodynamic and metabolic responses in men and women to experimentally controlled reductions in central blood volume at physiologically equivalent levels of compensatory reserve. We corroborated previous findings that females have lower tolerance to central hypovolemia than males but demonstrated for the first time that compensatory responses are similar. Our findings suggest lower tolerance to central hypovolemia in women results from reaching critical cerebral delivery of oxygen faster than men.
Muscle sympathetic nerve activity and hemodynamic responses to venous distension: does sex play a role?
Authors: Mansur Daniel E. , Campos Monique O. , Mattos João D. , Paiva Adrielle C. S. , Rocha Marcos P. , Videira Rogerio L. R. , Macefield Vaughan G. , Nóbrega Antonio C. L. , Fernandes Igor A.
Published: December 2018

Peripheral venous distension mechanically stimulates type III/IV sensory fibers in veins and evokes pressor and sympathoexcitatory reflex responses in humans. As young women have reduced venous compliance and impaired sympathetic transduction, we tested the hypothesis that pressor and sympathoexcitatory responses to venous distension may be attenuated in women compared with men. Mean arterial pressure (photoplethysmography), heart rate (HR), stroke volume (SV; Modelflow), cardiac output (CO = HR × SV), muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA), femoral artery blood flow, and femoral artery conductance (Doppler ultrasound) were quantified in eight men (27 ± 4 yr) and nine women (28 ± 4 yr) before [control (CON)], during (INF), and immediately after (post-INF) a local infusion of saline [5% of the total forearm volume (30 ml/min); the infusion time was 2 ± 1 and 1 ± 1 min ( P = 0.0001) for men and women, respectively] through a retrograde catheter inserted into an antecubital vein, to which venous drainage and arterial supply had been occluded. Mean arterial pressure increased during and after infusion in both groups (vs. the CON group, P < 0.05), but women showed a smaller pressor response in the post-INF period (Δ+7.2 ± 2.0 vs. Δ+18.3 ± 3.9 mmHg in men, P = 0.019). MSNA increased and femoral artery conductance decreased similarly in both groups (vs. the CON group, P < 0.05) at post-INF. Although HR changes were similar, increases in SV (Δ+20.4 ± 8.6 vs. Δ+2.6 ± 2.7 ml, P = 0.05) and CO (Δ+0.84 ± 0.17 vs. Δ+0.34 ± 0.10 l/min, P = 0.024) were greater in men compared with women. Therefore, venous distension evokes a smaller pressor response in young women due to attenuated cardiac adjustments rather than reduced venous compliance or sympathetic transduction.

NEW & NOTEWORTHY We found that the pressor response to venous distension was attenuated in young women compared with age-matched men. This was due to attenuated cardiac adjustments rather than reduced venous compliance, sympathetic activation, or impaired transduction and vascular control. Collectively, these findings suggest that an attenuated venous distension reflex could be involved in orthostatic intolerance in young women.
Central Nervous System Metastasis in Patients with HER2-Positive Metastatic Breast Cancer: Patient Characteristics, Treatment, and Survival from SystHERs
Authors: Hurvitz Sara A. , O'Shaughnessy Joyce , Mason Ginny , Yardley Denise A. , Jahanzeb Mohammad , Brufsky Adam , Rugo Hope S. , Swain Sandra M. , Kaufman Peter A. , Tripathy Debu , Chu Laura , Li Haocheng , Antao Vincent , Cobleigh Melody
Published: December 2018

Purpose:

Patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (MBC) with central nervous system (CNS) metastasis have a poor prognosis. We report treatments and outcomes in patients with HER2-positive MBC and CNS metastasis from the Systemic Therapies for HER2-positive Metastatic Breast Cancer Study (SystHERs).

Experimental Design:

SystHERs (NCT01615068) was a prospective, U.S.-based, observational registry of patients with newly diagnosed HER2-positive MBC. Study endpoints included treatment patterns, clinical outcomes, and patient-reported outcomes (PRO).

Results:

Among 977 eligible patients enrolled (2012–2016), CNS metastasis was observed in 87 (8.9%) at initial MBC diagnosis and 212 (21.7%) after diagnosis, and was not observed in 678 (69.4%) patients. White and younger patients, and those with recurrent MBC and hormone receptor–negative disease, had higher risk of CNS metastasis. Patients with CNS metastasis at diagnosis received first-line lapatinib more commonly (23.0% vs. 2.5%), and trastuzumab less commonly (70.1% vs. 92.8%), than patients without CNS metastasis at diagnosis. Risk of death was higher with CNS metastasis observed at or after diagnosis [median overall survival (OS) 30.2 and 38.3 months from MBC diagnosis, respectively] versus no CNS metastasis [median OS not estimable: HR 2.86; 95% confidence interval (CI), 2.05–4.00 and HR 1.94; 95% CI, 1.52–2.49]. Patients with versus without CNS metastasis at diagnosis had lower quality of life at enrollment.

Conclusions:

Despite advances in HER2-targeted treatments, patients with CNS metastasis continue to have a poor prognosis and impaired quality of life. Observation of CNS metastasis appears to influence HER2-targeted treatment choice.
Arterial Properties as Determinants of Left Ventricular Mass and Fibrosis in Severe Aortic Stenosis: Findings From ACRIN PA 4008
Authors: Chirinos Julio A. , Akers Scott R. , Schelbert Erik , Snyder Bradley S. , Witschey Walter R. , Jacob Ron M. , Jamis‐Dow Carlos , Ansari Bilal , Lee Jonathan , Segers Patrick , Schnall Mitchell , Cavalcante João L.
Published: December 2018

Background

The role of arterial load in severe aortic stenosis is increasingly recognized. However, patterns of pulsatile load and their implications in this population are unknown. We aimed to assess the relationship between the arterial properties and both (1) left ventricular remodeling and fibrosis and (2) the clinical course of patients with severe aortic stenosis undergoing aortic valve replacement (
AVR
).

Methods and Results

We enrolled 38 participants with symptomatic severe aortic stenosis scheduled to undergo surgical
AVR
. Aortic root characteristic impedance, wave reflections parameters (reflection magnitude, reflected wave transit time), and myocardial extracellular mass were measured with cardiac magnetic resonance imaging and arterial tonometry Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging was repeated at 6 months in 30 participants. A reduction in cellular mass (133.6 versus 113.9 g;
P
=0.002) but not extracellular mass (42.3 versus 40.6 g;
P
=0.67) was seen after
AVR
. Participants with higher extracellular mass exhibited greater reflection magnitude (0.68 versus 0.54;
P
=0.006) and lower aortic root characteristic impedance (56.3 versus 96.9 dynes/s per cm
5
;
P
=0.006). Reflection magnitude was a significant predictor of smaller improvement in the quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire score) after
AVR
(
R
=−0.51;
P
=0.0026). The 6‐minute walk distance at 6 months after
AVR
was positively correlated with the reflected wave transit time (
R
=0.52;
P
=0.01).

Conclusions

Consistent with animal studies, arterial wave reflections are associated with interstitial volume expansion in severe aortic stenosis and predict a smaller improvement in quality of life following
AVR
. Future trials should assess whether wave reflections represent a potential therapeutic target to mitigate myocardial interstitial remodeling and to improve the clinical status of this patient population.
eHealth Tools to Provide Structured Assistance for Atrial Fibrillation Screening, Management, and Guideline‐Recommended Therapy in Metropolitan General Practice: The AF‐SMART Study
Authors: Orchard Jessica , Neubeck Lis , Freedman Ben , Li Jialin , Webster Ruth , Zwar Nicholas , Gallagher Robyn , Ferguson Caleb , Lowres Nicole
Published: December 2018

Background

This
eH
ealth implementation study aimed to evaluate strategies to promote opportunistic atrial fibrillation (
AF
) screening using electronic screening prompts and improve treatment using electronic decision support (
EDS
) software.

Methods and Results

An electronic screening prompt appeared whenever an eligible patient's (aged ≥65 years, no
AF
diagnosis) medical record was opened in participating general practices. General practitioners and practice nurses offered screening using a smartphone ECG, with validated
AF
algorithm. Guideline‐based
EDS
was provided to assist treatment decisions. Deidentified data were collected from practices using a data extraction tool. General practices (n=8) across Sydney, Australia, screened for a median of 6 months. A total of 1805 of 11 476 (16%) eligible patients who attended were screened (44% men, mean age 75.7 years). Screening identified 19 (1.1%) new cases of
AF
(mean age, 79 years; mean
CHA
2
DS
2
‐
VAS
c, 3.7; 53% men). General practitioners (n=30) performed 70% of all screenings (range 1–448 patients per general practitioner). The proportion of patients with AF who had
CHA
2
DS
2
‐
VAS
c ≥2 for men or ≥3 for women prescribed oral anticoagulants was higher for those diagnosed during the study: 15 of 18 (83%) for screen‐detected and 39 of 46 (85%) for clinically detected, compared with 933 of 1306 (71%) patients diagnosed before the study (
P
<0.001). The
EDS
was accessed 111 times for patients with
AF
and for 4 of 19 screen‐detected patients.

Conclusions

The
eH
ealth tools showed promise. Adherence to guideline‐based oral anticoagulant prescription was significantly higher in patients diagnosed during the study period, although the
EDS
was only used in a minority. While the proportion of eligible patients screened and
EDS
use was relatively low, further refinements may improve uptake in clinical practice.

Clinical Trial Registration

URL
:
www.anzctr.org.au
. Unique identifier:
ACTRN
12616000850471.
PSİKOLOJİK GÜÇLENDİRMENİN ÇALIŞMAYA TUTKUNLUK ÜZERİNDEKİ ETKİSİ: SAĞLIK SEKTÖRÜ ÇALIŞANLARINA YÖNELİK BİR ARAŞTIRMA
Authors: HATİPOĞLU Sercan , ÖRÜCÜ Edip
Published: December 2018

﻿﻿Akademisyen ve uygulayıcıların psikolojik güçlendirme ve çalışmaya
tutkunluk konularına olan ilgisi son yıllarda önemli ölçüde artmıştır. Bununla
birlikte, birbirinden bağımsız olarak ortaya çıkan bu kavramların boyutlarının nasıl
ilişkili oldukları konusunda yapılan çalışma sayısı oldukça yetersizdir. Bu
çalışmanın amacı psikolojik güçlendirmenin boyutlarının çalışmaya tutkunluğun boyutları
üzerindeki etkisini analiz etmektir. Çalışma kapsamındaki veriler Bursa’da
bulunan sağlık kurumlardaki 146 katılımcıdan anket yöntemi ile elde edilmiştir.
Verilerin analizinde korelasyon ve çoklu doğrusal regresyon istatistik
teknikleri kullanılmıştır. Analiz sonuçlarına göre, psikolojik güçlendirmenin anlamlılık
alt boyutu tüm çalışmaya tutkunluk alt boyutlarını açıklamada istatistiksel
olarak anlamlıdır. Etki alt boyutu ise hiç bir çalışmaya tutkunluk alt boyutunu
açıklamada istatistiksel olarak anlamlı değildir. Ayrıca, yeterlilik alt boyutu
çalışmaya tutkunluğun dinçlik ve yoğunlaşma alt boyutlarını açıklamada istatistiksel olarak anlamlıyken,
özerklik alt boyutu çalışmaya tutkunluğun dinçlik ve adanmışlık alt boyutlarını
açıklamada istatistiksel olarak anlamlıdır sonuçlarına ulaşılmıştır.
CARTEL SCREENING IN PUBLIC TENDERS OF ROADWAY GUARDRAIL
Authors: ÇELEN Aydın
Published: December 2018

The Competition Board has opened an investigation with
the decision of 27.04.2017 on the seven guardrail producers and their
association (TOD). The Board has alleged that these producers restricted the competition in
the guardrail tenders by determining jointly their bids (price quotations) in
these tenders under TOD. In this article, it was analyzed whether a competition
infringement occurred or not by using a wide range of data on guardrail
tenders. The results showed that the ratios between price quotations of
producers and the approximate costs announced by the Administration (bid /
approximate cost) have increased in 2016 as claimed by the Board. However, this
increase did not arise from the fact that TOD members who are parties to the
investigation are in a cooperation restricting the competition. Instead, the
reason for this increase is that the actual costs incurred by the producers
increased while the approximate costs announced by the Administration in 2016
fell.
MOTHER’S EMPLOYMENT, CHILD CARE USE AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
Authors: PEKKURNAZ Didem
Published: December 2018

This
paper aims to analyze the effects of mother’s employment and non-parental child
care on cognitive development in early childhood. Investment in the development
of children at early rather than later ages provides higher returns in terms of
labor market outcomes. Thus, decision making process of primary care givers are
extremely important at this period. A nationally representative longitudinal
data for the United States of America is used in this paper. Hybrid production
function for the cognitive development is estimated within a dynamic framework
using a two-step system Generalized Method of Moments estimator. The results
show that more hours of center-based care significantly increase cognitive
achievement and this holds true when center-based care is defined as full- or
part-time. Furthermore, both a high quality home environment and a high quality
out-of-home child care improve a child’s cognitive development while there is
no statistically significant impact of maternal work hours.
Direct Feature Evaluation in Black-Box Optimization Using Problem Transformations
Authors: Saleem Sobia , Gallagher Marcus , Wood Ian
Published: December 2018

Exploratory Landscape Analysis provides sample-based methods to calculate features of black-box optimization problems in a quantitative and measurable way. Many problem features have been proposed in the literature in an attempt to provide insights into the structure of problem landscapes and to use in selecting an effective algorithm for a given optimization problem. While there has been some success, evaluating the utility of problem features in practice presents some significant challenges. Machine learning models have been employed as part of the evaluation process, but they may require additional information about the problems as well as having their own hyper-parameters, biases and experimental variability. As a result, extra layers of uncertainty and complexity are added into the experimental evaluation process, making it difficult to clearly assess the effect of the problem features. In this article, we propose a novel method for the evaluation of problem features which can be applied directly to individual or groups of features and does not require additional machine learning techniques or confounding experimental factors. The method is based on the feature's ability to detect a prior ranking of similarity in a set of problems. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) significance tests are used to determine if the feature has successfully distinguished the successive problems in the set. Based on ANOVA test results, a percentage score is assigned to each feature for different landscape characteristics. Experimental results for twelve different features on four problem transformations demonstrate the method and provide quantitative evidence about the ability of different problem features to detect specific properties of problem landscapes.
Modeling Semantic Expectation: Using Script Knowledge for Referent Prediction
Authors: Modi Ashutosh , Titov Ivan , Demberg Vera , Sayeed Asad , Pinkal Manfred
Published: December 2018

Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the factors that affect human prediction by building a computational model that can predict upcoming discourse referents based on linguistic knowledge alone vs. linguistic knowledge jointly with common-sense knowledge in the form of scripts. We find that script knowledge significantly improves model estimates of human predictions. In a second study, we test the highly controversial hypothesis that predictability influences referring expression type but do not find evidence for such an effect.
Shift-Reduce Constituent Parsing with Neural Lookahead Features
Authors: Liu Jiangming , Zhang Yue
Published: December 2018

Transition-based models can be fast and accurate for constituent parsing. Compared with chart-based models, they leverage richer features by extracting history information from a parser stack, which consists of a sequence of non-local constituents. On the other hand, during incremental parsing, constituent information on the right hand side of the current word is not utilized, which is a relative weakness of shift-reduce parsing. To address this limitation, we leverage a fast neural model to extract lookahead features. In particular, we build a bidirectional LSTM model, which leverages full sentence information to predict the hierarchy of constituents that each word starts and ends. The results are then passed to a strong transition-based constituent parser as lookahead features. The resulting parser gives 1.3% absolute improvement in WSJ and 2.3% in CTB compared to the baseline, giving the highest reported accuracies for fully-supervised parsing.
A Generative Model of Phonotactics
Authors: Futrell Richard , Albright Adam , Graff Peter , O’Donnell Timothy J.
Published: December 2018

We present a probabilistic model of phonotactics, the set of well-formed phoneme sequences in a language. Unlike most computational models of phonotactics (Hayes and Wilson, 2008; Goldsmith and Riggle, 2012), we take a fully generative approach, modeling a process where forms are built up out of subparts by phonologically-informed structure building operations. We learn an inventory of subparts by applying stochastic memoization (Johnson et al., 2007; Goodman et al., 2008) to a generative process for phonemes structured as an and-or graph, based on concepts of feature hierarchy from generative phonology (Clements, 1985; Dresher, 2009). Subparts are combined in a way that allows tier-based feature interactions. We evaluate our models’ ability to capture phonotactic distributions in the lexicons of 14 languages drawn from the WOLEX corpus (Graff, 2012). Our full model robustly assigns higher probabilities to held-out forms than a sophisticated N-gram model for all languages. We also present novel analyses that probe model behavior in more detail.
Context Gates for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Tu Zhaopeng , Liu Yang , Lu Zhengdong , Liu Xiaohua , Li Hang
Published: December 2018

In neural machine translation (NMT), generation of a target word depends on both source and target contexts. We find that source contexts have a direct impact on the adequacy of a translation while target contexts affect the fluency. Intuitively, generation of a content word should rely more on the source context and generation of a functional word should rely more on the target context. Due to the lack of effective control over the influence from source and target contexts, conventional NMT tends to yield fluent but inadequate translations. To address this problem, we propose context gates which dynamically control the ratios at which source and target contexts contribute to the generation of target words. In this way, we can enhance both the adequacy and fluency of NMT with more careful control of the information flow from contexts. Experiments show that our approach significantly improves upon a standard attention-based NMT system by +2.3 BLEU points.
Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs
Authors: Peng Nanyun , Poon Hoifung , Quirk Chris , Toutanova Kristina , Yih Wen-tau
Published: December 2018

Past work in relation extraction has focused on binary relations in single sentences. Recent NLP inroads in high-value domains have sparked interest in the more general setting of extracting n-ary relations that span multiple sentences. In this paper, we explore a general relation extraction framework based on graph long short-term memory networks (graph LSTMs) that can be easily extended to cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction. The graph formulation provides a unified way of exploring different LSTM approaches and incorporating various intra-sentential and inter-sentential dependencies, such as sequential, syntactic, and discourse relations. A robust contextual representation is learned for the entities, which serves as input to the relation classifier. This simplifies handling of relations with arbitrary arity, and enables multi-task learning with related relations. We evaluate this framework in two important precision medicine settings, demonstrating its effectiveness with both conventional supervised learning and distant supervision. Cross-sentence extraction produced larger knowledge bases. and multi-task learning significantly improved extraction accuracy. A thorough analysis of various LSTM approaches yielded useful insight the impact of linguistic analysis on extraction accuracy.
Head-Lexicalized Bidirectional Tree LSTMs
Authors: Teng Zhiyang , Zhang Yue
Published: December 2018

Sequential LSTMs have been extended to model tree structures, giving competitive results for a number of tasks. Existing methods model constituent trees by bottom-up combinations of constituent nodes, making direct use of input word information only for leaf nodes. This is different from sequential LSTMs, which contain references to input words for each node. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic head-lexicalization for tree-structure LSTMs, propagating head words from leaf nodes to every constituent node. In addition, enabled by head lexicalization, we build a tree LSTM in the top-down direction, which corresponds to bidirectional sequential LSTMs in structure. Experiments show that both extensions give better representations of tree structures. Our final model gives the best results on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and highly competitive results on the TREC question type classification task.
Joint Modeling of Topics, Citations, and Topical Authority in Academic Corpora
Authors: Kim Jooyeon , Kim Dongwoo , Oh Alice
Published: December 2018

Much of scientific progress stems from previously published findings, but searching through the vast sea of scientific publications is difficult. We often rely on metrics of scholarly authority to find the prominent authors but these authority indices do not differentiate authority based on research topics. We present Latent Topical-Authority Indexing (LTAI) for jointly modeling the topics, citations, and topical authority in a corpus of academic papers. Compared to previous models, LTAI differs in two main aspects. First, it explicitly models the generative process of the citations, rather than treating the citations as given. Second, it models each author’s influence on citations of a paper based on the topics of the cited papers, as well as the citing papers. We fit LTAI into four academic corpora: CORA, Arxiv Physics, PNAS, and Citeseer. We compare the performance of LTAI against various baselines, starting with the latent Dirichlet allocation, to the more advanced models including author-link topic model and dynamic author citation topic model. The results show that LTAI achieves improved accuracy over other similar models when predicting words, citations and authors of publications.
Domain-Targeted, High Precision Knowledge Extraction
Authors: Mishra Bhavana Dalvi , Tandon Niket , Clark Peter
Published: December 2018

Our goal is to construct a domain-targeted, high precision knowledge base (KB), containing general (subject,predicate,object) statements about the world, in support of a downstream question-answering (QA) application. Despite recent advances in information extraction (IE) techniques, no suitable resource for our task already exists; existing resources are either too noisy, too named-entity centric, or too incomplete, and typically have not been constructed with a clear scope or purpose. To address these, we have created a domain-targeted, high precision knowledge extraction pipeline, leveraging Open IE, crowdsourcing, and a novel canonical schema learning algorithm (called CASI), that produces high precision knowledge targeted to a particular domain - in our case, elementary science. To measure the KB’s coverage of the target domain’s knowledge (its “comprehensiveness” with respect to science) we measure recall with respect to an independent corpus of domain text, and show that our pipeline produces output with over 80% precision and 23% recall with respect to that target, a substantially higher coverage of tuple-expressible science knowledge than other comparable resources. We have made the KB publicly available.
Semantic Specialization of Distributional Word Vector Spaces using Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Constraints
Authors: Mrkšić Nikola , Vulić Ivan , Séaghdha Diarmuid Ó , Leviant Ira , Reichart Roi , Gašić Milica , Korhonen Anna , Young Steve
Published: December 2018

We present Attract-Repel, an algorithm for improving the semantic quality of word vectors by injecting constraints extracted from lexical resources. Attract-Repel facilitates the use of constraints from mono- and cross-lingual resources, yielding semantically specialized cross-lingual vector spaces. Our evaluation shows that the method can make use of existing cross-lingual lexicons to construct high-quality vector spaces for a plethora of different languages, facilitating semantic transfer from high- to lower-resource ones. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with state-of-the-art results on semantic similarity datasets in six languages. We next show that Attract-Repel-specialized vectors boost performance in the downstream task of dialogue state tracking (DST) across multiple languages. Finally, we show that cross-lingual vector spaces produced by our algorithm facilitate the training of multilingual DST models, which brings further performance improvements.
Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation
Authors: Johnson Melvin , Schuster Mike , Le Quoc V. , Krikun Maxim , Wu Yonghui , Chen Zhifeng , Thorat Nikhil , Viégas Fernanda , Wattenberg Martin , Corrado Greg , Hughes Macduff , Dean Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no changes to the model architecture from a standard NMT system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT systems using a single model. On the WMT’14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for English→French and surpasses state-of-theart results for English→German. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for French→English and German→English on WMT’14 and WMT’15 benchmarks, respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. Our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and also show some interesting examples when mixing languages.
Ordinal Common-sense Inference
Authors: Zhang Sheng , Rudinger Rachel , Duh Kevin , Van Durme Benjamin
Published: December 2018

Humans have the capacity to draw common-sense inferences from natural language: various things that are likely but not certain to hold based on established discourse, and are rarely stated explicitly. We propose an evaluation of automated common-sense inference based on an extension of recognizing textual entailment: predicting ordinal human responses on the subjective likelihood of an inference holding in a given context. We describe a framework for extracting common-sense knowledge from corpora, which is then used to construct a dataset for this ordinal entailment task. We train a neural sequence-to-sequence model on this dataset, which we use to score and generate possible inferences. Further, we annotate subsets of previously established datasets via our ordinal annotation protocol in order to then analyze the distinctions between these and what we have constructed.
Evaluating Low-Level Speech Features Against Human Perceptual Data
Authors: Richter Caitlin , Feldman Naomi H. , Salgado Harini , Jansen Aren
Published: December 2018

We introduce a method for measuring the correspondence between low-level speech features and human perception, using a cognitive model of speech perception implemented directly on speech recordings. We evaluate two speaker normalization techniques using this method and find that in both cases, speech features that are normalized across speakers predict human data better than unnormalized speech features, consistent with previous research. Results further reveal differences across normalization methods in how well each predicts human data. This work provides a new framework for evaluating low-level representations of speech on their match to human perception, and lays the groundwork for creating more ecologically valid models of speech perception.
Replicability Analysis for Natural Language Processing: Testing Significance with Multiple Datasets
Authors: Dror Rotem , Baumer Gili , Bogomolov Marina , Reichart Roi
Published: December 2018

With the ever growing amount of textual data from a large variety of languages, domains, and genres, it has become standard to evaluate NLP algorithms on multiple datasets in order to ensure a consistent performance across heterogeneous setups. However, such multiple comparisons pose significant challenges to traditional statistical analysis methods in NLP and can lead to erroneous conclusions. In this paper we propose a Replicability Analysis framework for a statistically sound analysis of multiple comparisons between algorithms for NLP tasks. We discuss the theoretical advantages of this framework over the current, statistically unjustified, practice in the NLP literature, and demonstrate its empirical value across four applications: multi-domain dependency parsing, multilingual POS tagging, cross-domain sentiment classification and word similarity prediction.
Anchored Correlation Explanation: Topic Modeling with Minimal Domain Knowledge
Authors: Gallagher Ryan J. , Reing Kyle , Kale David , Ver Steeg Greg
Published: December 2018

While generative models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have proven fruitful in topic modeling, they often require detailed assumptions and careful specification of hyperparameters. Such model complexity issues only compound when trying to generalize generative models to incorporate human input. We introduce Correlation Explanation (CorEx), an alternative approach to topic modeling that does not assume an underlying generative model, and instead learns maximally informative topics through an information-theoretic framework. This framework naturally generalizes to hierarchical and semi-supervised extensions with no additional modeling assumptions. In particular, word-level domain knowledge can be flexibly incorporated within CorEx through anchor words, allowing topic separability and representation to be promoted with minimal human intervention. Across a variety of datasets, metrics, and experiments, we demonstrate that CorEx produces topics that are comparable in quality to those produced by unsupervised and semi-supervised variants of LDA.
An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication
Authors: Pavlick Ellie , Tetreault Joel
Published: December 2018

This paper presents an empirical study of linguistic formality. We perform an analysis of humans’ perceptions of formality in four different genres. These findings are used to develop a statistical model for predicting formality, which is evaluated under different feature settings and genres. We apply our model to an investigation of formality in online discussion forums, and present findings consistent with theories of formality and linguistic coordination.
A Joint Model for Answer Sentence Ranking and Answer Extraction
Authors: Sultan Md Arafat , Castelli Vittorio , Florian Radu
Published: December 2018

Answer sentence ranking and answer extraction are two key challenges in question answering that have traditionally been treated in isolation, i.e., as independent tasks. In this article, we (1) explain how both tasks are related at their core by a common quantity, and (2) propose a simple and intuitive joint probabilistic model that addresses both via joint computation but task-specific application of that quantity. In our experiments with two TREC datasets, our joint model substantially outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both tasks.
Learning to Make Inferences in a Semantic Parsing Task
Authors: Richardson Kyle , Kuhn Jonas
Published: December 2018

We introduce a new approach to training a semantic parser that uses textual entailment judgements as supervision. These judgements are based on high-level inferences about whether the meaning of one sentence follows from another. When applied to an existing semantic parsing task, they prove to be a useful tool for revealing semantic distinctions and background knowledge not captured in the target representations. This information is used to improve the quality of the semantic representations being learned and to acquire generic knowledge for reasoning. Experiments are done on the benchmark Sportscaster corpus (Chen and Mooney, 2008), and a novel RTE-inspired inference dataset is introduced. On this new dataset our method strongly outperforms several strong baselines. Separately, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the original Sportscaster semantic parsing task.