bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Language Demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk
Authors: Pavlick Ellie , Post Matt , Irvine Ann , Kachaev Dmitry , Callison-Burch Chris
Published: December 2018

We present a large scale study of the languages spoken by bilingual workers on Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We establish a methodology for determining the language skills of anonymous crowd workers that is more robust than simple surveying. We validate workers’ self-reported language skill claims by measuring their ability to correctly translate words, and by geolocating workers to see if they reside in countries where the languages are likely to be spoken. Rather than posting a one-off survey, we posted paid tasks consisting of 1,000 assignments to translate a total of 10,000 words in each of 100 languages. Our study ran for several months, and was highly visible on the MTurk crowdsourcing platform, increasing the chances that bilingual workers would complete it. Our study was useful both to create bilingual dictionaries and to act as census of the bilingual speakers on MTurk. We use this data to recommend languages with the largest speaker populations as good candidates for other researchers who want to develop crowdsourced, multilingual technologies. To further demonstrate the value of creating data via crowdsourcing, we hire workers to create bilingual parallel corpora in six Indian languages, and use them to train statistical machine translation systems.
Exploring the Role of Stress in Bayesian Word Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars
Authors: Börschinger Benjamin , Johnson Mark
Published: December 2018

Stress has long been established as a major cue in word segmentation for English infants. We show that enabling a current state-of-the-art Bayesian word segmentation model to take advantage of stress cues noticeably improves its performance. We find that the improvements range from 10 to 4%, depending on both the use of phonotactic cues and, to a lesser extent, the amount of evidence available to the learner. We also find that in particular early on, stress cues are much more useful for our model than phonotactic cues by themselves, consistent with the finding that children do seem to use stress cues before they use phonotactic cues. Finally, we study how the model’s knowledge about stress patterns evolves over time. We not only find that our model correctly acquires the most frequent patterns relatively quickly but also that the Unique Stress Constraint that is at the heart of a previously proposed model does not need to be built in but can be acquired jointly with word segmentation.
Senti-LSSVM: Sentiment-Oriented Multi-Relation Extraction with Latent Structural SVM
Authors: Qu Lizhen , Zhang Yi , Wang Rui , Jiang Lili , Gemulla Rainer , Weikum Gerhard
Published: December 2018

Extracting instances of sentiment-oriented relations from user-generated web documents is important for online marketing analysis. Unlike previous work, we formulate this extraction task as a structured prediction problem and design the corresponding inference as an integer linear program. Our latent structural SVM based model can learn from training corpora that do not contain explicit annotations of sentiment-bearing expressions, and it can simultaneously recognize instances of both binary (polarity) and ternary (comparative) relations with regard to entity mentions of interest. The empirical evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems across domains (cameras and movies) and across genres (reviews and forum posts). The gold standard corpus that we built will also be a valuable resource for the community.
Dynamic Language Models for Streaming Text
Authors: Yogatama Dani , Wang Chong , Routledge Bryan R. , Smith Noah A. , Xing Eric P.
Published: December 2018

We present a probabilistic language model that captures temporal dynamics and conditions on arbitrary non-linguistic context features. These context features serve as important indicators of language changes that are otherwise difficult to capture using text data by itself. We learn our model in an efficient online fashion that is scalable for large, streaming data. With five streaming datasets from two different genres—economics news articles and social media—we evaluate our model on the task of sequential language modeling. Our model consistently outperforms competing models.
Grounded Compositional Semantics for Finding and Describing Images with Sentences
Authors: Socher Richard , Karpathy Andrej , Le Quoc V. , Manning Christopher D. , Ng Andrew Y.
Published: December 2018

Previous work on Recursive Neural Networks (RNNs) shows that these models can produce compositional feature vectors for accurately representing and classifying sentences or images. However, the sentence vectors of previous models cannot accurately represent visually grounded meaning. We introduce the DT-RNN model which uses dependency trees to embed sentences into a vector space in order to retrieve images that are described by those sentences. Unlike previous RNN-based models which use constituency trees, DT-RNNs naturally focus on the action and agents in a sentence. They are better able to abstract from the details of word order and syntactic expression. DT-RNNs outperform other recursive and recurrent neural networks, kernelized CCA and a bag-of-words baseline on the tasks of finding an image that fits a sentence description and vice versa. They also give more similar representations to sentences that describe the same image.
Entity Linking meets Word Sense Disambiguation: a Unified Approach
Authors: Moro Andrea , Raganato Alessandro , Navigli Roberto
Published: December 2018

Entity Linking (EL) and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) both address the lexical ambiguity of language. But while the two tasks are pretty similar, they differ in a fundamental respect: in EL the textual mention can be linked to a named entity which may or may not contain the exact mention, while in WSD there is a perfect match between the word form (better, its lemma) and a suitable word sense.

In this paper we present Babelfy, a unified graph-based approach to EL and WSD based on a loose identification of candidate meanings coupled with a densest subgraph heuristic which selects high-coherence semantic interpretations. Our experiments show state-of-the-art performances on both tasks on 6 different datasets, including a multilingual setting. Babelfy is online at http://babelfy.org
Crosslingual and Multilingual Construction of Syntax-Based Vector Space Models
Authors: Utt Jason , Padó Sebastian
Published: December 2018

Syntax-based distributional models of lexical semantics provide a flexible and linguistically adequate representation of co-occurrence information. However, their construction requires large, accurately parsed corpora, which are unavailable for most languages.

In this paper, we develop a number of methods to overcome this obstacle. We describe (a) a crosslingual approach that constructs a syntax-based model for a new language requiring only an English resource and a translation lexicon; and (b) multilingual approaches that combine crosslingual with monolingual information, subject to availability. We evaluate on two lexical semantic benchmarks in German and Croatian. We find that the models exhibit complementary profiles: crosslingual models yield higher accuracies while monolingual models provide better coverage. In addition, we show that simple multilingual models can successfully combine their strengths.
Exploiting Social Network Structure for Person-to-Person Sentiment Analysis
Authors: West Robert , Paskov Hristo S. , Leskovec Jure , Potts Christopher
Published: December 2018

Person-to-person evaluations are prevalent in all kinds of discourse and important for establishing reputations, building social bonds, and shaping public opinion. Such evaluations can be analyzed separately using signed social networks and textual sentiment analysis, but this misses the rich interactions between language and social context. To capture such interactions, we develop a model that predicts individual A’s opinion of individual B by synthesizing information from the signed social network in which A and B are embedded with sentiment analysis of the evaluative texts relating A to B. We prove that this problem is NP-hard but can be relaxed to an efficiently solvable hinge-loss Markov random field, and we show that this implementation outperforms text-only and network-only versions in two very different datasets involving community-level decision-making: the Wikipedia Requests for Adminship corpus and the Convote U.S. Congressional speech corpus.
It’s All Fun and Games until Someone Annotates: Video Games with a Purpose for Linguistic Annotation
Authors: Jurgens David , Navigli Roberto
Published: December 2018

Annotated data is prerequisite for many NLP applications. Acquiring large-scale annotated corpora is a major bottleneck, requiring significant time and resources. Recent work has proposed turning annotation into a game to increase its appeal and lower its cost; however, current games are largely text-based and closely resemble traditional annotation tasks. We propose a new linguistic annotation paradigm that produces annotations from playing graphical video games. The effectiveness of this design is demonstrated using two video games: one to create a mapping from WordNet senses to images, and a second game that performs Word Sense Disambiguation. Both games produce accurate results. The first game yields annotation quality equal to that of experts and a cost reduction of 73% over equivalent crowdsourcing; the second game provides a 16.3% improvement in accuracy over current state-of-the-art sense disambiguation games with WordNet.
A Joint Model for Entity Analysis: Coreference, Typing, and Linking
Authors: Durrett Greg , Klein Dan
Published: December 2018

We present a joint model of three core tasks in the entity analysis stack: coreference resolution (within-document clustering), named entity recognition (coarse semantic typing), and entity linking (matching to Wikipedia entities). Our model is formally a structured conditional random field. Unary factors encode local features from strong baselines for each task. We then add binary and ternary factors to capture cross-task interactions, such as the constraint that coreferent mentions have the same semantic type. On the ACE 2005 and OntoNotes datasets, we achieve state-of-the-art results for all three tasks. Moreover, joint modeling improves performance on each task over strong independent baselines.
A New Corpus and Imitation Learning Framework for Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing
Authors: Vlachos Andreas , Clark Stephen
Published: December 2018

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into a machine-interpretable meaning representation. Most approaches to this task have been evaluated on a small number of existing corpora which assume that all utterances must be interpreted according to a database and typically ignore context. In this paper we present a new, publicly available corpus for context-dependent semantic parsing. The MRL used for the annotation was designed to support a portable, interactive tourist information system. We develop a semantic parser for this corpus by adapting the imitation learning algorithm DAgger without requiring alignment information during training. DAgger improves upon independently trained classifiers by 9.0 and 4.8 points in F-score on the development and test sets respectively.
Grounding Action Descriptions in Videos
Authors: Regneri Michaela , Rohrbach Marcus , Wetzel Dominikus , Thater Stefan , Schiele Bernt , Pinkal Manfred
Published: December 2018

Recent work has shown that the integration of visual information into text-based models can substantially improve model predictions, but so far only visual information extracted from static images has been used. In this paper, we consider the problem of grounding sentences describing actions in visual information extracted from videos. We present a general purpose corpus that aligns high quality videos with multiple natural language descriptions of the actions portrayed in the videos, together with an annotation of how similar the action descriptions are to each other. Experimental results demonstrate that a text-based model of similarity between actions improves substantially when combined with visual information from videos depicting the described actions.
Branch and Bound Algorithm for Dependency Parsing with Non-local Features
Authors: Qian Xian , Liu Yang
Published: December 2018

Graph based dependency parsing is inefficient when handling non-local features due to high computational complexity of inference. In this paper, we proposed an exact and efficient decoding algorithm based on the Branch and Bound (B&B) framework where non-local features are bounded by a linear combination of local features. Dynamic programming is used to search the upper bound. Experiments are conducted on English PTB and Chinese CTB datasets. We achieved competitive Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS) when no additional resources are available: 93.17% for English and 87.25% for Chinese. Parsing speed is 177 words per second for English and 97 words per second for Chinese. Our algorithm is general and can be adapted to non-projective dependency parsing or other graphical models.
Weakly Supervised Learning of Semantic Parsers for Mapping Instructions to Actions
Authors: Artzi Yoav , Zettlemoyer Luke
Published: December 2018

The context in which language is used provides a strong signal for learning to recover its meaning. In this paper, we show it can be used within a grounded CCG semantic parsing approach that learns a joint model of meaning and context for interpreting and executing natural language instructions, using various types of weak supervision. The joint nature provides crucial benefits by allowing situated cues, such as the set of visible objects, to directly influence learning. It also enables algorithms that learn while executing instructions, for example by trying to replicate human actions. Experiments on a benchmark navigational dataset demonstrate strong performance under differing forms of supervision, including correctly executing 60% more instruction sets relative to the previous state of the art.
Modeling Child Divergences from Adult Grammar
Authors: Sahakian Sam , Snyder Benjamin
Published: December 2018

During the course of first language acquisition, children produce linguistic forms that do not conform to adult grammar. In this paper, we introduce a data set and approach for systematically modeling this child-adult grammar divergence. Our corpus consists of child sentences with corrected adult forms. We bridge the gap between these forms with a discriminatively reranked noisy channel model that translates child sentences into equivalent adult utterances. Our method outperforms MT and ESL baselines, reducing child error by 20%. Our model allows us to chart specific aspects of grammar development in longitudinal studies of children, and investigate the hypothesis that children share a common developmental path in language acquisition.
Combined Distributional and Logical Semantics
Authors: Lewis Mike , Steedman Mark
Published: December 2018

We introduce a new approach to semantics which combines the benefits of distributional and formal logical semantics. Distributional models have been successful in modelling the meanings of content words, but logical semantics is necessary to adequately represent many function words. We follow formal semantics in mapping language to logical representations, but differ in that the relational constants used are induced by offline distributional clustering at the level of predicate-argument structure. Our clustering algorithm is highly scalable, allowing us to run on corpora the size of Gigaword. Different senses of a word are disambiguated based on their induced types. We outperform a variety of existing approaches on a wide-coverage question answering task, and demonstrate the ability to make complex multi-sentence inferences involving quantifiers on the FraCaS suite.
Jointly Learning to Parse and Perceive: Connecting Natural Language to the Physical World
Authors: Krishnamurthy Jayant , Kollar Thomas
Published: December 2018

This paper introduces Logical Semantics with Perception (LSP), a model for grounded language acquisition that learns to map natural language statements to their referents in a physical environment. For example, given an image, LSP can map the statement “blue mug on the table” to the set of image segments showing blue mugs on tables. LSP learns physical representations for both categorical (“blue,” “mug”) and relational (“on”) language, and also learns to compose these representations to produce the referents of entire statements. We further introduce a weakly supervised training procedure that estimates LSP’s parameters using annotated referents for entire statements, without annotated referents for individual words or the parse structure of the statement. We perform experiments on two applications: scene understanding and geographical question answering. We find that LSP outperforms existing, less expressive models that cannot represent relational language. We further find that weakly supervised training is competitive with fully supervised training while requiring significantly less annotation effort.
Dual Coordinate Descent Algorithms for Efficient Large Margin Structured Prediction
Authors: Chang Ming-Wei , Yih Wen-tau
Published: December 2018

Due to the nature of complex NLP problems, structured prediction algorithms have been important modeling tools for a wide range of tasks. While there exists evidence showing that linear Structural Support Vector Machine (SSVM) algorithm performs better than structured Perceptron, the SSVM algorithm is still less frequently chosen in the NLP community because of its relatively slow training speed.

In this paper, we propose a fast and easy-to-implement dual coordinate descent algorithm for SSVMs. Unlike algorithms such as Perceptron and stochastic gradient descent, our method keeps track of dual variables and updates the weight vector more aggressively. As a result, this training process is as efficient as existing online learning methods, and yet derives consistently better models, as evaluated on four benchmark NLP datasets for part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition and dependency parsing.
Efficient Parsing for Head-Split Dependency Trees
Authors: Satta Giorgio , Kuhlmann Marco
Published: December 2018

Head splitting techniques have been successfully exploited to improve the asymptotic runtime of parsing algorithms for projective dependency trees, under the arc-factored model. In this article we extend these techniques to a class of non-projective dependency trees, called well-nested dependency trees with block-degree at most 2, which has been previously investigated in the literature. We define a structural property that allows head splitting for these trees, and present two algorithms that improve over the runtime of existing algorithms at no significant loss in coverage.
Dynamically Shaping the Reordering Search Space of Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation
Authors: Bisazza Arianna , Federico Marcello
Published: December 2018

Defining the reordering search space is a crucial issue in phrase-based SMT between distant languages. In fact, the optimal trade-off between accuracy and complexity of decoding is nowadays reached by harshly limiting the input permutation space. We propose a method to dynamically shape such space and, thus, capture long-range word movements without hurting translation quality nor decoding time. The space defined by loose reordering constraints is dynamically pruned through a binary classifier that predicts whether a given input word should be translated right after another. The integration of this model into a phrase-based decoder improves a strong Arabic-English baseline already including state-of-the-art early distortion cost (Moore and Quirk, 2007) and hierarchical phrase orientation models (Galley and Manning, 2008). Significant improvements in the reordering of verbs are achieved by a system that is notably faster than the baseline, while bleu and meteor remain stable, or even increase, at a very high distortion limit.
What Makes Writing Great? First Experiments on Article Quality Prediction in the Science Journalism Domain
Authors: Louis Annie , Nenkova Ani
Published: December 2018

Great writing is rare and highly admired. Readers seek out articles that are beautifully written, informative and entertaining. Yet information-access technologies lack capabilities for predicting article quality at this level. In this paper we present first experiments on article quality prediction in the science journalism domain. We introduce a corpus of great pieces of science journalism, along with typical articles from the genre. We implement features to capture aspects of great writing, including surprising, visual and emotional content, as well as general features related to discourse organization and sentence structure. We show that the distinction between great and typical articles can be detected fairly accurately, and that the entire spectrum of our features contribute to the distinction.
Modeling Missing Data in Distant Supervision for Information Extraction
Authors: Ritter Alan , Zettlemoyer Luke , Mausam  , Etzioni Oren
Published: December 2018

Distant supervision algorithms learn information extraction models given only large readily available databases and text collections. Most previous work has used heuristics for generating labeled data, for example assuming that facts not contained in the database are not mentioned in the text, and facts in the database must be mentioned at least once. In this paper, we propose a new latent-variable approach that models missing data. This provides a natural way to incorporate side information, for instance modeling the intuition that text will often mention rare entities which are likely to be missing in the database. Despite the added complexity introduced by reasoning about missing data, we demonstrate that a carefully designed local search approach to inference is very accurate and scales to large datasets. Experiments demonstrate improved performance for binary and unary relation extraction when compared to learning with heuristic labels, including on average a 27% increase in area under the precision recall curve in the binary case.
Erratum: “From Paraphrase Database to Compositional Paraphrase Model and Back”
Authors: Wieting John , Bansal Mohit , Gimpel Kevin , Livescu Karen , Roth Dan
Published: December 2018

Correction to the list of authors and the acknowledgements.
First male of Corethrella andersoni Poinar & Szadziewski, 2007 (Diptera: Corethrellidae) from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber

Authors: SZADZIEWSKI RYSZARD , SONTAG ELŻBIETA
Published: December 2018

The family Corethrellidae, called frog-biting midges, with the single genus Corethrella Coquillett, 1902, is a small group of dipterans including 107 extant species (Borkent, 2017). Females of most species are haematophagous and feed on males of frogs and toads locating them by their calls (Borkent, 2008). Extant frog-biting midges have a pantropical distribution, absent in Europe, north Africa, middle and northern Asia (Giłka & Szadziewski, 2009). The genus during its phylogenetic history dated back to Lower Cretaceous (125–129 Ma) had a broader geographical distribution, and during Eocene was present in Europe. Till now nine fossil species have been described from Lower Cretaceous Lebanese amber (1), mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber (1), Eocene Baltic amber (5) and Miocene Dominican amber (2) (a complete annotated list is provided below).
A survey of descriptions of immature instars of mites during the last three years
Authors: LIU JIAN-FENG , ZHANG ZHI-QIANG
Published: December 2018

Immature instars of mites can provide valuable information for understanding mite taxonomy and evolution. However, most taxonomists described only adults and rarely did they also describe immature stages and the ontogenetic sequence. For example, only about 8% of the known oribatid mites (excluding Astigmata) have one or more juvenile instars described (Norton & Ermilov 2014). Since then we noted rapid increase of papers on the ontogeny of oribatid mites as well as other mites in Systematic and Applied Acarology during our editing and production process. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of descriptions of immature instars of mites during the last three years (2015–2017). We follow our previous methods in sampling most important journals in mite systematics (Liu et al. 2013; Liu & Zhang 2016; Li & Zhang 2016; Wei & Zhang 2016; Liu et al. 2017), while expanding the scope further to include more journals that publish a significant amount of mite taxonomic papers.
Ontogenetic changes in the morphology of Eharius chergui (Acari: Phytoseiidae)
Authors: MA MIN , FAN QING-HAI , ZHANG ZHI-QIANG
Published: December 2018

The morphological ontogeny of Eharius chergui (Athias-Henriot, 1960) is described in this paper based on laboratory-reared specimens originating from Marrubium vulgare L. (Lamiaceae) collected in North Island, New Zealand. Malformation was observed in the development of some idiosomal setae in some specimens and was suggested to be related to the host plant M. vulgare.
Ontogeny of morphological traits in Teleioliodes ghanensis Wallwork, 1963, with remarks on juveniles of Neoliodidae (Acari: Oribatida)
Authors: BAYARTOGTOKH BADAMDORJ , ERMILOV SERGEY G.
Published: December 2018

The juvenile instars of oribatid mites of the family Neoliodidae are poorly known, and little information is available on the morphology of ontogenetic stages. Herein, comparative characteristics of juvenile instars of the Neoliodidae species are given based on our own data and available literature sources. The analysis of literature dealing with juveniles of Neoliodidae generated ambiguous results, as certain descriptions are incomplete partly and unclear. The major characteristics of juvenile instars of 10 neoliodid species are presented, and the morphological ontogeny of Teleioliodes ghanensis Wallwork, 1963 is investigated based on material from Oumé region of Côte d‘Ivoire, Western Africa. From these studies, it can be generalized that the juvenile morphologies of neoliodid genera have certain differences, but species within a same genus are demonstrated to have no obvious morphological difference.
Phloeocharis subtilissima Mannerheim (Staphylinidae: Phloeocharinae) and Cephennium gallicum Ganglbauer (Scydmaenidae) new to North America: a case study in the introduction of exotic Coleoptera to the port of Halifax, with new records of other species
Authors: MAJKA CHRISTOPHER , KLIMASZEWSKI JAN
Published: December 2018

Phloeocharis subtilissima Mannerheim (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Phloeocharinae), a Palearctic staphylinid, and Cephennium gallicum Ganglbauer (Coleoptera: Scydmaenidae: Cephenniini) are recorded for the first time for North America from Point Pleasant Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The bionomics of both species are discussed based on European data in addition to new observations of their ecology in Nova Scotia. The role of port cities, such as Halifax, in relation to the introduction of exotic Coleoptera is discussed with examples of other species introduced to North America from this location. The earliest known record of Meligethes viridescens (Fabricius) for North America and the second and third reported locations of Dromius fenestratus Fabricius are also presented.
Endohelminths from five rare species of turtles (Bataguridae) from southeast Asia confiscated by international authorities in Hong Kong, People s Republic of China
Authors: MURRAY REBECCA A. , DRONEN NORMAN O. , BLEND CHARLES K.
Published: December 2018

Specimens of 5 species of threatened, vulnerable, and endangered turtles (Cuora amboinensis, Cyclemys dentata, Heosemys grandis, Orlitia borneensis, and Pyxidea mouhotii) belonging to Bataguridae, were confiscated in Hong Kong, China on 11 December 2001 by international authorities. A review of the endohelminths previously reported from these turtles was compiled and is summarized herein. Endohelminth studies on these turtle species are reasonably scarce, and this study provided a rare opportunity to examine a limited number of specimens for endohelminths. Seven different parasite species were collected and there were 8 new host records. This is the first record of a parasite from P. mouhotii. This study is intended to provide additional information for comparisons to future parasite studies of species of Asian freshwater turtles.
A new species of Eucosma Hübner from the Western United States (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae: Eucosmini)
Authors: FERRIS CLIFFORD D.
Published: December 2018

Eucosma aurilineana, new species, is described from five western states. The adults and male and female genitalia are illustrated, along with adults and female genitalia of two similar species, Eucosma crambitana and E. ridingsana.
Description of a new species of Echiodon (Teleostei: Carapidae) from the South Atlantic Ocean
Authors: ANDERSON M. ERIC
Published: December 2018

A new species of pearlfish, Echiodon atopus, is described from a single adult male, 176 mm TL, collected off Inaccessible Island, Tristan da Cunha Group, South Atlantic Ocean. It is characterized by its high, equal D 30 and A 30 counts (46 rays each), 7 anal rays anterior to the dorsal-fin origin, 38 precaudal vertebrae, 18 pectoral-fin rays and ventral swim bladder tunic ridges. It was caught in a bottom trawl over a deep lava-reef structure, but may be pelagic.
Dissipation Characteristics of Tornadic Vortex Signatures Associated with Long-Duration Tornadoes
Authors: French Michael M. , Kingfield Darrel M.
Published: December 2018

Weather Surveillance Radar–1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) data from 36 tornadic supercell cases from 2012 to 2016 are investigated to identify common tornadic vortex signature (TVS) behaviors prior to tornado dissipation. Based on the results of past case studies, four characteristics of TVSs associated with tornado dissipation were identified: weak or decreasing TVS intensity, rearward storm-relative motion of the TVS, large or increasing TVS vertical tilt, and large or increasing TVS horizontal displacement from the main storm updraft. Only cases in which a TVS was within 60 km of a WSR-88D site in at least four consecutive volumes at the end of the tornado life cycle were examined. The space and time restrictions on case selection ensured that the aforementioned quantities could be determined within ~500 m of the surface at several time periods despite the relatively coarse spatiotemporal resolution of WSR-88D systems. It is found that prior to dissipation, TVSs become increasingly less intense, tend to move rearward in a storm-relative framework, and become increasingly more separated from the approximate location of the main storm updraft. There is no clear signal in the relationship between tornado tilt, as measured in inclination angle, and TVS dissipation. The frequency of combinations of TVS dissipation behaviors, the impact of increased low-level WSR-88D scanning on dissipation detection, and prospects for future nowcasting of tornado life cycles also are discussed.
Observed Decadal Transition in Trend of Autumn Rainfall over Central China in the Late 1990s
Authors: Wang Zunya , Zhou Botao
Published: December 2018

This article presents a decadal transition from a decreasing trend to an increasing trend in the late 1990s for autumn rainfall in central China. The atmospheric and oceanic background underlying this regime shift is also addressed. Accompanying the above decadal transition, the moisture convergence and ascending motion averaged in central China both switch from a weakening trend to a strengthening trend. Meanwhile, after the late 1990s, the declining of the Asian sea level pressure (SLP) and the deepening of the Lake Balkhash trough may induce more cold air from high latitudes to break out southward. The strengthening of the low-level southerly in East Asia could transport more moisture northward from low latitudes. More cold air and more warm-moist airflow encountering in the targeted region contribute to the increasing trend of local rainfall. The situation before the late 1990s is generally reversed, which accounts for the decreasing trend of autumn rainfall. The movement of the East Asian jet (EAJ) from southward to northward also has a contribution via its influence on dynamic condition. Additionally, changes in the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the western Indian and Atlantic Oceans from a cooling trend to a warming trend in the late 1990s play significant roles through their modulations on moisture transport and cold-air activities.
Contributions of Different Combinations of the IPO and AMO to Recent Changes in Winter East Asian Jets
Authors: Huang Danqing , Dai Aiguo , Yang Ben , Yan Peiwen , Zhu Jian , Zhang Yaocun
Published: December 2018

Recent concurrent shifts of the East Asian polar-front jet (EAPJ) and the East Asian subtropical jet (EASJ) in the boreal winter have raised concerns, since they could result in severe weather events over East Asia. However, the possible mechanisms are not fully understood. In this study, the roles of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO) and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) are investigated by analyzing reanalysis data and model simulations. Results show that combinations of opposite phases of the IPO and AMO can result in significant shifts of the two jets during 1920–2014. This relationship is particularly evident during 1999–2014 and 1979–98 in the reanalysis data. A combination of a negative phase of the IPO (−IPO) and a positive phase of the AMO (+AMO) since the late 1990s has enhanced the meridional temperature gradient and the Eady growth rate and thus westerlies over the region between the two jets, but weakened them to the south and north of the region, thereby contributing to the equatorward and poleward shifts of the EAPJ and EASJ, respectively. Atmospheric model simulations are further used to investigate the relative contribution of −IPO and +AMO to the jet shifts. The model simulations show that the combination of −IPO and +AMO favors the recent jet changes more than the individual −IPO or +AMO. Under a concurrent −IPO and +AMO, the meridional eddy transport of zonal momentum and sensitive heat strengthens, and more mean available potential energy converts to the eddy available potential energy over the region between the two jets, which enhances westerly winds there.
Revisiting the Linkages between the Variability of Atmospheric Circulations and Arctic Melt-Season Sea Ice Cover at Multiple Time Scales
Authors: Yu Lejiang , Zhong Shiyuan , Zhou Mingyu , Lenschow Donald H. , Sun Bo
Published: December 2018

The sharp decline of Arctic sea ice in recent decades has captured the attention of the climate science community. A majority of climate analyses performed to date have used monthly or seasonal data. Here, however, we analyze daily sea ice data for 1979–2016 using the self-organizing map (SOM) method to further examine and quantify the contributions of atmospheric circulation changes to the melt-season Arctic sea ice variability. Our results reveal two main variability modes: the Pacific sector mode and the Barents and Kara Seas mode, which together explain about two-thirds of the melt-season Arctic sea ice variability and more than 40% of its trend for the study period. The change in the frequencies of the two modes appears to be associated with the phase shift of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO). The PDO and AMO trigger anomalous atmospheric circulations, in particular, the Greenland high and the North Atlantic Oscillation and anomalous warm and cold air advections into the Arctic Ocean. The changes in surface air temperature, lower-atmosphere moisture, and downwelling longwave radiation associated with the advection are consistent with the melt-season sea ice anomalies observed in various regions of the Arctic Ocean. These results help better understand the predictability of Arctic sea ice on multiple (synoptic, intraseasonal, and interannual) time scales.
Seasonal Prediction of North Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy and Major Hurricane Activity
Authors: Davis Kyle , Zeng Xubin
Published: December 2018

Building upon our previous seasonal hurricane prediction model, here we develop two statistical models to predict the number of major hurricanes (MHs) and accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) in the North Atlantic basin using monthly data from March to May for an early June forecast. The input data include zonal pseudo–wind stress to the 3/2 power, sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic, and, depending on the magnitude of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation index, the multivariate ENSO index. From 1968 to 2017, these models have a mean absolute error of 0.96 storms for MHs and 30 units for ACE. When tested over an independent period from 1958 to 1967, the models show a 22% improvement for MHs and 16% for ACE over a no-skill metric based on a 5-yr running average. Both the MH and ACE results show consistent improvements over those produced by three other centers using statistical–dynamical hybrid models and a 5-yr running average prediction over the period 2000–17 for MHs (2003–17 for ACE) in a simulated real-time prediction. These improvements vary from 25% to 37% for MHs and from 15% to 37% for ACE. While most forecasting centers called for a slightly above-average hurricane season in May/June 2017, our models predicted in June 2017 a very active season, in much better agreement with observations.
What counts as ‘good sociology’? Conflicting discourses on legitimate sociology in Finland and Sweden
Authors: Hokka Johanna
Published: December 2018

This qualitative study explores how sociology is legitimated among established Finnish and Swedish sociology professors, who are conceived as a scientific elite. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, the analysis traces the discourses that define legitimate sociology in these two national contexts, and the relations between those discourses. While the scientific elite of Finnish and Swedish sociology share four discourses – the Excellence, Humboldtian, Emancipatory and Policy discourses – the relative value of each differs between the different national contexts. The Excellence discourse dominates in the Finnish data, while the Humboldtian discourse is dominant in the Swedish data. The emphases on the other two discourses also vary: in Finnish interviews, the Policy discourse holds a strong position, while the Emancipatory discourse is articulated only with nostalgia; in Swedish interviews, the Emancipatory discourse is strong and the Policy discourse is weak. The results show that different national contexts produce variations in sociology’s internal dynamics.
Social class and the risk of unemployment: Trends, gender differences and the contribution of education
Authors: Lahtinen Hannu , Sirniö Outi , Martikainen Pekka
Published: December 2018

Previous research has shown that an advantaged social class position protects individuals from unemployment, but less is known about how this relationship has developed after the turn of the millennium, how it varies by gender and to what extent education contributes to the association between these factors. We assess these questions using register-based data on the Finnish labour force over a 28-year period between 1988 and 2015. The overall risk of unemployment was 2.7–3.7-fold among manual classes compared to upper non-manual classes, and 1.4–1.7-fold among lower compared to upper non-manual classes. Controlling for education attenuated the differences between social classes by about two-thirds. Social class disparities were somewhat more distinct among men than among women, but gender differences narrowed over time. Overall, temporal changes were small, especially among men, except for a curvilinear pattern observed for the relative unemployment risk of the lower non-manual class. To conclude, despite a comparatively egalitarian context and drastic changes in economic conditions and labour market structures over time, social stratification in unemployment has been substantial and considerably persistent. This is in line with the conceptualization of social class underpinning differing employment relations and, therefore, inherently creating variation in labour market risks.
Meaning Reconstruction in Bereaved Family Caregivers of Person’s With Alzheimer’s Disease: A Mixed-Methods Study
Authors: Romero Melissa M.
Published: December 2018

The purpose of this descriptive study was to identify whether meaning reconstruction was associated with indicators of bereavement adaptation in 66 spouses and adult child caregivers of person’s with Alzheimer’s disease. A cross-sectional mixed-methods design was used. Hierarchical regression models were used to examine whether meaning making predicted grief, depression, and positive and states of mind in the sample. Qualitative interviews were conducted to gain further knowledge about ways in which Alzheimer’s disease caregivers construct meaning during bereavement. The majority of participants reported experiencing positive aspects of meaning reconstruction. Benefit-finding and identity change contributed to reductions in grief, and benefit-finding contributed to positive states of mind. Being a spouse and female gender contributed to increased grief and depression. Bereaved caregivers who are at risk for high levels of grief should be targeted for grief therapy interventions that foster meaning making.
Representations of fabric hand attributes in the cerebral cortices based on the Automated Anatomical Labeling atlas
Authors: Wang Qicai , Tao Yuan , Zhang Zhongwei , Yuan Jie , Ding Zuowei , Jiang Zhaohui , Jia Zhao , Wang Jing
Published: December 2018

Fabric hand is most frequently used by consumers and researchers to evaluate the touch feeling of textiles. Academically, many methods have been developed to characterize it psychologically and physically, and the relationship between the hand attributes of fabrics and their physical properties are well understood. However, in physiological terms, the cognitive mechanism of the brain on different attributes of fabric hand is not clear. Previous studies have shown that the sensory or discrimination information from fabric touch can be detected by the technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this study, further fMRI experiments were carried out, attempting to find the relationship between the cerebral cortices of various brain areas and different hand attributes of fabrics. The subtle atlas of Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) was used to display and analyze the blood oxygenation level dependent signals completely and conveniently. The results showed that when the subjects touched two samples with distinct fabric hand in a specified way, activation information and the index of the mean signal in every related brain areas can distinguish them, and several brain regions in the AAL atlas are linked to different fabric hand attributes. The technology of fMRI was proved again to be a promising tool for studying the cognitive mechanism of the brain on fabric touch.
A novel hyperspectral imaging and modeling method for the component identification of woven fabrics
Authors: Li Jiaping , Meng Xiang , Wang Wendi , Xin Binjie
Published: December 2018

The component identification of textile materials is critical for quality control and measurement in the textile field. A novel hyperspectral imaging method and the related identification model are proposed to classify single-component textiles. Firstly, the hyperspectral data of the single-component fabrics were processed to conduct dimensionality reduction based on locally linear embedding (LLE), principal component analysis (PCA), and locally preserving projection (LPP) algorithms. Moreover, the original data of 288 wavelengths from 920 nm to 2500 nm were compressed to keep the typical wavelength regions. After that, these data were imported into two classifiers (decision tree classifier and K nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier) for training, and an identification model based on these training data was developed for the sample classification. The experimental results showed that all the samples could be identified correctly by the established identification model. The recognition rate and the stability of the classifier based on LPP model and KNN classification algorithm were proved to have the highest accuracy in our research.
Introduction: Building for Eternity
Authors: Jackson-Lowman Huberta
Published: December 2018

This article provides an introduction to the special issue in the Journal of Black Psychology, commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi). A highlight is provided of the five articles that makeup this issue. Jamison takes a developmental approach in examining keys concepts, theories, and issues that have been or need to be addressed in African/Black psychology. In contrast, Cokley and Garba examine how Black psychology has had an impact on the field of psychology. Grills, Nobles, and Hill scrutinize the models and strategies of Black psychology, African psychology, African-centered, and Pan-African psychology that have been developed through ABPsi. Myers, Anderson, Lodge, Speight, and Queener present optimal conceptual theory, an alternative cultural paradigm based in the African worldview, and discuss its application therapeutically and pragmatically as a solution to global human challenges. Finally, as emerging scholars, Woodyard and Gadson provide a critical reflection of the impact on ABPsi on their personal and professional development.
Crossing the Line: High School Student Activism, the New York High School Student Union, and the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers’ Strike
Authors: Buffett Neil Philip
Published: December 2018

In the fall of 1968, 54,000 of 57,000 New York City teachers went on strike in what has since become known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers’ Strike. With schools closed for thirty-six days, from September to November, more than one million students were left without schools to attend. Nearly 300,000 of them were high school students—many of whom utilized their “time off” to become or, in some cases, continue to be socially and politically active. This article outlines high school students’ involvement in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. It centers upon the New York High School Student Union, which was established as a citywide student organization in September of 1968. During the tense days of that autumn, members of this organization openly supported the African American community’s call for decentralization of schools and firmly opposed the United Federation of Teachers’s strike action.
Shades of Bliss
Authors: Tate William
Published: December 2018

Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” describes fountains which embody different conceptions of human virtue expressed in contrasting religious systems. Wallace Stevens’s “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” similarly contrasts conceptions of virtue with reference to worship-spaces taken as embodying the assumptions of competing religious systems. Stevens’s speaker reaches the somewhat Nietzschean, somewhat Freudian conclusion that religious practice merely projects human desires; differences are relatively meaningless. Wilbur’s speaker, developing Christian theological openness to the other, concludes that the differences between religions make possible a productive complementarity.
Sanctifying Rites in Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634
Authors: Timmis Patrick
Published: December 2018

This article seeks to challenge Stanley Fish’s picture of the heroine of Milton’s Comus as a complete and immaculate soul, and thus a static one with no need to grow. In conversation with Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, I argue that Milton presents the Christian virtues as developed through the ritual enactment of prevenient grace. Thus, the pattern for the Lady’s growth into sanctified maturity is a ceremonial or even liturgical movement intended to lead masquers and audience heavenward.