The Materials Science Procedural Text Corpus: Annotating Materials Synthesis Procedures with Shallow Semantic Structures

Materials science literature contains millions of materials synthesis procedures described in unstructured natural language text. Large-scale analysis of these synthesis procedures would facilitate deeper scientific understanding of materials synthesis and enable automated synthesis planning. Such analysis requires extracting structured representations of synthesis procedures from the raw text as a first step. To facilitate the training and evaluation of synthesis extraction models, we introduce a dataset of 230 synthesis procedures annotated by domain experts with labeled graphs that express the semantics of the synthesis sentences. The nodes in this graph are synthesis operations and their typed arguments, and labeled edges specify relations between the nodes. We describe this new resource in detail and highlight some specific challenges to annotating scientific text with shallow semantic structure. We make the corpus available to the community to promote further research and development of scientific information extraction systems.Comment: Accepted as a long paper at the Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) at ACL 201

AutoBayes: A System for Generating Data Analysis Programs from Statistical Models

Data analysis is an important scientific task which is required whenever information needs to be extracted from raw data. Statistical approaches to data analysis, which use methods from probability theory and numerical analysis, are well-founded but difficult to implement: the development of a statistical data analysis program for any given application is time-consuming and requires substantial knowledge and experience in several areas. In this paper, we describe AutoBayes, a program synthesis system for the generation of data analysis programs from statistical models. A statistical model specifies the properties for each problem variable (i.e., observation or parameter) and its dependencies in the form of a probability distribution. It is a fully declarative problem description, similar in spirit to a set of differential equations. From such a model, AutoBayes generates optimized and fully commented C/C++ code which can be linked dynamically into the Matlab and Octave environments. Code is produced by a schema-guided deductive synthesis process. A schema consists of a code template and applicability constraints which are checked against the model during synthesis using theorem proving technology. AutoBayes augments schema-guided synthesis by symbolic-algebraic computation and can thus derive closed-form solutions for many problems. It is well-suited for tasks like estimating best-fitting model parameters for the given data. Here, we describe AutoBayes's system architecture, in particular the schema-guided synthesis kernel. Its capabilities are illustrated by a number of advanced textbook examples and benchmarks

The nature of the potassium compound acting as a promoter in iron-alumina catalysts for ammonia synthesis

The chemical form of the potassium promoter on an iron-alumina catalyst during ammonia synthesis has been studied by two methods, viz, (i) the measurement of the equilibrium constant of the process KNH2 + H2 KH + NH3, and (ii) chemical analysis of the used catalyst. The equilibrium constant measurements gave K723 = (12.9 ± 0.5) × 10−3, ΔHf2980(KNH2) = −119 ± 3 kJ mol−1 and S2980(KNH2) = 109 ± 4 J mol−1 K−1. The chemical analysis showed that no KNH2 is present on the catalyst during synthesis. From these results and with the aid of thermodynamic considerations it is concluded that KNH2, K and K2O are not stable compounds under conditions of ammonia synthesis. X-Ray diffraction showed that part of the potassium reacts with Al2O3, probably leaving part of the potassium in the form of KOH which is quite stable under ammonia synthesis conditions

Sparse Signal Separation in Redundant Dictionaries

We formulate a unified framework for the separation of signals that are sparse in "morphologically" different redundant dictionaries. This formulation incorporates the so-called "analysis" and "synthesis" approaches as special cases and contains novel hybrid setups. We find corresponding coherence-based recovery guarantees for an l1-norm based separation algorithm. Our results recover those reported in Studer and Baraniuk, ACHA, submitted, for the synthesis setting, provide new recovery guarantees for the analysis setting, and form a basis for comparing performance in the analysis and synthesis settings. As an aside our findings complement the D-RIP recovery results reported in Cand\`es et al., ACHA, 2011, for the "analysis" signal recovery problem: minimize_x ||{\Psi}x||_1 subject to ||y - Ax||_2 \leq {\epsilon}, by delivering corresponding coherence-based recovery results.Comment: Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Boston, MA, July 201

Tree-structured complementary filter banks using all-pass sections

Tree-structured complementary filter banks are developed with transfer functions that are simultaneously all-pass complementary and power complementary. Using a formulation based on unitary transforms and all-pass functions, we obtain analysis and synthesis filter banks which are related through a transposition operation, such that the cascade of analysis and synthesis filter banks achieves an all-pass function. The simplest structure is obtained using a Hadamard transform, which is shown to correspond to a binary tree structure. Tree structures can be generated for a variety of other unitary transforms as well. In addition, given a tree-structured filter bank where the number of bands is a power of two, simple methods are developed to generate complementary filter banks with an arbitrary number of channels, which retain the transpose relationship between analysis and synthesis banks, and allow for any combination of bandwidths. The structural properties of the filter banks are illustrated with design examples, and multirate applications are outlined

Acylsulfonamide safety-catch linker : promise and limitations for solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesis

Safety-catch linkers are useful for solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesis as they are orthogonal to many common protective groups. A new acylsulfonamide safety-catch linker was designed, synthesized and employed during glycosylations using an automated carbohydrate synthesizer. The analysis of the cleavage products revealed shortcomings for oligosaccharide synthesis

Generic Feasibility of Perfect Reconstruction with Short FIR Filters in Multi-channel Systems

We study the feasibility of short finite impulse response (FIR) synthesis for perfect reconstruction (PR) in generic FIR filter banks. Among all PR synthesis banks, we focus on the one with the minimum filter length. For filter banks with oversampling factors of at least two, we provide prescriptions for the shortest filter length of the synthesis bank that would guarantee PR almost surely. The prescribed length is as short or shorter than the analysis filters and has an approximate inverse relationship with the oversampling factor. Our results are in form of necessary and sufficient statements that hold generically, hence only fail for elaborately-designed nongeneric examples. We provide extensive numerical verification of the theoretical results and demonstrate that the gap between the derived filter length prescriptions and the true minimum is small. The results have potential applications in synthesis FB design problems, where the analysis bank is given, and for analysis of fundamental limitations in blind signals reconstruction from data collected by unknown subsampled multi-channel systems.Comment: Manuscript submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin