Application of Weighted Voting Taggers to Languages Described with Large Tagsets

The paper presents baseline and complex part-of-speech taggers applied to the modified corpus of Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Polish, annotated with a large tagset. First, the paper examines accuracy of 6 baseline part-of-speech taggers. The main part of the work presents simple weighted voting and complex voting taggers. Special attention is paid to lexical voting methods and issues of ties and fallbacks. TagPair and WPDV voting methods achieve the top accuracy among all considered methods. Error reduction 10.8 % with respect to the best baseline tagger for the large tagset is comparable with other author's results for small tagsets

New machine learning methods demonstrate the existence of a human stylome

Earlier research has shown that established authors can be distinguished by measuring specific properties of their writings, their stylome as it were. Here, we examine writings of less experienced authors. We succeed in distinguishing between these authors with a very high probability, which implies that a stylome exists even in the general population. However, the number of traits needed for so successful a distinction is an order of magnitude larger than assumed so far. Furthermore, traits referring to syntactic patterns prove less distinctive than traits referring to vocabulary, but much more distinctive than expected on the basis of current generativist theories of language learning

EVOLUTION OF EQUINE ARTERITIS VIRUS DURING PERSISTENT INFECTION IN THE REPRODUCTIVE TRACT OF THE STALLION AND THE MALE DONKEY

Equine arteritis virus (EAV) establishes persistent infection in the stallion reproductive tract, and the carrier stallion continues to shed virus in semen for weeks to years or lifelong. The objective of this study was to elucidate the intra-host evolution of EAV during persistent infection in stallions. Seven EAV seronegative stallions were experimentally infected with EAV KY84 strain and followed for 726 days post-infection, and sequential clinical samples including semen were collected for virus isolation and next-generation sequencing (NGS). In addition, archived sequential semen samples from two stallions that were naturally infected with EAV KY84 for a long-period (up to 10 years) were also sequenced by NGS. The data demonstrated genetic bottleneck event and selection during acute infection followed by intra-host quasispecies diversification during persistent infection in the stallion reproductive tract. Also, the full-length genome of a novel EAV donkey strain from Chile and a noncytopathic bovine viral diarrhea virus-1 (ncpBVDV-1) strain contaminating rabbit kidney-13 cells were also sequenced by NGS. The EAV donkey strain was genetically distinct but antigenically cross-reacted with EAV antisera, and it was phylogenetically closely related to the South African donkey strain of EAV. Genetic and phylogenetic analyses demonstrated that ncpBVDV-1 belongs to BVDV-1b group

Horses as Sentinels of Emerging Infectious Disease

Horses with illness consistent with Hendra virus (HeV) are routinely sampled and submitted with case descriptions, to government laboratories for timely testing. Extensive investigations for further infectious agents are rare, yet <1% of around 1000 horses test HeV positive annually. Most that test negative feature infectious-like signs such as acute, severe neurological or respiratory illness and pyrexia, yet do not receive causative diagnosis HeV in horses and testing of suspect cases have highlighted challenges/ gaps in significant zoonotic disease investigation. Yet horses investigated for HeV-like disease present unique opportunities for improvements of broad profound biosecurity benefit. Horses are maintained in close association with other animals and humans, monitored thoroughly for disease and susceptible to agents transmitted by insects and wildlife such as bats This research identified significant pathogens among horses with severe HeV-like illness beyond those currently recognised and considered disease significance Fore-front diagnostic approaches integrated with information theoretical, epidemiological and virological analyses. Systematic pathologic-basis-interpretation of disease descriptions sensitively informed likelihood of infectious cause. Three innovative pillars were developed • purpose-built SQL database integrating bio-banked sample ID, sample event, subject and clinical details with parallel test results • explorative multiplex microbead immunoassay serological testing approach screening both IgG and IgM for emerging pathogens • explorative molecular methods targeting novel and emerging infectious agents, including high-throughput pan-PCR, metatranscriptomic sequencing and bioinformatical pipelines Integrated application to suitably bio-banked clinical samples served proof-of-concept for proactive convergence research consideration of emerging infectious agents that could affect One health, livestock, trade and industry security and public healt