Targeted Query Expansions as a Method for Searching Mixed Quality Digitized Cultural Heritage Documents

Digitization of cultural heritage is a huge ongoing effort in many countries. In digitized historical documents, words may occur in different surface forms due to three types of variation - morphological variation, historical variation, and errors in optical character recognition (OCR). Because individual documents may differ significantly from each other regarding the level of such variations, digitized collections may contain documents of mixed quality. Such different types of documents may require different types of retrieval methods. We suggest using targeted query expansions (QE) to access documents in mixed-quality text collections. In QE the user-given search term is replaced by a set of expansion keys (search words); in targeted QE the selection of expansion terms is based on the type of surface level variation occurring in the particular text searched. We illustrate our approach in a highly inflectional compounding language, Finnish while the variation occur across all natural languages. We report a minimal-scale experiment based on the QE method and discuss the need to support targeted QEs in the search interface.ye

Seattle Pacific College Catalog 1958-1959

https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/archives_catalogs/1037/thumbnail.jp

Machine transliteration of proper names between English and Persian

Machine transliteration is the process of automatically transforming a word from a source language to a target language while preserving pronunciation. The transliterated words in the target language are called out-of-dictionary, or sometimes out-of-vocabulary, meaning that they have been borrowed from other languages with a change of script. When a whole text is being translated, for example, then proper nouns and technical terms are subject to transliteration. Machine translation, and other applications which make use of this technology, such as cross-lingual information retrieval and cross-language question answering, deal with the problem of transliteration. Since proper nouns and technical terms - which need phonetical translation - are part of most text documents, transliteration is an important problem to study. We explore the problem of English to Persian and Persian to English transliteration using methods that work based on the grapheme of the source word. One major problem in handling Persian text is its lack of written short vowels. When transliterating Persian words to English, we need to develop a method of inserting vowels to make them pronounceable. Many different approaches using n-grams are explored and compared in this thesis, and we propose language-specific transliteration methods that improved transliteration accuracy. Our novel approaches use consonant-vowel sequences, and show significant improvements over baseline systems. We also develop a new alignment algorithm, and examine novel techniques to combine systems; approaches which improve the effectiveness of the systems. We also investigate the properties of bilingual corpora that affect transliteration accuracy. Our experiments suggest that the origin of the source words has a strong effect on the performance of transliteration systems. From the careful analysis of the corpus construction process, we conclude that at least five human transliterators are needed to construct a representative bilingual corpus that is used for the training and testing of transliteration systems

Human metapneumovirus: Investigation of epidemiology strain diversity and human immune response

Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) is a newly described respiratory virus belonging to the Paramyxoviridae family, first identified in respiratory samples of children with acute respiratory tract infection (ARTI). Since its discovery hMPV has been associated with ARTI worldwide, however, important questions remain as to the contribution of hMPV to respiratory illness, and its impact on public health. Extensive surveillance of hMPV within different populations of the United Kingdom (UK) demonstrates it is an important cause of ARTI in the elderly, and influenza like illness (ILI) in people of all ages in the community. Furthermore it is a frequent cause of hospitalisation in young children. Recombinant baculovirus expressed hMPV nucleocapsid protein (N) proved to be a useful source of antigen for the development of an hMPV specific ELISA. Analysis of age stratified sera from the UK indicates that a majority of children are infected by the age of 6 years with primary infections occurring throughout infancy. Virtually all adults have detectable levels of hMPV antibody; however, reinfection with hMPV is common, raising questions concerning acquisition and duration of immunity. Sequence analysis of the attachment glycoprotein (G), shows a high degree of nucleotide and amino acid variation and extensive glycosylation. Frequent nucleotide insertions or deletions result in frame shift mutations which can drastically alter the appearance of the protein and often results in premature termination. Antibody recognition of hMPV G is likely to be highly strain specific and dependent on the extent of glycosylation, suggesting an involvement of G in immune evasion. Phylogenetic analysis of hMPV G gene sequence shows that whilst a large degree of variation exists within this gene, strains circulating within the UK are genetically similar to strains circulating elsewhere in the world, and similar strains circulate throughout different years and populations within the UK

34th Annual Meeting & Pre-Conference Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2019): part 2

Document type: Articl

Rheology and Structure Formation in Complex Polymer Melts

Polymeric materials are ubiquitous in our modern lives. Their many applications in complex materials are accompanied by potentially huge benefits for technological advancement. These applications range from batteries, fuel cells, molecular sieves, tires, and microelectronic devices. The ability to self-assemble into nanostructures in combination with their viscoelastic properties make polymers attractive for this wide range of applications. I perform computer simulations gaining knowledge about their properties for applications and manufacturing, to improve the understanding of these materials. The simulation of multicomponent polymer melts poses an extreme computational challenge. The large spatial extent of defects in self-assembled structures or nonperiodic metastable phases, which are prone to finite size effects, require the study of large system sizes. Hence, I use a soft, coarse-grained polymer model reducing the degrees of freedom to gain insights into long time and length scales. Consistent implementations of these models that scale well on modern GPUs accelerated HPCs hardware enable investigations with up to billions of particles. Consequently, I can address challenges that were deemed intractable before. Firstly, I analyze metastable network phases as a function of the volume fraction, f, of diblock copolymers for polymeric battery electrolytes. One polymer block provides the mechanical stability while the other is ion conducting. The focus lies on the structure of the conducting phase. Due to the trapped metastable states, I investigate systems of extreme sizes with billions of particles circumventing finite size effects. In fact, I identify fractal structures on significant length scales inside the network phase, which influence the transport properties locally. As such, this work highlights the necessity of soft models and scaling implementations obtaining insights on engineering scales. Secondly, I will investigate the simulation of viscoelastic properties of polymeric materials with soft, coarse-grained models. It is particularly challenging to correctly capture the entangled dynamics. The noncrossability of polymer backbones introduces topological constraints on the motion of the chains. A soft, coarse-grained model does not capture this noncrossability automatically. Hence, I utilize a SLSP model to mimic the entanglements via dynamic bonds. With this model and a novel technique to average the stress auto-correlation function G(t), I perform a dynamic mechanical analysis of polymer melts and a cross-linked network. The obtained storage modulus G'(w) and loss modulus G''(w) meet the expectations for a comparison with experimental studies. A nonequilibrium study of diblock copolymers in shear flow completes this work. Shear flow is a powerful method to macroscopically order a metastable microstructure. In a symmetric diblock copolymer melt, the equilibrium microstructure is a lamellar phase. The first step determines the perpendicular orientation of the lamellae in shear flow as stable at all stresses according to the concept of the Rayleighian, R. Further, I study the transition between a grain in the unstable orientation next to a grain in the stable orientation. I identify two different transition pathways. At low applied stresses, the grain boundary of the stable grain grows into the unstable grain. At higher stresses, the unstable orientation is destabilized and forms an intermediate microemulsion-like phase with no local orientation. This intermediate phase turns subsequently into the stable orientation. Oscillatory shear at high frequencies delays the onset of this microemulsion pathway. In a collaboration with Matthias Heck and Manfred Wilhelm at KIT, these transitions have been studied in LAOS experiments as well

The Rule Implementing Sections 201 and 210 of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978: A Regulatory History

The act provides that utilities must purchase power for qualifying producers of electricity at nondiscriminatory rates. It exempts private generators from virtually all state and federal utility regulation. Pertinent reference material is provided.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/rnd_energy/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Rule Implementing Sections 201 and 210 of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978: A Regulatory History

The act provides that utilities must purchase power for qualifying producers of electricity at nondiscriminatory rates. It exempts private generators from virtually all state and federal utility regulation. Pertinent reference material is provided.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/rnd_energy/1001/thumbnail.jp