A comparison of services for intent and entity recognition for conversational recommender systems

Conversational Recommender Systems (CoRSs) are becoming increasingly popular. However, designing and developing a CoRS is a challenging task since it requires multi-disciplinary skills. Even though several third-party services are available for supporting the creation of a CoRS, a comparative study of these platforms for the specific recommendation task is not available yet. In this work, we focus our attention on two crucial steps of the Conversational Recommendation (CoR) process, namely Intent and Entity Recognition. We compared four of the most popular services, both commercial and open source. Furthermore, we proposed two custom-made solutions for Entity Recognition, whose aim is to overcome the limitations of the other services. Results are very interesting and give a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of each solution

Similarity Patterns and Stability of Environmental Response in Sunflower Hybrids

The rationale for the following research was to analyse the response of sunflower hybrids to different sowing dates and to evaluate hybrid response to critical environmental conditions. The data used are from an experiment conducted in a location-year combination over a period of two years (2007-09) in southern Italy. Eleven hybrids were tested following a randomized complete block design with three replications at each location-year combination. Eight agronomic characters including seed oil content were recorded. Classification and ordination procedures were used to investigate hybrid performance in relation to three different sowing dates. Combined analysis of variance showed that hybrids, location-year combination, sowing date and their interactions were highly significant for all characters. Hybrid performances were classified by cluster analysis into groups that were differentiable in terms of means and stability. The first three components accounted for 74%, 82%, and 87% of the total variation for the first, second and third sowing date respectively. Plotting component one against component two along Euclidean axes should therefore provide a reasonable representation of the spatial arrangements of hybrid performances in the original multi-dimensional space. The applied statistical method gives full information on hybrid performances similarity

Diversity and relationships in key traits for functional and apparent quality in a collection of eggplant: fruit phenolics content, antioxidant activity, polyphenol oxidase activity, and browning

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work seehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf402429kEggplant (Solanum melongena) varieties with increased levels of phenolics in the fruit present enhanced functional quality, but may display greater fruit flesh browning. We evaluated 18 eggplant accessions for fruit total phenolics content, chlorogenic acid content, DPPH scavenging activity, polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity, liquid extract browning, and fruit flesh browning. For all the traits we found a high diversity, with differences among accessions of up to 3.36-fold for fruit flesh browning. Variation in total content in phenolics and in chlorogenic acid content accounted only for 18.9% and 6.0% in the variation in fruit flesh browning, and PPO activity was not significantly correlated with fruit flesh browning. Liquid extract browning was highly correlated with chlorogenic acid content (r = 0.852). Principal components analysis (PCA) identified four groups of accessions with different profiles for the traits studied. Results suggest that it is possible to develop new eggplant varieties with improved functional and apparent quality.This project has been funded by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia through the grants SP20120681 and PAID-06-11 Nr. 2082, and by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad Grant AGL2012-34213 (jointly funded by FEDER).Plazas Ávila, MDLO.; López Gresa, MP.; Vilanova Navarro, S.; Torres Vidal, C.; Hurtado Ricart, M.; Gramazio, P.; Andújar Pérez, I.... (2013). Diversity and relationships in key traits for functional and apparent quality in a collection of eggplant: fruit phenolics content, antioxidant activity, polyphenol oxidase activity, and browning. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 61(37):8871-8879. https://doi.org/10.1021/jf402429kS88718879613

Identification of SNP and SSR markers in eggplant using RAD tag sequencing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The eggplant (<it>Solanum melongena </it>L.) genome is relatively unexplored, especially compared to those of the other major <it>Solanaceae </it>crops tomato and potato. In particular, no SNP markers are publicly available; on the other hand, over 1,000 SSR markers were developed and publicly available. We have combined the recently developed Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) approach with Illumina DNA sequencing for rapid and mass discovery of both SNP and SSR markers for eggplant.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>RAD tags were generated from the genomic DNA of a pair of eggplant mapping parents, and sequenced to produce ~17.5 Mb of sequences arrangeable into ~78,000 contigs. The resulting non-redundant genomic sequence dataset consisted of ~45,000 sequences, of which ~29% were putative coding sequences and ~70% were in common between the mapping parents. The shared sequences allowed the discovery of ~10,000 SNPs and nearly 1,000 indels, equivalent to a SNP frequency of 0.8 per Kb and an indel frequency of 0.07 per Kb. Over 2,000 of the SNPs are likely to be mappable via the Illumina GoldenGate assay. A subset of 384 SNPs was used to successfully fingerprint a panel of eggplant germplasm, producing a set of informative diversity data. The RAD sequences also included nearly 2,000 putative SSRs, and primer pairs were designed to amplify 1,155 loci.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The high throughput sequencing of the RAD tags allowed the discovery of a large number of DNA markers, which will prove useful for extending our current knowledge of the genome organization of eggplant, for assisting in marker-aided selection and for carrying out comparative genomic analyses within the <it>Solanaceae </it>family.</p

Network meta-analysis of (individual patient) time to event data alongside (aggregate) count data

Objectives: Network meta-analysis (NMA) methods extend the standard pair-wise framework to allow simultaneous comparison of multiple interventions in a single statistical model. Despite published work on NMA mainly focussing on the synthesis of aggregate data (AD), methods have been developed that allow the use of individual patient-level data (IPD) specifically when outcomes are dichotomous or continuous. This paper focuses on the synthesis of IPD and AD time to event data, motivated by a real data example looking at the effectiveness of high compression treatments on the healing of venous leg ulcers. Methods: This paper introduces a novel NMA modelling approach that allows IPD (time to event with censoring) and AD (event count for a given follow-up time) to be synthesised jointly by assuming an underlying, common, distribution of time to healing. Alternative model assumptions were tested within the motivating example. Model fit and adequacy measures were used to compare and select models. Results: Due to the availability of IPD in our example we were able to use a Weibull distribution to describe time to healing; otherwise, we would have been limited to specifying a uniparametric distribution. Absolute effectiveness estimates were more sensitive than relative effectiveness estimates to a range of alternative specifications for the model. Conclusions: The synthesis of time to event data considering IPD provides modelling flexibility, and can be particularly important when absolute effectiveness estimates, and not just relative effect estimates, are of interest

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)