From Key Points to Key Point Hierarchy: Structured and Expressive Opinion Summarization

Key Point Analysis (KPA) has been recently proposed for deriving fine-grained insights from collections of textual comments. KPA extracts the main points in the data as a list of concise sentences or phrases, termed key points, and quantifies their prevalence. While key points are more expressive than word clouds and key phrases, making sense of a long, flat list of key points, which often express related ideas in varying levels of granularity, may still be challenging. To address this limitation of KPA, we introduce the task of organizing a given set of key points into a hierarchy, according to their specificity. Such hierarchies may be viewed as a novel type of Textual Entailment Graph. We develop ThinkP, a high quality benchmark dataset of key point hierarchies for business and product reviews, obtained by consolidating multiple annotations. We compare different methods for predicting pairwise relations between key points, and for inferring a hierarchy from these pairwise predictions. In particular, for the task of computing pairwise key point relations, we achieve significant gains over existing strong baselines by applying directional distributional similarity methods to a novel distributional representation of key points, and further boost performance via weak supervision.Comment: ACL 202

On the continuum from mainstreaming to inclusion: the development of the approaches towards students with special needs and their expression in the educational frameworks in Israel

The State of Israel, like other developed countries around the world, engages intensively in the thinking about and care of students with special needs (SwSN). Israel attempts to open rang of possibilities to this population in its considerable diversity, while responding to the challenges faced by the population of students defined in Israel as „special education”. This article presents the developing approaches, which are at the basis of the special educational system in Israel, as a case study of the reference to SwSn. The first part of the article presents the ideological elements of the special education system in Israel throughout its historical development, and the second part presents the way in which the continuum of the educational frameworks was understood to serve the educational perception

CHAMP: Efficient Annotation and Consolidation of Cluster Hierarchies

Various NLP tasks require a complex hierarchical structure over nodes, where each node is a cluster of items. Examples include generating entailment graphs, hierarchical cross-document coreference resolution, annotating event and subevent relations, etc. To enable efficient annotation of such hierarchical structures, we release CHAMP, an open source tool allowing to incrementally construct both clusters and hierarchy simultaneously over any type of texts. This incremental approach significantly reduces annotation time compared to the common pairwise annotation approach and also guarantees maintaining transitivity at the cluster and hierarchy levels. Furthermore, CHAMP includes a consolidation mode, where an adjudicator can easily compare multiple cluster hierarchy annotations and resolve disagreements.Comment: EMNLP 202

Revisiting Egyptian Foreign Policy towards Israel under Mubarak: From Cold Peace to Strategic Peace

This article is the first academic study of Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel under Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). It challenges a deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that Egypt pursued a cold-peace foreign policy towards Israel throughout this period. We demonstrate that Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel was dynamic – comprising cold peace (1981–91), a hybrid foreign policy of cold peace and strategic peace (1991–2003), and a pure strategic peace posture (2003–11). We also use the case of Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel as a heuristic to develop a conception of a new type of peace, strategic peace, as an intermediary analytical category between cold and stable peace

Identification of woolliness response genes in peach fruit after post-harvest treatments

Woolliness is a physiological disorder of peaches and nectarines that becomes apparent when fruit are ripened after prolonged periods of cold storage. This disorder is of commercial importance since shipping of peaches to distant markets and storage before selling require low temperature. However, knowledge about the molecular basis of peach woolliness is still incomplete. To address this issue, a nylon macroarray containing 847 non-redundant expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a ripe peach fruit cDNA library was developed and used. Gene expression changes of peach fruit (Prunus persica cv. O'Henry) ripened for 7 d at 21 °C (juicy fruit) were compared with those of fruit stored for 15 d at 4 °C and then ripened for 7 d at 21 °C (woolly fruit). A total of 106 genes were found to be differentially expressed between juicy and woolly fruit. Data analysis indicated that the activity of most of these genes (>90%) was repressed in the woolly fruit. In cold-stored peaches (cv. O'Henry), the expression level of selected genes (cobra, endopolygalacturonase, cinnamoyl-CoA-reductase, and rab11) was lower than in the juicy fruit, and it remained low in woolly peaches after ripening, a pattern that was conserved in woolly fruit from two other commercial cultivars (cv. Flamekist and cv. Elegant Lady). In addition, the results of this study indicate that molecular changes during fruit woolliness involve changes in the expression of genes associated with cell wall metabolism and endomembrane trafficking. Overall, the results reported here provide an initial characterization of the transcriptome activity of peach fruit under different post-harvest treatments