215 research outputs found
Asset Allocation under the Basel Accord Risk Measures
Financial institutions are currently required to meet more stringent capital
requirements than they were before the recent financial crisis; in particular,
the capital requirement for a large bank's trading book under the Basel 2.5
Accord more than doubles that under the Basel II Accord. The significant
increase in capital requirements renders it necessary for banks to take into
account the constraint of capital requirement when they make asset allocation
decisions. In this paper, we propose a new asset allocation model that
incorporates the regulatory capital requirements under both the Basel 2.5
Accord, which is currently in effect, and the Basel III Accord, which was
recently proposed and is currently under discussion. We propose an unified
algorithm based on the alternating direction augmented Lagrangian method to
solve the model; we also establish the first-order optimality of the limit
points of the sequence generated by the algorithm under some mild conditions.
The algorithm is simple and easy to implement; each step of the algorithm
consists of solving convex quadratic programming or one-dimensional
subproblems. Numerical experiments on simulated and real market data show that
the algorithm compares favorably with other existing methods, especially in
cases in which the model is non-convex
Netrin-1 attenuates the progression of renal dysfunction by blocking endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition in the 5/6 nephrectomy rat model
Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search
In search engines, query expansion (QE) is a crucial technique to improve
search experience. Previous studies often rely on long-term search log mining,
which leads to slow updates and is sub-optimal for time-sensitive news
searches. In this work, we present Event-Centric Query Expansion (EQE), a novel
QE system that addresses these issues by mining the best expansion from a
significant amount of potential events rapidly and accurately. This system
consists of four stages, i.e., event collection, event reformulation, semantic
retrieval and online ranking. Specifically, we first collect and filter news
headlines from websites. Then we propose a generation model that incorporates
contrastive learning and prompt-tuning techniques to reformulate these
headlines to concise candidates. Additionally, we fine-tune a dual-tower
semantic model to function as an encoder for event retrieval and explore a
two-stage contrastive training approach to enhance the accuracy of event
retrieval. Finally, we rank the retrieved events and select the optimal one as
QE, which is then used to improve the retrieval of event-related documents.
Through offline analysis and online A/B testing, we observe that the EQE system
significantly improves many metrics compared to the baseline. The system has
been deployed in Tencent QQ Browser Search and served hundreds of millions of
users. The dataset and baseline codes are available at
https://open-event-hub.github.io/eqe .Comment: ACL 2023 Industry Trac
Title2Event: Benchmarking Open Event Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese Title Dataset
Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation
and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually
define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing
to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles,
an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in
current EE research. In this paper, We present Title2Event, a large-scale
sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting
event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics
collected from Chinese web pages. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently
the largest manually-annotated Chinese dataset for open event extraction. We
further conduct experiments on Title2Event with different models and show that
the characteristics of titles make it challenging for event extraction,
addressing the significance of advanced study on this problem. The dataset and
baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/title2event.Comment: EMNLP 202
IL-22 Signaling Contributes to West Nile Encephalitis Pathogenesis
The Th17 cytokine, IL-22, regulates host immune responses to extracellular pathogens. Whether IL-22 plays a role in viral infection, however, is poorly understood. We report here that Il22-/- mice were more resistant to lethal West Nile virus (WNV) encephalitis, but had similar viral loads in the periphery compared to wild type (WT) mice. Viral loads, leukocyte infiltrates, proinflammatory cytokines and apoptotic cells in the central nervous system (CNS) of Il22-/- mice were also strikingly reduced. Further examination showed that Cxcr2, a chemokine receptor that plays a non-redundant role in mediating neutrophil migration, was significantly reduced in Il22-/- compared to WT leukocytes. Expression of Cxcr2 ligands, cxcl1 and cxcl5, was lower in Il22-/- brains than wild type mice. Correspondingly, neutrophil migration from the blood into the brain was attenuated following lethal WNV infection of Il22-/- mice. Our results suggest that IL-22 signaling exacerbates lethal WNV encephalitis likely by promoting WNV neuroinvasion
Is re-Rex shunt a better choice for patients with failed Rex shunt?
PurposeTo review our single-center surgical outcomes of redo operations after failed Rex shunt procedures.MethodsFrom September 2017 to October 2021, a total of 20 patients (11 males, 9 females; median age: 8.6 years) with Rex shunt occlusions were admitted to our hospital. Two of these patients were previously operated on in our hospital, and the remaining 18 were from other centers. All patients underwent repeat operations after detailed preoperative evaluations.ResultsPreoperative wedged hepatic vein portography (WHVP) was conducted for 18 patients. Thirteen patients exhibited well-developed Rex recessus and intrahepatic portal vein during WHPV examination, consistent with the intraoperative exploration results. Fifteen patients (75%, 15/20) underwent redo-Rex shunt, four underwent Warren shunt and one underwent devascularization surgery. During the redo-Rex shunt operations, the left internal jugular veins (IJV) were used as bypass grafts in 11 patients; the intra-abdominal veins were used in 4 patients. The patients were followed up for 12β59 months (mean, 24.8 months). After redo Rex shunts, the grafts were patent in 14 patients (93.3%, 14/15), but 1 graft had thrombosis (6.7%, 1/15). Three patients suffered from postoperative anastomotic stenosis, and all of the stenosis was relieved with balloon dilatations. After re-Rex shunts, esophageal varices and spleen size were substantially reduced, and the platelet count significantly increased. Postoperative graft thrombosis was found in 1 patient after Warren shunt (1/4, 25%), and there was no graft stenosis. Compared with Warren surgery, patients who underwent re-Rex shunt had a significantly higher rate of platelet increase.ConclusionsRedo-rex shunts can be finished in most patients with failed Rex shunts. Re-Rex shunt is a preferred surgical choice after a failed Rex shunt when a good bypass graft is available, and the surgical success rate can reach more than 90%. A suitable bypass graft is essential for a successful redo Rex shunt. Preoperative WHVP is recommended for the design of a redo surgical plan preoperatively
CD8+ DC, but Not CD8βDC, Isolated from BCG-Infected Mice Reduces Pathological Reactions Induced by Mycobacterial Challenge Infection
Tuberculosis is a mycobacterial infection causing worldwide public health problems but the available vaccine is far from ideal. Type-1 T cell immunity has been shown to be critical for host defence against tuberculosis infection, but the role of dendritic cell (DC) subsets in pathogenesis of mycobacterial infection remains unclear.We examined the effectiveness of dendritic cell (DC) subsets in BCG-infected mice in generating immune responses beneficial for pathogen clearance and reduction of pathological reactions in the tissues following challenge infection. Our data showed that only the adoptive transfer of the subset of CD8alpha+ DC isolated from infected mice (iCD8+ DC) generated significant protection, demonstrated by less mycobacterial growth and pathological changes in the lung and liver tissues in iCD8+ DC recipients than sham-treated control mice. The adoptive transfer of the CD8alpha(-)DC from the infected mice (iCD8(-) DC) not only failed to reduce bacterial growth, but enhanced inflammation characterized by diffuse heavy cellular infiltration. Notably, iCD8(-) DC produced significantly higher levels of IL-10 than iCD8+ DC and promoted more Th2 cytokine responses in in vitro DC-T cell co-culture and in vivo adoptive transfer experiments.The data indicate that in vivo BCG-primed CD8+ DC is the dominant DC subset in inducing protective immunity especially for reducing pathological reactions in infected tissues. The finding has implications for the rational improvement of the prophylactic and therapeutic approaches for controlling tuberculosis infection and related diseases
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