An equilibrium state with macroscopic correlations

In this paper we show that the equilibrium macroscopic entropy of a generic non reversible Kawasaki+Glauber dynamics is a non local functional of the density. This implies that equilibrium correlations extend to macroscopic distances.Comment: 8 page

Chitosan glutamate hydrogels with local anesthetic activity for buccal application.

Hydrogels for the buccal application of the anesthetic drug lidocaine hydrochloride (LDC) were prepared using chitosan glutamate (CHG), a soluble salt of chitosan, or a binary mixture of CHG and glycerin, at different weight ratios. The in vitro drug release was studied at the pH value of saliva to assess the effect of the different formulations on drug delivery. The anesthetic activity of mucoadhesive LDC-CHG hydrogels was assessed in vivo after application on the buccal mucosa, compared to commercial semisolid formulations containing the same drug. LDC-loaded hydrogels can be proposed for the symptom relief of aphthosis or other painful mouth diseases

MQALD: Evaluating the impact of modifiers in question answering over knowledge graphs.

Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KG) aims to develop a system that is capable of answering users’ questions using the information coming from one or multiple Knowledge Graphs, like DBpedia, Wikidata, and so on. Question Answering systems need to translate the user’s question, written using natural language, into a query formulated through a specific data query language that is compliant with the underlying KG. This translation process is already non-trivial when trying to answer simple questions that involve a single triple pattern. It becomes even more troublesome when trying to cope with questions that require modifiers in the final query, i.e., aggregate functions, query forms, and so on. The attention over this last aspect is growing but has never been thoroughly addressed by the existing literature. Starting from the latest advances in this field, we want to further step in this direction. This work aims to provide a publicly available dataset designed for evaluating the performance of a QA system in translating articulated questions into a specific data query language. This dataset has also been used to evaluate three QA systems available at the state of the art

Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord, Lists, Mysticism, and Magic, Chicago 2008

Giovanni Maniscalco BasileAll the Names of the Lord, Lists, Mysticism, and Magic, by Valentina IzmirlievaThe Author describes the book and adds some considerations about the double significance of both the book itself and the impact the very idea of a history of the names of God had for the development of philosophy up to our time. The book – the Author maintains – investigates some aspects of the history of our culture that were kept in dark by theologically oriented way of thinking; at the same time it gives evidence of the evolution of religious thinking that in principle hardly admits evolution. To conclude, the history of the lists of the names of God manifests itself as a powerful means for the investigation of the transformation old beliefs underwent in new cultural contexts in various epochs

Analyzing Gaussian distribution of semantic shifts in Lexical Semantic Change Models

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in interest in lexical semantic change detection. Many are the existing approaches, data used, and evaluation strategies to detect semantic shifts. The classification of change words against stable words requires thresholds to label the degree of semantic change. In this work, we compare state-of-the-art computational historical linguistics approaches to evaluate the efficacy of thresholds based on the Gaussian Distribution of semantic shifts. We present the results of an in-depth analysis conducted on both SemEval-2020 Task 1 Subtask 1 and DIACR-Ita tasks. Specifically, we compare Temporal Random Indexing, Temporal Referencing, Orthogonal Procrustes Alignment, Dynamic Word Embeddings and Temporal Word Embedding with a Compass. While results obtained with Gaussian thresholds achieve state-of-the-art performance in English, German, Swedish and Italian, they remain far from results obtained using the optimal threshold

Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord, Lists, Mysticism, and Magic, Chicago 2008

Giovanni Maniscalco BasileAll the Names of the Lord, Lists, Mysticism, and Magic, by Valentina IzmirlievaThe Author describes the book and adds some considerations about the double significance of both the book itself and the impact the very idea of a history of the names of God had for the development of philosophy up to our time. The book – the Author maintains – investigates some aspects of the history of our culture that were kept in dark by theologically oriented way of thinking; at the same time it gives evidence of the evolution of religious thinking that in principle hardly admits evolution. To conclude, the history of the lists of the names of God manifests itself as a powerful means for the investigation of the transformation old beliefs underwent in new cultural contexts in various epochs

Introducing linked open data in graph-based recommender systems

Thanks to the recent spread of the Linked Open Data (LOD) initiative, a huge amount of machine-readable knowledge encoded as RDF statements is today available in the so-called LOD cloud. Accordingly, a big effort is now spent to investigate to what extent such information can be exploited to develop new knowledge-based services or to improve the effectiveness of knowledge-intensive platforms as Recommender Systems (RS). To this end, in this article we study the impact of the exogenous knowledge coming from the LOD cloud on the overall performance of a graph-based recommendation framework. Specifically, we propose a methodology to automatically feed a graph-based RS with features gathered from the LOD cloud and we analyze the impact of several widespread feature selection techniques in such recommendation settings. The experimental evaluation, performed on three state-of-the-art datasets, provided several outcomes: first, information extracted from the LOD cloud can significantly improve the performance of a graph-based RS. Next, experiments showed a clear correlation between the choice of the feature selection technique and the ability of the algorithm to maximize specific evaluation metrics, as accuracy or diversity of the recommendations. Moreover, our graph-based algorithm fed with LOD-based features was able to overcome several baselines, as collaborative filtering and matrix factorization

Systemic candidiasis in farm-reared red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa) caused by Leucosporidium spp

BACKGROUND: This report describes the results of radiological, histological and molecular examination of three farm-reared red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa) affected by candidiasis. CASE PRESENTATION: Three juvenile farm-reared red-legged partridges in a batch of 100 of the same species were sent for clinical and pathological investigations. The owner referred of a sudden isolation of the sick animals, with apathy, diarrhea, ruffled plumage and respiratory rattles. Post mortem total body lateral projection radiograph showed an increased perihilar interstitial pattern and air bronchogram signs due to lung edema. At necropsy, carcasses showed cachexia; the pericloacal region was soiled by diarrheic fecal material. From the mouth to the intestine, a mucous yellowish fluid was present on a slightly reddish mucosa. Histopathology showed slight edema and congestion with different free fungal elements, referable to blastospores, hyphae and pseudohyphae. Biomolecular exam identified the most similar sequences as belonging to Leucosporidium scottii. CONCLUSION: To our knowledge, this case report describes for the first time this fungal species as a causative agent of candidiasis in birds