DISCO: A Large Scale Human Annotated Corpus for Disfluency Correction in Indo-European Languages

Disfluency correction (DC) is the process of removing disfluent elements like fillers, repetitions and corrections from spoken utterances to create readable and interpretable text. DC is a vital post-processing step applied to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs, before subsequent processing by downstream language understanding tasks. Existing DC research has primarily focused on English due to the unavailability of large-scale open-source datasets. Towards the goal of multilingual disfluency correction, we present a high-quality human-annotated DC corpus covering four important Indo-European languages: English, Hindi, German and French. We provide extensive analysis of results of state-of-the-art DC models across all four languages obtaining F1 scores of 97.55 (English), 94.29 (Hindi), 95.89 (German) and 92.97 (French). To demonstrate the benefits of DC on downstream tasks, we show that DC leads to 5.65 points increase in BLEU scores on average when used in conjunction with a state-of-the-art Machine Translation (MT) system. We release code to run our experiments along with our annotated dataset here.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 Finding

Establishing a Wireless Sensor Network to Monitor the Temperature in a two storied building

The advancement in information technology and the need for large-scale communication infrastructure has triggered the era of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensor network is a collection of sensor nodes connected wirelessly to one another to gather information about the surrounding environment. In this paper a WSN testbed is established using Texas instruments sensor nodes to monitor the temperature in a two storied building

Link Quality Based Power Efficient Routing Protocol (LQ-PERP)

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in deploying infrastructure-less, self configurable, distributed networks such as Mobile AdHoc Networks (MANET) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for applications like emergency management and physical variables monitoring respectively. However, nodes in these networks are susceptible to high failure rate due to battery depletion, environmental changes and malicious destruction. Since each node operates with limited sources of power, energy efficiency is an important metric to be considered for designing communication schemes for MANET and WSN. Energy consumed by nodes in MANET or WSN can be reduced by optimizing the internode transmission power which is uniform even with dynamic routing protocols like AODV. However, the transmission power required for internode communication depends on the wireless link quality which inturn depends on various factors like received signal power, propagation path loss, fading, multi-user interference and topological changes. In this paper, link quality based power efficient routing protocol (LQ-PERP) is proposed which saves the battery power of nodes by optimizing the power during data transmission. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using QualNet network simulator by considering metrics like total energy consumed in nodes, throughput, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and jitter

Performance Study of Adhoc on-Demand Link Quality Aware Route Search Protocol (AO-LQARSP)

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network with few tens to thousands of small devices called sensor nodes which are connected wirelessly and involve in communicating the data. WSNs have generated tremendous interest among researchers in recent years because of its potential usage in wide variety of applications. The sensor nodes in WSNs have scarce power; they work in harsh and unattended environments which initiates the need for a better and more reliable routing path to send data. In this paper a routing protocol is proposed to select the route based on better signal strength conditions using Link Quality Indicator of the received signal for IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The performance of the proposed routing protocol is compared with standard reactive routing protocol Adhoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) with metrics like total packets received, throughput, total bytes received, average end-to-end delay and average jitter and total energy consumed for various node density scenarios

Role of clobetasol propionate 0.025% topical therapy in various dermatoses

The anti-inflammatory and vasoconstrictive properties of topical corticosteroids (TCs) contribute in providing therapeutic benefits in several skin conditions, including atopic eczema, localized vitiligo, psoriasis, and chronic hand eczema. Clobetasol propionate (CP) is the most common topical agent used for psoriasis management and demonstrates an efficacy superior to other TCs. A new CP 0.025% cream formulation has demonstrated hypoallergenic effects due to the absence of known contact allergens, such as propylene glycol, short-chain alcohols, and sorbitol-based emulsifiers. Lower CP serum levels and less hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis suppression with CP 0.025% cream formulation than with CP 0.05% ensure better safety. The present case series discusses the clinical experience of using CP 0.025% cream in various dermatological conditions

Global burden of 288 causes of death and life expectancy decomposition in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BACKGROUND Regular, detailed reporting on population health by underlying cause of death is fundamental for public health decision making. Cause-specific estimates of mortality and the subsequent effects on life expectancy worldwide are valuable metrics to gauge progress in reducing mortality rates. These estimates are particularly important following large-scale mortality spikes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When systematically analysed, mortality rates and life expectancy allow comparisons of the consequences of causes of death globally and over time, providing a nuanced understanding of the effect of these causes on global populations. METHODS The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2021 cause-of-death analysis estimated mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) from 288 causes of death by age-sex-location-year in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations for each year from 1990 until 2021. The analysis used 56 604 data sources, including data from vital registration and verbal autopsy as well as surveys, censuses, surveillance systems, and cancer registries, among others. As with previous GBD rounds, cause-specific death rates for most causes were estimated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model-a modelling tool developed for GBD to assess the out-of-sample predictive validity of different statistical models and covariate permutations and combine those results to produce cause-specific mortality estimates-with alternative strategies adapted to model causes with insufficient data, substantial changes in reporting over the study period, or unusual epidemiology. YLLs were computed as the product of the number of deaths for each cause-age-sex-location-year and the standard life expectancy at each age. As part of the modelling process, uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated using the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles from a 1000-draw distribution for each metric. We decomposed life expectancy by cause of death, location, and year to show cause-specific effects on life expectancy from 1990 to 2021. We also used the coefficient of variation and the fraction of population affected by 90% of deaths to highlight concentrations of mortality. Findings are reported in counts and age-standardised rates. Methodological improvements for cause-of-death estimates in GBD 2021 include the expansion of under-5-years age group to include four new age groups, enhanced methods to account for stochastic variation of sparse data, and the inclusion of COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality-which includes excess mortality associated with the pandemic, excluding COVID-19, lower respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and pertussis. For this analysis, 199 new country-years of vital registration cause-of-death data, 5 country-years of surveillance data, 21 country-years of verbal autopsy data, and 94 country-years of other data types were added to those used in previous GBD rounds. FINDINGS The leading causes of age-standardised deaths globally were the same in 2019 as they were in 1990; in descending order, these were, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. In 2021, however, COVID-19 replaced stroke as the second-leading age-standardised cause of death, with 94·0 deaths (95% UI 89·2-100·0) per 100 000 population. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the rankings of the leading five causes, lowering stroke to the third-leading and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to the fourth-leading position. In 2021, the highest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (271·0 deaths [250·1-290·7] per 100 000 population) and Latin America and the Caribbean (195·4 deaths [182·1-211·4] per 100 000 population). The lowest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 were in the high-income super-region (48·1 deaths [47·4-48·8] per 100 000 population) and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania (23·2 deaths [16·3-37·2] per 100 000 population). Globally, life expectancy steadily improved between 1990 and 2019 for 18 of the 22 investigated causes. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the positive effect that reductions in deaths from enteric infections, lower respiratory infections, stroke, and neonatal deaths, among others have contributed to improved survival over the study period. However, a net reduction of 1·6 years occurred in global life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, primarily due to increased death rates from COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality. Life expectancy was highly variable between super-regions over the study period, with southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania gaining 8·3 years (6·7-9·9) overall, while having the smallest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 (0·4 years). The largest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (3·6 years). Additionally, 53 of the 288 causes of death were highly concentrated in locations with less than 50% of the global population as of 2021, and these causes of death became progressively more concentrated since 1990, when only 44 causes showed this pattern. The concentration phenomenon is discussed heuristically with respect to enteric and lower respiratory infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS, neonatal disorders, tuberculosis, and measles. INTERPRETATION Long-standing gains in life expectancy and reductions in many of the leading causes of death have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adverse effects of which were spread unevenly among populations. Despite the pandemic, there has been continued progress in combatting several notable causes of death, leading to improved global life expectancy over the study period. Each of the seven GBD super-regions showed an overall improvement from 1990 and 2021, obscuring the negative effect in the years of the pandemic. Additionally, our findings regarding regional variation in causes of death driving increases in life expectancy hold clear policy utility. Analyses of shifting mortality trends reveal that several causes, once widespread globally, are now increasingly concentrated geographically. These changes in mortality concentration, alongside further investigation of changing risks, interventions, and relevant policy, present an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of mortality-reduction strategies. Examining patterns in mortality concentration might reveal areas where successful public health interventions have been implemented. Translating these successes to locations where certain causes of death remain entrenched can inform policies that work to improve life expectancy for people everywhere. FUNDING Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation