HindEnCorp – Hindi-English and Hindi-only Corpus for Machine Translation

We present HindEnCorp, a parallel corpus of Hindi and English, and HindMonoCorp, a monolingual corpus of Hindi in their release version 0.5. Both corpora were collected from web sources and preprocessed primarily for the training of statistical machine translation systems. HindEnCorp consists of 274k parallel sentences (3.9 million Hindi and 3.8 million English tokens). HindMonoCorp amounts to 787 million tokens in 44 million sentences. Both the corpora are freely available for non-commercial research and their preliminary release has been used by numerous participants of the WMT 2014 shared translation task

Optical simulations and optimization of perovskite/CI(G)S tandem solar cells using the transfer matrix method

In this work we employ the transfer matrix method for the analysis of optical materials properties to simulate and optimize monolithic tandem solar cell devices based on CuIn$_{1−x}$Ga$_x$Se$_2$, CI(G)S, and perovskite (PVK) absorbers. By finding models that fit well the experimental data of the CI(G)S solar cell, the semitransparent perovskite solar cell (PSC) and the PVK/CI(G)S monolithic tandem solar cell, we were able to perform a detailed optical loss analysis that allowed us to determine sources of parasitic absorption. We found better substitute materials for the transport layers to increase the power conversion efficiency and, in case of semitransparent PSCs, sub-bandgap transmittance. Our results set guidelines for the monolithic PVK/CI(G)S tandem solar cells development, predicting an achievable efficiency of 30%

Antiandrogenic compounds and dysfunctions and disorders of the male reproductive system development

Rozwój męskiego układu rozrodczego przebiega od przekształcenia pierwotnej gonady w kierunku jądra do zmian w okresie pokwitania, których skutkiem ma być osiągnięcie zdolności reprodukcyjnej i rozwinięcie typowo męskich drugo- i trzeciorzędowych cech płciowych. Rozwój ten odbywa się pod kontrolą hormonalną i jej zakłócenia mogą prowadzić do zaburzeń rozwojowych. Mogą to być deformacje zewnętrznych narządów płciowych, takie jak spodziectwo (hypospadia) czy wnętrostwo (cryptorchism) wynikające z nieprawidłowości w rozwoju prenatalnym. Zaburzenia gospodarki hormonalnej zarówno w rozwoju prenatalnym jak i postnatalnym mogą prowadzić do niepłodności. Od kilkudziesięciu lat notuje się postępujący spadek płodności, wzrasta także liczba notowanych spodziectwa i wnętrostwa. W związku z rozpowszechnieniem w środowisku chemikaliów stosowanych do produkcji tworzyw sztucznych i substancji stosowanych w rolnictwie i przemyśle, których ekspansja produkcji nastąpiła w drugiej połowie XX wieku oraz faktem, że notowano związki pomiędzy ekspozycją na niektóre chemikalia a występowanie zaburzenia męskiej płodności i występowanie wad rozwojowych u dzieci rodziców narażonych nań, zaproponowano kategorię chemikaliów nazwaną Endocrine Disruptors. Są to egzogenne związki wykazujące czynność hormonalną, ze względu na planarną budowę cząsteczki, lipofilny jej charakter i strukturalne podobieństwo do endogennych hormonów steroidowych i hormonów tarczycy. Niektóre z nich zaliczane są do antyandrogenów w związku z powinowactwem do receptora androgenowego, aktywując lub blokując jego działanie zakłócają prawidłowy rozwój tkanek zależnych od androgenów lub spermatogenezę. W tej pracy przyglądnięto się w szczególny sposób: ftalanom oraz Bisfenolowi A – składnikom tworzyw sztucznych a także pestycydom, stosowanym w rolnictwie. Badania na zwierzętach dowodzą ich wpływ na zaburzenia rozwojowe w obrębie układu rozrodczego, deregulację produkcji hormonów płciowych oraz zaburzanie spermatogenezy. Badania na ludziach również wykazują liczne zależności między występowaniem wnętrostwa, spodziectwa, zaburzonej sekrecji hormonów czy obniżonej płodności a ekspozycją zarówno in utero jak i w czasie rzeczywistym na antyandrogeny, jednak nie wszystkie z nich są jednoznaczne i zgodne z badaniami na myszach i szczurach. Dowodzi to potrzeby prowadzenia dalszych badań nad szkodliwością antyandrogenów środowiskowych.The development of the male reproductive system runs from the transformation of primary gonadal axis in the direction of the nucleus changes during puberty, the effect of which is to be the achievement of reproductive capacity and develop a typical male secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics. This development takes place under the control of the hormone and its interference can lead to developmental disorders. They can be external genital deformities, such as hypospadias (hypospadia) or cryptorchidism (cryptorchism) arising from irregularities in the development of prenatal exposure. Endocrine hormone both in the development of prenatal and postnatal can lead to infertility. For decades recorded a progressive decline in fertility, increasing the number of listed hypospadias and cryptorchidism. In connection with the dissemination in the environment of chemicals used for the manufacture of plastic materials and substances used in agriculture and industry, which the expansion of the production came in the second half of the 20th century, and the fact that the reported links between exposure to some chemicals and the presence of impaired male fertility and the presence of malformations in children parents exposed him, the proposed category of chemicals called Endocrine Disruptors. These are the exogenous compounds exhibiting hormonal activity, due to the planar structure of the molecule, lipophilic nature and structural similarity to endogenous steroid hormones and thyroid hormones. Some of them are classified as anti-androgens, which means disruption of the male endocrine system through the connection with affinity for the androgen receptor by activating or blocking its action or the induction of the expression of other hormones disturbing the normal development of androgen-dependent tissues or spermatogenesis.The aim of this study was to review data, especially of phthalates and Biphenyl A, whose are plastic components and pesticides, used in agriculture. Animal studies demonstrate their impact on the developmental disorders within the reproductive system, and deregulation of the production of sex hormones and disruption of spermatogenesis. Human studies also show a number of relationships between the occurrence of cryptorchidism, hypospadias, the disturbed hormone secretion or reduced fertility and exposure both in utero and in real time on the anti-androgens, but not all of them are clear and consistent with studies in mice and rats. This shows the need for further research on the impact of antiandrogens

Programming mammalian gene expression with the antibiotic simocyclinone D8 and the flavonoid luteolin

Precise control of gene expression with small‐molecular or physical inducers has been a central aim of synthetic biology in recent decades, and has led, for example, to dramatic improvements in the production of protein therapeutics. However, the number of inputs for inducible promoters and gene circuits is still limited, and new orthogonal inducers are needed to support the construction of more complex programmable systems in the fields of bioengineering and biocomputing. Here, two new gene switches inducible by the antibiotic simocyclinone D8 (SD8) and the flavonoid luteolin in mammalian cells are presented. Streptomyces antibioticus Tü 6040 has evolved the DNA gyrase inhibitor SD8, which, through the bacterial TetR‐like transcriptional repressor SimR, also regulates the multidrug efflux pump SimX. Taking advantage of SimR, as well as the luteolin‐binding TetR‐like transcriptional repressor EmrR from Sinorhizobium meliloti, we optimized the amounts of transfected genes and DNA operator sites to engineer highly effective, orthogonal transcriptional OFF‐ as well as ON‐switches triggered by SD8 and/or luteolin. We confirmed that SD8 and luteolin are not cytotoxic at the concentrations required for switching, and demonstrated the functionality of these gene switches in a range of biotechnologically relevant cell lines. These switches were combined to generate OR and AND Boolean logic gates, and we confirmed their modularity by the addition of the vanillic acid‐responsive transcriptional repressor VanR to generate a three‐input AND gate. These additions to the panoply of inducers available for synthetic biology are expected to facilitate advances in the fields of biocomputing, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, and biomedicine.ISSN:1547-5905ISSN:0001-154

The Role of Protein Engineering in Biomedical Applications of Mammalian Synthetic Biology

Engineered proteins with enhanced or altered functionality, generated for example by mutation or domain fusion, are at the core of nearly all synthetic biology endeavors in the context of precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine. From designer receptors sensing elevated blood markers to effectors rerouting signaling pathways to synthetic transcription factors and the customized therapeutics they regulate, engineered proteins play a crucial role at every step of novel therapeutic approaches using synthetic biology. Here, recent developments in protein engineering aided by advances in directed evolution, de novo design, and machine learning are discussed. Building on clinical successes already achieved with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR‐) T cells and other cell‐based therapies, these developments are expected to further enhance the capabilities of mammalian synthetic biology in biomedical and other applications.ISSN:1613-6810ISSN:1613-682

The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics Czech Machine Translation in the project CzechMATE

Abstract We present various achievements in statistical machine translation from English, German, Spanish and French into Czech. We discuss specific properties of the individual source languages and describe techniques that exploit these properties and address language-specific errors. Besides the translation proper, we also present our contribution to error analysis

Hindi Web Texts

A Hindi corpus of texts downloaded mostly from news sites. Contains both the original raw texts and an extensively cleaned-up and tokenized version suitable for language modeling. 18M sentences, 308M token

Replacing Linguists with Dummies: A Serious Need for Trivial Baselinesin Multi-Task Neural Machine Translation

Recent developments in machine translation experiment with the idea that a model can improve the translation quality by performing multiple tasks, e.g., translating from source to target and also labeling each source word with syntactic information. The intuition is that the network would generalize knowledge over the multiple tasks, improving the translation performance, especially in low resource conditions. We devised an experiment that casts doubt on this intuition. We perform similar experiments in both multi-decoder and interleaving setups that label each target word either with a syntactic tag or a completely random tag. Surprisingly, we show that the model performs nearly as well on uncorrelated random tags as on true syntactic tags. We hint some possible explanations of this behavior. The main message from our article is that experimental results with deep neural networks should always be complemented with trivial baselines to document that the observed gain is not due to some unrelated properties of the system or training effects. True confidence in where the gains come from will probably remain problematic anyway