Explainable and Discourse Topic-aware Neural Language Understanding

Marrying topic models and language models exposes language understanding to a broader source of document-level context beyond sentences via topics. While introducing topical semantics in language models, existing approaches incorporate latent document topic proportions and ignore topical discourse in sentences of the document. This work extends the line of research by additionally introducing an explainable topic representation in language understanding, obtained from a set of key terms correspondingly for each latent topic of the proportion. Moreover, we retain sentence-topic associations along with document-topic association by modeling topical discourse for every sentence in the document. We present a novel neural composite language model that exploits both the latent and explainable topics along with topical discourse at sentence-level in a joint learning framework of topic and language models. Experiments over a range of tasks such as language modeling, word sense disambiguation, document classification, retrieval and text generation demonstrate ability of the proposed model in improving language understanding.Comment: Accepted at ICML2020 (13 pages, 2 figures), acknowledgements adde

EFFECT OF DIFFERENT CONCENTRATIONS OF GLYCEROL IN CRYOPRESERVATION OF GADDI GOAT SEMEN

Goats have greater importance under small familiar systems in India. The unabated decline in Gaddi males of superior genetic merit due to extensive culling and unplanned breeding (inbreeding) accentuates the importance of conserve superior males and their use for artificial insemination. The available literature is unequivocal about the importance of glycerol during sperm cryopreservation. However, the optimal level seems to vary between species and breeds. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of different concentrations of glycerol (6, 7, and 8%) on the quality of thawed semen from Gaddi bucks. A total of 180 ejaculates from six Gaddi buck were frozen in Tris citrate extender containing 10% of Egg Yolk with 6, 7, or 8% of glycerol. Sperm quality parameters in thawed semen (morphological abnormalities, sperm viability, progressive motility, and HOST response) were compared; in addition, the percentage of change in thawed semen with respect to fresh was determined. No effect of concentration of glycerol was observed on progressive motility and HOST response. Sperm viability was better in semen frozen at 6 and 8% (45.26±1.32% and 45.10±2.81% respectively) in comparison with 7% of glycerol (34.81±2.78%, P<0.05). Lower sperm morphological abnormalities were observed in semen frozen at 6% of glycerol (7.93±0.28, P<0.05) in comparison with 7% (9.18±0.69%) and 8% (9.90±0.55%). A fertility rate of 41.25% was achieved following AI with semen frozen containing 6% of glycerol. In conclusions, 6% of glycerol was a valid option to cryopreservation of semen from Gaddi buck, resulting in better viability and lower abnormalities. In addition, a good fertility response was observed.RESUMENLas cabras están teniendo mayor importancia en los pequeños sistemas familiares en India. Sin embargo, la disminución deliberada de machos Gaddi de alto merito genético debido a la eliminación excesiva y a los cruzamientos no planificados (consanguinidad) acentúan la importancia de conservar machos superiores y su uso para inseminación artificial. La literatura disponible ha confirmado la importancia del glicerol durante la criopreservación espermática. Sin embargo, el nivel óptimo parece variar entre especies y razas. El propósito de este estudio fue evaluar el efecto de diferentes concentraciones de glicerol (6, 7 y 8%) sobre la calidad del semen descongelado de machos de raza Gaddi. Un total de 180 eyaculados de seis machos fueron congelado en diluyente a base de Tris citrato conteniendo 10% de yema de huevo con 6, 7 u 8% de glicerol. Los parámetros de calidad espermática en el semen descongelado (motilidad progresiva, viabilidad, anomalías morfológicas y respuesta a HOST) fueron comparadas, además el porcentaje de cambio de cada parámetro con respecto al semen fresco fue determinado. No se observó un efecto del nivel de glicerol sobre la motilidad progresiva y la respuesta al HOST. La viabilidad espermática fue mejor en el semen congelado con 6 y8% de glicerol (45,26±1,32% y 45,10±2,81% respectivamente) en comparación con el semen congelado con 7% de glicerol (34,81±2,78%, P<0,05). Menos morfoanomalías fueron observadas en el semen congelado con 6% de glicerol (7,93±0,28, P<0,05) en comparación con el congelado con 7% (9,18±0,69%) y 8% (9,90±0,55%). Una tasa de 41,25% de fertilidad fue alcanzada luego de la inseminación con semen congelado con &% de glicerol. En conclusión, 6% de glicerol es una opción validad para la criopreservación de semen de machos cabríos Gaddi, resultando en una mayor viabilidad y menos morfoanomalías espermáticas. Además, una buena fertilidad fue observada.

FORMULATION, CHARACTERIZATION AND IN-VITRO EVALUATION OF NANOSUSPENSION FORMULATION OF CLOPIDOGREL USING SOLVENT-ANTISOLVENT TECHNIQUE

Aim: The main aim of our study was to improve solubility of Clopidogrel bisulphate by preparing nanosuspensions using solvent-antisolvent (bottom up) technology. Methods: Clopidogrel nanosuspensions were formed by solvent antisolvent method. 15 formulations were prepared with different concentrations at different ratios. These formulations were evaluated for mean particle size, solubility, drug content and maximum yield. The selected formulation was then compared with pure drug for various parameters such as X-ray diffraction, Scanning Electron Microscopy, in-vitro Dissolution studies, Fourier Transform – Infrared Radiation (FT-IR) etc. Release kinetics and stability studies were performed for the optimized formulation. Results: Out of 15 formulations, F15 comply well with all the parameters. On comparison with pure drug, F15 showed better characteristics such as Fourier Transform- Infrared Radiation (FT-IR), Solubility, particle size, Scanning electron microscopy, in-vitro dissolution, X-ray diffraction etc. Optimized formulation showed first order kinetics and stability was shown for over 3 months. Conclusion: Clopidogrel (anti-platelet) in nanosuspension formulation can overcome the limitation of low solubility, dissolution, bioavailability and explore further. Keywords: Clopidogrel, Nanosuspension, Solvent-antisolvent, Bioavailability, Release Kinetic

Neural Topic Modeling with Continual Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning has recently attracted attention in building machine learning systems that continually accumulate and transfer knowledge to help future learning. Unsupervised topic modeling has been popularly used to discover topics from document collections. However, the application of topic modeling is challenging due to data sparsity, e.g., in a small collection of (short) documents and thus, generate incoherent topics and sub-optimal document representations. To address the problem, we propose a lifelong learning framework for neural topic modeling that can continuously process streams of document collections, accumulate topics and guide future topic modeling tasks by knowledge transfer from several sources to better deal with the sparse data. In the lifelong process, we particularly investigate jointly: (1) sharing generative homologies (latent topics) over lifetime to transfer prior knowledge, and (2) minimizing catastrophic forgetting to retain the past learning via novel selective data augmentation, co-training and topic regularization approaches. Given a stream of document collections, we apply the proposed Lifelong Neural Topic Modeling (LNTM) framework in modeling three sparse document collections as future tasks and demonstrate improved performance quantified by perplexity, topic coherence and information retrieval task.Comment: ICML202

A prospective study on drug utilization pattern of anti-diabetic drugs in a tertiary care teaching hospital of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder with common denominator of hyperglycemia, arising from a variety of pathogenic mechanisms. The aim of the study was to evaluate the drug utilization pattern of anti-diabetic drugs in diabetic patients and observe adverse drug events (ADEs) associated with anti-diabetic therapy in a prospective way.Methods: A prospective study was carried out in diabetic patients visiting the Departments of General Medicine in a tertiary care teaching hospital. Demographic data, drug utilization pattern and ADEs due to Anti-diabetic drugs were summarized.Results: In the present study, 153 (54%) of the 282 diabetic patients were males and 129 (46%) were females. Majority of patients were in the age group of 51-60 years (31.20%) and most of the patients (31.56%) had a diabetic history of 11-15 years. Metformin was the most commonly prescribed drug (64.89%). Majority of the patients (36.87%) were on multidrug therapy. Co-morbid condition was found in 232 patients (82.26%) where hypertension (22.69%) being the most common co-morbid condition. 32 ADRs were observed with Nausea being the most common ADR reported.Conclusions: The present study helps to find out current prescribing pattern of oral diabetic medications with different co-morbidities with respect to diagnosis, cost of treatment and it also highlight the need for comprehensive management of diabetic patients, including life style changes, dietary control, hypoglycemic agents, cardiovascular prevention, treatment of complications and co-morbidity. Therefore, through the existing prescribing patterns, attempts can be made to improve the quality and efficiency of drug therapy

A comparative study of tapentadol versus tramadol in the treatment of low back pain

Background: Nontraumatic musculoskeletal disorders are the main reason for presentation to the emergency department with Rachialgia being the most common reason to request medical assessment among them. Methods: This was a prospective, randomized, parallel group open labelled study conducted in a district level tertiary care hospital attached to a medical teaching institute. Patients were randomized into two groups. Group I (63 patients) received tablet tramadol 50 mg twice daily orally and group II (63 patients) received tablet tapentadol 50 mg twice daily orally.Results: The mean age of the patients of group I was 40.6±9.6 years and in the group II was 42.7±10.6 years. A total of 61 males participated in the study of which 31 males were enrolled in group I and 30 in group II while 65 females participated in the study of which 32 females were enrolled in group I and 33 in group II. The mean reduction of pain intensity VAS score at the end of 4 weeks from baseline in group I and group II were 34.57 and 37.55 respectively. The difference in the mean reduction of pain intensity VAS between the two groups was not statistically significant.Conclusions: We conclude that both the drugs show significant reduction in the pain intensity in moderate to severe CLBP patients. Tapentadol is as efficacious as tramadol in moderate to severe CLBP. However, tapentadol is better tolerated than tramadol