Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion

Fact-centric information needs are rarely one-shot; users typically ask follow-up questions to explore a topic. In such a conversational setting, the user's inputs are often incomplete, with entities or predicates left out, and ungrammatical phrases. This poses a huge challenge to question answering (QA) systems that typically rely on cues in full-fledged interrogative sentences. As a solution, we develop CONVEX: an unsupervised method that can answer incomplete questions over a knowledge graph (KG) by maintaining conversation context using entities and predicates seen so far and automatically inferring missing or ambiguous pieces for follow-up questions. The core of our method is a graph exploration algorithm that judiciously expands a frontier to find candidate answers for the current question. To evaluate CONVEX, we release ConvQuestions, a crowdsourced benchmark with 11,200 distinct conversations from five different domains. We show that CONVEX: (i) adds conversational support to any stand-alone QA system, and (ii) outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and question completion strategies

Efficient Contextualization using Top-k Operators for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KB-QA) faces huge input data with billions of facts, involving millions of entities and thousands of predicates. For efficiency, QA systems first reduce the answer search space by identifying a set of facts that is likely to contain all answers and relevant cues. The most common technique or doing this is to apply named entity disambiguation (NED) systems to the question, and retrieve KB facts for the disambiguated entities. This work presents CLOCQ, an efficient method that prunes irrelevant parts of the search space using KB-aware signals. CLOCQ uses a top-k query processor over score-ordered lists of KB items that combine signals about lexical matching, relevance to the question, coherence among candidate items, and connectivity in the KB graph. Experiments with two recent QA benchmarks for complex questions demonstrate the superiority of CLOCQ over state-of-the-art baselines with respect to answer presence, size of the search space, and runtimes

Conversational Question Answering on Heterogeneous Sources

Conversational question answering (ConvQA) tackles sequential informationneeds where contexts in follow-up questions are left implicit. Current ConvQAsystems operate over homogeneous sources of information: either a knowledgebase (KB), or a text corpus, or a collection of tables. This paper addressesthe novel issue of jointly tapping into all of these together, this wayboosting answer coverage and confidence. We present CONVINSE, an end-to-endpipeline for ConvQA over heterogeneous sources, operating in three stages: i)learning an explicit structured representation of an incoming question and itsconversational context, ii) harnessing this frame-like representation touniformly capture relevant evidences from KB, text, and tables, and iii)running a fusion-in-decoder model to generate the answer. We construct andrelease the first benchmark, ConvMix, for ConvQA over heterogeneous sources,comprising 3000 real-user conversations with 16000 questions, along with entityannotations, completed question utterances, and question paraphrases.Experiments demonstrate the viability and advantages of our method, compared tostate-of-the-art baselines.<br

Kombinationswirkung der beiden Pflanzenschutzmittel Karate Zeon und Callisto in aquatischen Modellökosystemen

Bis heute liegt das Augenmerk der aquatischen Risikobewertung von Pflanzenschutzmitteln (PSM) auf der Evaluierung und Regulierung einzelner aktiver Substanzen. Verbindliche Richtlinien für PSM-Mischungen fehlen bislang. Dieser Diskrepanz widmet sich die vorliegende Studie. Um aus der Kenntnis der Toxizität einzelner PSM Aussagen über die Kombinationswirkung der Substanzen einer PSM-Mischung treffen zu können, wurden drei aquatische Mesokosmenstudien unter Verwendung eines Herbizids und eines Insektizids durchgeführt. Zusätzlich wurde ein Vergleich zwischen einer zeitgleichen und einer zeitlich versetzten Applikation gezogen.Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Übertragung der Einzeltoxizität auf die Toxizität der PSM-Mischung nur bedingt möglich ist. Während sich die Auswirkungen auf die sensitivsten Organismen und Gesellschaftsgruppen, sowie indirekte Effekte sehr gut vorhersagen lassen, ist eine Aussage über Effektstärken und Erholungspotential betroffener Taxa nur unzureichend möglich.To date, the aquatic risk assessment of plant protection products (PPPs) focuses on the evaluation and regulation of individual active substances. Guidelines for the regulation of pesticide-mixtures are still lacking. This study is dedicated to this discrepancy. In particular, the aim of the experimental work is to clarify in which cases it is possible to transfer the knowledge of the toxicity of individual PPPs to the toxicity of pesticide mixtures. Another aspect of the study on pesticide mixtures is to compare a simultaneous application against a time-shifted application of two different PPPs. Therefore three aquatic mesocosm studies were conducted with a herbizid and an insecticide. The results indicated that the derivation from the individual toxicity of the PPPs to the toxicity of the PPP-mixture was limited. While the most direct and indirect effects could be determined well, the prediction of the effect degrees and the recovery potential of affected species is not sufficient.

Response of a catalytic reaction to periodic variation of the CO pressure: Increased CO_2 production and dynamic phase transition

We present a kinetic Monte Carlo study of the dynamical response of a Ziff-Gulari-Barshad model for CO oxidation with CO desorption to periodic variation of the CO presure. We use a square-wave periodic pressure variation with parameters that can be tuned to enhance the catalytic activity. We produce evidence that, below a critical value of the desorption rate, the driven system undergoes a dynamic phase transition between a CO_2 productive phase and a nonproductive one at a critical value of the period of the pressure oscillation. At the dynamic phase transition the period-averged CO_2 production rate is significantly increased and can be used as a dynamic order parameter. We perform a finite-size scaling analysis that indicates the existence of power-law singularities for the order parameter and its fluctuations, yielding estimated critical exponent ratios $\beta/\nu \approx 0.12$ and $\gamma/\nu \approx 1.77$. These exponent ratios, together with theoretical symmetry arguments and numerical data for the fourth-order cumulant associated with the transition, give reasonable support for the hypothesis that the observed nonequilibrium dynamic phase transition is in the same universality class as the two-dimensional equilibrium Ising model.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, accepted in Physical Review

Inflationary and dark energy regimes in 2+1 dimensions

In this work we investigate the behavior of three-dimensional (3D) cosmological models. The simulation of inflationary and dark-energy-dominated eras are among the possible results in these 3D formulations; taking as starting point the results obtained by Cornish and Frankel. Motivated by those results, we investigate, first, the inflationary case where we consider a two-constituent cosmological fluid: the scalar field represents the hypothetical inflaton which is in gravitational interaction with a matter/radiation contribution. For the description of an old universe, it is possible to simulate its evolution starting with a matter dominated universe that faces a decelerated/accelerated transition due to the presence of the additional constituent (simulated by the scalar field or ruled by an exotic equation of state) that plays the role of dark energy. We obtain, through numerical analysis, the evolution in time of the scale factor, the acceleration, the energy densities, and the hydrostatic pressure of the constituents. The alternative scalar cosmology proposed by Cornish and Frankel is also under investigation in this work. In this case an inflationary model can be constructed when another non-polytropic equation of state (the van der Waals equation) is used to simulate the behavior of an early 3D universe.Comment: Latex file, plus 9 figures. To appear in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Transition from accelerated to decelerated regimes in JT and CGHS cosmologies

In this work we discuss the possibility of positive-acceleration regimes, and their transition to decelerated regimes, in two-dimensional (2D) cosmological models. We use general relativity and the thermodynamics in a 2D space-time, where the gas is seen as the sources of the gravitational field. An early-Universe model is analyzed where the state equation of van der Waals is used, replacing the usual barotropic equation. We show that this substitution permits the simulation of a period of inflation, followed by a negative-acceleration era. The dynamical behavior of the system follows from the solution of the Jackiw-Teitelboim equations (JT equations) and the energy-momentum conservation laws. In a second stage we focus the Callan-Giddings-Harvey-Strominger model (CGHS model); here the transition from the inflationary period to the decelerated period is also present between the solutions, although this result depend strongly on the initial conditions used for the dilaton field. The temporal evolution of the cosmic scale function, its acceleration, the energy density and the hydrostatic pressure are the physical quantities obtained in through the analysis.Comment: To appear in Europhysics Letter

De problematiek van de kasgrondteelten: Mogelijke oplossingen aangedragen door ondernemers met substraatbedden in het bijzonder

De kasgrond glastuinbouw ziet zich geconfronteerd met stijgende kosten en een afname van de hoeveelheid toegelaten gewasbeschermingsmiddelen. Het middelenpakket tegen schadelijke bodemschimmels en aaltjes wordt mogelijk verkleind (Spruit e.a. 2008). Op dit moment is grondstomen nog een optie, maar door de sterk toenemende energie- en arbeidskosten wordt grondstomen steeds duurder. In voorgaande gesprekken met ondernemers en betrokkenen blijkt dat een teeltsysteem dat relatief goedkoop, en gemakkelijk in de praktijk is in te passen, de voorkeur heeft. Doelstelling van dit project is daarom het in kaart brengen van problemen met mogelijke oplossingen ten aanzien van bodemproblematiek in kasgrondteelten