IEST: WASSA-2018 Implicit Emotions Shared Task

Past shared tasks on emotions use data with both overt expressions of emotions (I am so happy to see you!) as well as subtle expressions where the emotions have to be inferred, for instance from event descriptions. Further, most datasets do not focus on the cause or the stimulus of the emotion. Here, for the first time, we propose a shared task where systems have to predict the emotions in a large automatically labeled dataset of tweets without access to words denoting emotions. Based on this intention, we call this the Implicit Emotion Shared Task (IEST) because the systems have to infer the emotion mostly from the context. Every tweet has an occurrence of an explicit emotion word that is masked. The tweets are collected in a manner such that they are likely to include a description of the cause of the emotion - the stimulus. Altogether, 30 teams submitted results which range from macro F1 scores of 21 % to 71 %. The baseline (MaxEnt bag of words and bigrams) obtains an F1 score of 60 % which was available to the participants during the development phase. A study with human annotators suggests that automatic methods outperform human predictions, possibly by honing into subtle textual clues not used by humans. Corpora, resources, and results are available at the shared task website at http://implicitemotions.wassa2018.com.Comment: Accepted at Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysi

Adaptively time stepping the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation at nonzero temperature: implementation and validation in MuMax3

Thermal fluctuations play an increasingly important role in micromagnetic research relevant for various biomedical and other technological applications. Until now, it was deemed necessary to use a time stepping algorithm with a fixed time step in order to perform micromagnetic simulations at nonzero temperatures. However, Berkov and Gorn have shown that the drift term which generally appears when solving stochastic differential equations can only influence the length of the magnetization. This quantity is however fixed in the case of the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation. In this paper, we exploit this fact to straightforwardly extend existing high order solvers with an adaptive time stepping algorithm. We implemented the presented methods in the freely available GPU-accelerated micromagnetic software package MuMax3 and used it to extensively validate the presented methods. Next to the advantage of having control over the error tolerance, we report a twenty fold speedup without a loss of accuracy, when using the presented methods as compared to the hereto best practice of using Heun's solver with a small fixed time step.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Cytokinin response factor 6 represses cytokinin-associated genes during oxidative stress

Cytokinin is a phytohormone that is well known for its roles in numerous plant growth and developmental processes, yet it has also been linked to abiotic stress response in a less defined manner. Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) Cytokinin Response Factor 6 (CRF6) is a cytokinin-responsive AP2/ERF-family transcription factor that, through the cytokinin signaling pathway, plays a key role in the inhibition of dark-induced senescence. CRF6 expression is also induced by oxidative stress, and here we show a novel function for CRF6 in relation to oxidative stress and identify downstream transcriptional targets of CRF6 that are repressed in response to oxidative stress. Analysis of transcriptomic changes in wild-type and crf6 mutant plants treated with H2O2 identified CRF6-dependent differentially expressed transcripts, many of which were repressed rather than induced. Moreover, many repressed genes also show decreased expression in 35S:CRF6 overexpressing plants. Together, these findings suggest that CRF6 functions largely as a transcriptional repressor. Interestingly, among the H2O2 repressed CRF6-dependent transcripts was a set of five genes associated with cytokinin processes: (signaling) ARR6, ARR9, ARR11, (biosynthesis) LOG7, and (transport) ABCG14. We have examined mutants of these cytokinin-associated target genes to reveal novel connections to oxidative stress. Further examination of CRF6-DNA interactions indicated that CRF6 may regulate its targets both directly and indirectly. Together, this shows that CRF6 functions during oxidative stress as a negative regulator to control this cytokinin-associated module of CRF6-dependent genes and establishes a novel connection between cytokinin and oxidative stress response

Eddy-induced cross currents in the Westerschelde estuary: numerical simulation, physical driving mechanisms and navigation assistance

The Westerschelde estuary is located in The Netherlands and is a major shipping route connecting the North Sea to the Port of Antwerp (Belgium). Cross currents up to three knots occur at high water during extreme spring tides and are increasingly hampering navigation in the Westerschelde near Hansweert resulting in one major incident leaving a container vessel stranded on a nearby sand bank.This study aimed at the simulation, prediction and assessment of a large eddy (stretching over the complete navigation channel) which produces these cross currents. A numerical model was set up and a detailed calibration of the hydrodynamic model was executed. A good agreement was obtained between model and measured data on the location of the eddy and the strength of the cross currents. Flow fields produced by the numerical model subsequently have been implemented in a nautical simulator in which pilots are trained on sailing in these exceptional conditions.Currently, a warning is sent out to Traffic Control whenever at least one of two parameters is being foreseen to pass a critical value according to forecasting models (high water level and water level gradient). This system has been proven to yield false negatives in some cases. The simulation results and analysis have clarified the conditions in which the eddy grows sufficiently (2 km across) to cause cross currents in the navigation channel. A new criterion for sending out a navigation warning is proposed. It shows a better correlation with the occurrence of cross currents, hence pilots will have a higher probability to be warned in case of cross currents.</p

Time-dependent Hamiltonian estimation for Doppler velocimetry of trapped ions

The time evolution of a closed quantum system is connected to its Hamiltonian through Schroedinger's equation. The ability to estimate the Hamiltonian is critical to our understanding of quantum systems, and allows optimization of control. Though spectroscopic methods allow time-independent Hamiltonians to be recovered, for time-dependent Hamiltonians this task is more challenging. Here, using a single trapped ion, we experimentally demonstrate a method for estimating a time-dependent Hamiltonian of a single qubit. The method involves measuring the time evolution of the qubit in a fixed basis as a function of a time-independent offset term added to the Hamiltonian. In our system the initially unknown Hamiltonian arises from transporting an ion through a static, near-resonant laser beam. Hamiltonian estimation allows us to estimate the spatial dependence of the laser beam intensity and the ion's velocity as a function of time. This work is of direct value in optimizing transport operations and transport-based gates in scalable trapped ion quantum information processing, while the estimation technique is general enough that it can be applied to other quantum systems, aiding the pursuit of high operational fidelities in quantum control.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

The horizontal resolution of MIPAS

Limb remote sensing from space provides atmospheric composition measurements at high vertical resolution while the information is smeared in the horizontal domain. The horizontal components of two-dimensional (altitude and along-track coordinate) averaging kernels of a limb retrieval constrained to horizontal homogeneity can be used to estimate the horizontal resolution of limb retrievals. This is useful for comparisons of measured data with modeled data, to construct horizontal observation operators in data assimilation applications or when measurements of different horizontal resolution are intercompared. We present these averaging kernels for retrievals of temperature, H2O, O3, CH4, N2O, HNO3 and NO2 from MIPAS (Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding) high-resolution limb emission spectra. The horizontal smearing of a MIPAS retrieval in terms of full width at half maximum of the rows of the horizontal averaging kernel matrix varies typically between about 200 and 350 km for most species, altitudes and atmospheric conditions. The range where 95% of the information originates from varies from about 260 to 440 km for these cases. This information spread is smaller than the MIPAS horizontal sampling, i.e. MIPAS data are horizontally undersampled, and the effective horizontal resolution is driven by the sampling rather than the smearing. The point where the majority of the information originates from is displaced from the tangent point towards the satellite by typically less than 10 km for trace gas profiles and about 50 to 100 km for temperature, with a few exceptions for uppermost altitudes. The geolocation of a MIPAS profile is defined as the tangent point of the middle line of sight in a MIPAS limb scan. The majority of the information displacement with respect to this nominal geolocation of the measurement is caused by the satellite movement and the geometrical displacement of the actual tangent point as a function of the elevation angle