Non-hierarchical Structures: How to Model and Index Overlaps?

Overlap is a common phenomenon seen when structural components of a digital object are neither disjoint nor nested inside each other. Overlapping components resist reduction to a structural hierarchy, and tree-based indexing and query processing techniques cannot be used for them. Our solution to this data modeling problem is TGSA (Tree-like Graph for Structural Annotations), a novel extension of the XML data model for non-hierarchical structures. We introduce an algorithm for constructing TGSA from annotated documents; the algorithm can efficiently process non-hierarchical structures and is associated with formal proofs, ensuring that transformation of the document to the data model is valid. To enable high performance query analysis in large data repositories, we further introduce an extension of XML pre-post indexing for non-hierarchical structures, which can process both reachability and overlapping relationships.Comment: The paper has been accepted at the Balisage 2014 conferenc

Estimating Ultimate Recovery in Shale Wells Based on Facts

Natural gas, as one of the nation\u27s major energy sources plays a vital role in the US energy mix. In recent years, the production from Shale has focused much attention on this source of hydrocarbon. As an essential step for the production planning, natural gas professionals estimate production and ultimate recovery (EUR) throughout the life of wells. The fluid production rate (q) usually varies as a function of rock properties, well, and completion design parameters. The variation associated with these parameters is a source of uncertainty in estimating the long term production for unconventional reservoirs.;A number of methodologies have been suggested to estimate the long term production of shale wells. Decline curve analysis is the most widely used methodology in the estimation of the future production profile. However, its results have been determined to be over optimistic.;Discrepancies between actual and estimated production values by Arps decline curves have been observed. This is dominant in low permeability reservoirs characterized by production over-estimation that is a consequence of large values of hyperbolic component (b-values higher than 1). A combination of Arps hyperbolic (in early time) and exponential decline (in later time) is employed to overcome this deficiency (production over estimation). This combination of Arps declines curves are referred to as Combined Decline Curves (CDC).;The major objective of this research is to condition the results of the CDC-EUR of shale wells to rock properties, well characteristics, and completion design parameters in a given shale asset. The first step of this study is CDC-EUR estimation using Arps combined decline curves. In order to have a more accurate (conservative) estimation, the hyperbolic curve will be switched to exponential decline during later time in the well\u27s life. Then, artificial intelligence will be employed to condition the CDC-EUR to rock properties, well characteristics, and completion design parameters.;The major rock properties that will be studied in this research as input parameters include porosity, total organic carbon, net thickness, and water saturation. Moreover, the effect of several design parameters, such as well trajectories, completion, and hydraulic fracturing variables on CDC-EUR will be investigated. This model will help natural gas professionals to have a better understanding of the effect of rock properties and design parameters on future gas production of shale

Personal Entity, Concept, and Named Entity Linking in Conversations

Building conversational agents that can have natural and knowledge-grounded interactions with humans requires understanding user utterances. Entity Linking (EL) is an effective and widely used method for understanding natural language text and connecting it to external knowledge. It is, however, shown that existing EL methods developed for annotating documents are suboptimal for conversations, where personal entities (e.g., "my cars") and concepts are essential for understanding user utterances. In this paper, we introduce a collection and a tool for entity linking in conversations. We collect EL annotations for 1327 conversational utterances, consisting of links to named entities, concepts, and personal entities. The dataset is used for training our toolkit for conversational entity linking, CREL. Unlike existing EL methods, CREL is developed to identify both named entities and concepts. It also utilizes coreference resolution techniques to identify personal entities and references to the explicit entity mentions in the conversations. We compare CREL with state-of-the-art techniques and show that it outperforms all existing baselines

Data Augmentation for Conversational AI

Advancements in conversational systems have revolutionized information access, surpassing the limitations of single queries. However, developing dialogue systems requires a large amount of training data, which is a challenge in low-resource domains and languages. Traditional data collection methods like crowd-sourcing are labor-intensive and time-consuming, making them ineffective in this context. Data augmentation (DA) is an affective approach to alleviate the data scarcity problem in conversational systems. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of DA approaches in the context of conversational systems. It highlights recent advances in conversation augmentation, open domain and task-oriented conversation generation, and different paradigms of evaluating these models. We also discuss current challenges and future directions in order to help researchers and practitioners to further advance the field in this area

How Social Media Influencer Collaborations are Percieved by Consumers

Within the social media community, influencers engage in a variety of collaborative practices such as tagging, reposting content from, or forming partnerships with other influencers and brands. While such collaborative efforts are a known practice, less is understood about how influencer collaborations affect consumers\u27 perceptions of the partnering influencers, specifically when a status differential exists within the collaboration. We suggest that such collaborative practices, specifically those where the focal influencer has a higher status than the collaborating partner, may help to weaken consumers\u27 perceptions that the influencer\u27s actions are purely self‐focused. A pilot study, analyzing both influencer–influencer collaborations and influencer–brand collaborations, provides evidence that influencers engage in collaborations with other influencers and brands of different status levels. Two studies then support our theorizing that influencers who collaborate with lower‐status influencers are perceived as less self‐serving and more altruistic, while influencers who collaborate with lower‐status brands are only perceived as less self‐serving. This suggests that, for influencers who desire to enhance how consumers perceive them, an effective strategy is to engage in collaborations with either a lower‐status influencer or brand

Entropy generation for forced convection in a porous channel with isoflux or isothermal walls

A numerical study is reported to investigate the entropy generation due to forced convection in a parallel plate channel filled by a saturated porous medium. Two different thermal boundary conditions are considered being isoflux and isothermal walls. Effects of the Péclet number, the porous medium shape factor, the dimensionless temperature difference for isothermal walls, the dimensionless heat flux for isoflux walls, and the Brinkman number on the Bejan number as well as the local and average dimensionless entropy generation rate are examined

Study of a low Re airfoil considering laminar separation bubbles in static and pitching motion

Performance of low Reynolds number (Re) devices is highly dependent on their airfoil design. Small wind turbines that usually work in areas with poor wind resources with a vast application from remote to busy urban regions are no exception. The unsteady flow field around the turbine blade results in an unsteady boundary layer that makes aerodynamics of these turbines complex and interesting. But due to the complexity of unsteady low Reynolds flow, and the small scale of boundary layer flow there are still unanswered questions in this area. Therefore, this study is arranged to fully investigate low Reynolds number boundary layer flow in steady and unsteady flow using small scale experiments. For this goal, three non-intrusive experimental techniques used to study low Re flow behavior over a miniature SD7037 airfoil including surface oil flow visualization (SOFV), IR-Thermography (IT), and particle image velocimetry (PIV) at 14000 < Re < 48000 have been developed and utilized. To model unsteady flow a pitch oscillation about the static stall angle of attack with amplitude 9 was considered. The quality of acquired results from all the experimental methods confirms the possibility of downscaling of low Reynolds flow experiments. Flow parameters such as the separation and reattachment points were quantitatively determined from SOFV and IT. The high-resolution PIV measurements provided an accurate velocity field so that surface pressure distribution and estimation of skin friction coefficient were determined from the velocity fields in both the steady and unsteady flow where due to the scale of the experiment and low magnitude of shear stress other measurement techniques would be intrusive or cannot be used. Estimated surface pressure coefficient (Cp) from PIV data revealed vortical structure effects as low-pressure waves that cannot be captured with coarse resolution methods. Integral boundary layer parameters are calculated in steady and unsteady conditions that provide in-depth information regarding low Re boundary layer flow behavior and laminar separation bubble characteristics. Boundary layer flow and reversed flow under the separated bubble were captured precisely while the Field of View covers the whole airfoil and results were confirmed by acquired data using finer spatial resolution. The measured aerodynamic force shows the effect of the height of the bubble on increasing the drag and the proper orthogonal decomposition method provided more information regarding the time-dependent behavior of vortices

Halal and Religious Tourism Development in Mashhad, Iran

Mashhad is not only a megacity for religious tourism (nationally and internationally), but also a major source of revenue for the government of Iran. Mashhad's potential to become a more economically lucrative city for the halal-conscious tourist has sparked expansive development by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government in its halalization of the city is investing money into a wide array of tourist-related establishments in order to become members of a global halal-certified business community and to take advantage of the rapidly growing religious tourism industry.To issue halal certifications, in 2014 the Iranian government established the Halal National &amp; Regional Research Center as a new division in the Agriculture Research Institute. From an economic perspective, this is a sound investment for the Iranian government with a prospect of lucrative economic rewards. Halal certification in Iran is also a timely project since, according to recent studies, halal tourism is among the fastest and more lucrative form of travel among Muslim travelers. Mashhad has without doubt the potential of becoming one of the most significant Shi`i halal pilgrimage destinations in the world. With already over 2 million visitors annually coming to this city, the halal certification makes it even more attractive for international Muslim halal-conscious tourists. This paper also discusses the expansion and improvements in infrastructure, which includes park maintenance, public art projects and many other beautification projects in Mashhad to attract tourists in even greater numbers not only for religious purposes but also to enjoy the city itself and all it has to offer