PASTA: Table-Operations Aware Fact Verification via Sentence-Table Cloze Pre-training

Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, in this paper we introduce PASTA, a novel state-of-the-art framework for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence-table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence-table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence-table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pretrains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two table-based fact verification benchmarks: TabFact and SEM-TAB-FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms the previous state of the art by 4.7 points (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small TabFact test set is narrowed to just 1.5 points (90.6% vs. 92.1%).Comment: EMNLP 202

Load prediction with an improved feature selection method for building energy management of an office park

Load prediction plays a significant role in building energy management. An accurate HVAC load prediction model highly depends on the feature selection and the quality of training data. In previous work on load prediction, the input features are majorly manually selected by expertise, which is relatively subjective and lacks theoretical supports. Using the real building operational data collected from an office park located in Hangzhou, this paper developed a short-term cooling load prediction model, in which the input features are selected based on an analysis on the heat transfer process. Combined with qualitative analysis of the real data, several features such as outdoor air enthalpy and indoor black-bulb temperatures from different orientations are introduced into the model. The proposed model was then applied to the HVAC control system of the office park. Compared to the load prediction model with commonly used features, the proposed model reduced CRVMSE by 21% and MAPE by 30% during the operation period of the system. Furthermore, the impacts of training dataset size and prediction time range on model’s accuracy and training time were discussed

Certification for biofuel: a means to sustainable development?

In recent decades, many countries, including the U.S., have adopted policies to promote greater use of biofuel, with the hope that biofuel can be used to meet the sustainability goal of reducing carbon emission associated with conventional fossil fuel. However, biofuel production, if not implemented with care, can bring about lots of environmental and social problems itself. The growing of feedstock can exacerbate land degradation, water pollution or even cause indirect emission of greenhouse gas. In addition, it is claimed that biofuel demands fueled human rights abuse such as forced labor or economic exploitation. For continued expansion of global biofuels industry, it is critical to address these environmental and social concerns in a timely manner. Biofuel certification is designed as a means to guarantee that fuel crop cultivation and biofuel production adhere to certain sustainability standards. Such programs have been used in many other industries, such as timber, finishing and mining to influence the way in which these businesses are operating and the products are producing. By building trust between the economic operators along the supply chain, certification programs are favored by market players and governments as a means to reduce the negative externalities of biofuel production and promote better practices in biofuel industry. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of these biofuel certification schemes are now facing serious challenges, as studies observed that the sustainability criteria set by some organizations fail to take into account important factors such as food security, land conflicts and labor conditions, so biofuels certified under such programs are not sustainable at all. In addition, some reports revealed that the assurance process of certification, though done by independent certifier/auditor and thus can offer greater level of credibility, was not as transparent and reliable as it claims. This paper discusses the main factors that contributes to the failure of certification schemes in ensuring sustainable development of biofuels: first, the economic operators are reluctant to participate in certification program, as they can gain little if any competitive advantage in the market by being certified. The situation is worse for small farmers in developing countries, because the processes to adapt the sustainability standards could impose high transaction costs on them. In addition, implementation of sustainable criteria and certification system could raise questions as to whether the certification in place would violate WTO trade rules and principles, such as General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). Third, the certifications schemes may fail to provide a rigorous approach on some environmental or societal impacts of biofuel production. For example, indirect land-use change is loosely addressed in most certification systems as it is rooted in micro-economic mechanism, making it difficult to measure at the level of individual projects. In addition, due to the lack of harmonization between different schemes, individual or corporations may prone to choose certifications programs with lower requirements, thereby creating a “race to the bottom” phenomenon. Lastly, there is no oversight on third-party certifiers who are integral to the legitimacy of certification. Certification schemes generally involves two processes: establishing comprehensive and measurable sustainability criteria and inspecting whether biofuel production meet these criteria, which are administered by the standard-setter and the certification bodies respectively. Therefore, to ensure sustainable certification are delivering real social, environmental and economic results, it is necessary to ensure the auditors are doing their jobs

Remarkably Enhanced Room-Temperature Hydrogen Sensing of SnO2 Nanoflowers via Vacuum Annealing Treatment

In this work, SnO2 nanoflowers synthesized by a hydrothermal method were employed as hydrogen sensing materials. The as-synthesized SnO2 nanoflowers consisted of cuboid-like SnO2 nanorods with tetragonal structures. A great increase in the relative content of surface-adsorbed oxygen was observed after the vacuum annealing treatment, and this increase could have been due to the increase in surface oxygen vacancies serving as preferential adsorption sites for oxygen species. Annealing treatment resulted in an 8% increase in the specific surface area of the samples. Moreover, the conductivity of the sensors decreased after the annealing treatment, which should be attributed to the increase in electron scattering around the defects and the compensated donor behavior of the oxygen vacancies due to the surface oxygen adsorption. The hydrogen sensors of the annealed samples, compared to those of the unannealed samples, exhibited a much higher sensitivity and faster response rate. The sensor response factor and response rate increased from 27.1% to 80.2% and 0.34%/s to 1.15%/s, respectively. This remarkable enhancement in sensing performance induced by the annealing treatment could be attributed to the larger specific surface areas and higher amount of surface-adsorbed oxygen, which provides a greater reaction space for hydrogen. Moreover, the sensors with annealed SnO2 nanoflowers also exhibited high selectivity towards hydrogen against CH4, CO, and ethanol

Factors associated with oral health service utilization among young people in southern China

Abstract Objectives To identify the patterns and influencing factors of oral health service utilization among college students, and further to provide scientific evidence for policy making on oral health education and behavioral interventions for the college population. Methods The study population was college students in Southern China. Totally 678 students participated in the survey. A self-designed questionnaire based on Anderson’s model (predisposing factors, enabling factors, need factors) was used to survey college students. Descriptive statistics, χ2 test, and logistic regression were used to analyze influence factors of oral health service utilization among college students. Results The utilization rate of oral health service in the past 12 months was 30.2%. The primary type of oral health service was treatment (59.6%), and only 12.8% were for prevention. There were 39% of the participants having oral health diseases, of which dental caries (25.7%) and oral bleeding (22.2%) were the main problems. The results from logistic regression analysis revealed that students with better beliefs (OR = 1.84, 95% CI:=1.02–3.43), frequent consumption of sugary drinks (OR = 2.90, 95% CI:=1.90–4.47), teeth brushing frequency > = 2 times per day (OR = 2.09, 95% CI = 1.24–3.61), frequent floss utilization (OR = 2.63, 95% CI = 1.21–5.76), dental caries (OR = 2.07, 95% CI = 1.35–3.17) used oral health services higher, while those lived in rural areas (OR:0.52, 95% CI = 0.34–0.80), and had only a fair concern (OR = 0.48, 95% CI = 0.31–0.74) or no concern (OR = 0.26, 95% CI = 0.08–0.67) on oral health utilized oral health services lower. Conclusions Chinese college students demonstrate some knowledge and attitudes towards oral health. However, they tend to neglect oral hygiene and have limited understanding of their own oral issues. Furthermore, the utilization of oral services, such as treatment, remains remarkably low, despite the availability of long-term and favorable health insurance policies. The utilization of oral health services among college students is influenced by various factors, including residing in rural areas, consuming sugary beverages on a daily basis, brushing teeth at least twice a day, and practicing flossing