Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts

Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng' 201

R-Curve Response Of Silicon Carbide Whisker-Reinforced Alumina: Microstructural Influence

Rising fracture resistance with crack extension (R-curve response) can lead to improvements in the mechanical reliability of ceramics. To understand how microstructures influence the R-curve behavior, direct observations of crack interactions with microstructural features were conducted on SiC whisker-reinforced alumina. The contribution of the dominant toughening mechanisms to the R-curve behavior of these composites is discussed using experimental and theoretical studies

A Microcantilever-based Gas Flow Sensor for Flow Rate and Direction Detection

The purpose of this paper is to apply characteristics of residual stress that causes cantilever beams to bend for manufacturing a micro-structured gas flow sensor. This study uses a silicon wafer deposited silicon nitride layers, reassembled the gas flow sensor with four cantilever beams that perpendicular to each other and manufactured piezoresistive structure on each micro-cantilever by MEMS technologies, respectively. When the cantilever beams are formed after etching the silicon wafer, it bends up a little due to the released residual stress induced in the previous fabrication process. As air flows through the sensor upstream and downstream beam deformation was made, thus the airflow direction can be determined through comparing the resistance variation between different cantilever beams. The flow rate can also be measured by calculating the total resistance variations on the four cantilevers.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

Comparative bactericidal activities of daptomycin, glycopeptides, linezolid and tigecycline against blood isolates of Gram-positive bacteria in Taiwan

ABSTRACTIn-vitro MICs and minimum bactericidal concentrations (MBCs) of daptomycin, linezolid, tigecycline, vancomycin and teicoplanin against Gram-positive bacteria were determined using the broth microdilution method for ten blood isolates each of methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), including two vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and Enterococcus faecalis. One strain of VISA was tested in a time-kill synergism assay of daptomycin combined with oxacillin, imipenem, rifampicin and isepamicin. Daptomycin showed excellent in-vitro bactericidal activity against all the isolates tested, with no tolerance or synergism effects when combined with other agents, except with rifampicin against VISA. Vancomycin had better bactericidal activity against MRSA and MSSA than did teicoplanin. Linezolid had the poorest bactericidal activity against the isolates tested, with 100% tolerance by the MSSA and VRE isolates, and 80% tolerance by the MRSA isolates. Tolerance towards tigecycline was exhibited by 40% of the MRSA isolates, 100% of the MSSA and vancomycin-resistant E. faecalis isolates, and 90% of the vancomycin-resistant E. faecium isolates

Bacteraemia caused by Weissella confusa at a university hospital in Taiwan, 1997–2007

AbstractHuman infections caused by Weissella confusa are rarely reported. Ten patients with bacteraemia caused by W. confusa who were treated at a tertiary-care hospital in Taiwan during 1997–2007 were studied. All isolates were initially misidentified as various Lactobacillus and Leuconostoc species by two commercial automated identification methods, and were confirmed to be W. confusa by 16S rRNA sequencing analysis. MICs of these isolates for ten antimicrobial agents were determined by the agar dilution method. The characteristics of these patients included underlying malignancy (n = 4), presence of a central catheter (n = 6), surgery within the previous 3 months (n = 4) and concomitant polymicrobial bacteraemia (n = 5, 50%). Mortality was directly attributed to bacteraemia in two patients. All isolates exhibited high trimethoprim–sulphamethoxazole and ceftazidime MICs (≥128 mg/L) and were inhibited by linezolid, daptomycin, ceftobiprole and tigecycline at 4, 0.12, 2 and 0.12 mg/L, respectively. In conclusion, W. confusa should be included in the list of organisms causing bacteraemia in immunocompromised hosts. Novel antibiotics, including daptomycin, moxifloxacin, doripenem and tigecycline, exert good activity against W. confusa

Flavor and Spin Contents of the Nucleon in the Quark Model with Chiral Symmetry

A simple calculation in the framework of the chiral quark theory of Manohar and Georgi yields results that can account for many of the ''failures'' of the naive quark model: significant strange quark content in the nucleon as indicated by the value of $\sigma _{\pi N},$ the $\overline{u}$-$\overline{d}$ asymmetry in the nucleon as measured by the deviation from Gottfried sum rule and by the Drell-Yan process, as well as the various quark contributions to the nucleon spin as measured by the deep inelastic polarized lepton-nucleon scatterings.Comment: figure has been separated from tex file. No other changes. Preprint CMU-HEP94-3

The R-curve response of ceramics with microscopic reinforcements: Reinforcement and additive effects

Using direct observations with the scanning electron and optical microscopes, simultaneous measurements of fracture resistance versus crack length (R-curve behavior) and crack interactions with microstructural features at the crack tip and in its wake were made. Selecting whisker-reinforced aluminas and self-reinforced silicon nitrides, one can examine the effects of systematic modifications of microstructure and composition on the R-curve response and the mechanisms giving rise to it. Specifically, increases in whisker content and size can increase the R-Curve response, even for short crack lengths. In the self-reinforced silicon nitrides, changes in alumina: yttria additive ratios also modify the R-curve. Modeling of the R-curve response allows one to verify toughening mechanisms and, with experimental studies, to optimize the R-curve behavior in ceramics containing microscopic reinforcements, e.g., whiskers and elongated grain structures

Impact of measurement backaction on nuclear spin qubits in silicon

Phosphorus donor nuclear spins in silicon couple weakly to the environment making them promising candidates for high-fidelity qubits. The state of a donor nuclear spin qubit can be manipulated and read out using its hyperfine interaction with the electron confined by the donor potential. Here we use a master equation-based approach to investigate how the backaction from this electron-mediated measurement affects the lifetimes of single and multi-donor qubits. We analyze this process as a function of electric and magnetic fields, and hyperfine interaction strength. Apart from single nuclear spin flips, we identify an additional measurement-related mechanism, the nuclear spin flip-flop, which is specific to multi-donor qubits. Although this flip-flop mechanism reduces qubit lifetimes, we show that it can be effectively suppressed by the hyperfine Stark shift. We show that using atomic precision donor placement and engineered Stark shift, we can minimize the measurement backaction in multi-donor qubits, achieving larger nuclear spin lifetimes than single donor qubits

Detecting Action Items in Meetings

Abstract. We present a method for detecting action items in spontaneous meeting speech. Using a supervised approach incorporating prosodic, lexical and structural features, we can classify such items with a high degree of accuracy. We also examine how well various feature subclasses can perform this task on their own.

Noise Correlations in a 1D Silicon Spin Qubit Array

Correlated noise across multi-qubit architectures is known to be highly detrimental to the operation of error correcting codes and the long-term feasibility of quantum processors. The recent discovery of spatially dependent correlated noise in multi-qubit architectures of superconducting qubits arising from the impact of cosmic radiation and high-energy particles giving rise to quasiparticle poisoning within the substrate has led to intense investigations of mitigation strategies to address this. In contrast correlated noise in semiconductor spin qubits as a function of distance has not been reported to date. Here we report the magnitude, frequency and spatial dependence of noise correlations between four silicon quantum dot pairs as a function of inter-dot distance at frequencies from 0.3mHz to 1mHz. We find the magnitude of charge noise correlations, quantified by the magnitude square coherence $C_{xy}$, are significantly suppressed from $>0.5$ to $<0.1$ as the inter-dot distance increases from 75nm to 300nm. Using an analytical model we confirm that, in contrast to superconducting qubits, the dominant source of correlated noise arises from low frequency charge noise from the presence of two level fluctuators (TLFs) at the native silicon-silicon dioxide surface. Knowing this, we conclude with an important and timely discussion of charge noise mitigation strategies.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl