AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction

Argument generation is a challenging task in natural language processing, which requires rigorous reasoning and proper content organization. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought prompting that breaks down a complex task into intermediate steps, we propose Americano, a novel framework with agent interaction for argument generation. Our approach decomposes the generation process into sequential actions grounded on argumentation theory, which first executes actions sequentially to generate argumentative discourse components, and then produces a final argument conditioned on the components. To further mimic the human writing process and improve the left-to-right generation paradigm of current autoregressive language models, we introduce an argument refinement module which automatically evaluates and refines argument drafts based on feedback received. We evaluate our framework on the task of counterargument generation using a subset of Reddit/CMV dataset. The results show that our method outperforms both end-to-end and chain-of-thought prompting methods and can generate more coherent and persuasive arguments with diverse and rich contents

Path-integral quantization of tensionless (super) string

In this work, we study the tensionless (super)string in the formalism of path-integral quantization. We introduce BMS $bc$ and $\beta\gamma$ ghosts intrinsically by accounting for the Faddeev-Popov determinants appeared in fixing the gauges. We then do canonical quantization and obtain the critical dimensions for different tensionless strings. We find that among four kinds of tensionless superstrings, the $\mathcal{N}=2$ homogeneous and inhomogeneous doublet tensionless superstrings have the same critical dimension as the usual superstrings. Taking the BMS $bc$ and $\beta\gamma$ ghosts as new types of BMS free field theories, we find that their enhanced underlying symmetries are generated by BMS-Kac-Moody algebras, with the Kac-Moody subalgebras being built from a three-dimensional non-abelian and non-semi-simple Lie algebra.Comment: 46 pages, 1 table; v2: typos correcte

Facile Synthesis and Special Phase Transformation of Hydrophilic Iron Oxides Nanoparticles

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), γ-Fe2O3, with hydrophilic surfaces are fabricated in ethylene glycol solutions, without surfactant or additive, by solvothermal process from α-Fe2O3 nanoparticle as precursors. With the addition of a trace of hydrazine hydrate, the cubic phase Fe3O4 nanoparticles are obtained instead of γ-Fe2O3. The saturation magnetization value of γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles is up to 74.3 emu/g. This study provides a low cost, safe, and universal route to serve as excellent biocompatibility magnetic core for future applications in biomedical, agriculture, and horticulture applications

TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention

In this paper, we focus on exploring the robustness of the 3D object detection in point clouds, which has been rarely discussed in existing approaches. We observe two crucial phenomena: 1) the detection accuracy of the hard objects, e.g., Pedestrians, is unsatisfactory, 2) when adding additional noise points, the performance of existing approaches decreases rapidly. To alleviate these problems, a novel TANet is introduced in this paper, which mainly contains a Triple Attention (TA) module, and a Coarse-to-Fine Regression (CFR) module. By considering the channel-wise, point-wise and voxel-wise attention jointly, the TA module enhances the crucial information of the target while suppresses the unstable cloud points. Besides, the novel stacked TA further exploits the multi-level feature attention. In addition, the CFR module boosts the accuracy of localization without excessive computation cost. Experimental results on the validation set of KITTI dataset demonstrate that, in the challenging noisy cases, i.e., adding additional random noisy points around each object,the presented approach goes far beyond state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, for the 3D object detection task of the KITTI benchmark, our approach ranks the first place on Pedestrian class, by using the point clouds as the only input. The running speed is around 29 frames per second.Comment: AAAI 2020(Oral

Health status prediction for the elderly based on machine learning

Health and social care services are crucial to old people. The provision of services to the elderly with care needs requires more accurate predictions of the health status of the elderly to rationalize the allocation of the limited social care resources. The traditional analytical methods have proved incapable of predicting the demands of today's society, compared to which machine learning methods can more accurately capture the nonlinear relationships between the variables. To ascertain visually the performance of these machine learning methods regarding the prediction of the elderly's care needs, we designed and verified the experiment

ApoG2 induces cell cycle arrest of nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells by suppressing the c-Myc signaling pathway

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>apogossypolone (ApoG2) is a novel derivate of gossypol. We previously have reported that ApoG2 is a promising compound that kills nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) cells by inhibiting the antiapoptotic function of Bcl-2 proteins. However, some researchers demonstrate that the antiproliferative effect of gossypol on breast cancer cells is mediated by induction of cell cycle arrest. So this study was aimed to investigate the effect of ApoG2 on cell cycle proliferation in NPC cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that ApoG2 significantly suppressed the expression of c-Myc in NPC cells and induced arrest at the DNA synthesis (S) phase in a large percentage of NPC cells. Immunoblot analysis showed that expression of c-Myc protein was significantly downregulated by ApoG2 and that the expression of c-Myc's downstream molecules cyclin D1 and cyclin E were inhibited whereas p21 was induced. To further identify the cause-effect relationship between the suppression of c-Myc signaling pathway and induction of cell cycle arrest, the expression of c-Myc was interfered by siRNA. The results of cell cycle analysis showed that the downregulation of c-Myc signaling pathway by siRNA interference could cause a significant arrest of NPC cell at S phase of the cell cycle. In CNE-2 xenografts, ApoG2 significantly downregulated the expression of c-Myc and suppressed tumor growth <it>in vivo</it>.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings indicated that ApoG2 could potently disturb the proliferation of NPC cells by suppressing c-Myc signaling pathway. This data suggested that the inhibitory effect of ApoG2 on NPC cell cycle proliferation might contribute to its use in anticancer therapy.</p

ApoG2, a novel inhibitor of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, induces apoptosis and suppresses tumor growth in nasopharyngeal carcinoma xenografts

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a common malignant tumor in South China. It has been reported that overexpression of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins in NPC has caused the lack of long-term efficacy of conventional therapies. Apogossypolone (ApoG2), a novel small-molecule inhibitor of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, has been discovered as the optimized derivative of gossypol. In this study, we found that in NPC cells, ApoG2 totally blocked the antiapoptotic function of Bcl-2 family proteins without affecting the expression levels of these proteins. ApoG2 selectively inhibited proliferation of 3 NPC cell lines (C666-1, CNE-1 and CNE-2) that highly expressed the antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins. This inhibitory activity was associated with release of cytochrome c, activation of caspase-9 and caspase-3 and apoptosis of sensitive NPC cells. However, ApoG2 had no obvious inhibitory effect on NPC cell line HONE-1, which expressed antiapoptotic Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL at a low level. We further found that ApoG2 effectively suppressed tumor growth of NPC xenografts in nude mice and enhanced the antitumor effect of CDDP (cisplatin) on NPC cells in vitro and in vivo . Immunohistochemical results showed that the expression of CD31 decreased after ApoG2 treatment, which suggested inhibition of angiogenesis in NPC xenografts. Our findings strongly suggest that ApoG2 may serve as a novel inhibitor of Bcl-2 family proteins and, by targeting these proteins, may become a promising drug for the treatment of NPC. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60986/1/23752_ftp.pd