Neural Coreference Resolution for Dutch Parliamentary Documents with the DutchParliament Dataset

The task of coreference resolution concerns the clustering of words and phrases referring to the same entity in text, either in the same document or across multiple documents. The task is challenging, as it concerns elements of named entity recognition and reading comprehension, as well as others. In this paper, we introduce DutchParliament, a new Dutch coreference resolution dataset obtained through the manual annotation of 74 government debates, expanded with a domain-specific class. In contrast to existing datasets, which are often composed of news articles, blogs or other documents, the debates in DutchParliament are transcriptions of speech, and therefore offer a unique structure and way of referencing compared to other datasets. By constructing and releasing this dataset, we hope to facilitate the research on coreference resolution in niche domains, with different characteristics than traditional datasets. The DutchParliament dataset was compared to SoNaR-1 and RiddleCoref, two other existing Dutch coreference resolution corpora, to highlight its particularities and differences from existing datasets. Furthermore, two coreference resolution models for Dutch, the rule-based DutchCoref model and the neural e2eDutch model, were evaluated on the DutchParliament dataset to examine their performance on the DutchParliament dataset. It was found that the characteristics of the DutchParliament dataset are quite different from that of the other two datasets, although the performance of the e2eDutch model does not seem to be significantly affected by this. Furthermore, experiments were conducted by utilizing the metadata present in the DutchParliament corpus to improve the performance of the e2eDutch model. The results indicate that the addition of available metadata about speakers has a beneficial effect on the performance of the model, although the addition of the gender of speakers seems to have a limited effect

Identification and mapping of quantitative resistance to late blight (Phytophthora infestans) in Solanum habrochaites LA1777

Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) can have devastating effects on tomato production over the whole world. Most of the commercial cultivars of tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, are susceptible. Qualitative and quantitative resistance has been described in wild relatives of tomato. In general qualitative resistance can more easily be overcome by newly evolved isolates. Screening of three S. habrochaites accessions (LA1033, LA2099 and LA1777) through a whole plant assay showed that accession LA1777 had a good level of resistance to several isolates of P. infestans. To explore the potential in this wild species, an introgression line (IL) population of S. habrochaites LA1777 was used to screen individual chromosome regions of the wild species by a detached leaf assay. Two major isolates (T1,2 and T1,2,4) were used and two parameters were measured: lesion size (LS), and disease incidence (DI). Substantial variation was observed between the individual lines. QTLs were identified for LS but not for DI. The presence of five QTLs derived from LA1777 (Rlbq4a, Rlbq4b, Rlbq7, Rlbq8 and Rlbq12) results in unambiguous higher levels of resistance. All QTLs co-localized with previously described QTLs from S. habrochaites LA2099 except QTL Rlbq4b, which is therefore a novel QT

Entity Linking in the ParlaMint Corpus

The ParlaMint corpus is a multilingual corpus consisting of the parliamentary debates of seventeen European countries over a span of roughly five years. The automatically annotated versions of these corpora provide us with a wealth of linguistic information, including Named Entities. In order to further increase the research opportunities that can be created with this corpus, the linking of Named Entities to a knowledge base is a crucial step. If this can be done successfully and accurately, a lot of additional information can be gathered from the entities, such as political stance and party affiliation, not only within countries but also between the parliaments of different countries. However, due to the nature of the ParlaMint dataset, this entity linking task is challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of linking entities from ParlaMint in different languages to a knowledge base, and evaluating the performance of three entity linking methods. We will be using DBPedia spotlight, WikiData and YAGO as the entity linking tools, and evaluate them on local politicians from several countries. We discuss two problems that arise with the entity linking in the ParlaMint corpus, namely inflection, and aliasing or the existence of name variants in text. This paper provides a first baseline on entity linking performance on multiple multilingual parliamentary debates, describes the problems that occur when attempting to link entities in ParlaMint, and makes a first attempt at tackling the aforementioned problems with existing methods

Seedling salt tolerance in tomato

Soils with higher concentrations of salt are becoming more and more a constraint for many crops to obtain high yields. Wild tomato species, adapted to adverse environments, are a potential reservoir for genes underlying quantitative trait loci (QTL) related to salt tolerance in tomato. In this study two introgression line (IL) libraries derived from two different wild species, Solanum pennellii LA716 and Solanum lycopersicoides LA2951, were used to identify QTLs for salt tolerance in the seedling stage. In the S. pennellii IL library, four major QTLs were identified on chromosomes 6, 7 and 11. In the S. lycopersicoides IL library, six major QTLs were discovered which are located on chromosomes 4, 6, 9 and 12. Co-localization of QTLs on chromosome 6 in the two IL libraries and previously reports hinted that this locus might be conserved in the tomato crop. Three S. pennellii ILs (IL6-2, IL7-1 and IL7-5) harboring QTLs on chromosome 6 and 7 were crossed. Semi-dominance and dominance were shown for these three QTLs, and non-additive and epistatic interactions between them were observe

A Synthesis Method for Automatic Handling of Inter-patient Variability in Closed-loop Anesthesia

This paper presents a convex-optimization-based technique to obtain parameters for a PID feedback controller, used to control the infusion rate of the anesthetic drug propofol. The controller design is based on a set of identified patient models, relating propofol infusion to an EEG-based conciousness index. The main contribution lies in the method automatically taking inter-patient variability into account, i.e., it guarantees robustness (sensitivity peak) and performance (disturbance rejection) over a set of patient models, without the need for manual intervention. The method is demonstrated using a clinically relevant design example. A controller designed using the proposed method is currently scheduled for clinical evaluation

Prijzen van landbouwgrond in en om VINEX-locaties

Studie in opdracht van het Directoraat-Generaal voor de VolksHuisvesting van het ministerie van Verkeer, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieu. De studie laat zien dat er met behulp van gegevens van het Kadaster betrouwbare overzichten van prijzen van landbouwgrond in VINEX-gemeenten kunnen worden opgesteld. Zowel per BON-gebied (Besturen Op Niveau), zoals vastgesteld binnen de kaderwet Bestuur en Verandering als per cluster van overige Stadsgewesten, zoals aangeduid in de bijlage van het Besluit Locatiegebonden Subsidies (BLS). De prijzen van landbouwgronden in VINEX-locaties en VINEX-gemeenten blijken tussen 1993 en 1997 met 60% te zijn gestegen tot gemiddeld 55 gulden per vierkante meter. In dezelfde periode stegen de prijzen van agrarisch bestemde gronden met 30% tot 5 gulden per vierkante meter