Exploiting Sentence Embedding for Medical Question Answering

Despite the great success of word embedding, sentence embedding remains a not-well-solved problem. In this paper, we present a supervised learning framework to exploit sentence embedding for the medical question answering task. The learning framework consists of two main parts: 1) a sentence embedding producing module, and 2) a scoring module. The former is developed with contextual self-attention and multi-scale techniques to encode a sentence into an embedding tensor. This module is shortly called Contextual self-Attention Multi-scale Sentence Embedding (CAMSE). The latter employs two scoring strategies: Semantic Matching Scoring (SMS) and Semantic Association Scoring (SAS). SMS measures similarity while SAS captures association between sentence pairs: a medical question concatenated with a candidate choice, and a piece of corresponding supportive evidence. The proposed framework is examined by two Medical Question Answering(MedicalQA) datasets which are collected from real-world applications: medical exam and clinical diagnosis based on electronic medical records (EMR). The comparison results show that our proposed framework achieved significant improvements compared to competitive baseline approaches. Additionally, a series of controlled experiments are also conducted to illustrate that the multi-scale strategy and the contextual self-attention layer play important roles for producing effective sentence embedding, and the two kinds of scoring strategies are highly complementary to each other for question answering problems.Comment: 8 page

Reproductive Contributions of Foreign Wives in Taiwan: Similarities and Differences among Major Source Countries

In light of the entrenchment of sub-replacement fertility and the sharp increase in the stock of foreign wives in Taiwan in recent years, this research studies the reproductive contributions of Taiwan’s foreign wives from the top five source countries (China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines), based mainly on an application of a multinomial logit model to the micro data of the 2003 census of foreign wives. Our main findings are as follows. First, the overall fertility level of the foreign wives was probably somewhat higher than that of the native-born women and definitely lower than the replacement level. Second, among the five nationalities, those from China were much less reproductive than those from the other countries, mainly because the former were more prone to (1) having a rather old marriage age, (2) having a very large spousal age gap, (3) being separated or divorced, (4) having their current marriage being their second marriage, and (5) having a veteran as the husband. Third, among the four Southeast Asian nationalities, those from Indonesia and the Philippines were more reproductive than those from Thailand and Vietnam. This contrast was a muted reflection of the fertility difference in countries of origin. Fourth, for every nationality, marriage duration and marriage age were the most powerful explanatory factors and must be included in the model to avoid getting misleading estimated coefficients of other less powerful explanatory factors, whereas current age was a spurious factor that should not be used in the model. Fifth, in the context of marriage duration and marriage age, the explanatory factors with rather strong explanatory powers for at least one nationality included spousal age gap, marital status, remarriage status, co-residence with parent, and wife’s employment status. Sixth, the expected negative effect of wife’s educational attainment on lifetime fertility turned out to be either non-existent or modest. In particular, it had practically no effect on the probability of being childless. These findings implied that getting better educated foreign wives could increase the quality of their children with little or no reduction in the number of their children and in their probability of being childlessASEAN countries, China, international marriage, international migration, fertility, Taiwan

Reproductive contributions of Taiwan´s foreign wives from the top five source countries

This research studies the reproductive contributions of Taiwan’s foreign wives from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, based on applications of the multinomial logit model to the micro data of the 2003 Census of Foreign Spouses. Wives from China are found to have the lowest lifetime fertility of 1.4 children, mainly because they were more prone to marry later, have a very large spousal age gap, be separated or divorced, and have their current marriage be their second marriage. The effect of wife’s educational attainment on lifetime fertility turned out to be either modest or nonexistent.fertility, international marriage, international migration, reproductive contribution, Taiwan

Understanding big consumer opinion data for market-driven product design

Big consumer data provide new opportunities for business administrators to explore the value to fulfil customer requirements (CRs). Generally, they are presented as purchase records, online behaviour, etc. However, distinctive characteristics of big data, Volume, Variety, Velocity and Value or ‘4Vs’, lead to many conventional methods for customer understanding potentially fail to handle such data. A visible research gap with practical significance is to develop a framework to deal with big consumer data for CRs understanding. Accordingly, a research study is conducted to exploit the value of these data in the perspective of product designers. It starts with the identification of product features and sentiment polarities from big consumer opinion data. A Kalman filter method is then employed to forecast the trends of CRs and a Bayesian method is proposed to compare products. The objective is to help designers to understand the changes of CRs and their competitive advantages. Finally, using opinion data in Amazon.com, a case study is presented to illustrate how the proposed techniques are applied. This research is argued to incorporate an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and engineering design. It aims to facilitate designers by exploiting valuable information from big consumer data for market-driven product design

Transformation Thermotics and Extended Theories

This open access book describes the theory of transformation thermotics and its extended theories for the active control of macroscopic thermal phenomena of artificial systems, which is in sharp contrast to classical thermodynamics comprising the four thermodynamic laws for the passive description of macroscopic thermal phenomena of natural systems. This monograph consists of two parts, i.e., inside and outside metamaterials, and covers the basic concepts and mathematical methods, which are necessary to understand the thermal problems extensively investigated in physics, but also in other disciplines of engineering and materials. The analyses rely on models solved by analytical techniques accompanied by computer simulations and laboratory experiments. This monograph can not only be a bridge linking three first-class disciplines, i.e., physics, thermophysics, and materials science, but also contribute to interdisciplinary development

Transformation Thermotics and Extended Theories

This open access book describes the theory of transformation thermotics and its extended theories for the active control of macroscopic thermal phenomena of artificial systems, which is in sharp contrast to classical thermodynamics comprising the four thermodynamic laws for the passive description of macroscopic thermal phenomena of natural systems. This monograph consists of two parts, i.e., inside and outside metamaterials, and covers the basic concepts and mathematical methods, which are necessary to understand the thermal problems extensively investigated in physics, but also in other disciplines of engineering and materials. The analyses rely on models solved by analytical techniques accompanied by computer simulations and laboratory experiments. This monograph can not only be a bridge linking three first-class disciplines, i.e., physics, thermophysics, and materials science, but also contribute to interdisciplinary development

BM-BC: A Bayesian Method of Base Calling for Solexa Sequence Data

Base calling is a critical step in the Solexa next-generation sequencing procedure. It compares the position-specific intensity measurements that reflect the signal strength of four possible bases (A, C, G, T) at each genomic position, and outputs estimates of the true sequences for short reads of DNA or RNA. We present a Bayesian method of base calling, BM-BC, for Solexa-GA sequencing data. The Bayesian method builds on a hierarchical model that accounts for three sources of noise in the data, which are known to affect the accuracy of the base calls: fading, phasing, and cross-talk between channels. We show that the new method improves the precision of base calling compared with currently leading methods. Furthermore, the proposed method provides a probability score that measures the confidence of each base call. This probability score can be used to estimate the false discovery rate of the base calling or to rank the precision of the estimated DNA sequences, which in turn can be useful for downstream analysis such as sequence alignment.NIH/NCI R01 CA132897, K25 CA123344FONDECYT 1100010Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES