21 research outputs found
Unsupervised Summarization for Chat Logs with Topic-Oriented Ranking and Context-Aware Auto-Encoders
Automatic chat summarization can help people quickly grasp important
information from numerous chat messages. Unlike conventional documents, chat
logs usually have fragmented and evolving topics. In addition, these logs
contain a quantity of elliptical and interrogative sentences, which make the
chat summarization highly context dependent. In this work, we propose a novel
unsupervised framework called RankAE to perform chat summarization without
employing manually labeled data. RankAE consists of a topic-oriented ranking
strategy that selects topic utterances according to centrality and diversity
simultaneously, as well as a denoising auto-encoder that is carefully designed
to generate succinct but context-informative summaries based on the selected
utterances. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a large-scale dataset
of chat logs from a customer service environment and build an annotated set
only for model evaluation. Experimental results show that RankAE significantly
outperforms other unsupervised methods and is able to generate high-quality
summaries in terms of relevance and topic coverage.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021, 9 page
Topic-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Summarization for Customer Service with Saliency-Aware Topic Modeling
In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service
efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in
which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this
work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly
abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken
dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the
underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches
difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific
information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively
perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this
work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS)
jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented
summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a
real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our
method against several strong baselines.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021, 9 page
Effects of a novel chitosan formulation treatment on quality attributes and storage behavior of harvested litchi fruit
The effects of Kadozan (a novel chitosan formulation) treatment on physiological attribute, nutritional quality and storage behavior of harvested “Wuye” litchi fruit were studied. Compared with control litchis, Kadozan treatment significantly decreased fruit respiration rate, retarded the increase of pericarp cell membrane permeability, maintained higher contents of anthocyanins and flavonoids and higher values of L∗, a∗ and b∗ in litchi pericarp, and reduced the decreases of titratable acidity, total soluble solids, total soluble sugars, and vitamin C contents in litchi pulp, maintaining better quality of litchis. Furthermore, Kadozan treatment decreased browning index and disease index of litchis, kept higher rate of commercially acceptable fruit, and reduced fruit weight loss, showing better storage behavior of litchis under ambient temperature. The optimal Kadozan treatment for litchis was the 1:100 (VKadozan: VKadozan + Water) dilution, which might be a promising method for keeping quality and prolonging shelf-life of harvested “Wuye” litchi fruit
Probiotic Supplements: Hope or Hype?
Probiotic bacteria have been associated with various health benefits and included in overwhelming number of foods. Today, probiotic supplements are consumed with increasing regularity and record a rapidly growing economic value. With billions of heterogeneous populations of probiotics per serving, probiotic supplements contain the largest quantity of probiotics across all functional foods. They often carry antibiotic-resistant determinants that can be transferred to and accumulate in resident bacteria of the gastrointestinal tract and risk their acquisitions by opportunistic pathogens. While the health benefits of probiotics have been widely publicized, this health risk, however, is underrepresented in both scientific studies and public awareness. On the other hand, the human gut presents conditions that are unfavorable for bacteria, including probiotics. It remains uncertain if probiotics from supplements can tolerate acids and bile salts that may undermine their effectiveness in conferring health benefits. Here, we put into perspective the perceived health benefits and the long-term safety of consuming probiotic supplements, specifically bringing intolerance to acids and bile salts, and the long-standing issue of antibiotic-resistant gene transfer into sharp focus. We report that probiotics from supplements examined in this study have poor tolerance to acids and bile salts while also displaying resistance to multiple antibiotics. They could also adapt and gain resistance to streptomycin in vitro. In an environment where consuming supplements is considered a norm, our results and that of others will put in perspective the persisting concerns surrounding probiotic supplements so that the current hype does not overpower the hope
Relatively Low Level of Antigen-specific Monocytes Detected in Blood from Untreated Tuberculosis Patients Using CD4<sup>+</sup> T-cell Receptor Tetramers
<div><p>The <em>in vivo</em> kinetics of antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in patients with advanced and convalescent tuberculosis (TB) is not well characterized. In order to target <em>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</em> (MTB) peptides- and HLA-DR-holding monocytes and macrophages, 2 MTB peptide-specific CD4<sup>+</sup> T-cell receptor (TCR) tetramers eu and hu were successfully constructed. Peripheral blood (PBL) samples from inpatients with advanced pulmonary TB (PTB) were analyzed using flow cytometry, and the percentages of tetramer-bound CD14<sup>+</sup> monocytes ranged from 0.26–1.44% and 0.21–0.95%, respectively; significantly higher than those measured in PBL samples obtained from non-TB patients, healthy donors, and umbilical cords. These tetramers were also able to specifically detect macrophages <em>in situ via</em> immunofluorescent staining. The results of the continuous time-point tracking of the tetramer-positive rates in PBL samples from active PTB outpatients undergoing treatment show that the median percentages were at first low before treatment, increased to their highest levels during the first month, and then began to decrease during the second month until finally reaching and maintaining a relatively low level after 3–6 months. These results suggest that there is a relatively low level of MTB-specific monocytes in advanced and untreated patients. Further experiments show that MTB induces apoptosis in CD14<sup>+</sup> cells, and the percentage of apoptotic monocytes dramatically decreases after treatment. Therefore, the relatively low level of MTB-specific monocytes is probably related to the apoptosis or necrosis of APCs due to live bacteria and their growth. The bactericidal effects of anti-TB drugs, as well as other unknown factors, would induce a peak value during the first month of treatment, and a relatively low level would be subsequently reached and maintained until all of the involved factors reached equilibrium. These tetramers have diagnostic potential and can provide valuable insights into the mechanisms of antigen presentation and its relationship with TB infection and latent TB infection.</p> </div
HLA-DRB1 alleles of 9 active PTB outpatients.
<p>HLA-DRB1 alleles of 9 active PTB outpatients.</p
<i>In situ</i> detection of tetramer-bound MTB APCs using confocal laser-scanning microscopy.
<p>(A) The MTB antigen and peptide/HLA-DR were detected using <i>in situ</i> immunofluorescent staining with anti-MTB antibody and TCR tetramer, respectively. The nucleus is stained blue (panel 1), TCR tetramer is stained green (panel 2), and MTB antigen is stained red (panel 3). Panel 4 shows a merged image. (B) CD14 and peptide/HLA-DR were detected using i<i>n situ</i> immunofluorescent staining with anti-CD14 antibody and TCR tetramer, respectively. The nucleus is labeled in blue (panel 1), CD14 is labeled in green (panel 2), and the TCR tetramer is labeled in red (panel 3). Panel 4 shows a merged image. Lymph node and lung sections of active TB patients show co-staining in both (A) and (B), but no staining or only anti-CD14 antibody staining were observed in the lung and lymph node sections from non-PTB patients.</p