Conceptualized Representation Learning for Chinese Biomedical Text Mining

Biomedical text mining is becoming increasingly important as the number of biomedical documents and web data rapidly grows. Recently, word representation models such as BERT has gained popularity among researchers. However, it is difficult to estimate their performance on datasets containing biomedical texts as the word distributions of general and biomedical corpora are quite different. Moreover, the medical domain has long-tail concepts and terminologies that are difficult to be learned via language models. For the Chinese biomedical text, it is more difficult due to its complex structure and the variety of phrase combinations. In this paper, we investigate how the recently introduced pre-trained language model BERT can be adapted for Chinese biomedical corpora and propose a novel conceptualized representation learning approach. We also release a new Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark (\textbf{ChineseBLUE}). We examine the effectiveness of Chinese pre-trained models: BERT, BERT-wwm, RoBERTa, and our approach. Experimental results on the benchmark show that our approach could bring significant gain. We release the pre-trained model on GitHub: https://github.com/alibaba-research/ChineseBLUE.Comment: WSDM2020 Health Da

Transformational leadership and trust in leadership impacts on employee commitment

Purpose -This study explores the effects of leadership style and trust in leadership on employees' affective commitment in the context of a global pandemic. Design/methodology/approach -A total of 580 valid questionnaires were collected online, targeting hospitality and tourism employees working from home during a particular period of the COVID-19 Coronavirus crisis. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data with AMOS software. Findings -The findings indicated that perceived transformational leadership was a positive predictor of trust in leadership and affective commitment. In addition to the positive contribution to commitment, trust in leadership also mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment. Originality/value -The current study contributes to the literature on leadership and organizational commitment. The results of this study may provide a valuable guide to organizations, leaders, and young employees

Mid-Infrared Self-Similar Compression of Picosecond Pulse in an Inversely Tapered Silicon Ridge Waveguide

On chip high quality and high degree pulse compression is desirable in the realization of integrated ultrashort pulse sources, which are important for nonlinear photonics and spectroscopy. In this paper, we design a simple inversely tapered silicon ridge waveguide with exponentially decreasing dispersion profile along the propagation direction, and numerically investigate self-similar pulse compression of the fundamental soliton within the mid-infrared spectral region. When higher-order dispersion (HOD), higher-order nonlinearity (HON), losses (α), and variation of the Kerr nonlinear coefficient γ(z) are considered in the extended nonlinear Schrödinger equation, a 1 ps input pulse at the wavelength of 2490 nm is successfully compressed to 57.29 fs in only 5.1-cm of propagation, along with a compression factor Fc of 17.46. We demonstrated that the impacts of HOD and HON are minor on the pulse compression process, compared with that of α and variation of γ(z). Our research results provide a promising solution to realize integrated mid-infrared ultrashort pulse sources

The perspectives of NETosis on the progression of obesity and obesity-related diseases: mechanisms and applications

Obesity is a disease commonly associated with urbanization and can also be characterized as a systemic, chronic metabolic condition resulting from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified obesity as the most serious chronic disease that is increasingly prevalent in the world population. If left untreated, it can lead to dangerous health issues such as hypertension, hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, hyperuricemia, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, atherosclerosis, and vulnerability to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events. The specific mechanisms by which obesity affects the development of these diseases can be refined to the effect on immune cells. Existing studies have shown that the development of obesity and its associated diseases is closely related to the balance or lack thereof in the number and function of various immune cells, of which neutrophils are the most abundant immune cells in humans, infiltrating and accumulating in the adipose tissues of obese individuals, whereas NETosis, as a newly discovered type of neutrophil-related cell death, its role in the development of obesity and related diseases is increasingly emphasized. The article reviews the significant role that NETosis plays in the development of obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes and its complications. It discusses the epidemiology and negative impacts of obesity, explains the mechanisms of NETosis, and examines its potential as a targeted drug to treat obesity and associated ailments

CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the recent progress in biomedical language understanding, is gradually changing medical practice. With the development of biomedical language understanding benchmarks, AI applications are widely used in the medical field. However, most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it challenging to replicate many of the successes in English for other languages. To facilitate research in this direction, we collect real-world biomedical data and present the first Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (CBLUE) benchmark: a collection of natural language understanding tasks including named entity recognition, information extraction, clinical diagnosis normalization, single-sentence/sentence-pair classification, and an associated online platform for model evaluation, comparison, and analysis. To establish evaluation on these tasks, we report empirical results with the current 11 pre-trained Chinese models, and experimental results show that state-of-the-art neural models perform by far worse than the human ceiling. Our benchmark is released at \url{https://tianchi.aliyun.com/dataset/dataDetail?dataId=95414&lang=en-us}

Comparative Analysis of Human Protein-Coding and Noncoding RNAs between Brain and 10 Mixed Cell Lines by RNA-Seq

In their expression process, different genes can generate diverse functional products, including various protein-coding or noncoding RNAs. Here, we investigated the protein-coding capacities and the expression levels of their isoforms for human known genes, the conservation and disease association of long noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) with two transcriptome sequencing datasets from human brain tissues and 10 mixed cell lines. Comparative analysis revealed that about two-thirds of the genes expressed between brain and cell lines are the same, but less than one-third of their isoforms are identical. Besides those genes specially expressed in brain and cell lines, about 66% of genes expressed in common encoded different isoforms. Moreover, most genes dominantly expressed one isoform and some genes only generated protein-coding (or noncoding) RNAs in one sample but not in another. We found 282 human genes could encode both protein-coding and noncoding RNAs through alternative splicing in the two samples. We also identified more than 1,000 long ncRNAs, and most of those long ncRNAs contain conserved elements across either 46 vertebrates or 33 placental mammals or 10 primates. Further analysis showed that some long ncRNAs differentially expressed in human breast cancer or lung cancer, several of those differentially expressed long ncRNAs were validated by RT-PCR. In addition, those validated differentially expressed long ncRNAs were found significantly correlated with certain breast cancer or lung cancer related genes, indicating the important biological relevance between long ncRNAs and human cancers. Our findings reveal that the differences of gene expression profile between samples mainly result from the expressed gene isoforms, and highlight the importance of studying genes at the isoform level for completely illustrating the intricate transcriptome

Comparisons of heat treatment on the electrochemical performance of different carbons for lithium-oxygen cells

Lithium-oxygen (Li-O2) cells are a promising power source, and carbons are an attractive non-metal catalyst for air electrodes. To improve the electrochemical performance, various carbons are heated in an inert atmosphere. It is found that heat treatment at 900 C can differently improve the electrochemical performance of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (CNTs), acetylene carbon black (AB) and activated carbon (AC), but the improvement of CNTs is the most obvious. After heat treatment, the peak current density of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and the 1st discharge capacity of CNTs increase ∼30% and ∼125%, respectively, while the charge transfer reaction resistance and the Warburg diffusion resistance decrease ∼7.0% and ∼11.1%, respectively. AC has the highest charge capacities and capacity retention ratio in spite of little influence by heat treatment. The possible mechanism and reasons are analyzed using different techniques. Microstructure is superior to conductivity for enhancing the rechargeability and the cyclability, and heat treatment is effective for some carbon materials in improving the electrochemical performance of Li-O2 cells. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Seasonal variations of nonmotor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease in Southeast China

Abstract. Background:. Studies suggest seasonal fluctuations of symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients in Western countries. However, the association between seasonal change and variation in nonmotor symptoms (NMS) in Chinese PD patients is unclear. Here, we studied whether there is a change rule with annual cycle with severity of NMS for patients with PD in Southeast China. Methods:. We studied 1005 PD patients between April 2008 and October 2020. Patients were classified into four seasons according to the 24 Chinese solar terms, based on assessment date. We compared comprehensive NMS scales and polysomnography parameters among groups and conducted further analysis of disease severity. Results:. Among the 1005 patients studied, the mean age was 64.2 ± 9.7 years and 569 (56.6%) of them were men. Relative to the summer group, patients assessed during winter had higher Scales for Outcomes in Parkinson's disease-Autonomic Dysfunction (SCOPA-AUT) scores (P = 0.045). The sleep efficiency factor scores of Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index in patients were higher during spring than summer (P = 0.009). Among patients who completed polysomnography during the same period (n = 135), compared with summer follow-ups, we observed a higher percentage of NREMS1 in winter and spring follow-ups (P = 0.042, P = 0.011), a higher NREMS1 time in spring follow-ups (P = 0.0024), a lower NREMS2 time in winter follow-ups (P = 0.007), and a higher percentage of phasic rapid eye movement (REM)-sleep without atonia in autumn and winter follow-ups (P = 0.026 and P = 0.020, respectively). In a subset of patients with PD and REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD; n = 182), those visited during winter had higher scores for RBD questionnaire-Hong Kong and its factor 1 (dream-related sub-score) than those visited during summer (P = 0.034, P = 0.020). We observed similar findings for SCOPA-AUT and sleep efficiency factor scores in early stage patients in subgroup analysis. Conclusions:. PD patients assessed for follow-up during summer showed less severe symptoms of autonomic dysfunction and RBD symptoms than those assessed in winter, and less sleep disturbance than those in spring and winter, suggesting that seasonal change and NMS fluctuation are related, especially in patients with early stage PD

KRIMSTI, Feras (Berlin, 2014). Die Unruhenvon 1850 in Aleppo – Gewalt im urbanen Raum, «Studien des Modernen Orient» Band Nr.33

On chip high quality and high degree pulse compression is desirable in the realization of integrated ultrashort pulse sources, which are important for nonlinear photonics and spectroscopy. In this paper, we design a simple inversely tapered silicon ridge waveguide with exponentially decreasing dispersion profile along the propagation direction, and numerically investigate self-similar pulse compression of the fundamental soliton within the mid-infrared spectral region. When higher-order dispersion (HOD), higher-order nonlinearity (HON), losses (α), and variation of the Kerr nonlinear coefficient γ(z) are considered in the extended nonlinear Schrödinger equation, a 1 ps input pulse at the wavelength of 2490 nm is successfully compressed to 57.29 fs in only 5.1-cm of propagation, along with a compression factor Fc of 17.46. We demonstrated that the impacts of HOD and HON are minor on the pulse compression process, compared with that of α and variation of γ(z). Our research results provide a promising solution to realize integrated mid-infrared ultrashort pulse sources