THE INTERACTION OF WAKES GENERATED BY SUBMERGED PROPAGATING OBJECTS WITH THE TURBULENT SUBSURFACE MIXED LAYER

In this study, the numeral simulations were conducted using OpenFOAM to investigate how changes in mixed layer depth (MLD), speed and depth of a submerged body (SB) affect observable signatures of the SB moving beneath a mixed layer. We studied the effect of these factors on both surface and interior temperature perturbations. This study has shown that the wake generated by an SB in the presence of a mixed layer has a greater surface temperature signature than that without it. Furthermore, the deeper the MLD, the greater the thermal signal. This is because when the mixed layer is present, the region is more weakly stratified than it would be without a mixed layer, and the reduced buoyancy force permits fluid entering the mixed layer to penetrate farther. Through variation in speed and depth of SB, we found that faster SB results in stronger turbulence, greater temperature change, and larger areas of surface wake penetration. Also, deeper SB motion levels result in greater surface temperature signals by dredging up colder water from the SB surroundings to the surface. This study confirmed the possibility of detection through surface temperature changes formed by wakes inevitably generated by submerged objects.Office of Naval Research, Washington, DC 20375Dae-wi, Republic of Korea NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA

Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previously, Min et al. (2020) have tackled this issue by generating disambiguated questions for all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question. This can be effective, but not ideal for providing an answer to the user. Instead, we propose to ask a clarification question, where the user's response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user's intention. We first present CAMBIGNQ, a dataset consisting of 5,654 ambiguous questions, each with relevant passages, possible answers, and a clarification question. The clarification questions were efficiently created by generating them using InstructGPT and manually revising them as necessary. We then define a pipeline of tasks and design appropriate evaluation metrics. Lastly, we achieve 61.3 F1 on ambiguity detection and 40.5 F1 on clarification-based QA, providing strong baselines for future work.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Dialogizer: Context-aware Conversational-QA Dataset Generation from Textual Sources

To address the data scarcity issue in Conversational question answering (ConvQA), a dialog inpainting method, which utilizes documents to generate ConvQA datasets, has been proposed. However, the original dialog inpainting model is trained solely on the dialog reconstruction task, resulting in the generation of questions with low contextual relevance due to insufficient learning of question-answer alignment. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Dialogizer, which has the capability to automatically generate ConvQA datasets with high contextual relevance from textual sources. The framework incorporates two training tasks: question-answer matching (QAM) and topic-aware dialog generation (TDG). Moreover, re-ranking is conducted during the inference phase based on the contextual relevance of the generated questions. Using our framework, we produce four ConvQA datasets by utilizing documents from multiple domains as the primary source. Through automatic evaluation using diverse metrics, as well as human evaluation, we validate that our proposed framework exhibits the ability to generate datasets of higher quality compared to the baseline dialog inpainting model.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 main conferenc

Pimecrolimus interferes the therapeutic efficacy of human mesenchymal stem cells in atopic dermatitis by regulating NFAT-COX2 signaling

Abstract Background Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) therapy has recently been considered a promising treatment for atopic dermatitis (AD) due to their immunomodulation and tissue regeneration ability. In our previous studies, we demonstrated that hMSCs alleviate allergic inflammation in murine AD model by inhibiting the activation of mast cells and B cells. Also our phase I/IIa clinical trial showed clinical efficacy and safety of hMSCs in moderate-to-severe adult AD patients. However, hMSCs therapy against atopic dermatitis have had poor results in clinical field. Therefore, we investigated the reason behind this result. We hypothesized that drug–cell interaction could interfere with the therapeutic efficacy of stem cells, and investigated whether coadministration with pimecrolimus, one of the topical calcineurin inhibitors, could influence the therapeutic potential of human umbilical cord blood mesenchymal stem cells (hUCB-MSCs) in AD. Methods hUCB-MSCs were subcutaneously injected to AD-induced mice with or without pimecrolimus topical application. To examine whether pimecrolimus influenced the immunomodulatory activity of hUCB-MSCs, hUCB-MSCs were treated with pimecrolimus. Results Pimecrolimus disturbed the therapeutic effect of hUCB-MSCs when they were co-administered in murine AD model. Moreover, the inhibitory functions of hUCB-MSCs against type 2 helper T (Th2) cell differentiation and mast cell activation were also deteriorated by pimecrolimus treatment. Interestingly, we found that pimecrolimus decreased the production of PGE2, one of the most critical immunomodulatory factors in hUCB-MSCs. And we demonstrated that pimecrolimus downregulated COX2-PGE2 axis by inhibiting nuclear translocation of NFAT3. Conclusions Coadministration of pimecrolimus with hMSCs could interfere with the therapeutic efficacy of hMSCs in atopic dermatitis, and this is the first study that figured out the interaction of hMSCs with other drugs in cell therapy of atopic dermatitis. Therefore, this study might give rise to improvement of the clinical application of hMSCs therapy and facilitate the widespread application of hMSCs in clinical field