Automatic Rule Generation for Time Expression Normalization

The understanding of time expressions includes two sub-tasks: recognition and normalization. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the recognition of time expressions while research on normalization has lagged behind. Existing SOTA normalization methods highly rely on rules or grammars designed by experts, which limits their performance on emerging corpora, such as social media texts. In this paper, we model time expression normalization as a sequence of operations to construct the normalized temporal value, and we present a novel method called ARTime, which can automatically generate normalization rules from training data without expert interventions. Specifically, ARTime automatically captures possible operation sequences from annotated data and generates normalization rules on time expressions with common surface forms. The experimental results show that ARTime can significantly surpass SOTA methods on the Tweets benchmark, and achieves competitive results with existing expert-engineered rule methods on the TempEval-3 benchmark.Comment: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 202

Enhancing Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs through Evidence Pattern Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) methods for KGQA consist of two stages: subgraph extraction and answer reasoning. We argue current subgraph extraction methods underestimate the importance of structural dependencies among evidence facts. We propose Evidence Pattern Retrieval (EPR) to explicitly model the structural dependencies during subgraph extraction. We implement EPR by indexing the atomic adjacency pattern of resource pairs. Given a question, we perform dense retrieval to obtain atomic patterns formed by resource pairs. We then enumerate their combinations to construct candidate evidence patterns. These evidence patterns are scored using a neural model, and the best one is selected to extract a subgraph for downstream answer reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that the EPR-based approach has significantly improved the F1 scores of IR-KGQA methods by over 10 points on ComplexWebQuestions and achieves competitive performance on WebQuestionsSP.Comment: Accepted to TheWebConf'24 (WWW 2024). This is a preprint version; the CR version will include more details. Github: https://github.com/nju-websoft/EPR-KGQ

Contribution of the vertical movement of dissolved organic carbon to carbon allocation in two distinct soil types under Castanopsis fargesii Franch. and C. carlesii (Hemsl.) Hayata forests

International audienceAbstractKey messageThe vertical transport of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is an important determinant of carbon distribution across a soil profile. The transport of DOC down a soil profile can be largely influenced by incoming DOC and soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, which insulate DOC from adsorption processes regulated by soil texture and Fe/Al mineralogy.ContextUncertainties about how soil properties affect DOC transport through the soil profile require study because soils can differ strongly with respect to texture or Fe/Al mineralogy and yet retain similar quantities of DOC.AimsThis study aimed to assess the role of incoming DOC and native SOC in regulating DOC migration in soils and investigate the contribution of DOC movement to SOC allocation.MethodsWe leached a standard DOC solution extracted from Castanopsis carlesii litter through two distinct soil types, using two leaching strategies: single leaching and sequential leaching. The two soil types under a natural Castanopsis carlesii (Hemsl.) Hayata forest and a natural Castanopsis fargesii Franch. forest, respectively, differ strongly with respect to soil texture, Fe/Al oxide abundances, and SOC nature.ResultsWith single leaching, where each of six soil layers making up an entire 0–100-cm soil depth profile received single doses of standard DOC solution, deeper soil layers retained more DOC than upper soil layers, with native SOC largely masking the effects of soil texture and Fe/Al mineralogy on DOC migration. Following sequential leaching, where a sixfold larger amount of standard DOC solution sequentially percolated through the six soil layers, the upper soil layers generally retained more DOC than deeper layers. Nevertheless, in sequential leaching, desorption-induced transfer of carbon from upper soil layers to deeper soil layers resulted in greater total carbon retention than in single leaching.ConclusionForest subsoils (40–100 cm) are well below C saturation, but DOC vertical movement from top soils only transfers limited organic carbon to them. However, DOC vertical movement may greatly alter SOC allocation along the top soil profile (0–40 cm), with part of outer sphere native SOC displaced by incoming DOC and migrating downwards, which is a natural way to preserve SOC

Local axisymmetry-breaking–induced transition of trapped-particle orbit and loss channels in quasi-axisymmetric stellarators

The transition of trapped-particle orbit topologies has been investigated in quasi-axisymmetric (QA) configurations, such as the Chinese First Quasi-axisymmetric Stellarator (CFQS). It is found that the axisymmetry-breaking phenomenon in QA configurations is of great significance at some specific locations, which could easily induce blocked particles to transit into localized particles. A novel aspect is presented to interpret the transition mechanism of trapped-particle orbit topologies in this paper, i.e., as the amplitudes of non-axisymmetric field increase along the radius direction, the region of large toroidal inhomogeneity is gradually generated, which makes the length of the trapped-particle trajectory substantially short, and hence, may restrict particles to a single helical field period. Meanwhile, at such locations the "pseudo-axisymmetric" field results in coupling of the maximum radial drift and the minimum poloidal drift, which enables the transition of trapped-particle orbit topologies considerably and forms specific loss channels, degrading plasma confinement. These results may shed light on the optimization of QA configurations via avoidance of such coupling with respect to energetic particle confinement. Moreover, this work is also relevant to the generation of inhomogeneity of particle flux deposition on the devertor plates

The Relationship between Insect Resistance and Tree Age of Transgenic Triploid Populus tomentosa Plants

To explore the stability of insect resistance during the development of transgenic insect-resistant trees, this study investigated how insect resistance changes as transgenic trees age. We selected 19 transgenic insect-resistant triploid Populus tomentosa lines as plant material. The presence of exogenous genes and Cry1Ac protein expression were verified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) analyses. The toxicity for Clostera anachoreta and Lymantria dispar was evaluated by feeding fresh leaves to first instar larvae after the trees were planted in the field for 2 years and after the sixth year. Results of PCR showed that the exogenous genes had a long-term presence in the poplar genome. ELISA analyses showed significant differences existed on the 6-year-old transgenic lines. The insect-feeding experiment demonstrated significant differences in the mortality rates of C. anachoreta and L. dispar among different transgenic lines. The average corrected mortality rates of C. anachoreta and L. dispar ranged from 5.6–98.7% to 35.4–7.2% respectively. The larval mortality rates differed significantly between the lines at different ages. Up to 52.6% of 1-year-old transgenic lines and 42.1% of 2-year-old transgenic lines caused C. anachoreta larval mortality rates to exceed 80%, whereas only 26.3% of the 6-year-old transgenic lines. The mortality rates of L. dispar exhibited the same trend: 89.5% of 1-year-old transgenic lines and 84.2% of 2-year-old transgenic lines caused L. dispar larval mortality rates to exceed 80%; this number decreased to 63.2% for the 6-year-old plants. The proportion of 6-year-old trees with over 80% larval mortality rates was clearly lower than that of the younger trees. The death distribution of C. anachoreta in different developmental stages also showed the larvae that fed on the leaves of 1-year-old trees were killed mostly during L1 and L2 stages, whereas the proportion of larvae that died in L3 and L4 stages was significantly increased when fed on leaves of 6-year-old trees. Results of correlation analysis showed there was a significant correlation between the larvae mortality rates of trees at different ages, as well as between Cry1Ac protein contents and larvae mortality rates of 6-year-old trees

Analysis of Laser Cell Response Characteristics under Different Irradiation Conditions

Although the application of laser wireless energy transmission technology in many fields such as UAV power supply is increasing, the laser incidence angle and beam shift remain the key factors limiting the efficiency of long-range laser wireless energy transmission. In this study, a laser cell response test platform was built to measure and analyze the response characteristics of a laser cell under different laser incidence angles and beam shifts. The results show that the increase in the incident angle intensifies the reflection on the irradiated surface, resulting in a linear decrease in the power density received by the laser cell, which eventually leads to a significant decrease in the output power, and the output power tends to be close to 0 when the incident angle exceeds 75°. The increase in the beam offset distance increases the reverse bias of the cell, which is the main reason for the significant decrease in the output power. The local irradiation also leads to an increase in the heat generation power; when the beam coverage is below 50%, the overall output power tends to be close to 0. This study provides a reference for improving the laser wireless energy transmission efficiency and laser cell optimization