Learning Robust Representations of Text

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results across many language processing tasks, however these methods are highly sensitive to noise and adversarial attacks. We present a regularization based method for limiting network sensitivity to its inputs, inspired by ideas from computer vision, thus learning models that are more robust. Empirical evaluation over a range of sentiment datasets with a convolutional neural network shows that, compared to a baseline model and the dropout method, our method achieves superior performance over noisy inputs and out-of-domain data.Comment: 5 pages with 2 pages reference, 2 tables, 1 figur

Dosimetric characteristics of a new linear accelerator under gated operation.

Respiratory gated radiotherapy may allow reduction of the treatment margins, thus sparing healthy tissue and/or allowing dose escalation to the tumor. However, current commissioning and quality assurance of linear accelerators do not include evaluation of gated delivery. The purpose of this study is to test gated photon delivery of a Siemens ONCOR Avant-Garde linear accelerator. Dosimetric characteristics for gated and nongated delivery of 6-MV and 15-MV photons were compared for the range of doses, dose rates, and for several gating regimes. Dose profiles were also compared using Kodak EDR2 and X-Omat V films for 6-MV and 15-MV photons for several dose rates and gating regimes. Results showed that deviation is less than or equal to 0.6% for all dose levels evaluated with the exception of the lowest dose delivered at 25 MU at an unrealistically high gating frequency of 0.5 Hz. At 400 MU, dose profile deviations along the central axes in in-plane and cross-plane directions within 80% of the field size are below 0.7%. No unequivocally detectable dose profile deviation was observed for 50 MU. Based on the comparison with widely accepted standards for conventional delivery, our results indicate that this LINAC is well suited for gated delivery of nondynamic fields

Review of Crucible: The Year that Forged Our World

The months between June 1947-1948, as Jonathan Fenby argues, was a pivotal moment in world history. This review will evaluate Fenby\u27s work in \u27Crucible\u27 to conclude that Fenby is correct in this assessment. Moreover, this review will argue that \u27Crucible\u27 acts as a uniquely reactive portrait of international affairs between June 1947-1948, giving the post-revisionist school on the origins of the Cold War more credibility

Semiparametric Estimation in Models of First-Price, Sealed-Bid Auctions with Affiliation

Within the affiliated private-values paradigm, we develop a tractable empirical model of equilibrium behaviour at first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The model is non-parametrically identified, but the rate of convergence in estimation is slow when the number of bidders is even moderately large, so we develop a semiparametric estimation strategy, focusing on the Archimedean family of copulae and implementing this framework using particular members--the Clayton, Frank, and Gumbel copulae. We apply our framework to data from low-price, sealed-bid auctions used by the Michigan Department of Transportation to procure road-resurfacing services, rejecting the hypothesis of independence and finding significant (and high) affiliation in cost signals.first-price, sealed-bid auctions, copulae, affiliation