ReadNet: A Hierarchical Transformer Framework for Web Article Readability Analysis

Analyzing the readability of articles has been an important sociolinguistic task. Addressing this task is necessary to the automatic recommendation of appropriate articles to readers with different comprehension abilities, and it further benefits education systems, web information systems, and digital libraries. Current methods for assessing readability employ empirical measures or statistical learning techniques that are limited by their ability to characterize complex patterns such as article structures and semantic meanings of sentences. In this paper, we propose a new and comprehensive framework which uses a hierarchical self-attention model to analyze document readability. In this model, measurements of sentence-level difficulty are captured along with the semantic meanings of each sentence. Additionally, the sentence-level features are incorporated to characterize the overall readability of an article with consideration of article structures. We evaluate our proposed approach on three widely-used benchmark datasets against several strong baseline approaches. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on estimating the readability for various web articles and literature.Comment: ECIR 202

Children’s perceptions of dissimilarity in parenting styles are associated with internalizing and externalizing behavior

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between children’s perception of dissimilarity in parenting styles, and internalizing and externalizing problems in children. Children from the general population (n = 658) reported on the level of emotional warmth, rejection, and overprotection of both parents by filling out the child version of the Egna Minnen Beträffande Uppfostran (EMBU-C) and mothers completed the child behavior checklist (CBCL). Intraclass correlations were computed as measures of dissimilarity between parenting styles of mothers and fathers. Children’s perceived dissimilarity in parental emotional warmth is associated with internalizing and externalizing problems (β = 0.092, p < 0.05; β = 0.091, p < 0.05). Perceived dissimilarity between parents’ overprotection is associated with externalizing problems (β = 0.097, p < 0.05). Perceived dissimilarity between parenting styles is associated with externalizing and internalizing problems, over and above the effects of the level of the parenting styles. The results highlight the negative consequences of perceived dissimilarity between parents. To conclude, children have more internalizing and externalizing problems when they perceive their parents as more dissimilar in parenting styles

Vitamin D3 Deficiency Differentially Affects Functional and Disease Outcomes in the G93A Mouse Model of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease characterized by motor neuron death in the central nervous system. Vitamin D supplementation increases antioxidant activity, reduces inflammation and improves motor neuron survival. We have previously demonstrated that vitamin D3 supplementation at 10× the adequate intake improves functional outcomes in a mouse model of ALS