12,647 research outputs found
Hierarchical Re-estimation of Topic Models for Measuring Topical Diversity
A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important
characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring
topical diversity identifies three elements for assessing diversity: words,
topics, and documents as collections of words. Topic models play a central role
in this approach. Using standard topic models for measuring diversity of
documents is suboptimal due to generality and impurity. General topics only
include common information from a background corpus and are assigned to most of
the documents in the collection. Impure topics contain words that are not
related to the topic; impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models and
impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a
hierarchical re-estimation approach for topic models to combat generality and
impurity; the proposed approach operates at three levels: words, topics, and
documents. Our re-estimation approach for measuring documents' topical
diversity outperforms the state of the art on PubMed dataset which is commonly
used for diversity experiments.Comment: Proceedings of the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval
(ECIR2017
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Generalized triangle groups, expanders, and a problem of Agol and Wise
Answering a question asked by Agol and Wise, we show that a desired stronger
form of Wise's malnormal special quotient theorem does not hold. The
counterexamples are generalizations of triangle groups, built using the
Ramanujan graphs constructed by Lubotzky--Phillips--Sarnak
Association between genotypic diversity and biofilm production in group B Streptococcus
Background:
Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is a leading cause of sepsis and meningitis and an important factor in premature and stillbirths. Biofilm production has been suggested to be important for GBS pathogenesis alongside many other elements, including phylogenetic lineage and virulence factors, such as pili and capsule type. A complete understanding of the confluence of these components, however, is lacking. To identify associations between biofilm phenotype, pilus profile and lineage, 293 strains from asymptomatic carriers, invasive disease cases, and bovine mastitis cases, were assessed for biofilm production using an in vitro assay.
Results:
Multilocus sequence type (ST) profile, pilus island profile, and isolate source were associated with biofilm production. Strains from invasive disease cases and/or belonging to the ST-17 and ST-19 lineages were significantly more likely to form weak biofilms, whereas strains producing strong biofilms were recovered more frequently from individuals with asymptomatic colonization.
Conclusions:
These data suggest that biofilm production is a lineage-specific trait in GBS and may promote colonization of strains representing lineages other than STs 17 and 19. The findings herein also demonstrate that biofilms must be considered in the treatment of pregnant women, particularly for women with heavy GBS colonization
Scaling and Universality in the Counterion-Condensation Transition at Charged Cylinders
We address the critical and universal aspects of counterion-condensation
transition at a single charged cylinder in both two and three spatial
dimensions using numerical and analytical methods. By introducing a novel
Monte-Carlo sampling method in logarithmic radial scale, we are able to
numerically simulate the critical limit of infinite system size (corresponding
to infinite-dilution limit) within tractable equilibration times. The critical
exponents are determined for the inverse moments of the counterionic density
profile (which play the role of the order parameters and represent the inverse
localization length of counterions) both within mean-field theory and within
Monte-Carlo simulations. In three dimensions (3D), correlation effects
(neglected within mean-field theory) lead to an excessive accumulation of
counterions near the charged cylinder below the critical temperature
(condensation phase), while surprisingly, the critical region exhibits
universal critical exponents in accord with the mean-field theory. In two
dimensions (2D), we demonstrate, using both numerical and analytical
approaches, that the mean-field theory becomes exact at all temperatures
(Manning parameters), when number of counterions tends to infinity. For finite
particle number, however, the 2D problem displays a series of peculiar singular
points (with diverging heat capacity), which reflect successive de-localization
events of individual counterions from the central cylinder. In both 2D and 3D,
the heat capacity shows a universal jump at the critical point, and the energy
develops a pronounced peak. The asymptotic behavior of the energy peak location
is used to locate the critical temperature, which is also found to be universal
and in accordance with the mean-field prediction.Comment: 31 pages, 16 figure
Superfluid Friction and Late-time Thermal Evolution of Neutron Stars
The recent temperature measurements of the two older isolated neutron stars
PSR 1929+10 and PSR 0950+08 (ages of and yr,
respectively) indicate that these objects are heated. A promising candidate
heat source is friction between the neutron star crust and the superfluid it is
thought to contain. We study the effects of superfluid friction on the
long-term thermal and rotational evolution of a neutron star. Differential
rotation velocities between the superfluid and the crust (averaged over the
inner crust moment of inertia) of rad s for PSR
1929+10 and rad s for PSR 0950+08 would account for their
observed temperatures. These differential velocities could be sustained by
pinning of superfluid vortices to the inner crust lattice with strengths of
1 MeV per nucleus. Pinned vortices can creep outward through thermal
fluctuations or quantum tunneling. For thermally-activated creep, the coupling
between the superfluid and crust is highly sensitive to temperature. If pinning
maintains large differential rotation ( rad s), a feedback
instability could occur in stars younger than yr causing
oscillations of the temperature and spin-down rate over a period of . For stars older than yr, however, vortex creep occurs
through quantum tunneling, and the creep velocity is too insensitive to
temperature for a thermal-rotational instability to occur. These older stars
could be heated through a steady process of superfluid friction.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Ap
In situ measurement of atmospheric krypton and xenon on Mars with Mars Science Laboratory
Mars Science Laboratory's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) investigation has measured all of the stable isotopes of the heavy noble gases krypton and xenon in the martian atmosphere, in situ, from the Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater, Mars. Previous knowledge of martian atmospheric krypton and xenon isotope ratios has been based upon a combination of the Viking mission's krypton and xenon detections and measurements of noble gas isotope ratios in martian meteorites. However, the meteorite measurements reveal an impure mixture of atmospheric, mantle, and spallation contributions. The xenon and krypton isotopic measurements reported here include the complete set of stable isotopes, unmeasured by Viking. The new results generally agree with Mars meteorite measurements but also provide a unique opportunity to identify various non-atmospheric heavy noble gas components in the meteorites. Kr isotopic measurements define a solar-like atmospheric composition, but deviating from the solar wind pattern at 80Kr and 82Kr in a manner consistent with contributions originating from neutron capture in Br. The Xe measurements suggest an intriguing possibility that isotopes lighter than 132Xe have been enriched to varying degrees by spallation and neutron capture products degassed to the atmosphere from the regolith, and a model is constructed to explore this possibility. Such a spallation component, however, is not apparent in atmospheric Xe trapped in the glassy phases of martian meteorites
Bounds on the diameter of Cayley graphs of the symmetric group
In this paper we are concerned with the conjecture that, for any set of
generators S of the symmetric group of degree n, the word length in terms of S
of every permutation is bounded above by a polynomial of n. We prove this
conjecture for sets of generators containing a permutation fixing at least 37%
of the points.Comment: 17 pages, 6 table
Word Embeddings for Entity-annotated Texts
Learned vector representations of words are useful tools for many information
retrieval and natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture
lexical semantics. However, while many such tasks involve or even rely on named
entities as central components, popular word embedding models have so far
failed to include entities as first-class citizens. While it seems intuitive
that annotating named entities in the training corpus should result in more
intelligent word features for downstream tasks, performance issues arise when
popular embedding approaches are naively applied to entity annotated corpora.
Not only are the resulting entity embeddings less useful than expected, but one
also finds that the performance of the non-entity word embeddings degrades in
comparison to those trained on the raw, unannotated corpus. In this paper, we
investigate approaches to jointly train word and entity embeddings on a large
corpus with automatically annotated and linked entities. We discuss two
distinct approaches to the generation of such embeddings, namely the training
of state-of-the-art embeddings on raw-text and annotated versions of the
corpus, as well as node embeddings of a co-occurrence graph representation of
the annotated corpus. We compare the performance of annotated embeddings and
classical word embeddings on a variety of word similarity, analogy, and
clustering evaluation tasks, and investigate their performance in
entity-specific tasks. Our findings show that it takes more than training
popular word embedding models on an annotated corpus to create entity
embeddings with acceptable performance on common test cases. Based on these
results, we discuss how and when node embeddings of the co-occurrence graph
representation of the text can restore the performance.Comment: This paper is accepted in 41st European Conference on Information
Retrieva
Photon collection from a trapped ion--cavity system
We present the design and implementation of a trapped ion cavity QED system.
A single ytterbium ion is confined by a micron-scale ion trap inside a 2 mm
optical cavity. The ion is coherently pumped by near resonant laser light while
the cavity output is monitored as a function of pump intensity and cavity
detuning. We observe a Purcell enhancement of scattered light into the solid
angle subtended by the optical cavity, as well as a three-peak structure
arising from strongly driving the atom. This system can be integrated into
existing atom{photon quantum network protocols and is a pathway towards an
efficient atom{photon quantum interface
Pilus distribution among lineages of group b <i>streptococcus</i>: an evolutionary and clinical perspective
<b>Background</b><p></p>
Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is an opportunistic pathogen in both humans and bovines. Epidemiological and phylogenetic analyses have found strains belonging to certain phylogenetic lineages to be more frequently associated with invasive newborn disease, asymptomatic maternal colonization, and subclinical bovine mastitis. Pilus structures in GBS facilitate colonization and invasion of host tissues and play a role in biofilm formation, though few large-scale studies have estimated the frequency and diversity of the three pilus islands (PIs) across diverse genotypes. Here, we examined the distribution of pilus islands (PI) 1, 2a and 2b among 295 GBS strains representing 73 multilocus sequence types (STs) belonging to eight clonal complexes. PCR-based RFLP was also used to evaluate variation in the genes encoding pilus backbone proteins of PI-2a and PI-2b.<p></p>
<b>Results</b><p></p>
All 295 strains harbored one of the PI-2 variants and most human-derived strains contained PI-1. Bovine-derived strains lacked PI-1 and possessed a unique PI-2b backbone protein allele. Neonatal strains more frequently had PI-1 and a PI-2 variant than maternal colonizing strains, and most CC-17 strains had PI-1 and PI-2b with a distinct backbone protein allele. Furthermore, we present evidence for the frequent gain and loss of genes encoding certain pilus types.<p></p>
<b>Conclusions</b><p></p>
These data suggest that pilus combinations impact host specificity and disease presentation and that diversification often involves the loss or acquisition of PIs. Such findings have implications for the development of GBS vaccines that target the three pilus islands
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