Entity-centric knowledge discovery for idiosyncratic domains

Technical and scientific knowledge is produced at an ever-accelerating pace, leading to increasing issues when trying to automatically organize or process it, e.g., when searching for relevant prior work. Knowledge can today be produced both in unstructured (plain text) and structured (metadata or linked data) forms. However, unstructured content is still themost dominant formused to represent scientific knowledge. In order to facilitate the extraction and discovery of relevant content, new automated and scalable methods for processing, structuring and organizing scientific knowledge are called for. In this context, a number of applications are emerging, ranging fromNamed Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking tools for scientific papers to specific platforms leveraging information extraction techniques to organize scientific knowledge. In this thesis, we tackle the tasks of Entity Recognition, Disambiguation and Linking in idiosyncratic domains with an emphasis on scientific literature. Furthermore, we study the related task of co-reference resolution with a specific focus on named entities. We start by exploring Named Entity Recognition, a task that aims to identify the boundaries of named entities in textual contents. We propose a newmethod to generate candidate named entities based on n-gram collocation statistics and design several entity recognition features to further classify them. In addition, we show how the use of external knowledge bases (either domain-specific like DBLP or generic like DBPedia) can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of NER for idiosyncratic domains. Subsequently, we move to Entity Disambiguation, which is typically performed after entity recognition in order to link an entity to a knowledge base. We propose novel semi-supervised methods for word disambiguation leveraging the structure of a community-based ontology of scientific concepts. Our approach exploits the graph structure that connects different terms and their definitions to automatically identify the correct sense that was originally picked by the authors of a scientific publication. We then turn to co-reference resolution, a task aiming at identifying entities that appear using various forms throughout the text. We propose an approach to type entities leveraging an inverted index built on top of a knowledge base, and to subsequently re-assign entities based on the semantic relatedness of the introduced types. Finally, we describe an application which goal is to help researchers discover and manage scientific publications. We focus on the problem of selecting relevant tags to organize collections of research papers in that context. We experimentally demonstrate that the use of a community-authored ontology together with information about the position of the concepts in the documents allows to significantly increase the precision of tag selection over standard methods

Analysis of the GATE aircraft pyrgeometer instrumentation, An

Includes bibliographical references (page 28).November 1976.Significant differences in US and USSR aircraft measurements of hemispherical infrared irradiance were noted during GATE in-flight intercomparisons. In specific instances the downward irradiance measured by the USSR instrument (a Kozyrev pyrgeometer) was as much as 1.5 times greater than the irradiance measured with the US instrument (an Eppley pyrgeometer). A post-GATE intercomparison at Colorado State University verified these differences; the pyrgeometer measurements were compared with independent measurements obtained with an infrared bolometer and with a radiative transfer calculation. The differences noted during GATE and post-GATE intercomparisons may be attributed to differences in calibration techniques and the accurate determination of the temperature of the instrument's thermopile cold junctions. When corrections based upon this analysis were applied to the USSR data, the maximum intercomparison differences were less than 5 percent

Prediction of Persistent Organic Pollutants Biodegradation in Contaminated Marine Sediments Using Passive Sampling Probes

The aim of this study is to evaluate a new configuration (new materials) of the commercial passive sampler Chemcatcher as probe for predicting the bioavailability of persistent organic pollutants in marine sediments. To predict the availability of pollutants to biota, it is important to understand both solution- and solid-phase processes in the sediment, including the kinetics of pollutants release from its binding agent (ligand and/or particle). The present study examined the kinetic of desorption and biodegradation of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in two different marine sediments sampled in the Adriatic Sea. The sediments were spiked with a standard mix of 16 PAHs in the range of 11-12 mg/Kg (dry sediment). Formaldehyde was added into the sediments to prevent biodegradation. After equilibration, the passive probes were placed in the specimens with prevented biodegradation, recovered and analyzed at prefixed time slots (in the range of 50 days) for the assessment of the accumulated PAHs; in parallel a little amount of sediments was collected and the residual concentration of PAHs was measured. Free PAHs in the sediment pore waters were also determined. The results suggest that the kinetically labile solid-phase pool of PAHs, which is included in the DGT measurement, played an important role in biodegradation processes along with the free PAHs in sediment pore water

Methodological aspects in problem solution of the determined factor analysis

The urgency of the analyzed problem is due to the fact that the need to study the relationship of economic phenomena and the comparative analysis of the factor ratings not only in time but also in space requires the development of determined factor analysis. The purpose of the article is to develop a generalized method of determined factor analysis, which increases the accuracy of its results, and it will broaden and deepen its scope. The leading approach to solve the problems of determined factor analysis is a systematic approach that allows establishing a more precise assessment of multiplicative component. Results: The proposed generalized integral method of determined factor analysis has a high precision of factorial assessment, and the ground construction allows carrying out a comparative analysis of the impact of factors on a productive indicator of the surveyed economic system of any level. The data of this article may be useful for the analysis of economic activity of organizations, as well as for the development of the economic development strategy. © 2016 Chistik et al

Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Moral Sanctions

The study deals with the content and transformations of Jeremy Bentham’s theory of sanctions and its role in the development of the contemporary understanding of how moral regulation works. In An Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, Bentham defines sanction as a type of pleasure and pain that gives the binding force to some law or rule and mentions four sanctions: physical, political, popular, or moral, and religious. The popular, or moral, sanction rests on such a motive as ‘the love of reputation’. Unlike the motive of ‘good-will’, ‘the love of reputation’ has some drawbacks that lessen its general efficiency and its contribution to the fulfillment of the principle of utility. Though the development of civilization makes them less dangerous. In the Deontology, two more sanctions were added: sympathetic (the pain generated by the contemplation of the pain suffered by a fellow creature) and retributive (the pain caused to a perpetrator by retaliatory actions of his/her immediate victim). The renewed typology of sanctions is discussed by Bentham in the context of the activity of a moralist, or a deontologist. There are two main interpretations of moral sanctions in the contemporary ethics: ‘the moral sanction as a public condemnation of a perpetrator’ and ‘the moral sanction as a self-condemnation of a perpetrator (his/her feeling of guilt, pricks of conscience)’. Bentham was a major figure in the development of the first interpretation. However, his extended typology contributed to the development of the second. Bentham’s sympathetic sanction in the case of ‘pains of sympathy’ that experienced by a perpetrator and caused him/her by pains of his/her victims is not identical to a guilt-feeling but can work without a public condemnation

Предопухолевая патология молочных желез в различных этнических популяциях населения Крыма

Серед жіночого населення АРК виявлені популяції із украй високою захворюваністю РМЖ (армянки - 114,25); з високою захворюваністю (слов’янки - 65,21); а також з відносно низькою захворюваністю (кримські татарки - 41,99 на 100 тис. відповідного жіночого населення; р < 0,001). Порівняльний аналіз поширеності доброякісної патології в 531 пацієнтки (399 слов’янок, 69 татарок, 63 армянки) показав, що вірогідно найбільш частими захворюваннями у вірменській популяції з високою захворюваністю РМЖ є кисты молочних залоз (Р=0,033) і вузлова форма фиброзно-кистозной хвороби (Р=0,040), які, очевидно, можна відносити до предраковой патології.In Crimean woman there are populations with very high Breast Cancer incidence (Armenians - 114,25); with high incidence (Slavs - 65,21); and with lowest incidence (Tatars - 41,99 in 100 000 woman populations; р < 0,001). In 531 patients (399 Slavs, 69 Tatars, 63 Armenians) more freqwently was diagnosed Breast Cysts (Р=0,033) and Nodular Fibrocystic disease (Р=0,040) in Armenian ethnic group with very high Breast Cancer incidence. Breast Cysts and Nodular Fibrocystic disease only are precancerous diseases of the Breast

The mirror illusion induces high gamma oscillations in the absence of movement

We tested whether mirror visual feedback (MVF) from a moving hand induced high gamma oscillation (HGO) response in the hemisphere contralateral to the mirror and ipsilateral to the self-paced movement. MEG was recorded in 14 subjects under three conditions: bilateral synchronous movements of both index fingers (BILATERAL), movements of the right hand index finger while observing the immobile left index finger (NOMIRROR), and movements of the right hand index finger while observing its mirror reflection (MIRROR). The right hemispheric spatiospectral regions of interests (ROIs) in the sensor space, sensitive to bilateral movements, were found by statistical comparison of the BILATERAL spectral responses to baseline. For these ROIs, the post-movement HGO responses were compared between the MIRROR and NOMIRROR conditions. We found that MVF from the moving hand, similarly to the real movements of the opposite hand, induced HGO (55–85 Hz) in the sensorimotor cortex. This MVF effect was frequency-specific and did not spread to oscillations in other frequency bands. This is the first study demonstrating movement-related HGO induced by MVF from the moving hand in the absence of proprioceptive feedback signaling. Our findings support the hypothesis that MVF can trigger the feedback-based control processes specifically associated with perception of one's own movements

Swisslink: high-precision, context-free entity linking exploiting unambiguous labels

Webpages are an abundant source of textual information with manually annotated entity links, and are often used as a source of training data for a wide variety of machine learning NLP tasks. However, manual annotations such as those found on Wikipedia are sparse, noisy, and biased towards popular entities. Existing entity linking systems deal with those issues by relying on simple statistics extracted from the data. While such statistics can effectively deal with noisy annotations, they introduce bias towards head entities and are ineffective for long tail (e.g., unpopular) entities. In this work, we first analyze statistical properties linked to manual annotations by studying a large annotated corpus composed of all English Wikipedia webpages, in addition to all pages from the CommonCrawl containing English Wikipedia annotations. We then propose and evaluate a series of entity linking approaches, with the explicit goal of creating highly-accurate (precision > 95%) and broad annotated corpuses for machine learning tasks. Our results show that our best approach achieves maximal-precision at usable recall levels, and outperforms both state-of-the-art entity-linking systems and human annotators

Analyzing Large-Scale Public Campaigns on Twitter

Social media has become an important instrument for running various types of public campaigns and mobilizing people. Yet, the dynamics of public campaigns on social networking platforms still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of over one hundred large-scale campaigns on social media platforms covering more than 6 years. In particular, we focus on campaigns related to climate change on Twitter, which promote online activism to encourage, educate, and motivate people to react to the various issues raised by climate change. We propose a generic framework based on a crowdsourcing to identify both the type of a given campaign as well as the various actions undertaken throughout its lifespan: official meetings, physical actions, calls for action, publications on climate related research, etc. We study whether the type of a campaign is correlated to the actions undertaken and how these actions influence the flow of the campaign. Leveraging more than one hundred different campaigns, we build a model capable of accurately predicting the presence of individual actions in tweets. Finally, we explore the influence of active users on the overall campaign flow