Automatic Generation of Rhetorical Questions and Its Application to a Chatbot

近年、チャットボットをより人間に近いものにする研究が増えた。例えば、皮肉を生成するチャットボットなどの研究が提案されている。しかし、修辞疑問を生成する研究はまだ存在しない。修辞疑問は質問だが、答えを得ることを目的としたものではない。日常会話やソーシャルメディアの対話では修辞疑問が使われることが多いため、チャットボットをより人間らしくするためには修辞疑問を生成する必要がある。修辞疑問を認識して話者の意見を表すためには、聞き手がお互いに共有している知識を利用すると、話者返事の前に、聞き手が答えを知った。そうすると、話者の観点が明確になる。さらに、非常識的な知識を基づいて、修辞疑問を生成すれば、修辞疑問として認識される可能性が高まる。本研究は常識の文を反転し、非常識な文として用いて、修辞疑問を生成するジェネレーターを作った。チャットボットが返事する前に前の対話を考慮して、返事すべきタイプを皮肉か、修辞疑問か、リテラルの返事とかを判断し返事する。そして、42の対話例をチャットボットで全ての返事を生成し、その返事は対話中の適切性と人間性を評価した。その結果、本研究のチャットボットは、修辞疑問を生成すべき時、修辞疑問が対話中の適切性がリテラルと皮肉の返事より優れた結果となる。電気通信大学202

Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Salmonella Phage vB_SalP_TR2

Salmonella is a widely distributed foodborne pathogen. The use of Salmonella phages as biocontrol agents has recently gained significant interest. Because the Salmonella genus has high diversity, efforts are necessary to identify lytic Salmonella phages focusing on different serovars. Here, five Salmonella phages were isolated from soil samples, and vB_SalP_TR2 was selected as a novel phage with high lytic potential against the host Salmonella serovar Albany, as well as other tested serovars, including Corvallis, Newport, Kottbus, and Istanbul. Morphological analyses demonstrated that phage vB_SalP_TR2 belongs to the Podoviridae family, with an icosahedral head (62 ± 0.5 nm in diameter and 60 ± 1 nm in length) and a short tail (35 ± 1 nm in length). The latent period and burst size of phage vB_SalP_TR2 was 15 min and 211 PFU/cell, respectively. It contained a linear dsDNA of 71,453 bp, and G + C content was 40.64%. Among 96 putative open reading frames detected, only 35 gene products were found in database searches, with no virulence or antibiotic resistance genes being identified. As a biological control agent, phage vB_SalP_TR2 exhibited a high temperature and pH tolerance. In vitro, it lysed most S. Albany after 24 h at 37°C with multiplicities of infection of 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, and 100. In food matrices (milk and chicken meat), treatment with phage vB_SalP_TR2 also reduced the number of S. Albany compared with that in controls. These findings highlighted phage vB_SalP_TR2 as a potential antibacterial agent for the control of Salmonella in food samples

FedMLSecurity: A Benchmark for Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning and LLMs

This paper introduces FedMLSecurity, a benchmark that simulates adversarial attacks and corresponding defense mechanisms in Federated Learning (FL). As an integral module of the open-sourced library FedML that facilitates FL algorithm development and performance comparison, FedMLSecurity enhances the security assessment capacity of FedML. FedMLSecurity comprises two principal components: FedMLAttacker, which simulates attacks injected into FL training, and FedMLDefender, which emulates defensive strategies designed to mitigate the impacts of the attacks. FedMLSecurity is open-sourced 1 and is customizable to a wide range of machine learning models (e.g., Logistic Regression, ResNet, GAN, etc.) and federated optimizers (e.g., FedAVG, FedOPT, FedNOVA, etc.). Experimental evaluations in this paper also demonstrate the ease of application of FedMLSecurity to Large Language Models (LLMs), further reinforcing its versatility and practical utility in various scenarios

Prioritizing human cancer microRNAs based on genes’ functional consistency between microRNA and cancer

The identification of human cancer-related microRNAs (miRNAs) is important for cancer biology research. Although several identification methods have achieved remarkable success, they have overlooked the functional information associated with miRNAs. We present a computational framework that can be used to prioritize human cancer miRNAs by measuring the association between cancer and miRNAs based on the functional consistency score (FCS) of the miRNA target genes and the cancer-related genes. This approach proved successful in identifying the validated cancer miRNAs for 11 common human cancers with area under ROC curve (AUC) ranging from 71.15% to 96.36%. The FCS method had a significant advantage over miRNA differential expression analysis when identifying cancer-related miRNAs with a fine regulatory mechanism, such as miR-27a in colorectal cancer. Furthermore, a case study examining thyroid cancer showed that the FCS method can uncover novel cancer-related miRNAs such as miR-27a/b, which were showed significantly upregulated in thyroid cancer samples by qRT-PCR analysis. Our method can be used on a web-based server, CMP (cancer miRNA prioritization) and is freely accessible at http://bioinfo.hrbmu.edu.cn/CMP. This time- and cost-effective computational framework can be a valuable complement to experimental studies and can assist with future studies of miRNA involvement in the pathogenesis of cancers

Assessment of Binding Interaction between Bovine Lactoferrin and Tetracycline Hydrochloride: Multi-Spectroscopic Analyses and Molecular Modeling

In this paper, the interaction between bovine lactoferrin (bLf) and tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH) was researched by microscale thermophoresis (MST), multi-spectroscopic methods, and molecular docking techniques. Normal fluorescence results showed that TCH effectively quenched the intrinsic fluorescence of bLf via static quenching. Moreover, MST confirmed that the combination force between bLf and TCH was very strong. Thermodynamic parameters and molecular docking further revealed that electrostatic forces, van der Waals, and hydrogen bonding forces played vital roles in the interaction between bLf and TCH. The binding distance and energy transfer efficiency between TCH and bLf were 2.81 nm and 0.053, respectively. Moreover, the results of circular dichroism spectra (CD), ultraviolet visible (UV-vis) absorption spectra, fluorescence Excitation-Emission Matrix (EEM) spectra, and molecular docking verified bLf indeed combined with TCH, and caused the changes of conformation of bLf. The influence of TCH on the functional changes of the protein was studied through the analysis of the change of the bLf surface hydrophobicity and research of the binding forces between bLf and iron ion. These results indicated that change in the structure and function of bLf were due to the interaction between bLf and TCH

The Runge--Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method with compact stencils for hyperbolic conservation laws

In this paper, we develop a new type of Runge--Kutta (RK) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving hyperbolic conservation laws. Compared with the original RKDG method, the new method features improved compactness and allows simple boundary treatment. The key idea is to hybridize two different spatial operators in an explicit RK scheme, utilizing local projected derivatives for inner RK stages and the usual DG spatial discretization for the final stage only. Limiters are applied only at the final stage for the control of spurious oscillations. We also explore the connections between our method and Lax--Wendroff DG schemes and ADER-DG schemes. Numerical examples are given to confirm that the new RKDG method is as accurate as the original RKDG method, while being more compact, for problems including two-dimensional Euler equations for compressible gas dynamics.Comment: 24 page