Mimicking Word Embeddings using Subword RNNs

Word embeddings improve generalization over lexical features by placing each word in a lower-dimensional space, using distributional information obtained from unlabeled data. However, the effectiveness of word embeddings for downstream NLP tasks is limited by out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, for which embeddings do not exist. In this paper, we present MIMICK, an approach to generating OOV word embeddings compositionally, by learning a function from spellings to distributional embeddings. Unlike prior work, MIMICK does not require re-training on the original word embedding corpus; instead, learning is performed at the type level. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations demonstrate the power of this simple approach. On 23 languages, MIMICK improves performance over a word-based baseline for tagging part-of-speech and morphosyntactic attributes. It is competitive with (and complementary to) a supervised character-based model in low-resource settings.Comment: EMNLP 201

Morphological Priors for Probabilistic Neural Word Embeddings

Word embeddings allow natural language processing systems to share statistical information across related words. These embeddings are typically based on distributional statistics, making it difficult for them to generalize to rare or unseen words. We propose to improve word embeddings by incorporating morphological information, capturing shared sub-word features. Unlike previous work that constructs word embeddings directly from morphemes, we combine morphological and distributional information in a unified probabilistic framework, in which the word embedding is a latent variable. The morphological information provides a prior distribution on the latent word embeddings, which in turn condition a likelihood function over an observed corpus. This approach yields improvements on intrinsic word similarity evaluations, and also in the downstream task of part-of-speech tagging.Comment: Appeared at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2016, Austin

Sick leave and workers' compensation for police officers in Australia

In Australia it has been necessary to enact specific provisions into industrial and employment laws to ensure workplace protection and coverage of police officers because at common law police officers have not been regarded as employees. Police unions in Australia have emerged as strong industrial players and have secured a range of terms and conditions of employment which do not apply to the broader workforce. However, the battle in relation to workers' compensation coverage ande extended sick leave seems to be ongoing, particularly in Western Australia. The area of interaction between workers' compensation laws and sick leave entitlements is often neglected against the background of other industrial matters concerning police. This article investigates the entitlements of Australian police officers to these benefits against the historical background of industrial laws. It concludes that there is no uniformity in coverage for workers' compensation and sick leave and that the publicly available data in relation to absence from work of police officers due to sickness are generally incomplete and present challenges for cross-jurisdictional comparisons. The article points to future areas of research into police sick leave

The Prevalence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among Federal Prison Inmates

Incarceration in the United States has increased dramatically in recent years. The total number of inmates under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on September 30, 1995, was 100,958, an increase of over 11,000 (12%) from January 1, 1994 (U. S. Department of Justice, 1995a) and an increase o f over 60,000 (152%) from 1981 (U. S. Department of Justice, 1994a). Approximately 92% of this population is male. Rubin and McCampbell (1995) point out that conservative estimates indicate that 6-8% (6,000-8,000) of inmates currently under BOP control exhibit a major mental disorder, such as bipolar affective disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia

Analyzing a Shopper’s Visual Experience in a Retail Store and the Impact on Impulse Profit

The retail industry in the U.S. contributed 1.14 trillion in value added (or 5.9%) to the GDP in 2017, an increase of 3.7% from the previous year. While store closures have dominated the news in the recent past (e.g., Toys-R-Us, Sears, and Bon-Ton) due to ineffective supply chain practices, inadequate in-store experiences, and competition from e-tailers, other retailers such as Ross, T. J. Maxx, Burlington Coat Factory, and Kroger have been expanding their footprint. Brick-and-mortar stores are unique as they allow shoppers the ability to see, touch, and try products, in addition to exploring new products. Kohl’s CEO has even indicated that 90% of their revenue is still generated in brick-and-mortar stores. Besides reducing supply chain costs, retailers have been paying considerable attention to redesigning their stores by varying layouts and displays to improve shopping experience and remain profitable. However, a lack of scientific methods that correlate layout changes to improved experience has often led to time-consuming and expensive trial-and-error approaches for the retailers. This research focuses on the design of such brick-and-mortar stores by developing a quantitative approach that models the visual interaction between a 3D shopper’s field of view and the rack layout. This visual interaction has been shown to influence shopper purchasing habits and their overall experience. While some metrics for visual experience have been proposed in the literature, they have been limited in many ways. The objective of this research is to develop new models to quantify visual experience and employ them in layout design models. Our first contribution consists of quantifying exposure (which rack locations are seen) and the intensity of exposure (how long they are seen) by accounting for the dynamic interaction between the human 3D field of regard with a 3D rack layout. We consider several rack designs/layouts that we noticed at nearby retail stores, ranging from the typical rectangular racks placed orthogonal to the main aisle to racks with varying orientations, curvatures, and heights. We model this 3D layout problem as a series of 2D problems while accounting for obstructions faced by shoppers during their travel path (both uni- and bi-directional). We also validate our approach through a human subjects study in a Virtual Environment. Our findings suggest that curving racks in a layout with racks oriented at 90° could increase exposure by 3-121% over straight racks. Further, several layout designs could increase exposure by over 500% with only a 20% increase in floor space. In our second contribution, we introduce the Rack Orientation and Curvature Problem (ROCP) for a retail store, which determines the best rack orientation and curvature that maximizes marginal impulse profit (after discounting for floor space cost). We derive impulse profit considering the probability a shopper will see a product category, the probability the shopper will purchase a product from that category if seen, and the product category’s unit profit. We estimate the probability that a shopper will see a location through a novel approach that considers (i) the effective area of that location, (ii) probability distribution of a shopper’s head position based on real shopper head movements, and (iii) exposure estimates from our approach in Contribution 1. To solve the ROCP, we design a particle swarm optimization approach and conduct a comprehensive experimental study using realistic data. Our findings suggest that layouts with either high-acute and straight-to-medium-curved racks or high-obtuse and high-curved racks tend to maximize marginal impulse profit. Profit increases ranging from 70-233% over common rack layouts (orthogonal and straight racks) can be realized depending on the location policy of product categories. The sensitivity of these solutions to shopper volume, cost of floor space, travel direction, and maximum aspect ratio is also evaluated. The implications of our proposed models and findings are wide-ranging to retailers. First, they provide retailers with insights on how design parameters affect both exposure and marginal impulse profit; this can help avoid expensive experiments with layout changes. Second, they reveal hot-warm-cold spots for specific layout designs, allowing for effective product location assignments. Finally, these insights can help enhance shopper interactions with products (i.e., ability to see more products, find products faster), which can improve their shopping experience and drive up sales

Use of High-Energy Radiation for Degradation of Environmental Pollutants

The purpose of this project was to explore the advantages and/or limitations of high-energy radiation treatment as a method for degrading organic pollutants, particularly aryl halides, in an aqueous medium. We have done analyses of 60Co-irradiated samples and kinetic studies using pulsed electron beams. For aryl halides containing no more than two fused rings, the main products detected are those of simple halogen replacement by hydrogen, although the amount of aryl halide destroyed was always greater than the total amount of products detected. To accomplish halogen replacement by H, the reaction solvent may not be pure water but must contain a hydrogen source such as an aliphatic alcohol. The absence of such an additive, results in products of aryl radical addition to aryl halide. The necessary amount of additive required is quite small for halobenzenes. With aryl halides of three (and presumably more than three) fused rings, the radical-anion intermediates either undergo conversion to halogen-containing dihydroarenes, or lose halogen to form raqicals which resist reaction with H-donating additive and thus form dimers. When aryl halides are solubilized in micelle-forming detergent solutions, the detergent molecules serve as hydrogen atom sources. Conversions are highest with cationic detergents

Bilateral National Metrology Institute Comparison of Guarded-Hot-Plate Apparatus

Two national metrology institutes have conducted an international interlaboratory comparison on thermal conductivity for two thermal insulation reference materials. The Laboratoire national de métrologie et d’essais (LNE), France, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), United States, present measurements obtained by the guarded-hot-plate method. The study involved two materials: expanded polystyrene board (EPS) and fibrous glass board (FGB). The EPS was provided by the LNE and is issued as a transfer specimen; the FGB provided by NIST was issued as Standard Reference Material (SRM) 1450c. For each reference material, the study was based on four independent measurements at a mean temperature of 24°C and two additional mean temperatures of 10°C and 35°C