A methodology for population projections: an application to Spain

This paper looks at projections for the Spanish population by sex and age for the period of 2005 to 2050. These were carried out using forecasts for birth and mortality rates, and migration. These rates are calculated using two main sources of information. First, a multivariate time series model was applied for the series of variables from the 1970 to 2001 period. Second a model was estimated for life expectancy and for a synthetic fertility index. Both sources of information were combined to obtain the forecasts for the rates. Immigration rates are predicted by assuming three possible scenarios based on the maximum proportion that immigrants will represent in the Spanish population. With these variables a structure of ages and sex for the Spanish population is estimated using a cohort component model

ChPT parameters from tau-decay data

Using the updated ALEPH V-A spectral function from tau decays, we determine the lowest spectral moments of the left-right correlator and extract dynamical information on order parameters of the QCD chiral symmetry breaking. Uncertainties associated with violations of quark-hadron duality are estimated from the data, imposing all known short-distance constraints on a resonance-based parametrization. Employing proper pinched weight functions, we obtain an accurate determination of the effective chiral couplings L10 and C87 and the dimension-six and -eight contributions in the Operator Product Expansion.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, QCD2015 Montpellie

Universal, Unsupervised (Rule-Based), Uncovered Sentiment Analysis

We present a novel unsupervised approach for multilingual sentiment analysis driven by compositional syntax-based rules. On the one hand, we exploit some of the main advantages of unsupervised algorithms: (1) the interpretability of their output, in contrast with most supervised models, which behave as a black box and (2) their robustness across different corpora and domains. On the other hand, by introducing the concept of compositional operations and exploiting syntactic information in the form of universal dependencies, we tackle one of their main drawbacks: their rigidity on data that are structured differently depending on the language concerned. Experiments show an improvement both over existing unsupervised methods, and over state-of-the-art supervised models when evaluating outside their corpus of origin. Experiments also show how the same compositional operations can be shared across languages. The system is available at http://www.grupolys.org/software/UUUSA/Comment: 19 pages, 5 Tables, 6 Figures. This is the authors version of a work that was accepted for publication in Knowledge-Based System

One model, two languages: training bilingual parsers with harmonized treebanks

We introduce an approach to train lexicalized parsers using bilingual corpora obtained by merging harmonized treebanks of different languages, producing parsers that can analyze sentences in either of the learned languages, or even sentences that mix both. We test the approach on the Universal Dependency Treebanks, training with MaltParser and MaltOptimizer. The results show that these bilingual parsers are more than competitive, as most combinations not only preserve accuracy, but some even achieve significant improvements over the corresponding monolingual parsers. Preliminary experiments also show the approach to be promising on texts with code-switching and when more languages are added.Comment: 7 pages, 4 tables, 1 figur

A methodology for population projections: an application to Spain

This paper looks at projections for the Spanish population by sex and age for the period of 2005 to 2050. These were carried out using forecasts for birth and mortality rates, and migration. These rates are calculated using two main sources of information. First, a multivariate time series model was applied for the series of variables from the 1970 to 2001 period. Second a model was estimated for life expectancy and for a synthetic fertility index. Both sources of information were combined to obtain the forecasts for the rates. Immigration rates are predicted by assuming three possible scenarios based on the maximum proportion that immigrants will represent in the Spanish population. With these variables a structure of ages and sex for the Spanish population is estimated using a cohort component model.Population projections, Time series, Factorial model, Bootstrap

A new manual wheelchair propulsion system with self-locking capability on ramps

A wheelchair user faces many difficulties in their everyday attempts to use ramps, especially those of some length. The present work describes the design and build of a propulsion system for manual wheelchairs for use in ascending or descending long ramps. The design is characterized by a self-locking mechanism that activates automatically to brake the chair when the user stops pushing. The system consists of a planetary transmission with a self-locking capacity coupled to a push rim with which the user moves the system. Different transmission ratios are proposed, adapted to the slope and to the user’s physical capacity (measured as the power the user can apply over ample time periods). The design is shown to be viable in terms of resistance, and approximate dimensions are established for the height and width of the propulsion system. Also, a prototype was built in order to test the self-locking system on ramps