Is This a Joke? Detecting Humor in Spanish Tweets

While humor has been historically studied from a psychological, cognitive and linguistic standpoint, its study from a computational perspective is an area yet to be explored in Computational Linguistics. There exist some previous works, but a characterization of humor that allows its automatic recognition and generation is far from being specified. In this work we build a crowdsourced corpus of labeled tweets, annotated according to its humor value, letting the annotators subjectively decide which are humorous. A humor classifier for Spanish tweets is assembled based on supervised learning, reaching a precision of 84% and a recall of 69%.Comment: Preprint version, without referra

Plant Arrangement Effects on Dry Matter Production and Nitrogen Fixation of Berseem Clover: Annual Ryegrass Mixture

Agronomic factors affect the productivity and efficiency of cereal-legume intercropping systems (Ofori & Stern, 1987). This research aimed to determine the effects of different plant arrangement on hay yield, nitrogen (N) content and N fixation of berseem clover-annual ryegrass mixture in a Mediterranean semi-arid environment

Detecting Satire in Italian Political Commentaries

This paper presents computational work to detect satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It uses the lexica extracted from the manual annotation based on Appraisal Theory, of some 30 K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to precisely pinpoint ironic content through the deep semantic analysis of evaluative judgement and appreciation. The paper presents the manual annotation phase realized on 112 texts by two well-known Italian journalists. After a first experimentation phase based on the lexica extracted from the xml output files, we proceeded to retag lexical entries dividing them up into two subclasses: figurative and literal meaning. Finally more fine-grained Appraisal features have been derived and more experiments have been carried out and compared to results obtained by a lean sentiment analysis. The final output is produced from held out texts to verify the usefulness of the lexica and the Appraisal theory in detecting ironic content

Applying basic features from sentiment analysis on automatic irony detection

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_38People use social media to express their opinions. Often linguistic devices such as irony are used. From the sentiment analysis perspective such utterances represent a challenge being a polarity reversor (usually from positive to negative). This paper presents an approach to address irony detection from a machine learning perspective. Our model considers structural features as well as, for the first time, sentiment analysis features such as the overall sentiment of a tweet and a score of its polarity. The approach has been evaluated over a set classifiers such as: Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, Maximum Entropy, Support Vector Machine, and for the first time in irony detection task: Multilayer Perceptron. The results obtained showed the ability of our model to distinguish between potentially ironic and non-ironic sentences.The National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT Mexico) has funded the research work of the first author (Grant No.218109/313683, CVU-369616). The research work of third author was carried out inthe framework of WIQ-EI IRSES (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, DIANA-APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Hernández Farías, I.; Benedí Ruiz, JM.; Rosso, P. (2015). Applying basic features from sentiment analysis on automatic irony detection. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: 7th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2015, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, June 17-19, 2015, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 337-344. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_38S337344Alba-Juez, L.: Irony and the other off record strategies within politeness theory. J. Engl. Am. Stud. 16, 13–24 (1995)Attardo, S.: Irony markers and functions: towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. Rask 12, 3–20 (2000)Barbieri, F., Saggion, H.: Modelling Irony in Twitter, pp. 56–64. Association for Computational Linguistics (2014)Bosco, C., Patti, V., Bolioli, A.: Developing corpora for sentiment analysis: the case of irony and senti-tut. IEEE Intell. Syst. 28(2), 55–63 (2013)Buschmeier, K., Cimiano, P., Klinger, R.: An impact analysis of features in a classification approach to irony detection in product reviews. In: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pp. 42–49. Association for Computational Linguistics (2014)Ghosh, A., Li, G., Veale, T., Rosso, P., Shutova, E., Reyes, A., Barnden, J.: Sentiment analysis of figurative language in twitter. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2015), Co-located with NAACL and *SEM (2015)Hu, M., Liu, B.: Mining and summarizing customer reviews. In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2004, pp. 168–177(2004)Maynard, D., Greenwood, M.: Who cares about sarcastic tweets? investigating the impact of sarcasm on sentiment analysis. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2014), European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (2014)Pedersen, T., Patwardhan, S., Michelizzi, J.: Wordnet::similarity: measuring the relatedness of concepts. In: Proceedings of the 9th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1024–1025. Association for Computational LinguisticsReyes, A., Rosso, P., Veale, T.: A multidimensional approach for detecting irony in twitter. Lang. Resour. Eval. 47(1), 239–268 (2013)Wallace, B.C.: Computational irony: a survey and new perspectives. Artif. Intell. Rev. 43, 467–483 (2013)Wang, A.P.: #irony or #sarcasm – a quantitative and qualitative study based on twitter. In: Proceedings of the PACLIC: the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, pp. 349–356. Department of English, National Chengchi University (2013)Whissell, C.: Using the revised dictionary of affect in language to quantify the emotional undertones of samples of natural languages. Psychol. Rep. 2, 509–521 (2009)Wolf, A.: Emotional expression online: gender differences in emoticon use. CyberPsychology Behavior 3, 827–833 (2000

The use of skin traction in the adult patients with proximal femur fracture. What are the effects, advantages and disadvantages? A scoping review

Background: Hip surgery is normally the chosen therapy for proximal femur fractures. Surgery within 24–48 h after hip fracture is recommended, but surgery may not always be performed promptly. Consequently, skin-traction is applied to reduce complications. The purpose of this review is to assess both advantages and disadvantages of skin traction. Methods: A scoping review was conducted. The research question was: which are the effects of skin traction, its advantages and disadvantages in adult patients with proximal femur fractures hospitalised in orthopaedic wards? The search was done in the databases PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane, Embase, DOAJ, ClinicalTrials.gov and OpenDissertation. Results: 9 records were included, skin traction effects were summarised in 7 categories: pain, pressure sores, comfort and relaxation, thromboembolism, damage from adhesive, complications and quality of care. The possible advantage is pain reduction between 24 and 60 h, the possible disadvantage is skin damage. Discussion and conclusion: The routine use of skin traction does not appear recommended, but more consistent evidence is necessary to make clinic decisions. Future RCTs could focus on the effects of skin traction 24–60 h after hospitalisation and before surgery

International Glossina Genome Initiative 2004-2014: a driver for post-genomic era research on the African continent

Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), also known as sleeping sickness, is a neglected disease that impacts 70 million people distributed over 1.55 million km2 in sub- Saharan Africa and includes at least 50% of the population of theDemocratic Republic of the Congo [1]. Trypanosoma brucei gambiense accounts for more than 98% of the infections in central and West Africa, the remaining infections being from Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense in East Africa [2]. The parasites are transmitted to the hosts through the bite of an infected tsetse fly. Disease control is challenging as there are no vaccines, and effective, easily delivered drugs are still lacking. Treatment invariably involves lengthy hospitalization, with both medical and socioeconomic consequences.Web of Scienc

The interaction between a sexually transferred steroid hormone and a female protein regulates oogenesis in the malaria mosquito anopheles gambiae

Molecular interactions between male and female factors during mating profoundly affect the reproductive behavior and physiology of female insects. In natural populations of the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae, blood-fed females direct nutritional resources towards oogenesis only when inseminated. Here we show that the mating-dependent pathway of egg development in these mosquitoes is regulated by the interaction between the steroid hormone 20-hydroxy-ecdysone (20E) transferred by males during copulation and a female Mating-Induced Stimulator of Oogenesis (MISO) protein. RNAi silencing of MISO abolishes the increase in oogenesis caused by mating in blood-fed females, causes a delay in oocyte development, and impairs the function of male-transferred 20E. Co-immunoprecipitation experiments show that MISO and 20E interact in the female reproductive tract. Moreover MISO expression after mating is induced by 20E via the Ecdysone Receptor, demonstrating a close cooperation between the two factors. Male-transferred 20E therefore acts as a mating signal that females translate into an increased investment in egg development via a MISO-dependent pathway. The identification of this male–female reproductive interaction offers novel opportunities for the control of mosquito populations that transmit malaria

High-fidelity multimode fibre-based endoscopy for deep brain in vivo imaging

Progress in neuroscience constantly relies on the development of new techniques to investigate the complex dynamics of neuronal networks. An ongoing challenge is to achieve minimally-invasive and high-resolution observations of neuronal activity in vivo inside deep brain areas. A perspective strategy is to utilise holographic control of light propagation in complex media, which allows converting a hair-thin multimode optical fibre into an ultra-narrow imaging tool. Compared to current endoscopes based on GRIN lenses or fibre bundles, this concept offers a footprint reduction exceeding an order of magnitude, together with a significant enhancement in resolution. We designed a compact and high-speed system for fluorescent imaging at the tip of a fibre, achieving micron-scale resolution across a 50 um field of view, and yielding 7-kilopixel images at a rate of 3.5 frames/s. Furthermore, we demonstrate in vivo observations of cell bodies and processes of inhibitory neurons within deep layers of the visual cortex and hippocampus of anesthetised mice. This study forms the basis for several perspective techniques of modern microscopy to be delivered deep inside the tissue of living animal models while causing minimal impact on its structural and functional properties.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Supplementary movie: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fm0G3TAIC49LVX6FaEiAtlefkWx1T2a5/vie

Live Imaging at the Onset of Cortical Neurogenesis Reveals Differential Appearance of the Neuronal Phenotype in Apical versus Basal Progenitor Progeny

The neurons of the mammalian brain are generated by progenitors dividing either at the apical surface of the ventricular zone (neuroepithelial and radial glial cells, collectively referred to as apical progenitors) or at its basal side (basal progenitors, also called intermediate progenitors). For apical progenitors, the orientation of the cleavage plane relative to their apical-basal axis is thought to be of critical importance for the fate of the daughter cells. For basal progenitors, the relationship between cell polarity, cleavage plane orientation and the fate of daughter cells is unknown. Here, we have investigated these issues at the very onset of cortical neurogenesis. To directly observe the generation of neurons from apical and basal progenitors, we established a novel transgenic mouse line in which membrane GFP is expressed from the beta-III-tubulin promoter, an early pan-neuronal marker, and crossed this line with a previously described knock-in line in which nuclear GFP is expressed from the Tis21 promoter, a pan-neurogenic progenitor marker. Mitotic Tis21-positive basal progenitors nearly always divided symmetrically, generating two neurons, but, in contrast to symmetrically dividing apical progenitors, lacked apical-basal polarity and showed a nearly randomized cleavage plane orientation. Moreover, the appearance of beta-III-tubulin–driven GFP fluorescence in basal progenitor-derived neurons, in contrast to that in apical progenitor-derived neurons, was so rapid that it suggested the initiation of the neuronal phenotype already in the progenitor. Our observations imply that (i) the loss of apical-basal polarity restricts neuronal progenitors to the symmetric mode of cell division, and that (ii) basal progenitors initiate the expression of neuronal phenotype already before mitosis, in contrast to apical progenitors