Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles

Online users today are exposed to misleading and propagandistic news articles and media posts on a daily basis. To counter thus, a number of approaches have been designed aiming to achieve a healthier and safer online news and media consumption. Automatic systems are able to support humans in detecting such content; yet, a major impediment to their broad adoption is that besides being accurate, the decisions of such systems need also to be interpretable in order to be trusted and widely adopted by users. Since misleading and propagandistic content influences readers through the use of a number of deception techniques, we propose to detect and to show the use of such techniques as a way to offer interpretability. In particular, we define qualitatively descriptive features and we analyze their suitability for detecting deception techniques. We further show that our interpretable features can be easily combined with pre-trained language models, yielding state-of-the-art results

Molecular Detection of Leishmania major in the Vectors and Reservoir Hosts of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Kalaleh District, Golestan Province, Iran

Background: An epidemiological study was carried out on the vector(s) and reservoir(s) of cutaneous leishmaniasis in rural areas of Kalaleh District, Golestan Province during 2006 - 2007. Methods: Totally 4900 sand flies were collected using sticky papers and were subjected to molecular methods for de­tection of leishmanial parasite. Results: Phlebotomus papatasi was the common species in outdoor and indoor resting places. Employing PCR tech­nique showed only 1 out of 372 P. papatasi (0.3%) was positive to parasite due Leishmania major. Sixteen ro­dent reservoir hosts were captured by Sherman traps and identified as Rhombomys opimus. Microscopic investiga­tion on blood smear of the animals for amastigote parasites revealed 6(37.5%) infected rodents. Infection of these ani­mals to L. major was then confirmed by PCR against rDNA loci of the parasite. Conclusion: This is the first molecular report of parasite infection of both vector (P. papatas) and reservoir (R. opimus) to L. major. The results indicated that P. papatas was the primary vector of the disease and circulating the para­site between human and reservoirs, and R. opimus was the most important host reservoir for maintenance of the para­site source in the area

Utility of Filter Paper for Preserving Insects, Bacteria, and Host Reservoir DNA for Molecular Testing

Background: Appropriate methodology for storage biological materials, extraction of DNA, and proper DNA preservation is vital for studies involving genetic analysis of insects, bacteria, and reservoir hosts as well as for molecular diagnostics of pathogens carried by vectors and reservoirs. Here we tried to evaluate the utility of a simple filter paper-based for storage of insects, bacteria, rodent, and human DNAs using PCR assays. Methods: Total body or haemolymph of individual mosquitoes, sand flies or cockroaches squashed or placed on the paper respectively. Extracted DNA of five different bacteria species as well as blood specimens of human and great gerbil Rhombomys opimus was pipetted directly onto filter paper. The papers were stored in room temperature up to 12 months during 2009 until 2011. At monthly intervals, PCR was conducted using a 1-mm disk from the DNA impregnated filter paper as target DNA. PCR amplification was performed against different target genes of the organisms including the ITS2-rDNA of mosquitoes, mtDNA-COI of the sand flies and cockroaches, 16SrRNA gene of the bacteria, and the mtDNA-CytB of the vertebrates. Results: Successful PCR amplification was observed for all of the specimens regardless of the loci, taxon, or time of storage. The PCR amplification were ranged from 462 to 1500 bp and worked well for the specified target gene/s. Time of storage did not affect the amplification up to one year. Conclusion: The filter paper method is a simple and economical way to store, to preserve, and to distribute DNA samples for PCR analysis

Determination of parasite species of cutaneous leishmaniasis using Nested PCR in Damghan – Iran, during 2008

Background and Objective: Cutaneous leishmaniases with two forms of rural and urban is the endemic diseases and as a health problem in our country. Identification of parasite species and type of disease is very important for treatment of disease as well as for planning of control program. The microscopic observations by Giemsa-stained smears is the most common laboratory test for the diagnosis of cutaneous leishmaniasis, but the determination of parasite species is impossible and utilization of other ways such as biochemical and molecular methods is required. This study was carried out to determine the parasite species caused cutaneous Leishmaniasis by Nested PCR in Damghan, Iran. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study was performed on 67 patients with dermal lesions that referred to Damghan health center laboratory in Iran during 2008. The patient's information were recorded in questionnaire. DNA of Giemsa-stained slides from patients was extracted and evaluated by specific primers of kinetoplast DNA using Nested PCR. Results: Leishmania parasites were observed in 57 patients under light microscope. The 10 patients were infected by other dermal diseases. The PCR result showed the parasite presence in lesions of 57 patients is Leismania major. 54% of patients were male and 46% were female. 72% of the patients were lived in rural areas. 50.9% of disease was observed in over 25 years old patients. Hands were the most common region of ulcer (44.7%). 48% of the patients had one ulcer and the other patients had two or more ulcers. High prevalence (31.6%) of disease was observed in October. Conclusion: This study showed that zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis to be prevalent in this area and Nested PCR method is a sensitive and accurate to leishmania species characterization

Neural attention for learning to rank questions in community question answering

In real-world data, e.g., from Web forums, text is often contaminated with redundant or irrelevant content, which leads to introducing noise in machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we apply Long Short-Lerm Memory networks with an attention mechanism, which can select important parts of text for the task of similar question retrieval from community Question Answering (cQA) forums. In particular, we use the attention weights for both selecting entire sentences and their subparts, i.e., word/chunk, from shallow syntactic trees. More interestingly, we apply tree kernels to the filtered text representations, thus exploiting the implicit features of the subtree space for learning question reranking. Our results show that the attention-based pruning allows for achieving the top position in the cQA challenge of SemEval 2016, with a relatively large gap from the other participants while greatly decreasing running time

Molecular Detection of Leishmania infantum in Naturally Infected Phlebotomus perfiliewi transcaucasicus in Bilesavar District, Northwestern Iran

Background: Visceral leishmaniasis is caused by Leishmania infantum, transmitted to humans by bites of phle­botomine sand flies and is one of the most important public health problems in Iran. To identify the vector(s), an investiga­tion was carried out in Bilesavar District, one of the important foci of the disease in Ardebil Province in northwest­ern Iran, during July-September 2008. Methods: Using sticky papers, 2,110 sand flies were collected from indoors (bedroom, guestroom, toilet and stable) and outdoors (wall cracks, crevices and animal burrows) and identified morphologically. Species-specific amplifica­tion of promastigotes revealed specific PCR products of L. infantum DNA. Results: Six sand fly species were found in the district, including: Phlebotomus perfiliewi transcaucasicus, P. pa­patasi, P. tobbi, P. sergenti, Sergentomyia dentata and S. sintoni. Phlebotomus perfiliewi transcaucasicus was the domi­nant species of the genus Phlebotomus (62.8%). Of 270 female dissected P. perfiliewi transcuacasicus, 4 (1.5%) were found naturally infected with promastigotes. Conclusion: Based on natural infections of P. perfiliewi transcaucasicus with L. infantum and the fact that it was the only species found infected with L. infantum, it seems, this sand fly could be the principal vector of visceral leishmani­asis in the region.