MIA 2022 Shared Task Submission: Leveraging Entity Representations, Dense-Sparse Hybrids, and Fusion-in-Decoder for Cross-Lingual Question Answering

We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse retrieval strategy. The second stage consists of a reader which outputs the answer from the top passages returned by the first stage. We show the efficacy of using a multilingual language model with entity representations in pretraining, sparse retrieval signals to help dense retrieval, and Fusion-in-Decoder. On the development set, we obtain 43.46 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 21.99 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 32.73. On the test set, we obtain 40.93 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 22.29 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 31.61. We improve over the official baseline by over 4 F1 points on both the development and test sets.Comment: System description for the Multilingual Information Access 2022 Shared Tas

XNMT: The eXtensible Neural Machine Translation Toolkit

This paper describes XNMT, the eXtensible Neural Machine Translation toolkit. XNMT distin- guishes itself from other open-source NMT toolkits by its focus on modular code design, with the purpose of enabling fast iteration in research and replicable, reliable results. In this paper we describe the design of XNMT and its experiment configuration system, and demonstrate its utility on the tasks of machine translation, speech recognition, and multi-tasked machine translation/parsing. XNMT is available open-source at https://github.com/neulab/xnmtComment: To be presented at AMTA 2018 Open Source Software Showcas

Growth of large-sized relaxor ferroelectric PZN-PT single crystals by modified flux growth method

A novel bottom-cooling high-temperature solution growth technique is developed for growing large-sized relaxor ferroelectric 0.91Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3O3)-0.09PbTiO3 (PZN-PT) single crystals. During the growth, an inverse temperature gradient is maintained in the crucible base by flowing air at a controlled rate. This method restricts the number of spontaneously nucleated crystals at crucible bottom, reduces loss of volatile PbO component and favours the growth of large-sized PZN-PT single crystals. Large-sized PZN-PT single crystals of dimensions ~ 22x20x14 mm3 are reproducibly grown by the proposed method. The electrical characteristics of the PZN-PT wafers oriented along the , and directions are investigated. PZN-PT wafers oriented along the direction exhibited superior piezoelectric coefficient (d33) of ~ 2221 pm/V. The homogeneity of the physical parameters is analysed by preparing 10 elements with dimensions of ~5x2.5x2.5 mm3 which were cut from single wafer oriented along the direction. The ferro-, piezo- and dielectric characteristics of these wafers were found to be highly uniform with small standard deviation. The observation of d33 value with less than 2 % deviation from mean value confirms the growth of high quality PZN-PT single crystals.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Infecções em dispositivos neurológicos implantáveis em crianças e adolescentes

OBJETIVO: Determinar a freqüência, as causas, o sítio específico e as manifestações clínicas e laboratoriais das infecções em crianças e adolescentes após a implantação de dispositivos neurológicos (DVP) no Hospital Governador João Alves Filho (Aracaju SE). MÉTODO: Estudo prospectivo, observacional, não controlado de 50 pacientes, submetidos a DVP (58 procedimentos), no período de janeiro de 2003 a outubro de 2004. RESULTADOS: Observaram-se taxas de infecção por procedimento de 27,6%, taxas de infecção de índice cirúrgico zero, 1 e 2 de 25,7% e 30,4%, respectivamente (NNIS-CDC). A infecção de sítio cirúrgico foi a principal complicação com 50% das infecções. CONCLUSÃO: Taxa de infecção por procedimento, paciente e índice de risco cirúrgico mostraram-se elevadas. Não houve significância estatística com relação à idade, etiologia da hidrocefalia, ao tipo de procedimento (derivação primária e reinserção), tempo de internação pré-operatória, duração da cirurgia, antibioticoprofilaxia, cateter SNC prévio e índice de risco cirúrgico. _________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE: To determine frequency, etiology, site and clinical and laboratory findings of ventriculoperitoneal shunt (VPS) infections in children and adolescents with hydrocephalus managed in Hospital Governador João Alves Filho, Aracaju SE, Brazil. METHOD: A non-controlled prospective observational study comprising 50 patients that underwent VPS (58 procedures) from January/2003 to October/2004. RESULTS: Infection rate per procedure was 27.6%; surgical risk index (NNISS-CDC) 0 and 1-2 were 25.7% and 30.4% respectively; surgical site infection was the main complication with 50% of the cases. CONCLUSION: Infection rates per procedure, per patient, and per surgical risk index were high. No statistical differences were found related to the following: age, etiology of hydrocephalus, type of procedure, pre-operative length of stay, duration of procedure, antibiotic prophylaxis, previous central nervous system catheter, and surgical risk index