Towards Open-World Product Attribute Mining: A Lightly-Supervised Approach

We present a new task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products, serving as a practical solution to extract open-world attributes without extensive human intervention. Our supervision comes from a high-quality seed attribute set bootstrapped from existing resources, and we aim to expand the attribute vocabulary of existing seed types, and also to discover any new attribute types automatically. A new dataset is created to support our setting, and our approach Amacer is proposed specifically to tackle the limited supervision. Especially, given that no direct supervision is available for those unseen new attributes, our novel formulation exploits self-supervised heuristic and unsupervised latent attributes, which attains implicit semantic signals as additional supervision by leveraging product context. Experiments suggest that our approach surpasses various baselines by 12 F1, expanding attributes of existing types significantly by up to 12 times, and discovering values from 39% new types.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

Timber production assessment of a plantation forest: An integrated framework with field-based inventory, multi-source remote sensing data and forest management history

Timber production is the purpose for managing plantation forests, and its spatial and quantitative information is critical for advising management strategies. Previous studies have focused on growing stock volume (GSV), which represents the current potential of timber production, yet few studies have investigated historical process-harvested timber. This resulted in a gap in a synthetical ecosystem service assessment of timber production. In this paper, we established a Management Process-based Timber production (MPT) framework to integrate the current GSV and the harvested timber derived from historical logging regimes, trying to synthetically assess timber production for a historical period. In the MPT framework, age-class and current GSV determine the times of historical thinning and the corresponding harvested timber, by using a "space-for-time" substitution. The total timber production can be estimated by the historical harvested timber in each thinning and the current GSV. To test this MPT framework, an empirical study on a larch plantation (LP) with area of 43,946 ha was conducted in North China for a period from 1962 to 2010. Field-based inventory data was integrated with ALOS PALSAR (Advanced Land-Observing Satellite Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Landsat-8 OLI (Operational Land Imager) data for estimating the age-class and current GSV of LP. The random forest model with PALSAR backscatter intensity channels and OLI bands as input predictive variables yielded an accuracy of 67.9% with a Kappa coefficient of 0.59 for age-class classification. The regression model using PALSAR data produced a root mean square error (RMSE) of 36.5 m(3) ha(-1). The total timber production of LP was estimated to be 7.27 x 10(6) m(3), with 4.87 x 10(6) m(3) in current GSV and 2.40 x 10(6) m(3) in harvested timber through historical thinning. The historical process-harvested timber accounts to 33.0% of the total timber production, which component has been neglected in the assessments for current status of plantation forests. Synthetically considering the RMSE for predictive GSV and misclassification of age-class, the error in timber production were supposed to range from -55.2 to 56.3 m(3) ha(-1). The MPT framework can be used to assess timber production of other tree species at a larger spatial scale, providing crucial information for a better understanding of forest ecosystem service. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.ArticleINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATION AND GEOINFORMATION.52:155-165(2016)journal articl

Roles for heterodimerization of APJ and B2R in promoting cell proliferation via ERK1/2-eNOS signaling pathway

Apelin receptor (APJ) and bradykinin B2 receptor (B2R) play an important role in many physiological processes and share multiple similar characteristics in distribution and functions in the cardiovascular system. We first identified the endogenous expression of APJ and B2R in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) and their co-localization on human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cells membrane. A suite of bioluminescence and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (BRET and FRET), proximity ligation assay (PLA), and co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP) was exploited to demonstrate formation of functional APJ and B2R heterodimer in HUVECs and transfected cells. Stimulation with apelin-13 and bradykinin (BK) increased the phosphorylation of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) in HUVECs, which could be inhibited by the silencing of APJ or B2R, indicating the APJ-B2R dimer is critical for eNOS phosphorylation in HUVECs. Furthermore, the increase of NOS and extracellular signal regulated kinases1/2 (ERK1/2) phosphorylation mediated by APJ/B2R dimer can be inhibited by U0126 and U73122, respectively, suggesting that the heterodimer might activate the PLC/ERK1/2/eNOS signaling pathway, and finally leading to a significant increase in cell proliferation. Thus, we uncovered for the first time the existence of APJ-B2R heterodimer and provided a promising new target in cardiovascular therapeutics

The molecular basis of beta-thalassemia intermedia in southern China: genotypic heterogeneity and phenotypic diversity

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The clinical syndrome of thalassemia intermedia (TI) results from the β-globin genotypes in combination with factors to produce fetal haemoglobin (HbF) and/or co-inheritance of α-thalassemia. However, very little is currently known of the molecular basis of Chinese TI patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We systematically analyzed and characterized β-globin genotypes, α-thalassemia determinants, and known primary genetic modifiers linked to the production of HbF and the aggravation of α/β imbalance in 117 Chinese TI patients. Genotype-phenotype correlations were analyzed based on retrospective clinical observations.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 117 TI patients were divided into two major groups, namely heterozygous β-thalassemia (n = 20) in which 14 were characterized as having a mild TI with the Hb levels of 68-95 g/L except for five co-inherited ααα^anti-3.7triplication and one carried a dominant mutation; and β-thalassemia homozygotes or compound heterozygotes for β-thalassemia and other β-globin defects in which the β⁺-thalassemia mutation was the most common (49/97), hemoglobin E (HbE) variants was second (27/97), and deletional hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin (HPFH) or δβ-thalassemia was third (11/97). Two novel mutations, Term CD+32(A→C) and Cap+39(C→T), have been detected.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Chinese TI patients showed considerable heterogeneity, both phenotypically and genotypically. The clinical outcomes of our TI patients were mostly explained by the genotypes linked to the β- and α-globin gene cluster. However, for a group of 14 patients (13 β⁰/β^Nand 1 β⁺/β^N) with known heterozygous mutations of β-thalassemia and three with homozygous β-thalassemia (β⁰/β⁰), the existence of other causative genetic determinants is remaining to be molecularly defined.</p

CT-Integral on Interval-Valued Sugeno Probability Measure and Its Application in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Problems

It is well known that the complexity of the decision-making environment frequently coexists with the diversity of linguistic information in the decision-making process. In order to solve this kind of uncertain multi-criteria decision-making problem, reasonable measures and integrals should be established. In this paper, the discrete expression of the CT-integral on the interval-valued Sugeno probability measure is proposed. The CT-integral is the Choquet integral when the t-norm is T(x,y)=xy in the CT-integral and is a pre-aggregation function. Then, the CT-integral on interval-valued Sugeno probability measure is applied to solve end-of-life (EOL) strategy in order to determine multi-criteria decision-making problems. Compared with the general Choquet integral, the method proposed in this paper significantly improves the calculation process, that is, the calculation is simpler and the amount of calculation is smaller. A case study was performed in order to validate the effectiveness of this conclusion

Mapping Spatial Distribution of Larch Plantations from Multi-Seasonal Landsat-8 OLI Imagery and Multi-Scale Textures Using Random Forests

The knowledge about spatial distribution of plantation forests is critical for forest management, monitoring programs and functional assessment. This study demonstrates the potential of multi-seasonal (spring, summer, autumn and winter) Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager imageries with random forests (RF) modeling to map larch plantations (LP) in a typical plantation forest landscape in North China. The spectral bands and two types of textures were applied for creating 675 input variables of RF. An accuracy of 92.7% for LP, with a Kappa coefficient of 0.834, was attained using the RF model. A RF-based importance assessment reveals that the spectral bands and bivariate textural features calculated by pseudo-cross variogram (PC) strongly promoted forest class-separability, whereas the univariate textural features influenced weakly. A feature selection strategy eliminated 93% of variables, and then a subset of the 47 most essential variables was generated. In this subset, PC texture derived from summer and winter appeared the most frequently, suggesting that this variability in growing peak season and non-growing season can effectively enhance forest class-separability. A RF classifier applied to the subset led to 91.9% accuracy for LP, with a Kappa coefficient of 0.829. This study provides an insight into approaches for discriminating plantation forests with phenological behaviors