Topic-Specific Sentiment Analysis Can Help Identify Political Ideology

Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of topics. This representation can then be used to detect ideological leanings of documents (speeches, news articles, etc.) based on the sentiments expressed towards different topics. Experiments performed using a widely used dataset show the promise of our proposed approach that achieves comparable performance to other methods despite being much simpler and more interpretable.Comment: Presented at EMNLP Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, 201

Production of Yogurt Powder Using Foam-Mat Drying

Yogurt powder was produced by using foam-mat drying method. Two types of foaming agents as methylcellulose and egg albumin were used at different concentrations as 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0% for methylcellulose and 1, 2, 3 and 4% for egg albumin, respectively. The mixture of plain yogurt and foaming agent were blended by using high speed mixer (900 W) for 5, 7, 9 and 12 min. Characteristics of yogurt foam, as foam density, foam stability and foam expansion, were determined. Three percentage of egg albumin with the mixing time of 12 min provided better foam characteristics. The yogurt foam was then dried at 50, 60 and 70C for 3 h. The dried yogurt was blended and kept in an air tight container. Characteristic of yogurt powder as moisture content, water activity (aw) and glass transition temperature (Tg) were analyzed. Simultaneously, the food application of yogurt powder in drinking yogurt was studied. Yogurt powder (15%) was dissolved in cold water (85 ml) and then mixed well. Orange flavor (0.1 g) and color (0.1 g) were added into the product. Two physical characteristics of the finished product, viscosity and cohesiveness, were measured. Moreover, sensory evaluation was performed by using 9-point hedonic score and 30 panelists. The highest viscosity product was obtained when 60C yogurt powder was used. Sensory qualities of drinking yogurt of all treatments were not significant (p>0.05) different. The yogurt powder (60C) had aw of 0.348, moisture content 8.5%, Tg 25.51 C and lactic acid bacteria count 5.6 x 107 cfu g-1 . The preference scores of drinking yogurt made by using yogurt powder were 6.7, 6.8, 6.6 and 6.7 for appearance, flavor, texture and overall, respectively

Ambiversive nature of Indian population in disease management: what is the need of the hour?

Allopathic and ayurvedic medicines have been used since ages, and both have their advantages and disadvantages. Not a single allopathic drug manufactured until date is free from side effects. Then why is allopathic medicine still preferred? Mainly because everyone of us need quick relief and/or fast action. In the case of HIV, cancer, stroke, myocardial infarction, medical emergency and/or casualty cases ayurvedic medicines are either unavailable or can’t be used

Dialogue Agents 101: A Beginner's Guide to Critical Ingredients for Designing Effective Conversational Systems

Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of conversational tasks, datasets, and methods. However, with numerous tasks being explored simultaneously, the current landscape of conversational AI becomes fragmented. Therefore, initiating a well-thought-out model for a dialogue agent can pose significant challenges for a practitioner. Towards highlighting the critical ingredients needed for a practitioner to design a dialogue agent from scratch, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the primary characteristics of a dialogue agent, the supporting tasks, their corresponding open-domain datasets, and the methods used to benchmark these datasets. We observe that different methods have been used to tackle distinct dialogue tasks. However, building separate models for each task is costly and does not leverage the correlation among the several tasks of a dialogue agent. As a result, recent trends suggest a shift towards building unified foundation models. To this end, we propose UNIT, a UNified dIalogue dataseT constructed from conversations of existing datasets for different dialogue tasks capturing the nuances for each of them. We also examine the evaluation strategies used to measure the performance of dialogue agents and highlight the scope for future research in the area of conversational AI.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Pharmaceutical Applications of Xanthan Gum in Ophthalmic Delivery Systems

Introduction: Ophthalmic delivery system is one of the challenging domains of formulation and development due to tear dilutions, drug loss due to lacrimal drainage, limited volume and pre-corneal barriers. Several pharmaceutical technologies are exploited in order to counter the challenges posed by ocular route such as emulsions and suspensions. But all these technologies have stability issues which lead to their limited use.Background: Among polysaccharides, xanthan gum, a natural occurring biodegradable exopolysaccharide extracted from bacterium Xanthomonas campestris is widely accepted as one of the potential polysaccharide in ophthalmic delivery systems.Review Results: Xanthan gum is commonly used as an additive to various ophthalmic formulations due to its mucoadhesive property and imparting stability to various novel pharmaceutical technologies for ophthalmic. Xanthan gum also allows chemical modifications with various ligands which consequently allow controlled release, modified dissolution rate and viscoelasticity. Conclusion: In this review we are providing an insight over potential of pharmaceutical applications of xanthan gum. Also, we have discussed the scope of chemical modifications in xanthan gum with modified physicochemical properties