5,335 research outputs found
Pair-Linking for Collective Entity Disambiguation: Two Could Be Better Than All
Collective entity disambiguation aims to jointly resolve multiple mentions by
linking them to their associated entities in a knowledge base. Previous works
are primarily based on the underlying assumption that entities within the same
document are highly related. However, the extend to which these mentioned
entities are actually connected in reality is rarely studied and therefore
raises interesting research questions. For the first time, we show that the
semantic relationships between the mentioned entities are in fact less dense
than expected. This could be attributed to several reasons such as noise, data
sparsity and knowledge base incompleteness. As a remedy, we introduce MINTREE,
a new tree-based objective for the entity disambiguation problem. The key
intuition behind MINTREE is the concept of coherence relaxation which utilizes
the weight of a minimum spanning tree to measure the coherence between
entities. Based on this new objective, we design a novel entity disambiguation
algorithms which we call Pair-Linking. Instead of considering all the given
mentions, Pair-Linking iteratively selects a pair with the highest confidence
at each step for decision making. Via extensive experiments, we show that our
approach is not only more accurate but also surprisingly faster than many
state-of-the-art collective linking algorithms
SkipFlow: Incorporating Neural Coherence Features for End-to-End Automatic Text Scoring
Deep learning has demonstrated tremendous potential for Automatic Text
Scoring (ATS) tasks. In this paper, we describe a new neural architecture that
enhances vanilla neural network models with auxiliary neural coherence
features. Our new method proposes a new \textsc{SkipFlow} mechanism that models
relationships between snapshots of the hidden representations of a long
short-term memory (LSTM) network as it reads. Subsequently, the semantic
relationships between multiple snapshots are used as auxiliary features for
prediction. This has two main benefits. Firstly, essays are typically long
sequences and therefore the memorization capability of the LSTM network may be
insufficient. Implicit access to multiple snapshots can alleviate this problem
by acting as a protection against vanishing gradients. The parameters of the
\textsc{SkipFlow} mechanism also acts as an auxiliary memory. Secondly,
modeling relationships between multiple positions allows our model to learn
features that represent and approximate textual coherence. In our model, we
call this \textit{neural coherence} features. Overall, we present a unified
deep learning architecture that generates neural coherence features as it reads
in an end-to-end fashion. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art
performance on the benchmark ASAP dataset, outperforming not only feature
engineering baselines but also other deep learning models.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201
Trace metal Contamination in Water from abandoned mining and non-mining areas in the Northern Parts of the Ashanti Gold Belt, Ghana
A survey was conducted on the levels of trace metals (Ni, Cu, Hg, Pb, Mn, Fe, Zn, Cr, Cd, Mg and Ca) in ground and surface water sources from the northern parts of the Ashanti gold belt. Water samples were collected from 67 boreholes, 24 wells, and 10 streams during dry and wet seasons for trace metal analyses using Philips PU 9200 atomic absorption spectrophotometer. The main objective was to determine whether trace metal contamination in the study area was as a result of mining or geochemical and biochemical processes within the aquifer. The results showed that ground water (pH range 4.09–7.29 and mean 5.87 pH units) was slightly acidic (low pH) than surface water (pH range 5.81–7.74 and mean 7.12 pH units). The ground waters (with conductivity range 96–1553 mS/cm and mean 407.7 mS/cm) in the study area were also more mineralized than surface waters (with conductivity range 113–540 mS/cm and mean 323.30 mS/cm). Correlations between the trace metals revealed expected process-based relationship between Mg2+ and Ca2+ (r = 0.76), derived mainly from the geochemical and biochemical processes within the aquifer. However, there were also other strong linear relationships between trace metals, such as Fe2+ and Ca2+ (r = 0.61); Mg2+ and Mn2+(r = 0.72), Hg2+ and Mn2+ (r = 0.61), that are not normally expected to be linked in terms of processes. All the well and stream water sources had one or more trace metal level outside acceptable limits set by the World Health Organization for drinking water, and only three borehole water samples at Konongo (Abronikrom), Ntronang (Ahenbronoso) andBomfa (Nkubem) were safe for human consumptio
Groundwater quality studies: A Case study of the Densu Basin, Ghana
Groundwater samples from 68 communities within the Densu basin were sampled and analysed over a period of 1 year for various physico-chemical water quality parameters using appropriate certified and acceptable international procedures, in order to assess the water types as well as the suitability of groundwater within the basin for drinking and other domestic uses. The study showed that most of the physico-chemical parameters were within the World Health Organization limits recommended for drinking water. However, a few of the boreholes were slightly acidic. Someboreholes showed high level of mineralization. Borehole (GaD 6) at Pokuasi recorded the highest conductivity value of 7780.0 ìS/cm. High levels of nitrates were also recorded in certain communities within the basin. These include Aponsahene (105.8 mg/l), Damang (66.0 mg/l), Adzen Kotoku (61.5 mg/l), Afabeng (50.8 mg/l), New Mangoase (48.3mg/l), Asuoatwene (41.3 mg/l), Potrase (33.6 mg/l) and Maase (33.3 mg/l). Correlations between major ions showed expected process-based relationship between Ca2+ and Cl- (r = 0.86); Mg2+ and Cl- (r = 0.84); Na+ and SO4 2- (r =0.77); Na+ and Cl- (r = 0.75); Mg2+ and SO42- (r = 0.74); Mg2+ and Ca2+ (r = 0.71); Ca2+ and SO4 2- (r = 0.58); and K+ and SO4 2- (r = 0.51), derived mainly from the geochemical and biochemical processes within the aquifer. Two major hydrochemical water types constituting 41% of groundwater sources within the basin have been delineated. These are Ca-Mg-HCO3 water (19%) and Na –Cl or Na –Cl –HCO3- Cl water (22%) types. Fifty-nine per cent of groundwatersources are mixed waters with no particular cation predominating, and having either HCO3-or SO4 2- ions as the main anion
Trace Metal Concentrations in Commercially Important Fishes from some Coastal and Inland Waters in Ghana
An assessment was conducted on the concentrations of zinc, copper, manganese, iron, lead and cadmium in 10 different fish species caught from some coastal and inland waters in Ghana, as part of a project on monitoring of pollution in water bodies in
Ghana. Shellfish species (Egeria paradoxa galanata and Atya gabonensis) caught from inland waters had higher elemental concentrations than those caught from coastal waters. Mean concentrations of Fe and Mn were higher in E. paradoxa galanata, A. gabonensis and Trachiurus trachiurus, while Panulirus regius and Sardinella eba had higher mean concentrations of Cu. T. trachiurus, Dentex congoensis and T. ovatus had higher mean concentrations of Pb, while T. trachiurus and S. eba had higher mean concentrations of Zn. Mean Cd concentrations in the fish species were relatively low, with mean concentrations of
Cynoglossus cadenati, D. congoensis and T. ovatus below detection limits. The mean concentrations of Zn, Cu, Pb and Cd for shell fishes were comparable to those obtained from previous studies in Ghana. However, they were lower than those reported in
other areas of the sub-region. The mean concentrations of Zn, Cu, Pb and Cd in fin fishes were higher than those obtained from previous studies in Ghana. However, these values were comparable to those obtained from other areas in the sub-region. Compared to WHO limits, the levels of Zn, Pb, Cu and Cd in the fish species were lower, and, therefore, safe for human consumption. The study also showed that all the fish species except S. eba, Solar crumophthalmus and P. regius are safe for human consumption with respect to Zn, Cu and Fe.West African Journal of Applied Ecology Vol. 13 2008: pp. 27-3
Quantum limited particle sensing in optical tweezers
Particle sensing in optical tweezers systems provides information on the
position, velocity and force of the specimen particles. The conventional
quadrant detection scheme is applied ubiquitously in optical tweezers
experiments to quantify these parameters. In this paper we show that quadrant
detection is non-optimal for particle sensing in optical tweezers and propose
an alternative optimal particle sensing scheme based on spatial homodyne
detection. A formalism for particle sensing in terms of transverse spatial
modes is developed and numerical simulations of the efficacy of both quadrant
and spatial homodyne detection are shown. We demonstrate that an order of
magnitude improvement in particle sensing sensitivity can be achieved using
spatial homodyne over quadrant detection.Comment: Submitted to Biophys
Dominant Eigenvalue-Eigenvector Pair Estimation via Graph Infection
We present a novel method to estimate the dominant eigenvalue and eigenvector
pair of any non-negative real matrix via graph infection. The key idea in our
technique lies in approximating the solution to the first-order matrix ordinary
differential equation (ODE) with the Euler method. Graphs, which can be
weighted, directed, and with loops, are first converted to its adjacency matrix
A. Then by a naive infection model for graphs, we establish the corresponding
first-order matrix ODE, through which A's dominant eigenvalue is revealed by
the fastest growing term. When there are multiple dominant eigenvalues of the
same magnitude, the classical power iteration method can fail. In contrast, our
method can converge to the dominant eigenvalue even when same-magnitude
counterparts exist, be it complex or opposite in sign. We conduct several
experiments comparing the convergence between our method and power iteration.
Our results show clear advantages over power iteration for tree graphs,
bipartite graphs, directed graphs with periods, and Markov chains with
spider-traps. To our knowledge, this is the first work that estimates dominant
eigenvalue and eigenvector pair from the perspective of a dynamical system and
matrix ODE. We believe our method can be adopted as an alternative to power
iteration, especially for graphs.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 3 table
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