Predicting the Quality of Short Narratives from Social Media

An important and difficult challenge in building computational models for narratives is the automatic evaluation of narrative quality. Quality evaluation connects narrative understanding and generation as generation systems need to evaluate their own products. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we employ upvotes in social media as an approximate measure for story quality. We collected 54,484 answers from a crowd-powered question-and-answer website, Quora, and then used active learning to build a classifier that labeled 28,320 answers as stories. To predict the number of upvotes without the use of social network features, we create neural networks that model textual regions and the interdependence among regions, which serve as strong benchmarks for future research. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale study for automatic evaluation of narrative quality.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the 2017 IJCAI conferenc

Revisiting the distance, environment and supernova properties of SNR G57.2+0.8 that hosts SGR 1935+2154

We have performed a multi-wavelength study of supernova remnant (SNR) G57.2+0.8 and its environment. The SNR hosts the magnetar SGR 1935+2154, which emitted an extremely bright ms-duration radio burst on 2020 Apr 28 (The Chime/Frb Collaboration et al. 2020; Bochenek et al. 2020). We used the 12CO and 13CO J=1-0 data from the Milky Way Image Scroll Painting (MWISP) CO line survey to search for molecular gas associated with G57.2+0.8, in order to constrain the physical parameters (e.g., the distance) of the SNR and its magnetar. We report that SNR G57.2+0.8 is likely impacting the molecular clouds (MCs) at the local standard of rest (LSR) velocity V_{LSR} ~ 30 km/s and excites a weak 1720 MHz OH maser with a peak flux density of 47 mJy/beam. The chance coincidence of a random OH spot falling in the SNR is <12%, and the OH-CO correspondence chance is 7% at the maser spot. This combines to give < 1% false probability of the OH maser, suggesting a real maser detection. The LSR velocity of the MCs places the SNR and magnetar at a kinematic distance of d=6.6 +/- 0.7 kpc. The nondetection of thermal X-ray emission from the SNR and the relatively dense environment suggests G57.2+0.8 be an evolved SNR with an age $t>1.6 \times 10^4$ (d/6.6 kpc) yr. The explosion energy of G57.2+0.8 is lower than $2 \times 10^{51}(n_0/10 cm^{-3})^{1.16} (d/~6.6 kpc)^{3.16}$ erg, which is not very energetic even assuming a high ambient density $n_0$ = 10 cm$^{-3}$. This reinforces the opinion that magnetars do not necessarily result from very energetic supernova explosions.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Effect of Qianliexin capsule on quality of life, NIH-CPSI score and IIEF-5 score in patients with prostatitis complicated with erectile dysfunction

Purpose: To study the influence of Qianliexin capsule on quality of life, NIH-CPS Index, and 5-item version of the 15-item International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF-5) scores in patients with prostatitis complicated with erectile dysfunction (ED).Methods: Patients with prostatitis complicated with ED (128) who were treated from November 2015 to December 2017 participated in this study. The patients were assigned to two groups (64 per group) according to the treatment given: study group which was given routine treatment plus Qianliexin capsule, and control group which received routine treatment only. Clinical effectiveness, adverse reactions, Quality of Life-Bref (QOL-BREF) scores, etc, of the two groups were determined.Results: The QOL-BREF score of the study group was significantly higher than that of the control group (p &lt; 0.05). While NIH-CPSI scores were significantly decreased in both groups, the decrease in the study group was lower (p &lt; 0.05). In contrast, IIEF-5 score significantly increased in both groups, but the increase in the study group was higher than in control (p &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: Qianliexin capsule is an effective and reasonably safely drug for enhancing the quality of life, NIH-CPSI and IIEF-5 scores, as well as the lecithin bodies in prostatitis patients with ED.Keywords: Qianliexin capsule, Prostatitis, Erectile dysfunction NIH-CPSI score, IIEF-5 scor

Multi-wavelength Stellar Polarimetry of the Filamentary Cloud IC5146: I. Dust Properties

We present optical and near-infrared stellar polarization observations toward the dark filamentary clouds associated with IC5146. The data allow us to investigate the dust properties (this paper) and the magnetic field structure (Paper II). A total of 2022 background stars were detected in $R_{c}$-, $i'$-, $H$-, and/or $K$-bands to $A_V \lesssim 25$ mag. The ratio of the polarization percentage at different wavelengths provides an estimate of $\lambda_{max}$, the wavelength of peak polarization, which is an indicator of the small-size cutoff of the grain size distribution. The grain size distribution seems to significantly change at $A_V \sim$ 3 mag, where both the average and dispersion of $P_{R_c}/P_{H}$ decrease. In addition, we found $\lambda_{max}$ $\sim$ 0.6-0.9 $\mu$m for $A_V>2.5$ mag, which is larger than the $\sim$ 0.55 $\mu$m in the general ISM, suggesting that grain growth has already started in low $A_V$ regions. Our data also reveal that polarization efficiency (PE $\equiv P_{\lambda}/A_V$) decreases with $A_V$ as a power-law in $R_c$-, $i'$-, and $K$-bands with indices of -0.71$\pm$0.10, -1.23$\pm$0.10 and -0.53$\pm$0.09. However, $H$-band data show a power index change; the PE varies with $A_V$ steeply (index of -0.95$\pm$0.30) when $A_V < 2.88\pm0.67$ mag but softly (index of -0.25$\pm$0.06) for greater $A_V$ values. The soft decay of PE in high $A_V$ regions is consistent with the Radiative Aligned Torque model, suggesting that our data trace the magnetic field to $A_V \sim 20$ mag. Furthermore, the breakpoint found in $H$-band is similar to the $A_V$ where we found the $P_{R_c}/P_{H}$ dispersion significantly decreased. Therefore, the flat PE-$A_V$ in high $A_V$ regions implies that the power index changes result from additional grain growth.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures, and 3 tables; accepted for publication in Ap