Crowdsourcing Argumentation Structures in Chinese Hotel Reviews

Argumentation mining aims at automatically extracting the premises-claim discourse structures in natural language texts. There is a great demand for argumentation corpora for customer reviews. However, due to the controversial nature of the argumentation annotation task, there exist very few large-scale argumentation corpora for customer reviews. In this work, we novelly use the crowdsourcing technique to collect argumentation annotations in Chinese hotel reviews. As the first Chinese argumentation dataset, our corpus includes 4814 argument component annotations and 411 argument relation annotations, and its annotations qualities are comparable to some widely used argumentation corpora in other languages.Comment: 6 pages,3 figures,This article has been submitted to "The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC2017)

Knowledge Engineering in Agent Oriented Business Process Management

The challenge of dynamic environment requires managing business processes with the ability to adapt to changes and to collaborate in activities. As a promising technology to process management, agent technology with its flexible, distributed and intelligent features has been studied in numerous studies. However, most existing approaches are special and ad-hoc. They have not looked much into the nature and characteristic of agents and their rational behaviours in process management. This paper intends to investigate the mechanism how to build intelligent agents in dynamic process management from the view of knowledge engineering. An agent-oriented approach to dynamic process management with its knowledge engineering is discussed, and a three-layer knowledge model of intelligent agents is proposed. By exploiting the knowledge involved in dynamic process management and transforming it into a computational model, this work provides an essential support of developing agent-oriented approaches to business process management

Joint RNN Model for Argument Component Boundary Detection

Argument Component Boundary Detection (ACBD) is an important sub-task in argumentation mining; it aims at identifying the word sequences that constitute argument components, and is usually considered as the first sub-task in the argumentation mining pipeline. Existing ACBD methods heavily depend on task-specific knowledge, and require considerable human efforts on feature-engineering. To tackle these problems, in this work, we formulate ACBD as a sequence labeling problem and propose a variety of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, which do not use domain specific or handcrafted features beyond the relative position of the sentence in the document. In particular, we propose a novel joint RNN model that can predict whether sentences are argumentative or not, and use the predicted results to more precisely detect the argument component boundaries. We evaluate our techniques on two corpora from two different genres; results suggest that our joint RNN model obtain the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE SMC 201

NMR STUDY OF WATER IN NANOSCOPIC CONFINEMENT AND AT THE INTERFACE OF BIOMOLECULES

Water in nanoscopic confinement and at the interface of biomolecules plays critical roles in a wide range of biological processes including protein dynamics and functions. For the nanoconfined water, I report a hydrophobic-hydrophilic transition upon cooling from 22 C to 8 C via the observation of water adsorption isotherms in SWNTs measured by NMR. A considerable slowdown in molecular reorientation of such adsorbed water was also detected. Nanoconfined water in slit-shaped wettable pores has a spin-lattice relaxation time similar to that observed in bulk water, suggesting a similar molecular reorientation in both conditions. The dependence of the capillary condensation pressure on the nanoscopic pore size resembles that given by the Kelvin equation, despite the equation's questionable validity on nanoscale. For water at the interfaces of proteins, the most basic property of protein hydration--the water sorption isotherm--remains inadequately understood. Using NMR to measure the isotherms of lysozyme in situ between 18 and 2 C, the present work provides evidence that the part of water uptake above the hydration level at which protein starts to function is significantly reduced below 8 C. Quantitative analysis shows that such reduction is directly related to the reduction of protein flexibility and enhanced cost in elastic energy for accommodating the hydration water at lower temperature. The elastic property derived from the water isotherm agrees with direct mechanical measurements, providing independent support for the solution model, in which protein is treated as a polymer-like solute. The hemoglobin hydration shows similar temperature dependence to that observed in lysozyme. NMR relaxation with paramagnetic centers that are present in those proteins could reveal the dynamics of hydration water within the protein. The role of interfacial water in the action of general anesthesia remains a topic of controversy. Using 1H and 19F NMR, I provide direct experimental evidence that interfacial water in the proximity to proteins is essential for the molecular interaction between anesthetics and proteins. The halothane adsorption isotherms can reveal the molecular nature of general anesthesia.Doctor of Philosoph

Using Argument-based Features to Predict and Analyse Review Helpfulness

We study the helpful product reviews identification problem in this paper. We observe that the evidence-conclusion discourse relations, also known as arguments, often appear in product reviews, and we hypothesise that some argument-based features, e.g. the percentage of argumentative sentences, the evidences-conclusions ratios, are good indicators of helpful reviews. To validate this hypothesis, we manually annotate arguments in 110 hotel reviews, and investigate the effectiveness of several combinations of argument-based features. Experiments suggest that, when being used together with the argument-based features, the state-of-the-art baseline features can enjoy a performance boost (in terms of F1) of 11.01\% in average.Comment: 6 pages, EMNLP201

Using Argument-based Features to Predict and Analyse Review Helpfulness

We study the helpful product reviews identification problem in this paper. We observe that the evidence-conclusion discourse relations, also known as arguments, often appear in product reviews, and we hypothesise that some argument-based features, e.g. the percentage of argumentative sentences, the evidences-conclusions ratios, are good indicators of helpful reviews. To validate this hypothesis, we manually annotate arguments in 110 hotel reviews, and investigate the effectiveness of several combinations of argument-based features. Experiments suggest that, when being used together with the argument-based features, the state-of-the-art baseline features can enjoy a performance boost (in terms of F1) of 11.01\% in average.Comment: 6 pages, EMNLP201

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers