Dialogue Act Recognition via CRF-Attentive Structured Network

Dialogue Act Recognition (DAR) is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to attach semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DAR problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from handcrafted feature extensions and attentive contextual structural dependencies. In this paper, we consider the problem of DAR from the viewpoint of extending richer Conditional Random Field (CRF) structural dependencies without abandoning end-to-end training. We incorporate hierarchical semantic inference with memory mechanism on the utterance modeling. We then extend structured attention network to the linear-chain conditional random field layer which takes into account both contextual utterances and corresponding dialogue acts. The extensive experiments on two major benchmark datasets Switchboard Dialogue Act (SWDA) and Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act (MRDA) datasets show that our method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art solutions to the problem. It is a remarkable fact that our method is nearly close to the human annotator's performance on SWDA within 2% gap.Comment: 10 pages, 4figure

Hydrostatic Mass Profiles of Galaxy Clusters in the eROSITA Survey

To assume hydrostatic equilibrium between the intracluster medium and the gravitational potential of galaxy clusters is an extensively used method to investigate their total masses. We want to test hydrostatic masses obtained with an observational code in the context of the SRG/eROSITA survey. We use the hydrostatic modeling code MBProj2 to fit surface-brightness profiles to simulated clusters with idealized properties as well as to a sample of 93 clusters taken from the Magneticum Pathfinder simulations. We investigate the latter under the assumption of idealized observational conditions and also for realistic eROSITA data quality. The comparison of the fitted cumulative total mass profiles and the true mass profiles provided by the simulations allows to gain knowledge about the reliability of our approach. Furthermore, we use the true profiles for gas density and pressure to compute hydrostatic mass profiles based on theory for every cluster. For an idealized cluster that was simulated to fulfill perfect hydrostatic equilibrium, we find that the cumulative total mass at the true $r_{500}$ and $r_{200}$ can be reproduced with deviations of less than 7%. For the clusters from the Magneticum Pathfinder simulations under idealized observational conditions, the median values of the fitted cumulative total masses at the true $r_{500}$ and $r_{200}$ are in agreement with our expectations, taking into account the hydrostatic mass bias. Nevertheless, we find a tendency towards a too high steepness of the cumulative total mass profiles in the outskirts. For realistic eROSITA data quality, this steepness problem intensifies for clusters with high redshifts and thus leads to too high cumulative total masses at $r_{200}$. For the hydrostatic masses based on the true profiles known from the simulations, we find a good agreement with our expectations concerning the hydrostatic mass

Conflict-related environmental damages on health: lessons learned from the past wars and ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine

On 24 February 2022, Russian military forces invaded Ukraine. The fighting has already caused unimaginable conditions and millions of people were forced to flee their homes. For decades, conflicts have been linked to environmental pollution, exposure to radioactivity and heavy metals as well as infectious diseases. The invasion may cause specific environmental risks, like the release of radioactive substances from nuclear power plants and contaminated soils. Because international collaboration is one of the most effective ways to address environmental problems, it is critical to establish scientific bodies within a global framework to identify concrete actions and tangible measures to provide immediate assistance to citizens. This commentary discusses the above issues from lessons learned from the past wars and the way forward in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Binary Neural Networks in FPGAs: Architectures, Tool Flows and Hardware Comparisons.

Binary neural networks (BNNs) are variations of artificial/deep neural network (ANN/DNN) architectures that constrain the real values of weights to the binary set of numbers {-1,1}. By using binary values, BNNs can convert matrix multiplications into bitwise operations, which accelerates both training and inference and reduces hardware complexity and model sizes for implementation. Compared to traditional deep learning architectures, BNNs are a good choice for implementation in resource-constrained devices like FPGAs and ASICs. However, BNNs have the disadvantage of reduced performance and accuracy because of the tradeoff due to binarization. Over the years, this has attracted the attention of the research community to overcome the performance gap of BNNs, and several architectures have been proposed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of BNNs for implementation in FPGA hardware. The survey covers different aspects, such as BNN architectures and variants, design and tool flows for FPGAs, and various applications for BNNs. The final part of the paper gives some benchmark works and design tools for implementing BNNs in FPGAs based on established datasets used by the research community

A Pacific sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand connection 1941-2

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging

Molecular changes during extended neoadjuvant letrozole treatment of breast cancer: distinguishing acquired resistance from dormant tumours

Abstract Background The risk of recurrence for endocrine-treated breast cancer patients persists for many years or even decades following surgery and apparently successful adjuvant therapy. This period of dormancy and acquired resistance is inherently difficult to investigate; previous efforts have been limited to in-vitro or in-vivo approaches. In this study, sequential tumour samples from patients receiving extended neoadjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy were characterised as a novel clinical model. Methods Consecutive tumour samples from 62 patients undergoing extended (4–45 months) neoadjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy with letrozole were subjected to transcriptomic and proteomic analysis, representing before (≤ 0), early (13–120 days), and long-term (> 120 days) neoadjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy with letrozole. Patients with at least a 40% initial reduction in tumour size by 4 months of treatment were included. Of these, 42 patients with no subsequent progression were classified as “dormant”, and the remaining 20 patients as “acquired resistant”. Results Changes in gene expression in dormant tumours begin early and become more pronounced at later time points. Therapy-induced changes in resistant tumours were common features of treatment, rather than being specific to the resistant phenotype. Comparative analysis of long-term treated dormant and resistant tumours highlighted changes in epigenetics pathways including DNA methylation and histone acetylation. The DNA methylation marks 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine were significantly reduced in resistant tumours compared with dormant tissues after extended letrozole treatment. Conclusions This is the first patient-matched gene expression study investigating long-term aromatase inhibitor-induced dormancy and acquired resistance in breast cancer. Dormant tumours continue to change during treatment whereas acquired resistant tumours more closely resemble their diagnostic samples. Global loss of DNA methylation was observed in resistant tumours under extended treatment. Epigenetic alterations may lead to escape from dormancy and drive acquired resistance in a subset of patients, supporting a potential role for therapy targeted at these epigenetic alterations in the management of resistance to oestrogen deprivation therapy

The eROSITA view of the Abell 3391/95 field: The Northern Clump. The largest infalling structure in the longest known gas filament observed with eROSITA, XMM-Newton, and Chandra

SRG/eROSITA PV observations revealed the A3391/95 cluster system and the Northern Clump (MCXC J0621.7-5242 galaxy cluster) are aligning along a cosmic filament in soft X-rays, similarly to what has been seen in simulations before. We aim to understand the dynamical state of the Northern Clump as it enters the atmosphere ($3\times R_{200}$) of A3391. We analyzed joint eROSITA, XMM-Newton, and Chandra observations to probe the morphological, thermal, and chemical properties of the Northern Clump from its center out to a radius of 988 kpc ($R_{200}$). We utilized the ASKAP/EMU radio data, DECam optical image, and Planck y-map to study the influence of the WAT radio source on the Northern Clump central ICM. From the Magneticum simulation, we identified an analog of the A3391/95 system along with an infalling group resembling the Northern Clump. The Northern Clump is a WCC cluster centered on a WAT radio galaxy. The gas temperature over $0.2-0.5R_{500}$ is $k_BT_{500}=1.99\pm0.04$ keV. We employed the $M-T$ scaling relation and obtained a mass estimate of $M_{500}=(7.68\pm0.43)\times10^{13}M_{\odot}$ and $R_{500}=(636\pm12)$ kpc. Its atmosphere has a boxy shape and deviates from spherical symmetry. We identify a southern surface brightness edge, likely caused by subsonic motion relative to the filament gas. At $\sim\! R_{500}$, the southern atmosphere appears to be 42% hotter than its northern atmosphere. We detect a downstream tail pointing toward the north with a projected length of $\sim318$ kpc, plausibly the result of ram pressure stripping. The analog group in the Magneticum simulation is experiencing changes in its gas properties and a shift between the position of the halo center and that of the bound gas, while approaching the main cluster pair.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures (main text), 6 figures (appendix). Submitted to A&A for the Special Issue: The Early Data Release of eROSITA and Mikhail Pavlinsky ART-XC on the SRG Mission. For more information, see https://astro.uni-bonn.de/~averonica/NorthernClump/eROSITA_A3391_Northern_Clump_AIfA.htm

The Seroprevalence and Seroincidence of Enterovirus71 Infection in Infants and Children in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

Enterovirus 71 (EV71)-associated hand, foot and mouth disease has emerged as a serious public health problem in South East Asia over the last decade. To better understand the prevalence of EV71 infection, we determined EV71 seroprevalence and seroincidence amongst healthy infants and children in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. In a cohort of 200 newborns, 55% of cord blood samples contained EV71 neutralizing antibodies and these decayed to undetectable levels by 6 months of age in 98% of infants. The EV71 neutralizing antibody seroconversion rate was 5.6% in the first year and 14% in the second year of life. In children 5–15 yrs of age, seroprevalence of EV71 neutralizing antibodies was 84% and in cord blood it was 55%. Taken together, these data suggest EV71 force of infection is high and highlights the need for more research into its epidemiology and pathogenesis in high disease burden countries