Revisiting knowledge-based Semantic Role Labeling

International audienceSemantic role labeling has seen tremendous progress in the last years, both for supervised and unsupervised approaches. The knowledge-based approaches have been neglected while they have shown to bring the best results to the related word sense disambiguation task. We contribute a simple knowledge-based system with an easy to reproduce specification. We also present a novel approach to handle the passive voice in the context of semantic role labeling that reduces the error rate in F1 by 15.7%, showing that significant improvements can be brought while retaining the key advantages of the approach: a simple approach which facilitates analysis of individual errors, does not need any hand-annotated corpora and which is not domain-specific

MINIMAXX PLAYER LOAD AS AN INDEX OF THE CENTER OF MASS DISPLACEMENT? A VALIDATION STUDY

The purpose of this study was to assess the concurrent validity of the player load computed by the MinimaxX accelerometers by comparing it to the player load computed by a gold standard method based on in series force platforms. Fourteen participants were instrumented with two accelerometers (MinimaxX S4, Catapult, Australia) during specific team sport displacements performed on the force plates. Pearson correlation coefficients were ranged from 0.74 to 0.93 while the coefficients of variation varied from 6.9 to 16.4%. The standard error of the estimate was small

APPLIED SESSION: ELASTOGRAPHY FOR MUSCLE BIOMECHANICS

The purpose of this applied session is to demonstrate the potential of shear wave elastography for the study of muscle biomechanics using both real-time demo and recent results, with a special focus on sport applications (stretching, fatigue, pain, damage)

ELECTROMECHANICAL DELAY AND ITS MECHANISMS ARE NOT IMPAIRED FOLLOWING ECCENTRIC EXERCISE

The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of exercise-induced muscle damage on both electrochemical and mechanical components involved in the electromechanical delay in the gastrocnemius medialis muscle. 15 healthy participants completed 10 sets of 30 maximal eccentric contractions of the plantar flexor muscles at a constant angular velocity of 45°.s-1. Delayed onset muscular soreness, maximal isometric torque, and electromechanical delay were measured before, 1h, and 48h following eccentric exercise. The present study revealed that the time required for both electrochemical and mechanical process involved in electromechanical delay are not impaired by exercise induced muscle damage. This study suggests that the long lasting reduction in force after eccentric exercise cannot be associated to an alteration of the force transmission efficiency

The influence of isoinertial-pneumatic ratio on force-velocity-power relationships

Introduction: Isoinertial contractions are effective to generate maximal force during the initiation of the movement whereas they do not provide an appropriate training stimulus to generate force once accelerative phase has been developed (1). Pneumatic resistance is one alternative that has been developed to overcome the aforementioned limitations associated with isoinertial contractions. This technique allow higher initial velocity and reduce the decrease of force towards the end of the concentric phase (1). There is some training interest by combining isoinertial and pneumatic loading. The aim of this study was to determine how different isoinertial-pneumatic ratio influence the force-velocity-power relationships during bench-press. Methods: Fifteen participants performed bench press at 30%, 45%, 60%, 75%, and 90% of their 1RM, with five isoinertial(I)-pneumatic(P) resistance ratio : 100%I/0%P, 75%I/25%P, 50%I/50%P, 25%I/75%P, and 0%I/100%P. Velocity, force and power were assessed using a linear transducer and mechanical parameters measured by the pneumatic ergometer. Force-, velocity- and power-time patterns were averaged over the push-off phase to build the corresponding force-velocity and power-velocity relationships for each resistance ratio. Results: The increase in pneumatic part in resistance ratio elicited higher movement velocity and lower force level from 0% to 80% of the concentric phase. The increase in isoinertial part in resistance balance resulted in higher velocity towards the end of the movement. As a consequence, the use of isoinertial resistance oriented the force-velocity relationship towards force, whereas pneumatic resistance elicited a more velocity-oriented profile. Conclusion: Pneumatic-oriented resistance could be used to develop initial velocity and force towards the end of the push-off. Isoinertial-oriented resistance should be used to develop maximal force and maximal power. Resistance modality could be modulated according to training objectives. Références : 1. Frost et al. A comparison of the kinematics, kinetics and muscle activity between pneumatic and free weight resistance. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2008;104:937-56

Differences in trunk and thigh muscle strength, endurance and thickness between elite sailors and non-sailors

International audienceDinghy sailors lean their upper body over the windward side of the boat ('hiking') to keep the boat's balance and maximise its speed. Sustaining the hiking position is essential for competitive performance and this study examined sport-specific differences of muscles relevant for hiking in elite sailors. Knee extensor muscle strength as well as trunk muscle strength, muscle endurance and muscle thickness were assessed in elite dinghy sailors (n = 15) and compared to matched, non-sailing controls (n = 15). Isometric extensor strength was significantly higher in sailors at 60° (+14%) but not at 20° knee flexion. Sailors showed significantly higher trunk flexor (but not extensor) strength under isometric (+18%) and eccentric (+11%) conditions, which was associated to greater muscle thickness (rectus abdominis +40%; external oblique +26%) and higher endurance for ventral (+66%) and lateral (+61%) muscle chains compared to non-sailors. Greater muscles thickness and the particular biomechanical requirements to maintain the hiking position may drive the increases in isometric and eccentric muscle strength as well as ventral and lateral trunk endurance. The current findings identified sport-specific muscle function differences and provide performance benchmarks for muscle strength and endurance in elite sailors

Interactions between fascicles and tendinous tissues in gastrocnemius medialis and vastus lateralis during drop landing

Animal tendons have been shown to act as shock absorbers to protect muscle fascicles from exercise-induced damage during landing tasks. Meanwhile, the contribution of tendinous tissues to damping activities such as landing has been less explored in humans. The aim of this study was to analyze in vivo fascicle-tendon interactions during drop landing to better understand their role in energy dissipation. Ultrafast ultrasound images of the gastrocnemius medialis (GM) and vastus lateralis (VL), lower limb electromyographic activity, 2-D kinematics, and ground reaction forces were collected from twelve participants during single- and double-leg drop landings from various heights. For both muscles, length changes were higher in tendinous tissues than in fascicles, demonstrating their key role in protecting fascicles from rapid active lengthening. Increasing landing height increased lengthening and peak lengthening velocity of VL fascicle and GM architectural gear ratio, whereas GM fascicle displayed similar length and velocity patterns. Single-leg landing lengthens the tendinous tissues of GM and, to a greater degree, VL muscles, without affecting the fascicles. These findings demonstrate the adjustment in fascicle-tendon interactions to withstand mechanical demand through the tendon buffer action and fascicle rotation. The higher VL fascicle contribution to negative work as the drop height increases would suggest muscle-specific damping responses during drop landing. This can originate from the distal-to-proximal sequence of joint kinetics, from differences in muscle and tendon functions (one- and two-joint muscles), architectural and morphological properties (eg, tendon stiffness), as well as from the muscle activity of the GM and VL muscles.Enzo Hollville is funded by the Natural Grass company. We warmly thank Hugo Hauraix for his technical support

In-flight piv for cror flight test demonstration

Designing innovative solutions for future aircraft is one the concerns of aeronautical engineers. Among the studied technologies, Counter Rotating Open Rotor (CROR) propeller technologies are appearing as a promising, though highly challenging, alternative solution to Ultra High Bypass Ratio (UHBR) engines. Amongst these challenges, the interaction of the wake of the CROR engine pylon with the counter rotating blades, positioned downstream of the pylon (pusher configuration), are responsible for both airframe noise and vibrations that penalize aircraft certification. ‘Erasing’ the pylon wake such as to recover a strictly uniform flow upstream of the rotating blades would suppress this major source of airframe noise and vibrations. The current study is put forward in that context and is part of a project funded by the European Commission through the Cleansky/FP7/SFWA (Smart Fixed Wing Aircraft) Demonstrator program. In the first part of the project, an optimal design of the pylon, associated with advanced flow control strategies, has been proposed. The current study aims at developing an advanced experimental methodology, based on vibration-controlled stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry (3C-PIV), able to be flight-operated and that will serve the validation of the above mentioned active flow control system when operated on the Flying Test Bench. This article deals particularly with the characterization of the limits of the vibration spectrum acceptable by the on-board PIV subsystems and with the design of a system to lessen potentially harmful vibrations

Muscle volume quantification: guiding transformers with anatomical priors

Muscle volume is a useful quantitative biomarker in sports, but also for the follow-up of degenerative musculo-skelletal diseases. In addition to volume, other shape biomarkers can be extracted by segmenting the muscles of interest from medical images. Manual segmentation is still today the gold standard for such measurements despite being very time-consuming. We propose a method for automatic segmentation of 18 muscles of the lower limb on 3D Magnetic Resonance Images to assist such morphometric analysis. By their nature, the tissue of different muscles is undistinguishable when observed in MR Images. Thus, muscle segmentation algorithms cannot rely on appearance but only on contour cues. However, such contours are hard to detect and their thickness varies across subjects. To cope with the above challenges, we propose a segmentation approach based on a hybrid architecture, combining convolutional and visual transformer blocks. We investigate for the first time the behaviour of such hybrid architectures in the context of muscle segmentation for shape analysis. Considering the consistent anatomical muscle configuration, we rely on transformer blocks to capture the longrange relations between the muscles. To further exploit the anatomical priors, a second contribution of this work consists in adding a regularisation loss based on an adjacency matrix of plausible muscle neighbourhoods estimated from the training data. Our experimental results on a unique database of elite athletes show it is possible to train complex hybrid models from a relatively small database of large volumes, while the anatomical prior regularisation favours better predictions

Document, create and translate knowledge: the mission of ReFORM, the Francophone IOC Research Centre for Prevention of Injury and Protection of Athlete Health

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has supported athletes’ health protection by funding Research Centres dedicated to prevention and treatment of sports-related injuries and illnesses. After establishing four centres in 2009, the IOC Research Centres network expanded to 9 Institutions in 2014 and the 2019 round recognised 11 centres. Here we introduce ReFORM — an international French-speaking network of five institutions.Peer reviewe