Comment-oriented blog summarization by sentence extraction

Much existing research on blogs focused on posts only, ignoring their comments. Our user study conducted on summarizing blog posts, however, showed that reading comments does change one’s understanding about blog posts. In this research, we aim to extract representative sentences from ablogpostthatbestrepresentthetopicsdiscussedamong its comments. The proposed solution first derives representative words from comments and then selects sentences containing representative words. The representativeness of words is measured using ReQuT (i.e., Reader, Quotation, and Topic). Evaluated on human labeled sentences, ReQuT together with summation-based sentence selection showed promising results

Comments-oriented document summarization: Understanding documents with readers' feedback

Comments left by readers on Web documents contain valuable information that can be utilized in different information retrieval tasks including document search, visualization, and summarization. In this paper, we study the problem of comments-oriented document summarization and aim to summarize a Web document (e.g., a blog post) by considering not only its content, but also the comments left by its readers. We identify three relations (namely, topic, quotation, andmention) by which comments can be linked to one another, and model the relations in three graphs. The importance of each comment is then scored by: (i) graph-based method, where the three graphs are merged into a multirelation graph; (ii) tensor-based method, where the three graphs are used to construct a 3rd-order tensor. To generate a comments-oriented summary, we extract sentences from the given Web document using either feature-biased approach or uniform-document approach. The former scores sentences to bias keywords derived from comments; while the latter scores sentences uniformly with comments. In our experiments using a set of blog posts with manually labeled sentences, our proposed summarization methods utilizing comments showed significant improvement over those not using comments. The methods using feature-biased sentence extraction approach were observed to outperform that using uniform-document approach

Microbiota Changes in the Musk Gland of Male Forest Musk Deer During Musk Maturation

The musk gland in an adult male forest musk deer is an organ that synthesizes, stores, and secretes musk, a cream-colored liquid upon initial secretion that gradually transforms into a blackish-brown solid substance upon full maturation. In this study, four healthy adult male forest musk deer were selected and a total of 12 musk samples were collected for analysis. The samples were in three different states depending on the different seasonal collection dates, which were in June, August, and October. High-throughput 16S-rRNA gene sequencing technology was used to detect microbiota changes in the gland. The results indicate that microbial richness gradually declined during the musk maturation process. The microbiota composition between the initial liquid and final solid musk samples was varied significantly (P < 0.05). The dominant bacterial phyla were similar at all three stages included Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes. However, the abundances were differences in terms of the dominant bacterial genera. PICRUSt analysis showed the highest represented category was “Amino acid transport and metabolism” (24.8%), followed by “Transcription” (22.04%), and “Carbohydrate transport and metabolism” (20.74%). Our findings indicate that the microbiota in the musk gland plays an important role in the maturation process of musk

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Mining user-created content for document summarization and event detection

Empowered with the ability of creating content using advanced Web services and ease-to-publish tools, today’s Web users are creating content and contributing knowledge through various Web activities. As a result, the Web is abundant with user-created content. With the aim to derive collective intelligence and wisdom-of-the-crowd, we conducted research in knowledge mining from user-created content. Our research focused on three forms of user-created content, including comments, blogs, and search queries. Being one of the important features in blogs, comments written by readers are believed to represent readers’ feedback about documents. From our user study conducted on blog reading, we found that human summarizers selected significantly different sets of sentences from the blog posts before and after reading comments. Hence, we proposed and studied the problem of comments-oriented document summarization, whose goal is to extract a subset of sentences from a given document that best reflects the topics not only presented in the document but also discussed among the associated comments. To generate comments-oriented summary, we proposed and evaluated a number of methods under two separate approaches. In feature-scoring approach, we view words as the features that bridge the semantics in document and the associated comments and scored sentences according to their contained words. As the important containers of words, the set of comments was scored through either graph-based or tensor-based scoring method based on three relations (i.e., topic, quotation, and mention) identified among comments. In language-modeling approach, we view the desire of a summary as an information need, and estimate a language model of comments-oriented summary from the document language model and comments language model. Sentences are then ranked through either Odds Ratio selection or Negative Kullback-Leibler Divergence selection.Doctor of Philosoph

Investigation and Control of the Blasting-Induced Ground Vibration under Cold Condition

This paper focuses on the investigation and control of the blasting-induced ground vibration under cold condition. The mechanical performance and wave propagation characteristics of the frozen rock mass are quite different from that of the conventional condition. Laboratory tests were implemented to investigate the wave impedance of rock mass in the frozen, saturated, normal, and drying states. Results reveal the longitudinal wave velocity could be enlarged by 40 percent in the frozen state. Then long-term monitoring of blasting vibration was implemented based on the blasting excavation of the Fengman hydropower station reconstruction project in the north of China. Results demonstrate the PPV and frequency both attenuate much slower when the rock mass is frozen, and the obvious turning points of PPV could be found between different temperatures, where the change of the PPV relationship happens. At last, numerical simulation of the blasting seismic wave attenuation and the response in the protected structure was implemented. The equivalent freezing simulation method was proposed and verified with the site experiment data. Results demonstrate that the attenuation coefficient decreases obviously as the frozen depth of the rock mass increases. The dynamic degree response in structure is much stronger and the maximum charge weight per delay was limited more strictly under the frozen condition. A most adverse frozen depth was determined when the charge weight per delay gets the minimum value. With the above control approaches, a total of 676 blasting was completed in Fengman hydropower station reconstruction and no case of excessive measurement could be found

Promote Cross-Border E-Trade under the Framework of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) / Free Trade Agreements (FTAs): Best Practices in the APEC Region

This report reviews cases of e-trade and cross-border e-trade development in the APEC region, analyzes e-trade and cross-border e-trade measures/provisions in selected RTAs/FTAs, researches three best practices of cross-border e-trade under the framework of RTAs/FTAs, addresses critical challenges in promoting cross-border e-trade, and puts forward several recommendations from the authors on how to promote cross-border e-trade under RTAs/FTAs, potential measures/provisions in future RTA/FTA negotiations as well as promoting the possible realization of FTAAP from the e-trade facilitation perspective