ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark

Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still feels the significant lack of large-scale non-factoid question answering collections with real questions and comprehensive relevance judgments. In this paper, we develop and release a collection of 2,626 open-domain non-factoid questions from a diverse set of categories. The dataset, called ANTIQUE, contains 34,011 manual relevance annotations. The questions were asked by real users in a community question answering service, i.e., Yahoo! Answers. Relevance judgments for all the answers to each question were collected through crowdsourcing. To facilitate further research, we also include a brief analysis of the data as well as baseline results on both classical and recently developed neural IR models

Training Curricula for Open Domain Answer Re-Ranking

In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest correct answers first (i.e., assign a high ranking score to answers that have characteristics that usually indicate relevance, and a low ranking score to those with characteristics that do not), before incorporating more complex logic to handle difficult cases (e.g., semantic matching or reasoning). In this work, we apply this idea to the training of neural answer rankers using curriculum learning. We propose several heuristics to estimate the difficulty of a given training sample. We show that the proposed heuristics can be used to build a training curriculum that down-weights difficult samples early in the training process. As the training process progresses, our approach gradually shifts to weighting all samples equally, regardless of difficulty. We present a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed idea on three answer ranking datasets. Results show that our approach leads to superior performance of two leading neural ranking architectures, namely BERT and ConvKNRM, using both pointwise and pairwise losses. When applied to a BERT-based ranker, our method yields up to a 4% improvement in MRR and a 9% improvement in P@1 (compared to the model trained without a curriculum). This results in models that can achieve comparable performance to more expensive state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long

Final report : life cycle assessment of UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical

The Life Cycle Assessment of the UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Center for Drug Research and Development was performed in order to evaluate its environmental impacts. This building is currently under construction and in order to attain the most reliable data and to evaluate their performance and impacts on the environment, more accurate data collection is required. Which itself requires more accurate and up to date drawings and models. This project was done through modeling the building using On-Screen Takeoff and Athena Impact Estimator software. Since this building is under construction, BIM model was found helpful and more updated than structural and architectural drawings and was used as a supplement to these drawings. According to the Bill of Materials obtained from On-Screen Takeoff and Athena Impact Estimator, five most significant materials of this building were recognized to be concrete 30Mpa, 5/8" Fire-Rated Type X Gypsum Board, glazing panels, galvanized studs and rebar rod, and light sections. The output from the Impact Estimator (IE) is a list of impact category during the manufacturing and construction phases to the end-of-life stage of the building. The results of the study in terms of the impact categories are as follow: •Global warming potential: 1.04E+07 kg CO₂ eq •Ozone layer depletion: 1.51E-02 kg CFC-11 eq •Acidification potential: 4.12E+06 moles of H⁺ eq •Eutrophication potential: 5.16E+03 kg N eq •Smog potential: 4.99E+04 kg NOx eq •Human health respiratory effects: 4.14E+04 kg PM2.5 eq •Weighted resource use: 5.60E+07 ecologically weighted kg •Fossil fuel use: 1.08E+08 MJ After performing Sensitivity Analysis on the five most common materials in the building and evaluating their effects on each impact category, walls show great impacts on global warming, ozone layer depletion, acidification potential, smog potential, human health respiratory effects, and fossil fuel use more than other assemblies. Also, columns and beams have the major contribution to eutrophication potential impact category since they mainly consist of concrete and rebar. Floors play the main role in impact potential of weighted resource use. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”Applied Science, Faculty ofCivil Engineering, Department ofUnreviewedUndergraduat

Play therapy and storytelling intervention on children's social skills with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder

BACKGROUND: Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neuro-behavioral disorder that negatively affects educational, relational, and occupational aspects of one's life. Although many children diagnosed with this disorder can benefit from taking medication, particularly for core symptoms, play therapy and storytelling can be seen as engaging, stimulating, and more compatible with children's developmental needs. The social skills of these children are as vital as other symptoms and can be better addressed with cognitive-based art therapy interventions. Because little research has been focused on the combination of play therapy and storytelling and the social interactions of children with ADHD are highly important in academic settings, this study aimed to determine the effects of this combination on children's social skills with ADHD.MATERIALS AND METHODS: This survey was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test–post-test design and a control group. Participants were 7–11-year-old girls and boys with ADHD based on DSM-V referred to child and adolescent psychiatrists' clinics. Selected children were randomly allocated into intervention and control groups. The intervention group received an individual combined intervention of play therapy and storytelling, whereas the control group did not receive any therapeutic intervention for social skills at that time and was on the waiting list. The research tool was the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS), and data were computer-analyzed using SPSS-20 and a couple of descriptive and analytic tests including ANCOVA.RESULTS: In this study, 30 children with ADHD were included. The combined intervention of play therapy and storytelling has had a significant effect on post-test results of ADHD patients in terms of social skills as well as all test subscales (P < 0/05). There was a significant improvement in the subscales of self-expression, self-control, responsibility, and cooperation (P < 0.05).CONCLUSIONS: Results show promise for combined play therapy and storytelling intervention to enhance the social skills of elementary school children diagnosed with ADHD

Alpha-Pinene Effect on the Improvement of Working and Spatial memory in Rats

Background and Aim: Oxidative stress is an important factor in the development of memory and learning disorder which can cause neuronal damage in the hippocampus. Alpha-pinene is a polyphenolic compound from the terpene family that has shown important anti-inflammatory, anti-anxiety, antioxidant and neuroprotective effects in the central nervous system and can affect memory. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of alpha-pinene on the improvement of working and spatial memory in rats.  Materials and Methods: In this study, 24 male rats were randomly divided into 3 groups: control and 2 alpha-pinene groups (5 and 10 mg/kg IP) for 3 weeks. Spatial and working memories were assessed by Morris water maze and Y maze, respectively. Then, malondialdehyde level and total antioxidant capacity in hippocampal tissue were measured. Data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance and Tukey's post hoc test. Results: The percentage of alternation in the Y maze increased in the group which had received 10 mg/kg alpha-pinene group compared to those in the control group and the group which had received 5 mg/kg alpha-pinene. The time spent in the target area at the dose of 10 mg/kg of alpha-pinene showed a significant increase compared to that in the control group, but there was no significant difference among the groups in terms of the time to reach the target platform. Alpha-pinene at the dose of 10 mg/kg decreased the level of malondialdehyde in hippocampal tissue compared to the control group, but no significant difference was observed between the groups in terms of total antioxidant capacity. Conclusion: Alpha-pinene increased spatial and working memory performance in rats. One of the possible mechanisms of memory improvement in the present study could be due to the reduction of malondialdehyde in the hippocampal tissue, as one of the important indicators of oxidative stress in the central nervous system