Unifying context with labeled property graph: A pipeline-based system for comprehensive text representation in NLP

Extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured digital text presents significant challenges across diverse domains. This research addresses this challenge by proposing a novel pipeline-based system that generates domain-agnostic and task-agnostic text representations. The proposed approach leverages labeled property graphs (LPG) to encode contextual information, facilitating the integration of diverse linguistic elements into a unified representation. The proposed system enables efficient graph-based querying and manipulation by addressing the crucial aspect of comprehensive context modeling and fine-grained semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through the implementation of NLP components that operate on LPG-based representations. Additionally, the proposed approach introduces specialized patterns and algorithms to enhance specific NLP tasks, including nominal mention detection, named entity disambiguation, event enrichments, event participant detection, and temporal link detection. The evaluation of the proposed approach, using the MEANTIME corpus comprising manually annotated documents, provides encouraging results and valuable insights into the system\u27s strengths. The proposed pipeline-based framework serves as a solid foundation for future research, aiming to refine and optimize LPG-based graph structures to generate comprehensive and semantically rich text representations, addressing the challenges associated with efficient information extraction and analysis in NLP

Knowledge of eggplant farmers on the proper use of pesticides in Khartoum State, Sudan

The knowledge of eggplant farmers on the proper use of pesticides was evaluated in Khartoum State. Questionnaire was distributed to farmers in North Nile Farms (NN), East Nile Farms (ENF), and West Nile Farms (WNF) to solicit information. Interviews and questionnaires revealed that there is a limited level of awareness among farmers. The majority (94%) of farmers did not abide by recommended disposal procedures, they only damage and bury the containers inside the farms. The majority of farmers (66%) were not aware of the safety period for any given product. The excessive use of pesticides in eggplant production and reliance only on pesticides as a pest management strategy calls for the implementation of IPM programs integrating the use of environmentally soft chemicals with other non-chemical control methods to manage pests and diseases. Safety periods should be carefully watched to reduce the level of residues in eggplant fruits below the acceptable level and to ensure sustainable and safe production

Prediction Models for COVID-19 Integrating Age Groups, Gender, and Underlying Conditions

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of infections worldwide, and the loss of trillions of dollars for many large economies. It poses a grave threat to the human population with an excessive number of patients constituting an unprecedented challenge with which health systems have to cope. Researchers from many domains have devised diverse approaches for the timely diagnosis of COVID-19 to facilitate medical responses. In the same vein, a wide variety of research studies have investigated underlying medical conditions for indicators suggesting the severity and mortality of, and role of age groups and gender on, the probability of COVID-19 infection. This study aimed to review, analyze, and critically appraise published works that report on various factors to explain their relationship with COVID-19. Such studies span a wide range, including descriptive analyses, ratio analyses, cohort, prospective and retrospective studies. Various studies that describe indicators to determine the probability of infection among the general population, as well as the risk factors associated with severe illness and mortality, are critically analyzed and these findings are discussed in detail. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on research studies that investigated the perceived differences in vulnerability of different age groups and genders to severe outcomes of COVID-19. Studies incorporating important demographic, health, and socioeconomic characteristics are highlighted to emphasize their importance. Predominantly, the lack of an appropriated dataset that contains demographic, personal health, and socioeconomic information implicates the efficacy and efficiency of the discussed methods. Results are overstated on the part of both exclusion of quarantined and patients with mild symptoms and inclusion of the data from hospitals where the majority of the cases are potentially ill

Multifractal scaling in the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld Sandpile and edge events

An analysis of moments and spectra shows that, while the distribution of avalanche areas obeys finite size scaling, that of toppling numbers is universally characterized by a full, nonlinear multifractal spectrum. Rare, large avalanches dissipating at the border influence the statistics very sensibly. Only once they are excluded from the sample, the conditional toppling distribution for given area simplifies enough to show also a well defined, multifractal scaling. The resulting picture brings to light unsuspected, novel physics in the model.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Radiofrequency Ablation of Barrett's Esophagus Reduces Esophageal Adenocarcinoma Incidence and Mortality in a Comparative Modeling Analysis

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Effect of gamma irradiation on the physical stability of DPPC liposomes

Unilamellar liposomes composed of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) were prepared by the reverse-phase evaporation method and extrusion through a polycarbonate membrane filter. Liposomes at 0.7 mg/mL lipid concentration in deionized water were exposed to gamma irradiation at a dose in the range 0.5 to 25 kGy. Gamma irradiation of liposomes resulted in the degradation of DPPC lipids into free fatty acids, lysophosphatidylcholine and 1,2-palmitoyl-phosphatidic acid (DPPA). The effect of gamma irradiation towards the physical stability of liposomes was investigated by means of dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and zeta potential analysis. From the DLS analysis, no significant changes were observed in the hydrodynamic size of liposomes. TEM images indicate that the liposomes surface became smoother and rounder as higher irradiation doses were applied. Zeta potential analysis showed that gamma irradiation of DPPC liposomes at radiation doses as low as 0.5 kGy resulted in a drastic rise in the magnitude of the zeta potential. The results also demonstrate that gamma irradiation of liposomes suspension enhanced the overall stability of liposomes. Hence, it can be concluded that gamma irradiation on DPPC liposomes may potentially produce liposomes with higher stability