Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Resurrecting Multilingual Retrieval Using Zero-shot Learning

While billions of non-English speaking users rely on search engines every day, the problem of ad-hoc information retrieval is rarely studied for non-English languages. This is primarily due to a lack of data set that are suitable to train ranking algorithms. In this paper, we tackle the lack of data by leveraging pre-trained multilingual language models to transfer a retrieval system trained on English collections to non-English queries and documents. Our model is evaluated in a zero-shot setting, meaning that we use them to predict relevance scores for query-document pairs in languages never seen during training. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform unsupervised retrieval techniques for Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, and Spanish. We also show that augmenting the English training collection with some examples from the target language can sometimes improve performance.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short

Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Triple Quadruple Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-TQ/MS) for Evaluation of Biogenic Amines in Wine

In this study, a fast, simple, and sensitive analytical method for direct determination of biogenic amines tryptamine, putrescine, histamine, phenylethylamine, tyramine, cadaverine, spermine, and spermidine in wine has been developed and validated. Detection of analytes was performed with ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled to triple quadruple mass spectrometer (TQ/MS). The calibration curves of all amines were linear with correlation coefficients (R2) ranging from 0.9906 for putrescine to 0.9998 for histamine and 2-phenyethylamine. The accuracy of the method was checked with a standard addition method, showing good accuracy, repeatability, and reproducibility (RSD < 10%). The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) ranged from 0.50 to 30 μg/L and 1.50 to 90 μg/L, respectively, for all amines. The validated method was applied to detect and quantify biogenic amines in Macedonian red and white wines. Higher concentration of amines was observed in red wines (5797 μg/L, on average) compared to the white wines (1485 μg/L, on average)