rmassidda @ DaDoEval: Document Dating Using Sentence Embeddings at EVALITA 2020

This report describes an approach to solve the DaDoEval document dating subtasks for the EVALITA 2020 competition. The dating problem is tackled as a classification problem, where the significant length of the documents in the provided dataset is addressed by using sentence embeddings in a hierarchical architecture. Three different pre-trained models to generate sentence embeddings have been evaluated and compared: USE, LaBSE and SBERT. Other than sentence embeddings the classifier exploits a bag-of-entities representation of the document, generated using a pre-trained named entity recognizer. The final model is able to simultaneously produce the required date for each subtask

Causal Abstraction with Soft Interventions

Causal abstraction provides a theory describing how several causal models can represent the same system at different levels of detail. Existing theoretical proposals limit the analysis of abstract models to "hard" interventions fixing causal variables to be constant values. In this work, we extend causal abstraction to "soft" interventions, which assign possibly non-constant functions to variables without adding new causal connections. Specifically, (i) we generalize $\tau$-abstraction from Beckers and Halpern (2019) to soft interventions, (ii) we propose a further definition of soft abstraction to ensure a unique map $\omega$ between soft interventions, and (iii) we prove that our constructive definition of soft abstraction guarantees the intervention map $\omega$ has a specific and necessary explicit form

Technology and Species independent Simulation of Sequencing data and Genomic Variants

International audienc

Attitude of Italian medical oncologists toward palliative care for patients with advanced cancer: results of the SIO project.

The aim of this survey was to describe the attitude of Italian oncologists towards palliative care. A survey on palliative care was carried out among 400 Italian oncologists. Seventy-two percent indicated that the management of patients with advanced stage cancer represents the majority of their practice. They are often involved in the management of pain (78%) and complications of chemotherapy (61%), and frequently, in the treatment of terminal patients (60%). Only 8.5% reported having frequent collaboration with psychiatrists in support of emotional and psychological patients' disturbances. About 40% are often directly involved in the management of existential or spiritual distress. Discussions on euthanasia and assisted suicide, which are illegal in Italy, took place never (68%) or occasionally (27%). Respondents agreed that all oncology centres should have access to palliative care service. These results are in line with those of the European Society of Medical Oncology survey and may be usefully employed to improve the organisation of palliative care

Impure Public Goods and Technological Interdependencies

Impure public goods represent an important group of goods. Almost every public good exerts not only effects which are public to all but also effects which are private to the producer of this good. What is often omitted in the analysis of impure public goods is the fact that – regularly – these private effects can also be generated independently of the public good. In our analysis we focus on the effects alternative technologies – independently generating the private effects of the public good – may have on the provision of impure public goods. After the investigation in an analytical impure public good model, we numerically simulate the effects of alternative technologies in a parameterized model for climate policy in Germany